Braid’s been receiving accolades for its amazing gameplay and complex storyline. Over at Gamasutra, I stumbled upon a great article detailing the evolution of Braid’s artwork. Especially after having beaten the game, I found it fascinating to see how the art had evolved, and had helped to give the game its unique feel.

Moving us one step closer to Blade Runner, I’m pleased to bring you a fully robotic water snake. Although the snake at first appears to be little more than a toy, its movements are preternaturally organic. I have a very easy time believing that I’m looking at some type of exotic life form—and I find that simultaneously amazing and frightening.

Philip K. Dick would be proud.

Although I’m not especially worried by higher fuel prices—in my opinion, they’ll help accelerate a much-needed movement to electric vehicles, which in turn will force us to use more nuclear and solar power—one of the things I’ve routinely wondered is how planes will deal with the problem. To me, the only solution seemed to be to use hydrogen (rather explosive) or increasingly expensive gas propellants. It turns out, though, that small planes can be powered by batteries—and someone has already made a battery-powered propeller plane. It’s quiet, clean, and can fly for 90 to 120 minutes—enough for a pleasure cruise. And the best part? It costs a mere 60¢ to refuel the craft.

Count me in.

And it turns out that the Toyota Prius isn’t necessarily that great for the environment after all. (This should not come as a surprise if you’ve been keeping up on the research into renewable energy.) Listen closely to the end of the segment, though—the point isn’t that the Prius cannot be more efficient than the M3, but rather that the driver has to do his part to drive more conservatively, too—something that I’ve argued, and been keenly aware of, since I started driving.

Bell Canada is currently engaged in a lovely kerfuffle with the CRTC (Canada’s rough equivalent of the FTC) for throttling BitTorrent traffic. The CRTC recently ordered Bell Canada to release its bandwidth numbers, and Bell Canada, after some protestations, complied. The little teensy problem with their data, as Ars Technica points out, is that the numbers indicate that any problems Bell Canada is experiencing have nothing whatsoever to do with BitTorrent, and can be trivially and cheaply fixed.

I am shocked—shocked!—to find that gambling is going on in here!

This has got to be one of the dumbest concepts for a cell phone I’ve seen in my life. I’m kind of amazed it wasn’t killed in preproduction.

It may not enable time travel, but the flux capacitor, in a literal sense, is here. Called a memristor, the device provides similar functionality to a transistor, but at vastly higher efficiencies, an should allow for much smaller, more efficient computers in the future.

The Freakonomics Blog has a fasciating report on the horrible accuracy of TV weather stations. Although I don’t find the results remotely surprising, the data reflect such a profound lack of insight that I’m forced to reevaluate whether watching the weather is worth my time at all. For most people, going outside, looking at the sky, and paying attention to changes in humidity seems as if it would yield more accurate results.

Sun has just announced that they will begin close-sourcing MySQL. For years, I’ve avoided MySQL due to a mixture of paranoia (I’ve had extremely bad experiences with MyISAM-backed data stores) and disdain for their shoddy standards compliance (which has bitten me before in nontrivial ways). Now I can also avoid them for not being open-source.

My standardization on PostgreSQL for this website feels more rational by the minute.

Update: The originally linked article wasn’t quite correct. MySQL AB’s CEO explains that they will not be making the MySQL core closed-source; merely new, enterprise-specific features. You can read his whole statement for more information. This position is more reasonable, and is similar to the relationship ElephantDB has with PostgreSQL.

Tim Bray makes the same argument I’ve been making for months on why ISO-certified OOXML won’t actually make a lick of difference. At least the ISO has successfully proved how corruptible they are for all geeks to see, so I suppose the approval process wasn’t totally useless.