Code Monkey by Jonathan Coulton: Anything by Coulton is gold, but this one deserves a special place of honor in nerd lore. Who among us hasn’t tried to have a conversation with a pretty girl only to achieve all-time epic failure in the attempt. If only those conversations went as well in real life as they do in our heads.

Hug a Developer Today: What makes it so funny is how true it really is.

Pixels By Patrick Jean: This is great fun for all of us that grew up during the 80′s. I especially love seeing Donkey Kong on top of the Empire State Building. I remember thinking that graphics just couldn’t get any better…I mean we had 8 bits, what else did we need?

Windows 7 Party Time (Censored): One of the great things about viral videos is the way the public edits and modifies them to make something even better than the original. Microsoft’s lame video was funny by itself, but this version takes it up a notch and let’s your imagination make funny, funny for you.

All Your Base Are Belong To Us: Okay, this is an oldie but a goodie. It was one of the original viral videos to win our hearts and deservedly so. I don’t know why, but I always find myself coming back to All Your Base Are Belong To Us. It’s just a classic.

UPDATE

Office 2010 The Movie: Microsoft strikes again with this fake movie trailer for Office 2010. My favorite part is the tombstone to his dead partner Clippy!

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I have owned many video game consoles in my life. The original Nintendo Entertainment System was not my first video game console, nor the last. But like so many gamers who have continued to carry on with childish things into adulthood, this is the system that cemented, for all time, my love of the medium. No other system is remembered with the nostalgia of this one. Emulators abound on the intrawebs for die-hards that, twenty years later, still can’t get enough of Ninja Gaiden or Metroid. I dare anyone to take a poll of 30-something males and tell me how many can recite the Contra cheat code by heart.* Nintendo is a shared experience. Very few American households during the 80s were without at least the basic console. Most had some of the more outrageous accessories as well (The Power Glove was, in my opinion, simultaneously the coolest and most useless of these). Gaming is now mainstream entertainment. Last month Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 sold 4.7 million copies within the first 24 hours of it’s release. This translated into a staggering $310 million, which makes it the beggest-selling launch in entertainment history. Notice I said entertainment, not gaming; video gaming has officially crossed over. The biggest movie debut of all time? The Dark Knight, which grossed $155.3 million in it’s opening weekend. The biggest book debut? Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows with a paltry $170 million. True, the video game sold for a higher price than a movie ticket or even a hardcover book, but it’s also worth mentioning that fans are willing to spend the extra money for this title. So now that gaming is no longer regulated to the basement TV set, I thought I’d take a stroll down memory-lane and reminisce about the moment in time when gaming became cool.

The NES was launched in 1985 and revitalized the video game market after the crash of 1983. Designed by Masayuki Uemura, it was Nintendo’s first venture into home gaming; however, Nintendo had a secret weapon named Shigeru Miyamoto. Miyamoto first found success as a game designer with the arcade hit Donky Kong where he introduced us to a diminutive mustachioed hero named Mario. Miyamoto was not trained as a game designer, but rather as an artist and storyteller. He, more than any other person, has shaped and established the world of modern day gaming and his creation, Super Mario Bros., catapulted the Nintendo Entertainment System into it’s status as a pop-culture icon. While there are several reasons why the NES captured our imagination, content, as always, is king and the games for the system are what endeared it to every child who ever played it. Here are a few of my favorites:

Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!: It’s laughable in retrospect how fun this game was. It wasn’t really a sports game, but more of a puzzler. I can still tell you the number of hops needed before the punch in order to stop Bald Bull in his tracks. The fact that the cartoonish charicture boxers played to every racial and ethnic stereotype imaginable didn’t even phase the twelve year old child glued to the TV. I’m not sure just what it was about the implausible story that captivated us, but it did. And all these years later the young at heart still love this game.

Tetris: Tetris wasn’t invented for the NES, but the world’s most famous console introduced it to a throng of brick puzzle-hungry gamers. To this day this is the NES game my wife proclaims that she enjoyed the most. Tetris was the gateway drug for an entire generation of gamers.

The Legend of Zelda: Designed by the great Shigeru Miyamoto, this is quite possibly the best video game of all time. I still remember the drive home from the store in my parents 1984 Toyota Camry. I remember unwrapping the packaging and the excitment of seeing the gold cartridge. I love gaming, but this is the only game that has ever had the kind of impact on my life that is usually reserved for the higher arts such as literature, or cinema. The immersive world, the etheral music and the challenging gameplay combined to deliver the most amazing gaming experience possible on the platform.? More than any other game, The Legend of Zelda gave us a taste of things to come.

