I came across XKCD via Shamus and am hooked. I mean, this is just genius.
(click to enlarge. original here)
Author: fledgling otaku
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Acute Wiiitis
As a medical researcher, I have unlimited access to resources such as PubMed. I take my responsibility as wielder of this immense resource seriously. Charged as I am with the welfare of the public, I am excerpting in full a recent letter to the Editor from the New England Journal of Medicine:
To the Editor: A healthy 29-year-old medical resident awoke one Sunday morning with intense pain in the right shoulder. He did not recall any recent injuries or trauma and had not participated in any sports or physical exercise recently. He consulted a rheumatology colleague. The Patte’s test was positive, consistent with acute tendonitis isolated to the right infraspinatus.
After further review of his activities during the previous 24 hours, the patient recalled that he had bought a new Nintendo Wii (pronounced “wee”) video-game system and had spent several hours playing the tennis video game. With the Wii system, the player faces a video screen and moves a handheld controller (approximately 14.5 cm by 3.0 cm by 3.0 cm, with a weight of approximately 200 g) containing solid-state accelerometers and gyroscopes that sense three-dimensional spatial movements. In the tennis video game, the player makes the same arm movements as in a real game of tennis. If a player gets too engrossed, he may “play tennis” on the video screen for many hours. Unlike in the real sport, physical strength and endurance are not limiting factors.
The final diagnosis for the isolated right shoulder pain was Nintendinitis. However, the variant in this patient can be labeled more specifically as “Wiiitis.” The treatment consisted of ibuprofen for 1 week, as well as complete abstinence from playing Wii video games. The patient recovered fully. Nintendinitis was first described in 1990,1 and there have been many case reports of injuries related to intensive use of recreational technologies, mainly in children and mainly from intensive use of the extensor tendon of the thumb.2,3,4,5
With the growing use of this new video-game system, the risk of the Wiiitis variant may be higher than that of Nintendinitis reported in the literature, especially among adults. The available games for the Wii system already include golf, boxing, baseball, and bowling. Future games could involve different and unexpected groups of muscles. Physicians should be aware that there may be multiple, possibly puzzling presentations of Wiiitis.
Julio Bonis, M.D.
Instituto Municipal de Investigación Médica
E-08003 Barcelona, Spain
drbonis@gmail.comReferences
- Brasington R. Nintendinitis. N Engl J Med 1990;322:1473-1474.
- Macgregor DM. Nintendonitis? A case report of repetitive strain injury in a child as a result of playing computer games. Scott Med J 2000;45:150-150.
- Koh TH. Ulcerative “nintendinitis”: a new kind of repetitive strain injury. Med J Aust 2000;173:671-671.
- Menz RJ. “Texting” tendinitis. Med J Aust 2005;182:308-308.
- Karim SA. Playstation thumb — a new epidemic in children. S Afr Med J 2005;95:412-412.
The full citation for this publication is: Bonis, J. Acute Wiiitis. NEJM, 356(23):2431-2 (2007). Full text PDF. PubMed ID: PMID 17554133
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incidentally
David Wong said, of the Matrix trilogy:
But the sequel… I’m pretty sure if you give me Reloaded and Revolutions and a knife, I can cut you a lone, 100-minute Matrix sequel that would flatten your balls.
I’m still waiting.
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Snow Crash: the movie
no, it’s not news. It’s not happening. I wish, you wish, but no way. The closest we are gonna come to it is my post title above. Even if they make it, it will suck. I swear, it’s better that they don’t make it. I mean, if they try, it will end up like Aliens 3 or Hitchhiker’s Guide.
Still,
“Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherf%^&er in the world. If I moved to a martial arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.”
oh, man. A Snow Crash movie would be the baddest motherf$%^ing movie in the history of film.
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MSI Luxium
I wrote a while back about new standards for external graphics cards on laptops – the basic idea being that you buy a fancy PCI card intended for PCs, drop it in an enclosure, and plug it into your laptop for desktop-level graphics capability. Gaming is of course the obvious market.
