Month: January 2018

Enlarge / Picture shows a woman about to sneeze holding a handkerchief in her hand. (credit: Getty | Bettmann)

Ah… AHHH… Choose wisely when it comes to handling that impending sneeze. Holding one in can lead to some serious damage, British doctors report Monday in BMJ Case Reports.

In their rare-disease case report, they relay the tale of an otherwise healthy 34-year-old male who managed to tear a hole the back of his throat trying to extinguish a snot explosion.

The man showed up in an emergency room with an alarming popping sensation and swelling in his throat. He was also in terrible pain and could barely talk. Subsequent X-rays and CT scans revealed that he had bubbles of air throughout his neck, including along his spine. The doctors also noted a crackling, grating sound coming from both sides of his throat down to his chest, which is a sign of gas trapped inside tissue.

Don't worry, no Ouya games snuck into this discussion. (It just happens to have a timeless, sleek controller because famous designer Yves Béhar came up with the concept.)

Warning: This piece contains mild spoilers by referencing plot points for The Dig, Mass Effect, and Pillars of Eternity.

Anybody with a passing familiarity with video games or those who play them knows that games are more than technology. But classifying games as simply some pop culture ephemera that typifies trends and norms also doesn’t perfectly describe them. To really get to the essence of games and the narratives they create, you need to find folks like me—or, more precisely, me sitting at a computer at age eight. That kid, to poach unnecessarily from Deep Space Nine, is both “the dreamer and the dream.”

To be less abstract, academic Walter Ong once wrote an essay titled “Writing is a Technology That Restructures Thought,” in which he argued that literacy was not a measure of intelligence, savvy, or know-how. Rather, Ong saw technology as something that restructures the brains of those who think with it, feel with it, and use it.

Enlarge / I'm sorry, it's just not doing it for me anymore guys. I don't know what to tell ya... (credit: Activision)

It’s the second week of January and I’m playing Suikoden II, which turns 20 this year. That’s not completely absurd in the lull between the holiday season and the next glut of big new releases that demand my immediate attention. If there was ever a time for me to play a game from 1998, it’s now.

But then I remember that Destiny 2 came out last September—and its first expansion just a few weeks ago. And then some old, familiar jaws are chewing at the back of my mind, reminding me that, by all rights, I should be filling my temporarily free hours by tooling around Mercury and The Leviathan. I want to give myself over to the same satisfying, mechanical repetition that Destiny gave me for hundreds of hours over two years—more time than just about any other game I’ve played.

But I can’t.

Courtesy of Lauren McCarthy

We love to talk about how our virtual assistants fail us. They allow parrots to order fire on Amazon and play porn channels to kids. Obviously, it's going to be quite some time before these machines will be as good as human assistants. That's why the quest to create personalities for assistive technology is a serious business. Google has a “personality team” working on providing Assistant with a more human-like personality. Now artists are testing the limits of these technologies too, asking what would happen if humans actually behaved the way our virtual assistants do.

Artist and UCLA professor Lauren McCarthy’s project, LAUREN, is a performance piece that examines how home automation effects social interactions within a home. The artist installs customized software and hardware in a willing participant’s home.