Mirror's Edge is a first person computer game in which you play an urban free-runner, leaping, sliding, and generally acting fly across the roofs of a dystopian city (see the trailer here). It looks good. In fact, it looks amazing. But, reportedly, to actually play it is even better, sickeningly better.

Clive Thompson, writing for wired.com, suggests that the total interactivity of the environment (if you can see something, you can jump on it, or off it) along with the visual cues about what your character's arms and legs are doing (they appear in shot as you run and jump) makes the game a convincing proprioception hack. In other words, it remaps your body schema so that you feel more fully that you are the character in the game. When your character runs fast, you feel it is you running fast. When you character jumps across between two buildings and look down, you feel a moment of sickening vertigo.

Research into illusions of proprioception --- your sense of where you body is in space --- has shown that our body map is surprisingly flexible. It is possible to mislocate your hand, for example, coming to believe that it is directly in front of you when in fact out at the side, or behind you (see video here). Jaron Lanier has reported on an early virtual reality experience he had that made him feel like he had the body of a lobster, with 6 extra limbs. The important feature of all these illusions is that they rely on precisely timed visual feedback. Although visual input can reprogramme our body image, it only does so when there is a tight coupling between what we see and feel. The importance is not the level of detail in what we see, but in the fluidity of the interaction. If Mirror's Edge makes you feel like you are really are doing Parkour then it is because it has the correct kind of visual feedback (your limbs, in a fully interactive world) with the correct timing.

A final thought: if a computer game really is immersive for something as visceral as free-running, isn't that kind of surprising, given how complex free running is physically, and how simple the commands used to control a computer game are? Perhaps what this is because when we automatise an action such as a run, a jump or a roll part of the process of making it automatic is losing the experience of the component parts. So, when a computer game feels like real, it is because real feels like nothing -- we just ask our brains 'jump' and the motor system sorts out the details without our any deep experience of how the jump is performed.

link Clive Thompson's report on playing Mirror's Edge
link YouTube trailer for the game

• Un genetista afirma que la evolución humana ha terminado.
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• Gmail evita que envíes correos no deseados cuando estás borracho o muy cansado.
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• Una entrevista a Lawrence Weiner, artista conceptual.
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• Unos muy creativos vestidos para mujer.
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• La caballa (un pescado; mackerel en inglés) es la moneda de curso en las cárceles de EE.UU. Más valorada que los cigarrillos.
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• ¿Qué hace un "nerdo" (¿friqui?) con mucho dinero? Visiten la biblioteca de Jay Walker para saber.
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• Impresionante: un tipo hace uso de Craigslist para publicar un empleo y reunir a varias personas vestidas iguales cerca del banco que él estaría robando vistiendo la misma ropa, logrando así confundir a la policía y escapar.
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  Continúe leyendo...
  
  
• Banksy de nuevo en Nueva York. Aquí y aquí.
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• Cómo nuestra psicología ayuda a los políticos a manipular la verdad.
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• Mientras aquí la gente se preocupa por las elecciones, el gobierno de EE.UU. inicia las operaciones del nuevo proyecto de vigilancia por medio de satélites, al estilo "Enemy of the State".
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• Obama es más popular que McCain, por mucho, según reflejan los correos chatarra (Spam).
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• Una orquesta de portátiles (laptops).
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• Ya la belleza es algorítmica. Algoritmos que embellecen fotografías de rostros.
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• ¿Qué sería de los carteles de las películas, si en vez de mostrar la lista de actores, mostraran la lista de compañías que están pagando para anunciarse?
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• La crisis financiera actual, explicada como una parábola de Pokémon.
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• Si alguna vez tiene que dar RCP a un amigo, hágalo cantando "Staying Alive"...
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• Alex Ferreira nos regala algunas versiones para disfrutar. Escuchen la de Nick Drake - Place To Be.

New Scientist has an interesting piece by sleep psychologist Jim Horne who sets about busting the myth that modern society causes large scale sleep deprivation.

It's full of fascinating facts and uses the phrase "to eke out the very last quantum of sleepiness" which is just lovely.

