As both a gamer and a student of neuroscience, this fascinates me. This Science article is from way before the birth of CrunchGear, but you know us: any excuse to post, right? You may be familiar with the Tetris Effect: after playing Tetris (or Bejeweled, or Solitaire) for a while, you can’t get those pieces/gems/cards out […]

As both a gamer and a student of neuroscience, this fascinates me. This Science article is from way before the birth of CrunchGear, but you know us: any excuse to post, right?

You may be familiar with the Tetris Effect: after playing Tetris (or Bejeweled, or Solitaire) for a while, you can’t get those pieces/gems/cards out of your head, and as you lay in bed they float in front of your eyes like ghosts of wasted time past. Well, some researchers were studying this effect (I know not why) and discovered that people with severe amnesia would also experience the Tetris effect — despite not remembering they’d ever played the game. I don’t think these findings are quite as applicable to something like World of Warcraft (it’s more the systematic and pattern-based nature of Tetris that makes it persist as a mental image), but just to be safe, no one tell Jack Thompson about it.

Via [crunchgear]

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Apparently the US government is above paying early termination fees. I’m not going to sit here flailing my arms around and pounding my fists on my desk, because I’m sure that every single government agent with a state-issued cell phone is walking around with a Nokia 6110 with duct tape over the battery cover. […]

Apparently the US government is above paying early termination fees. I’m not going to sit here flailing my arms around and pounding my fists on my desk, because I’m sure that every single government agent with a state-issued cell phone is walking around with a Nokia 6110 with duct tape over the battery cover. Ha! Because the government is slow to adopt change, get it?

Anyway, the story is that back in 2004, Nextel was trying to decide whether or not to charge the government $200 early termination fees when the company’s then-VP of Marketing, Scott Wiener, sent an e-mail around saying “The government will never, never accept such penalty amounts,” according to the Associated Press.

Fast-forward to this day and…

A spokesman for Sprint-Nextel, John Taylor, said the company determined it could not assess the termination fees in its federal contract because it would have been against the law. Taylor said the company is upfront with its customers about the fee and offers a variety of pricing plans.

You’ll notice that Sprint, along with most other cell phone companies, has special plans for the government and the public sector. It appears that those plans don’t include early termination fees like the plans for regular schlubs do.

The whole issue surfaced because of an FCC hearing going on this day, where Kevin Martin “has stated he wants to regulate fees charged to cellphone users who cancel their wireless contracts early.” That’s all well and good, but I have a feeling that if you made the early termination fee $75 instead of $175, the price of the handsets would just go up by $100.

via Consumerist

Via [crunchgear]

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whats in my mac dock

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Let’s say you live on Planet Pseudo-Science, where “weight” can be “generated” at the drop of a hat. Well, maybe not the drop of a hat, but rather the spinning of balls in a dumbbell. The comic book premise certainly sounds fun! Balls inside each dumbbell can be set to rotate at different speeds. The faster […]

Let’s say you live on Planet Pseudo-Science, where “weight” can be “generated” at the drop of a hat. Well, maybe not the drop of a hat, but rather the spinning of balls in a dumbbell.

The comic book premise certainly sounds fun! Balls inside each dumbbell can be set to rotate at different speeds. The faster they rotate, the more weight is generated. Seeing as though we live on planet Earth, where a tiny thing called physics applies, this design, while neat looking, is about as worthless as it gets.

The law of conservation of mass says, essentially, that matter can’t be created or destroyed in a shut system. These dumbbells claim to generate weight, which is a merely a function of gravity on mass. (That’s why you’d weigh differently on other planets—the gravitational force is different, while your mass remains constant.) Long story short, the spinning balls don’t change the dumbbells’ mass, so no change in weight could happen.

And now it’s time for Poland v. Austria, two rubbish teams.

via Boing Boing Gadgets and Gearfuse

Via [crunchgear]

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