I Art You

Researchers in England have finished work on the first ever video game museum/archive. Although the industry is only 46 years old the researchers want to make sure they avoid losing historic artifacts by not acting early enough to preserve them. Besides games the museum will include game artwork, advertisements, and other relevant artifacts.

The archive was formed by academics at Nottingham Trent University, in cooperation with the National Media Museum in Bradford. The archive will, in fact, be located at the National Media Museum, and managed by Nottingham Trent University’s Centre for Contemporary Play. Interestingly, along with games and consoles, the archive will also include a wide swath of game-related media, such as advertising campaigns, artwork, and “the communities that sustain them”

Source

Ever wonder what the deepest hole every dug was? OK well maybe you never have thought about it, but it is interesting to know nevertheless.  During the cold war the Soviets decided to dig a hole as deep as the possibly could, given their geographic location digging a hole to China would have been out of the question. They started digging their hole in a remote mining community named Pechenga, the goal was to beat an American scientific team to something called the ‘Mohorovicic Discontinuity’ (Moho), the heavily disputed boundry between the earths crust and magma filled mantle. The Russians continued to dig for over fifteen years eventually reaching a depth of 40,226 ft, the current world record.

Star City is Russia’s own Cape Canaveral, all of Russia’s cosmonauts where trained in this once secretive facility. These days the center is more open and can even be visited as a tourist (for aprox $500), or if you have deeper pockets you can follow in the foot steps of the worlds first space tourists who trained for their flights to the ISS at Star City.

Richard Garriott a video game designer is the next space tourist to fork over the $30 million dollar ticket price to take a ride on a Russian rocket and spend a week and a half on the ISS. Before he can leave Garriott must spend eight months training at Star City. Wired has written a great article about him along with some fantastic photos of the facility.

NetworkWorld ran a slide show on Valentines day showing their list of the Ten Best Places To Take A Techie On A Date. The list was very interesting, there were some obvious items such as the Kennedy Space Center, but there was also a large number of places I have not heard of before. From the Space Camp center in Alaska to the Sony experience center in New York the list was very educational and informative for Techie’s and those who want to date them. Heres the top ten,

1) Denver’s Wings Over the Rockies Museum

2) U.S. Space & Rocket Center (Huntsville, Ala.)

3) New York’s Sony Wonder Technology Lab

4) Seattle’s Experience Music Project

5) Cape Canaveral’s Kennedy Space Center

6) Orlando’s DisneyQuest Indoor Interactive Theme Park

7) Los Angeles’s Universal Studios Hollywood

Cambridge’s MIT Museum

9) Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute Science Museum

10) San Francisco’s Exploratorium
.