The London Philharmonic Orchestra is unleashing “The Greatest Video Game Music” album on November 8 featuring classically reimagined tunes from Grand Theft Auto, World of Warcraft, Tetris, BioShock, Angry Birds, and many others.

Yes, the same orchestra that brought us hit albums such as “Mozart: The Violin Concertos” and “Shostakovich: Symphonies Nos. 5 and 9,” is now tackling Splinter Cell and Legend of Zelda. via cnet</ … Read More → "The London Philharmonic Orchestra reimagines video game music"

From data scientists to data-savvy managers, data is playing a bigger role in how we do our work. According to a recent study by Factiva, there are at least six different personas that workers take on, illustrating the different ways we relate to this data. We can enhance our chosen data expertise and highlight our capabilities by understanding these personas. via GigaOM

Continue reading

Using a custom-built launch tower, Qu8k (pronounced as “quake” in homage to Carmack’s id software classic video game) made a safe return in a parachute descent that took another 7.5 minutes. It was fully recovered only three miles from the launch site (the Prize requirements include recovery of the intact rocket within 24 hours of the launch).

Constructed from aluminum and measuring 8 inches (20 cm) in diameter and 167.5 inches (425 cm) in length, the Qu8k’s rocket … Read More → "Home-built rocket climbs to 121,000 feet in 92 seconds"

Mouth guards like this one are being used by Stanford football players this season to record information about forces to the head. Image: X2 Impact

Christophe Mack, cofounder of X2 Impact, agrees that the mouth guards will be better than helmets at capturing the impact forces inside the head. The devices have six sensors measuring … Read More → "Wireless mouthpieces gather impact data from football players"

It’s challenging to be the lone remote worker in a team where most of the members are located in the same office. You miss out on opportunities like impromptu meetings, informal gatherings at the water cooler, and most offline collaborative activities. The phone and the web are your only means of connecting and participating with the hub.

The good news is that many companies are now offering in-office avatars or embodied social proxies (ESPs). Basically robots that can be remotely controlled, the ESPs are a substitute for a remote worker being in the same … Read More → "Why robots are good (and bad) stand-ins for remote workers"

There’s a new Kickstarter campaign that promises to launch a personalized satellite into orbit for a couple hundred bucks:

I’m Zac Manchester, a graduate student in Aerospace Engineering at Cornell University. Over the last several years a few collaborators and I have designed, built, and tested a very tiny and inexpensive spacecraft called Sprite that … Read More → "Would you like to have your own spacecraft in space?"

20 miles on Mars, at a top speed of about two inches a second, is a long, long way. The picture below shows the route that Opportunity has taken to its current position on the rim of a 14 mile-wide impact crater called Endeavor. The video shows the last three years of Opportunity’s journey, as it made its way from Victoria crater to where it is now. via … Read More → "Time lapse shows rover’s epic three-year trek across Mars"

The new LHSEE app, free on Google Android phones and tablets, lets users see events unfolding live inside the particle accelerator in a 3D view. You can even see individual protons colliding.

The app has already been downloaded more than 10,000 times. 

It was created by scientists at Oxford University, and has the full approval of CERN. via Daily … Read More → "The Higgs boson? There’s an app for that – scientists give phone users live 3D feed of events inside Hadron Collider"

Since 2009, former high school English teacher and self-taught artist Matt Kish has been drawing every page of the 552-page Signet Classics paperback edition of Herman Melville’s iconic Moby-Dick, methodically producing one gorgeous, obsessive drawing per day for 552 days using pages from discarded books and a variety of drawing tools, from ballpoint pen to crayon to ink and watercolor. via Brain Pickings

Read More → "Every page of Moby Dick, illustrated"

After years out of print the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction has roared back to life with a new website. The venerable publication is a massive directory of games, books, and other media that fall under the rather large banner of Science Fiction. Perhaps more importantly, the SFE also has a fairly extensive catalog of fan-zines and chronicles … Read More → "At long last, the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction launches online"