Nintendo changed the world and paved the way for the high-powered gaming consoles we know and love today. Anyone who doesn’t recognize gaming as a force in the entertainment community is deluding themselves. That power is in no small part due to the visionaries that created this classic system and the games that made it the best video game console of all time.

*up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, start

Two things I really enjoy doing on Saturday and Sunday mornings are reading the newspaper and listening to NPR’s Weekend Edition (Saturday and Sunday editions). I’m a a bit of news junkie, and I check a variety of sources online during the week. The reason I look forward to newspapers and the radio on the weekend is because of the stories I come across that I would never have gone looking for on my own. With a newspaper, as I flip from page to page though the broad range of content to get to the stories I want to read, more often than not I’ll stumble upon other intriguing stories I wouldn’t have found otherwise. For one reason or another I’ll get reading and the next thing you know I’ve spent several minutes filling in a void in my knowledge I didn’t even know was there.

It’s because of this side benefit of the relatively disorganized nature of traditional media that I was struck by the logic behind Rupert Murdoch’s announcement that he was going to block his properties from being searched by Google. (You can read a summary of this here).

Don’t get me wrong, I love getting news online. I check my usual haunts and get links via various social networks for news from all over the world. News that before the internet came along I’d never get. However, the news that I get via social networks tends to be more narrowly defined than what I get online. It’s usually related to topics either I or people I know are already interested in (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing) but it can be limiting in ways that aren’t obvious.

A notable exception here is Digg. Digg will serve up any damned thing and it’s as close to random as I’ve seen. My only problem with Digg is that so much of its content falls into what I call the “towel-snapping” category. To demonstrate, the following are the three most recent headlines:

1. Lost man drives nine hours to get newspaper
2. Local dad spoke only Klingon to child for three years
3. Boy Dials 911 After Parents Take Away His Xbox

Top in all topics are

1. Miss Universe Contestants in Three-Way Sex Tape
2. xkcd – Academia vs. Business (a cartoon)
3. The Problem With Internet Girlfriends

Entertaining, yes – but I’m not likely to find anything life changing here. Unless that three-way tape is really, really good.

The internet, as well as the way we use it, is still evolving. Some of these shortcomings won’t be solved over time, but it should be remembered that every medium has it’s own inherent advantages and limitations. I’m going to venture a guess that over time the internet will prove to be great at giving us more of the same stuff we already like but not so great at helping us find those things we normally discover serendipitously – those things we fall in love with that we’d never have sought out on our own.

In his book, The Big Sort, Bill Bishop argues that over the last 40 years we’ve been self segregating along lines of class, religion, politics and a host of other cultural markers. Mr. Bishop posits that this segregation has produced neighborhood after neighborhood of echo chambers resulting in two Americas, each made up of citizens with increasingly homogeneous attitudes and points of view. If he is correct, I fear social networks will, in the long term, prove to be a poor source of news about topics we wouldn’t normally seek out or from points of view that challenge our preconceived notions or understanding.

Setting aside the big issues of religion and politics and focusing instead on the safer issue of entertainment media (books, music, etc.), let’s look at the example of China’s hip hop grannies (stories here and here). As an elderly Chinese, I doubt very seriously Wu Ying would have sought out hip hop on her own. You may counter that there are several services that offer suggestions based on other a person’s other likes and dislikes, but to my knowledge those are all based on a user’s conscious inputs and behaviors. I can’t imagine what algorithm would divine that a Chinese septuagenarian would take interest in hip hop – especially if there was nothing in said septuagenarian’s background to suggest that hip hop is something she’d be remotely interested in.

Instead she stumbled across it by way of old media – television. By virtue of that medium’s limitations, she was “forcibly” exposed to something she wouldn’t normally have sought out on her own. I say forcibly here because the inherent qualities of any technology force certain behaviors on the part of the user.

To give a more personal example of this, I find almost all of my new music by listening to the Morning Show on KEXP. I’ve used Last FM and Pandora, and enjoy both for what they are, but I find that both end up serving me more of what I already know and like. I rarely if ever find anything new there. It’s only by listening to the selections of the morning DJ, John Richards, that I find new music that really strikes a chord with me. To be sure, some of his choices do nothing for me, and some I hate, but in the end I always walk away with more than I started.