Until recently, people living above the Arctic circle slept much longer in winter than in summer. There are reports from the 1950s of Inuit sleeping up to 14 hours a day during the darkest months compared with only 6 in the summertime. Given the opportunity, we can all learn to significantly increase daily sleep on a more or less permanent basis. When it is cut back to normal we are sleepy for a few days, and then the sleepiness disappears.

Far from our being chronically sleep-deprived, things have never been better. Compare today's sleeping conditions with those of a typical worker of 150 years ago, who toiled for 14 hours a day, six days a week, then went home to an impoverished, cold, damp, noisy house and shared a bed not only with the rest of the family but with bedbugs and fleas.

What of the risk of a sleep shortage causing obesity? Several studies have found a link, including the Nurses' Health Study, which tracked 68,000 women for 16 years (American Journal of Epidemiology, vol 164, p 947).

The hazard, though real, is hardly anything to worry about. It only becomes apparent when habitual sleep is below 5 hours a day, which applies to only 5 per cent of the population, and even then the problem is minimal. Somebody sleeping 5 hours every night would only gain a kilogram or so of fat per year. To put it in perspective, you could lose weight at the same rate by reducing your food intake by about 30 calories per day, equivalent to about one bite of a muffin, or by exercising gently for 30 minutes a week.

One of the lessons from sleep research is that we're actually pretty bad at judging how much sleep we need and even how much we actually get.

This seems to be particularly the case for people with insomnia who tend to underestimate the amount they sleep and overestimate the time it takes them to drop off.

The article is great guide to sleep myths and how they're addressed by the scientific research and surprisingly for New Scientist, the article is open-access.

NewSci staffer having sleepless nights over their closed-access policy or just someone asleep at the wheel? Answers on a night cap please...

Link to NewSci piece 'Time to wake up to the facts about sleep'.

Photo by Kirstie Shanley

Over the next couple days in Reykjavik, Iceland, music industry sorts will gather for You Are in Control, an international conference dealing with issues in music and media. One such presenter is Jane Dyball, head of business affairs for Warner/Chappell, the publishing company responsible for the work of that Radiohead band. Dyball's presentation concerns all kinds of data surrounding last October's release of In Rainbows, which, as you may have heard, completely changed the music business forever and stuff.

Well, not really; but according to a report on Dyball's figures from "digital music business information and strategy company" Music Ally-- which has been confirmed by Radiohead's publicist-- In Rainbows certainly worked out well for the band.

The writeup suggests that there have been three million purchases of In Rainbows thus far, from digital sales through the band's webstore in the run up to the album's release, the discboxes, the eventual physical release of the album on CD, and through other digital outlets. More specifically, the band moved around 100,000 of those (very nice!) discboxes, and the physical CD has sold 1.75 million units to date worldwide. Not bad for a thing you could get for free.

The report characterizes the In Rainbows experiment as a success, noting "for Warner it served to prove a point that by licensing directly (i.e. outside the collecting society network) and by offering a genuine one stop shop for licensing (i.e. combining all the digital rights into one offer from a single entity) the publisher was able to generate far more money for both themselves and the band than would have been possible under the traditional system."

Music Ally also notes that the last several Radiohead releases sold in the hundreds of thousands, not millions, so the buzz-building nature of the band's release plan certainly lit a fire under consumers. To that end, the report offers that "the fact that Radiohead had made more money before In Rainbows was physically released than they made in total on Hail to the Thief is surely evidence enough that the initiative was a tremendous success." Better album, too.

There were, of course, some hang-ups; the thing hit BitTorrent almost immediately after its release, and it's "clear that the BitTorrent downloads did indeed greatly outnumber those from Radiohead's official site." In fact, the band and their management kept a pretty keen eye on the digital sales of the disc through their website, "and were watching the average price daily with a view to potentially withdrawing it any moment should it drop too low."

They did, eventually, pull the free download option off the site, but the point seems to be this: what they did worked awfully damn well-- for Radiohead, for this particular album, at this particular moment. The article notes this as well: "In fact, if anything, the only trouble with the whole thing was that it was just arguably too successful. The whole 'pay what you like' experiment became the story rather than the music itself. And that's not so Radiohead. The band and Thom Yorke initially found themselves answering questions about why they chose to do what they did rather than being asked about the music itself."

