Deepak Chopra: The Video Game

Deepak Chopra is the author of over 50 books on spirituality and alternative medicine, liberally sprinkled with terms from quantum physics in an attempt to lend weight to what the Committee for the Advancement of Scientific Skepticism at the Centre for Inquiry (Canada) has described as "new age psycho-babble" and what quantum physicist and Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann calls “quantum flapdoodle".

You may be familiar with Chopra from the recent flap when he was invited to speak at the Royal Ontario Museum, his issues with evolution, or his ongoing nonsense at the Huffington Post and his distaste for skepticism

Most of my stinging darts come from skeptics. Over the years I've found that ill-tempered guardians of scientific truth can't abide speculative thinking. [...] No skeptic, to my knowledge, ever made a major scientific discovery or advanced the welfare of others.

If you're not familiar with him, you'll soon have a chance to learn all about him on your Xbox or Playstation.

Game developer THQ, whose franchises include Saints Row and Red Faction, and licensing agreements with WWE and UFC, has bought the exclusive video game rights to Chopra's "teachings" for all the major gaming consoles.

It's unclear what the games might entail. I suppose dodging the darts of skeptics and scientists could be kinda fun.

3D Blogging

3-D is all the rage now, with many major studio releases coming out in 3D and 3D TVs starting to make their way into homes (even though some people, like film maker Christopher Nolan dislike the technology). Normally the 3D effect is achieved by wearing special eyewear, like the iconic blue/red lenses, to deliver a different image to each eye. Newer devices, like the Nintendo 3DS, are using different, eyewear-free technology for the same effect. This video, grabbed from Joystiq, explains how it works:


You'll notice in the video, mention of another application for the same kind of technology: delivering different images to different viewers on the same screen. This could have some interesting uses - no more conflicts of TV scheduling (though unless directional audio is also part of the package, we'll still have to resort to headphones). And imagine local multiplayer gaming, without the annoying split-screen! Sony has, and has patents on a multiplayer stereoscopic system.

Adventures in Dreamland

There's a story making the rounds based on an an abstract presented at the Science of Consciousness Conference which is an extension of previously published work that claims that video game players more frequently experience control over their dreams. From the Livescience description of the work:

"If you're spending hours a day in a virtual reality, if nothing else it's practice," said Jayne Gackenbach, a psychologist at Grant MacEwan University in Canada. "Gamers are used to controlling their game environments, so that can translate into dreams."

They also suggest that because of the aptitude for lucid dreaming, gamers may experience fewer nightmares

[G]amers experienced less or even reversed threat simulation (in which the dreamer became the threatening presence), with fewer aggression dreams overall. [...] "What happens with gamers is that something inexplicable happens," Gackenbach explained. "They don't run away, they turn and fight back. They're more aggressive than the norms."

So if you're suffering from bad dreams, it might be worth trying some video games before bed. Maybe you'll turn those horrifying nightmares into a nice, relaxing game of Doom.

Who Wants to Solve a Protein Structure?

The Folding@Home project allows PS3 and computer owners to use spare processor cycles to help solve 3-dimensional protein structures. A new game allows players to use spare brain power to do the same. Foldit taps into human 3-D problem solving skills getting players to fold proteins in a video game interface, giving points based on energy required for a given configuration. The game has been in testing phase using proteins with known structures, but is about to challenge players with unknown structures.

Try it out or read more about the game here.

Virtual Epidemiology

The PS3 Folding at Home project harnesses the distributed processing power of idle playstations to use computational methods to understand protein folding, misfolding and related diseases. (The project isn't limited to the playstation - anybody with a PC and an internet connection can donate spare processor cycles). Now scientists are considering using World of Warcraft (WoW) to model infectious diseases. They think the natural interactions of a massively multiplayer online game (MMORPG) community (including travel and social interaction) can be harnessed to test hypotheses about disease spread. How well teleporting from Teldrassil to Durotar mimics an airline flight from New York to Toronto remains to be seen, but it's an interesting idea. A couple of years ago a virtual plague swept through the WoW land of Azeroth and the behaviour of the virtual population mimicked that of real populations during historical epidemics. An analysis of the 'Corrupted Blood' plague and commentary on the usefulness of MMORPGs for epidemiological studies can be found in a recent issue of the journal Epidemiology. Forget Bayman's facebook PhD... I'm majoring in World of Warcraft.