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Gary Gygax Fails Saving Throw for the Last Time
Before computers became popular (and even afterward), many of us
spent our Fridays and Saturdays rolling oddly-shaped dice and pretending
to be warriors, wizards, elves, or other kinds of epic characters.
We'd explore dungeons, slay nasty monsters, and take their treasure
for our own. This week, Gary Gygax, the man who created Dungeons
and Dragons and was largely responsible for those good times of
misspent youth, passed away. He was 69.
In addition to designing the original D&D game with Dave Arneson in 1974, Gygax created a number of board games and wrote several fantasy novels. Though he was not directly involved with D&D after 1985, his system deeply affected a whole generation of gamers and continues to influence them to this day. "He was like the cool uncle that every gamer had," said Mike Mearls, the lead developer on the yet-to-be-released fourth edition of D&D.
Many massively-multiplayer online roleplaying games owe a great debt to Gygax. Such games as World of Warcraft would not look or feel the same if Gygax had not imagined the kind of gaming universe that he did. He will be missed.
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Better Feedback from Levitating Controller
Many casual gamers got their first exposure to haptic technology from playing with the Wii controller. Thanks to its feedback, you can "feel" when you hit a ball in Wii Tennis or Wii Baseball. There's a higher level of haptic technology that more closely simulates the user's sense of touch, but these often require gloves or robotic arms to work, making it difficult to provide a natural feeling to the user.
Thanks to researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, however, that's set to change. They have developed a haptic device that features just one moving part. It consists of a bowl with electromagnets in its base and a levitating bar that the user grasps. The electromagnets adjust the force on the bar to give the user a feeling of resistance, as if from weight or friction. Light sensors in the bowl sense the bar's position by tracking LEDs on the bar's underside.
The bar can successfully simulate hard surfaces, which has been difficult with current haptic devices. It can also track movements as slight as two microns, far smaller than the width of a human hair. This should allow the device to reproduce extremely subtle effects of friction and texture. Best of all, users experience six degrees of freedom -- they can move the bar forward or backwards, left or right, and up or down. Ralph Hollis, lead researcher on the project, has started a company, Butterfly Haptics, to commercialize the technology.
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Using a Little Iron to Solve a Big Problem
Everyone knows that an increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere may be behind global warming. A number of people and companies are trying to do something about it. One of these companies, Climos, just raised $3.5 million to help with their ocean fertilization plan.
Still being tested, Climos' plan is to seed the ocean with the iron compound. The iron will stimulate the growth of plankton, which in turn will take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. As the plankton die, they will sink to the bottom of the ocean, sequestering the carbon dioxide.
How do you make money from this business? Assuming the technique works, Climos
hopes to do it by selling carbon offsets. But it has a ways to go;
though a number of tests in ocean iron fertilization have been conducted
in the past 20 years, there are still questions as to its effectiveness.
And environmental groups have expressed concerns about the technique.
Nevertheless, Climos' science and business model was strong enough
to get backing from Braemar Energy Ventures and Elon Musk, chairman
of Tesla Motors.
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