I’m a believer that the big events in one’s life and in history – the one’s that really matter – are serendipitous. What Nassim Taleb calls Black Swans. Google’s mission may be to organize the world’s information and social networks may facilitate communication with friends and co-workers, but both are built on systems of attribution – things that we (or the people we know) already know. There’s something to be said for the knowledge that comes from having to sift through less organized content. I’m not trying to beatify newspapers or suggest that everyone get a subscription to their local paper or start listening to drive time radio again (though you may want to check this out). Print journalism fell victim to its own shortsightedness, but will hopefully learn from its mistakes. In the mean time, online content providers and aggregation have a long way to go before they can fill the serendipitous void left by their predecessors.

Interestingly it was a machine constructed in the late 18th century that first deigned to pit man versus machine. Wolfgang Von Kempelen constructed the Turk in 1770 for Empress Maria Theresa of Austria. The amazing machine consisted of a life size human model dressed in the Turkish style of the day. The mechanical man sat at a large cabinet topped with a chessboard. The cabinet doors opened to expose a serious of gears and cogs very similar to that of a large clock.

Von Kempelen demonstrated the machine by challenging a member of the crowd of onlookers to play the machine at chess. The games rarely lasted very long with the hapless human usually losing in short order. Kempelen would also impress crowds by his machine?s ability to perform the Knight?s Tour, a chess puzzle in which a knight moves to occupy every square of the board only once. The chess-playing automaton toured Europe and America for over 70 years. During it?s lifetime some of the Turks more notable opponents/victims included Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon Bonaparte. In 1954 a fire destroyed the Turk and only then was it?s secret finally reveled.

The Turk was not a machine at all, but an eccentric hoax meant to fool any observer. A series of false walls and a sliding seat concealed a human player within the cabinet. The operator controlled the Turk using several levers. Each piece on the board contained a strong magnet, which moved a corresponding piece on the underneath of the board. Thus the operator was able to keep track of all the moves.

The Turk may not have been a genuine chess-playing machine, but its very existence and popularity are important. The Turk inspired us to keep finding ways to make our creations smarter. Today Deep Blue and its offspring command enough intelligence to rival the human brain. This kind of technology was imagined centuries before it became practical.? The incredible chess-playing automaton, just as visionaries such as Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, gave us a glimpse of what could be.

But what he may be best known for is a test he developed to determine the intelligence of a machine. The Turing test was conceived before the microchip and described prior to the advent of anything we today would even recognize as a computer. Yet, it is still a benchmark that is hotly debated both scientifically and philosophically. In the test, a person poses questions to two participants. One of the participants is a human, while the other participant is a machine. The inquisitor cannot see the two participants but can only judge based on their written responses. A machine is said to pass the test if it can deceive the judge into believing it is a human.

Each year since 1991 the Leobner Competition is held between computer programs participating in the Turing test. Three medals are at stake. The gold medal goes to a machine that can fool the judges visually as well as through sound, the silver to any program that can pass a text only version of the test. The bronze is given as an honorable mention to a program that does not pass the test but displays the most human-like artificial conversation. It is said that once a machine can consistently pass the test we will have achieved artificial intelligence. So far, only the bronze medal as ever been awarded.

Tragically, Alan Turing was a victim of the prejudice and bigotry of his time. Turing was a homosexual and prior to the 1960s this was a crime in Great Britain and treated as a mental illness. In 1952 the very government he helped save during World War 2 convicted him of gross indecency. He was given a choice between imprisonment or chemical castration. Turing accepted castration, which was preformed by giving him estrogen injections to suppress his libido. The treatment caused multiple side effects both mental and physical, including Turing developing breasts. Two years later Alan Turning was found dead. He had committed suicide by eating an apple he had dipped in cyanide.

Earlier this year a computer scientist named John Graham-Cumming started an online petition asking for an official apology from the British government for their treatment of Turing. On September 10th, 2009 the petition, which received over 31,000 signatures, was successful and Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued an apology on behalf of the British government. You can read the full contents of the apology here. John Graham-Cumming has also written to Queen Elizabeth and asked that Turing be award a posthumous knighthood. Given his contribution to the world of computing and the selfless work done breaking German ciphers during the darkest days of World War 2 this seems another only appropriate step to righting a terrible wrong.

Turing was a giant in the field of computer science and in 1999 Time Magazine named him on of the 100 Most Important People of the 20th Century. His story is one that should always be remembered as an example of what can happen when a society allows itself to be blinded by it?s own moral and political rightness. Albert Einstein once said ?Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.? Let us all honor Alan Turing by striving every day to not be mediocre, and by recognizing greatness and opening our minds to it whenever it is among us.