How time flies! Seems that MSI already has a product on the market, which plugs into the ExpressCard slot:
According to the ExpressCard web site, the ExpressCard channel will limit the performance that a PCI Express x16 card offers because it only operates on a single express channel at a data rate of 2.5Gbps. Still, being able to take a laptop on the road and returning home to play games by simply plugging it into an external video card may be tempting over the choice of buying a gaming desktop computer. Rock the Luxium with a 20″ monitor, a gaming mouse, and a desktop keyboard, and you’re good to frag without the expense of a high-performance desktop.
The thing even supports extra USB ports so it serves double duty as a USB hub for keyboard, mouse, etc. The desktop computer concept is increasingly obsolete.
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Shannara?
Warner Brothers is apparently interested in bringing Terry Brooks’ Sword of Shannara series to film. I remember being less than impressed by this series, it just blends into my memory with the various other Epic Fantasy series like the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant or the Wheel of Time. This description of Shannars doesn’t sound familiar to me, though:
The Shannara series, which blends technology and magic, is set in a world decimated by apocalyptic battles, with mankind splitting into races of trolls, gnomes, dwarves and men, with elves coming out of hiding. Politics and war are waged using magic with a backdrop of the skeletal remains of skyscrapers and subways.
Huh. Was Shannara really a Shadowrun-esque setting? I thought I’d have remembered that. We’ll see if they can actually make this work, but I am skeptical. Then again, I actually enjoyed Eragon, and I hadn’t even read those books. So who knows…
UPDATE: Astro remembers Shannara a lot better than I do.
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I choose HD-DVD
A few days ago, HeadGeek at AICN declared he’d taken sides in the nextgen-DVD format war: he chose HD-DVD. I am inclined to follow his lead. At present I am in no position to purchase a HDTV (without which the choice of DVD format is moot), but I am confident enough in HD-DVD to make the decision well in advance.
There are a number of reasons why HD-DVD makes more sense. The fundamental reason, however, is simple: HD-DVD is backwards-compatible with standard DVD. Couple this with the fact that I will have to buy a new DVD player anyway once I upgrade to HDTV (which will be mandatory as of February 17th, 2009). My aging DVD player doesn’t support progressive scan, so watching DVD movies with my old player on a new HDTV would be masochistic. I anticipate that my TV viewing will be driven more by Blockbuster and BitTorrent than by broadcast, so the choice of DVD player becomes even more important. With a single box that supports upscaling like the Toshiba HD-A2 ($250 at Amazon), I get the full benefits of the HD resolution with my existing DVD library as well as any HD content I might be inclined to rent.
The other primary factor is cost. HD-DVD is simply cheaper, and maintains a healthy price advantage over Blu-Ray even despite recent moves by Sony to reduce the price. The irony here is that while BR players are overpriced now, they are likely to become very cheap in the future, because you can always get one at a subsidized cost by buying a Playstation 3. So there’s even more incentive to wait. The price of any gaming console is guaranteed to drop over time; witness that the PS2 now sells for $129. If at some point I do decide that I want a BR version of Lion King (Disney is exclusively BR), I’ll go and buy a PS3 and get maximum value; I anticipate we will see the PS3 at the $300 price point within a few years, especially as the Wii and XBox continue to clean Sony’s clock.
Much has been made of the fact that Blu-Ray enjoys wider studio support, but if there ever really is a movie truly exclusive to BR that I must have, I still can buy the standard DVD and upconvert on the A2, or I can bittorrent it down and watch on my HDTV (DRM on both formats is irreversibly compromised). But how likely is that anyway? Given that King Kong is out on HD-DVD, I’m not worried about Lord of the Rings following suit; and I’m enough of a purist about Star Wars that if Lucas gets his head out of his arse and gives me the Original, Unedited Trilogy (i.e., Han shoots first, etc) then that’s worth buying a PS3 for. Later. I can wait.
All the debate about which format is winning, based on sales, is essentially bogus anyway. The actual numbers of players sold is so insignificant thus far that any advantage enjoyed by one or the other is illusory and can’t be used to predict the longer-term trend. So I’m not worried about being locked into a “losing” format like BetaMax – again, at a bare minimum I will have backwards, upscaling compatibility with my existing DVDs. As far as I am concerned, the “format war” is just hype.
And anyway, Sony is evil. Some things you just can’t forgive.
