Gearfuse Technology, Science, Culture & More

I start this column with only one aim. I would like to try to impart my love for one of the oldest, and most impenetrable, and aesthetically unattractive, and sociopathic and schizophrenic genres of computer game to a reader who will doubtlessly hate it for all of those exact reasons. I'm talking about rogue-likes, so called because of their ancestry in a progenitor called Rogue. Let's see how I do.

Precorder provides a buffer interface for iPhone video, letting you choose your shots after they've happened. Or seen another way, it's a reticle for aiming special effects at points in space and time.

Want to know what the future of Vimeo is? Look at the Dick Van Dyke show. Bruce Sterling shows how to think about the future: start with the past. He's not the first to say it, but he puts it together with as much brio and precision as anybody.

Michelle Obama teams up with Walmart to fight obesity and bring down the cost of healthy food. But the problems of processed food emerged from yesterday's answers to questions of purity, safety, and health; will the future be any different? The latest in our series on the science and technology of food, co-produced with GOOD.

Jonah Lehrer asks what happens in the brain to give music the kind of unique, uncanny power that Ton Koopman's organ performance exudes in spades. Video and quotes after the jump.

When two chatbots discuss Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault, it's Waiting for Godot meets the Turing test, in the stagecraft of Annie Dorsen. Video after the jump.

The trailer for the long-awaited, much-maligned Duke Nukem Forever may be pixelated, but it tries hard�too hard�to pull no punches. Warning: although blurred, some bits are not safe for work. Video after the jump.

A Data-viz lab headquartered in the "mythical birthplace of HAL 9000" produces both eye-popping IMAX animations and rigorous modelings of scientific data. In fact, these things are one and the same. Video after the jump.

You bought it? You own it; don't let esoteric screwheads take it away from you. Video after the jump.

Remember how we used to say that when the machines start reproducing, we'll know we're in trouble"? Well maybe it's time for a gut-check on that one. Video after the jump.