Month: November 2018

Enlarge / Jumpman, circa 1981, before the Segale-inspired renaming to "Mario"

Mario Segale, the Seattle-real estate and construction business owner who inspired the name for Nintendo's famous mascot, passed away on Oct. 27 according to reports from The Seattle Times and The Auburn Reporter. He was 84 years old.

Segale owned the business park housing Nintendo's American arcade operation in the early '80s, when the company was busy converting thousands of disused Radarscope cabinets to play Donkey Kong. At the time, Nintendo of America president Minoru Arakawa and other executives were trying to come up with an Americanized name for the game's player avatar, who was still referred to as "Jumpman" at that point (a name that appears on early Donkey Kong cabinet art).

As the story goes, when Segale came to Arakawa to demand payment for a late rent bill, inspiration struck.

If you're interested in a review of Diablo III: Eternal Edition for the Nintendo Switch, here's a quick one. The new version, out on Friday for $59.99, is still Diablo III. The game's existing versions on PC and console are nearly identical to this new Switch port, and that's great news.

Over the past few years, Blizzard climbed quite the corpse-laden mountain to get this dungeon-crawling game past its troubled 2012 launch. The worst we could say last year, upon the launch of a $15 DLC expansion, was that the core of Diablo III had already improved tremendously for all existing players—and thus rendered the paid Necromancer pack a bit moot.

So on Nintendo Switch, everything about Diablo III, from its basic, loot-driven combat to its expansive, "seasons"-driven endgame, is the same. (Every DLC add-on and free patch from the console and PC versions arrives here intact.) Yet, it's also born anew on this platform. Diablo III truly is the ultimate kind of game to work on Nintendo's hybrid console. It works as well for satisfying, quick-burst combat as it does marathon bed-battle sessions.

Enlarge / A giant Tetris board illuminating the windows of the Tel Aviv-Yafo Municipality in 2016. Playing Tetris provides a useful distraction during anxious waiting periods. (credit: Jack Guez/AFP/Getty Images)

There's nothing worse than waiting to hear potentially upsetting news, whether it's a bad medical diagnosis or learning if you got into your top college choice. These kinds of stressful periods can produce intense anxiety. Playing Tetris might be the perfect coping mechanism, according to a new study in the journal Emotion.

There have been a number of scientific studies involving Tetris, one of the most popular computer games in the world, in which players flip falling colored blocks every which way in order to neatly stack them into rows. For instance, a 2009 study found that one's brain activity becomes more efficient the longer one plays Tetris. The more proficient a player becomes, the less glucose the brain consumes for energy to fuel cognition.

That same year, a research group at Oxford University reported that playing Tetris could reduce the impact of viewing traumatic scenes, perhaps because the game disrupts retention of painful memories. That makes it a promising treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder. It is such an effective distraction that it can help reduce cravings in dieters and addicts seeking to kick the habit. After prolonged play, images of the Tetris combinations will linger in the brain (the so-called "Tetris effect"), although this will happen with any repeated images or scenarios (solitaire, jigsaw puzzles, and so forth).

Enlarge / Artist's impression of professional archaeologist doing science.

Today we present the third and final installment of my interview with Sarah Parcak, a prominent founding figure in the emerging field of astroarchaeology. Please check out parts one and two if you missed them. Otherwise, press play on the embedded player or pull up the transcript—both of which are below.

We open today’s installment talking about the presentation Sarah made while accepting the TED prize—which came with a million-dollar check to advance her work. Sarah presented in full Indiana Jones regalia, and Harrison Ford turned out to be in the audience, and a rather fun story emerges from that. On a (slightly) related note, Sarah and I also discuss an amazing VR rig the people from The VOID set up at TED that year (fittingly, with a Temple of Doom theme).

Most of today’s installment concerns a crowd-enabled detection project Sarah created with proceeds from the TED Prize. It’s called GlobalXplorer. Partly inspired by Galaxy Zoo, it let armies of “citizen scientists” scan twelve million quadrants of Peruvian satellite imagery for hints of archaeological remains. Tens of thousands of promising features were discovered. This will help the Peruvian archaeology community set its agenda over the coming decade. Sarah’s longer-term goal is to rally enough volunteers to scan the entire globe over the coming decade.

Enlarge (credit: Valentina Palladino)

Lenovo's quirky Yoga Book is back with some significant updates for 2018. The original Yoga Book was a unique hybrid of a tablet sporting a "halo" keyboard panel with no actual keys and a real paper drawing pad. Part netbook and part convertible, this year's edition remains quirky but seems more practical and less cumbersome than the original.

For 2018, Lenovo ditched the halo keyboard and paper pad and opted for an E Ink panel that can switch between keyboard, note, and e-reader modes. There's also a new embedded fingerprint sensor, new precision pen, and bumped-up specs. All together, those features also bump up the Yoga Book's price to $999.

Do the changes add up to a more competent companion device? After spending some time with the new model, it seems like a lot of the hardware issues with the original Yoga Book may be resolved by Lenovo's updates. In fact, the Yoga Book may even have some more mainstream appeal thanks to these improvements. Still, this doesn't seem like a device made to replace most people's all-purpose convertibles.