Broken Controllers Central

Breaks the walls down…

Marxi Julien — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 03:49:15 +0000

Broken Controllers Central is closing down; feel free to browse the content that was put up in the short-lived lifespan of this section of Broken Controllers. You can also visit MadBlogz.com, a free blog-hosting website.

What Was That Ring Around the Moon?

TJ Wasiuk — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 04:59:32 +0000

Source: Yahoo! Buzz

Yahoo! - Many folks who looked up at the sky last night were greeted with a very bizarre sight: a luminous ring surrounding the moon. Were aliens coming? Was the end of the world at hand? Fortunately, no.

Though it looked ominous, the shiny ring around the moon last night was actually a rather common weather phenomenon. According to various weather-related blogs across the Buzz, this ring around the moon occurs when thin cirrus clouds, which contain ice crystals, refract the moonlight. A blog from the Goddard Space Flight Center explains that “the shape of the ice crystals results in a focusing of the light into a ring. Since the ice crystals typically have the same shape, namely a hexagonal shape, the Moon ring is always the same size.”

New Blue Whale Song Mystery

TJ Wasiuk — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 04:43:41 +0000

Source: WIRED

WIRED - All around the world, blue whales aren’t singing like they used to, and scientists have no idea why.

The largest animals on Earth are singing in ever-deeper voices every year. Among the suggested explanations are ocean noise pollution, changing population dynamics and new mating strategies. But none of them is entirely convincing.

“We don’t have the answer. We just have a lot of recordings,” said Mark McDonald, president of Whale Acoustics, a company that specializes in the sonic monitoring of cetaceans.

McDonald and his collaborators first noticed the change eight years ago, when they kept needing to recalibrate the automated song detectors used to track blue whales off the California coast. The detectors are triggered by songs that match a particular waveform. Every year, McDonald had to set them lower.

Since then, he and Scripps Institution of Oceanography researchers Sarah Melnick and John Hildebrand have gathered thousands of blue whale recordings made since the 1960s, spanning populations from the North Atlantic to the South Pacific to the East Indian Ocean. Their analysis, published in October in Endangered Species Research, shows that the songs’ tonal frequency is falling every year by a few fractions of a hertz.

“It’s a fascinating finding,” said John Calombokidis, a blue whale expert at the Cascadia Research Collective. “It’s even more remarkable, given that the songs themselves differ in different oceans. There seem to be these distinct populations, yet they’re all showing this common shift.”

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Ron Artest admits he used to drink Hennessy at halftime

TJ Wasiuk — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 04:40:01 +0000

Source: Yahoo! Sports

Yahoo! - Leave it to Ron Artest to try and steal a little of Tiger Woods and Allen Iverson’s headline thunder.

In a lengthy and candid interview for the upcoming issue of Sporting News magazine, Artest — best known as the central figure in the infamous Malice at the Palace in Detroit — lets it fly, including a startling admission that he drank alcohol during games as a member of the Chicago Bulls.

“I used to drink Hennessy … at halftime,” said Artest, who played with the Bulls from 1999-2002 and now is with the Los Angeles Lakers. “I [kept it] in my locker. I’d just walk to the liquor store [near the stadium] and get it.”

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Going Green With New Video Game Cases

TJ Wasiuk — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 23:51:57 +0000

Source:IGN

Those who recently purchased some of this holiday’s biggest titles for Xbox 360, such as Left 4 Dead 2 and Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2, probably noticed something a little different about their game cases. The circular-style holes behind game discs and instruction manuals are not production errors. It’s a new effort by companies to become more environmentally friendly by reducing excess packaging materials.

Hong Kong-based case manufacturer Viva Group recently rolled style the new style of casing dubbed the ‘Eco-Box’ which significantly reduces CO2 production emissions. The Eco-Box is already being used by movie studios for DVDs, but now it has begun appearing in the videogames industry.

recently spoke with Kyle Sheppard, Manager of Business Development at Viva. He says this initiative to reduce packaging was actually driven by retailers and not game publishers.

“We have had success over the past two years converting the movie studios to the Eco-Box on a large scale and are now working with the various gaming platforms and game publishers on a similar transition for the games market,” Sheppard told IGN. “Retailers are demanding that the entertainment industry and product manufacturers reduce or eliminate the large and wasteful packaging that has become the standard over the last twenty years.’

“Wal-Mart even introduced a packaging scorecard with certain criteria that must be met, including reducing all packaging by 5% by 2013,” Sheppard added. “The Eco-Box already exceeds this goal for the entertainment industry.”