So, back to the music, then. Thom's on that new Björk single, and the band recently joined the artist advocacy group Featured Artists Coalition. Having finally wrapped that Japanese tour, they've got no live dates on the way at the moment, opting instead to work up the successor to In Rainbows. New Radiohead album? AAAAAAAHHH!!!

Now that he has a book coming out on the subject of genius and high achievement, the New Yorker finally lets Malcolm Gladwell write about David Galenson's work on age and innovation. (A previous effort was Gladwell's first article to be rejected by The New Yorker.) For an overview of Galenson's work, check out my post from August.

The most interesting bit of Gladwell's piece is his discussion of the economics of the two different types of artist. The conceptual artist's talent is noticed and rewarded immediately. But conceptual innovators need more help to reach their full potential.

Sharie was Ben's wife. But she was also-to borrow a term from long ago-his patron. That word has a condescending edge to it today, because we think it far more appropriate for artists (and everyone else for that matter) to be supported by the marketplace. But the marketplace works only for people like Jonathan Safran Foer, whose art emerges, fully realized, at the beginning of their career, or Picasso, whose talent was so blindingly obvious that an art dealer offered him a hundred-and-fifty-franc-a-month stipend the minute he got to Paris, at age twenty. If you are the type of creative mind that starts without a plan, and has to experiment and learn by doing, you need someone to see you through the long and difficult time it takes for your art to reach its true level.

Gladwell discusses the article in a podcast and will be answering reader questions about it later in the week.

Hay 10^11 estrellas en la galaxia. Esto solía ser un número enorme. Pero son sólo cien mil millones. ¡Es menos que el déficit nacional! Solíamos llamarles números astronómicos. Ahora deberíamos llamarles números económicos.

Shared by Chad
I was pretty skeptical about this game at first, but it's starting to look pretty rad. It's like a modern version of Prince of Persia: The Sand of Time from a First Person perspective.

If there was any room left in our minds to be impressed with this game, that void has been filled. After our correspondent A.J. met "Dude Huge" at the Mirror's Edge event yesterday she sent us these two videos full of free running insanity. The first one focuses on a chopper chase resembling the one found in Half Life 2, except you're jumping from skyscrapers. In the second, Faith seems to be taking an alternate route, but similar to a video we posted a while back, which is no less impressive. We can't wait to get our hands on it! Second video after the jump.

Absolutely love this Type the Sky project by Lisa Rienermann

(thank you aline)

• Ingredientes secos:
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• 3/4 Tazas de Gluten Vital de Trigo
• 1/8 Tazas de "Nutritional Yeast" (Levadura Nutricional?)
• 1/2 cucharadita de sal
• 1 cucharaditas de páprika
• 1/8 cucharaditas de canela en polvo
• 1/8 cucharadaitas de comino
• 3/4 cucharaditas de pimienta negra
• 1/8 cucharaditas de semillas secas de ají (o su picante favorito)
  
• 1 cucharadita de polvo de gengibre
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• Ingredientes líquidos:
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• 1/4 Tazas de agua
• 1/8 Tazas de caldo de vegetales
• 2 cucharadas de tomate licuado (o pasta de tomate)
• 1/2 cucharada de salsa de soya
• 1 cucharada de aceite de oliva extra virgen

• Seitan O'Greatness

I just came across these two beautiful images in a paper by neuroscientist Marek Kubicki and colleagues on diffusion tensor imaging studies in schizophrenia.

DTI is a technique that using MRI scans to track how water moves throughout the brain. As water tends to move in one particular direction when its trapped inside nerve fibres, a technique called MRI tractography can be used to map out all the white matter 'cabling', separate from the rest of the brain.

I think the technique produces some of the most beautiful images in neuroscience. You get to see the brain's connections, disconnected, and suspended in space.

Link to full-text of paper (see page 27 for images).
Link to PubMed entry for same.
Link to more DTI tractography images.