I can add one more game to my list of “games I’ve beaten as a grown-up:” Metroid Prime.
The unfortunate thing is that the final battle was fought while my children slept. They’re going to be sad enough for having missed it that I expect they’ll require me to go back and beat that final bad-guy AGAIN. The good news is that I copied my save off to another memory card for just that occasion.
Now it tells me that “hard” mode is unlocked. Bah. Way to make me feel like a wuss, there. I’m not planning to play again. I’m itching for Metroid Prime II…
Ah, SCO. I read an article (which I can’t FIND now!) likening McBride to Keanu Reeves’ character in Point Break who jumps out of an airplane without a parachute.
There’s a point in the movie Chocolat where Juliette Binoche’s character tells us she puts a pinch of cayenne pepper in the pot of hot cocoa.
Bah. I just added three drops of Blair’s Sudden Death Sauce to 6 ounces of hot cocoa. Drink THAT with your gypsy buddies, Vianne!
Someone posted a link to me describing research in which theobromine (the it’s-not-caffeine-but-it’s-similar ingredient in cocoa) was tested successfully as a cough suppressant. In order to make patients cough in the first place they had them inhale capsicum/capseicin. The message to me was “hey Howard, look! Two of your favorite ingredients in the same place!” Well, now I’ve GOT them in the same place. Two great tastes that OW IT BURNS OW OW OW!
SETI may have a hard time finding anything at all, even if the universe is teeming with life. This article, which I picked up over at PhysOrg, cites new research which says that once you get good at compressing your data, radio transmissions become indistinguishable from those naturally emanating from stars. SETI looks for inefficient transmissions like the ones we currently create, but it’s likely that any civilizations out there who have had radio for more than the paltry 8 decades we have will be communicating in very efficient, compressed code.
Bummer. We’re probably staring at hundreds of really, really cool feeds from 20,000-year-old disc jockeys when we look at the night sky, but our gear doesn’t recognize the signal. (And we don’t have their public key, either.)