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Afghan war could be over in 3 years

TJ Wasiuk — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 20:55:16 +0000

Source: CNN

CNN - President Obama is sending 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan but has a goal of concluding the war and withdrawing most U.S. service members within three years, senior administration officials told CNN Tuesday.

The president is ordering military officials to get the reinforcements to Afghanistan within six months, White House officials said.

Obama will travel to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York, later Tuesday to officially announce his plans. It would be his second escalation of U.S. forces in the war-torn Islamic country since he came to power in January.

The president also is seeking further troop commitments from NATO allies as part of a counterinsurgency strategy aimed at wiping out al Qaeda elements and stabilizing the country while training Afghan forces.

The expected new troop deployment would increase the total U.S. commitment to roughly 100,000 troops in Afghanistan, bolstered by about 45,000 NATO forces.

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Obama to detail big troop increase in Afghanistan

Marxi Julien — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 04:30:54 +0000

Source: Yahoo!

Yahoo! - WASHINGTON – After months of debate, President Barack Obama will spell out a costly Afghanistan war expansion to a skeptical public Tuesday night, coupling an infusion of as many as 35,000 more troops with a vow that there will be no endless U.S. commitment. His first orders have already been made: at least one group of Marines who will be in place by Christmas.

Obama has said that he prefers “not to hand off anything to the next president” and that his strategy will “put us on a path toward ending the war.” But he doesn’t plan to give any more exact timetable than that Tuesday night.

The president will end his 92-day review of the war with a nationally broadcast address in which he will lay out his revamped strategy from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y. He spent part of Monday briefing foreign allies in a series of private meetings and phone calls.

Before Obama’s call to Britain’s Gordon Brown, the prime minister announced that 500 more U.K. troops would arrive in southern Afghanistan next month — making a British total of about 10,000 in the country. And French President Nicolas Sarkozy, whose nation has more than 3,000 in Afghanistan, said French troops would stay “as long as necessary” to stabilize the country.

Obama’s war escalation includes sending 30,000 to 35,000 more American forces into Afghanistan in a graduated deployment over the next year, on top of the 71,000 already there. There also will be a fresh focus on training Afghan forces to take over the fight and allow the Americans to leave.

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US dollar falls to 14-year low against the yen

TJ Wasiuk — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 23:47:28 +0000

Source: BBC News

BBC - The US dollar has hit a 14-year low against the Japanese yen with low interest rates in the US making the greenback less attractive to investors.

The dollar fell to 86.28 yen in early Thursday trading, it’s lowest level since 1995, before recovering to 86.61. The US has indicated it is unconcerned about the dollar’s slide, and will not intervene to strengthen it.

Many traders are swapping dollar holdings for gold as a safer investment in the current economic climate. The price of gold hit a fresh record high of $1,194.9 per ounce on Thursday, before falling back slightly to $1,182.4.

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Spin-based electronics gets boost

TJ Wasiuk — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 23:40:59 +0000

Source: BBC News

BBC - The next generation of computers may make use of the “spin” of electrons instead of their charge. Spintronics relies on manipulating these spins to make them capable of carrying data. The technique has been shown in a number of materials at low temperatures before.

But researchers writing in Nature have made use of these “spin-polarised” electrons in silicon at room temperature for the first time. The result could lead to computers that require far less power than conventional ones.

The fact that the effect has been demonstrated in silicon - the material that already underpins the computer industry - means that devices exploiting it could be made on a commercial scale more easily.

The problem with silicon is that, as the individual features on silicon chips get smaller and smaller, they require more and more power to move the charged electrons around to represent 0s and 1s of binary code.

That rise in power also means that future chips will run into problems with heating.

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Obama to attend climate change summit

TJ Wasiuk — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 23:33:58 +0000

Source: CNN

CNN - President Obama will go to Copenhagen, Denmark, next month for a climate change summit, the White House said Wednesday.

According to a news release, Obama is prepared to set a goal of reducing emissions to 17 percent below 2005 levels over the next decade.

The White House also reiterated Obama’s goal of reducing U.S. emissions by 83 percent by 2050.

The targets come from a climate change bill passed by the House of Representatives. The Senate has yet to pass the bill, so the United States has not committed itself to any binding goals.

“This provisional target is in line with current legislation in both chambers of Congress and demonstrates a significant contribution to a problem that the U.S. has neglected for too long,” the White House said.

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