Robot Claw – Page 569 – “Life In The So-Called Space Age”

It’s More Fun To Compute

December 12, 2011

Another graduation gift I received is the TI Voyage 200 calculator. This is pretty much the Rolls Royce of calculators, and (I firmly believe) may be the best chip-based calculator ever made.

This shot shows it next to my iPad, which itself displays a life-sized image of the calculator. How meta!

It’s a super device that can do almost anything you can imagine. A machine brain that makes me, a mere human, humble.

Newer TI calculators are more like tablets, with colour screens and apps. This guy is old school, and although it can run apps (downloaded from the PC) via USB, the main function of the device is in a dedicated chip.

Did I mention the manual is 1080 pages in length? 🙂

Anyway I’m going to write a basic game for this one day. You can expect a blog entry if I succeed…

Going Berko

December 11, 2011

Today I shall tackle the long unanswered question of the origin of a particular piece of Australian slang.

“Going berko” is the term. As in “Watch out, he just found out we broke the window and he’s going berko”. Irrationally angry. Crazy. Enraged. Demented even.

I’ve used this for years, and still do. Sometimes the cats go berko for instance. A few weeks ago KLS and I had a discussion about the term, which she’d never heard before me. A rudimentary online search shows that it is almost exclusively Australian, and slang.

The word ‘Berko’ exists with other uses of course, most notably as a name (of African origin) or an English village. The urban slang dictionary includes it with no origin. Where did it come from? Why is it just Australian?

I suspect, as you may have guessed from the above, that the term derives from David Berkowitz, the so-called ‘Son of Sam’. It makes sense in many ways, and is indeed what I assumed the origin has been most most of my life. But could this be true? Could this slang be as recent as 1977? Is it actually possible that Australian schoolyard slang could be derived from a NY serial killer and that the same slang doesn’t even exist in America?

I have no answers, and for once information seems very scant online. What do you think? Do you use the term? How long have you used it? Where do you think it came from?

(Not So) Basic

December 10, 2011

Magic The Gathering has been around for over 15 years now, and the basic design of the cards has barely changed in that time. However they were modernized in 2003 by updating the card frames. Here’s an example of the old frame:

And here’s the new (and still current) frame:

But did you know that WoTC spent about 3 years deciding on the updated frame, and during that period even did some test prints of alternate frame designs? I’ve seen scans of a few of these now, and unquestionably the ones I find most attractive are these two:

Incredible aren’t they? Only two of the first were printed (and in foil no less) and only three of the latter. They are now in the hands of private collectors and valued at many thousands ($7k+ apparently). Many other cards exist using these never-used frames, but the lands (2 islands and allegedly a mountain) are by far the most expensive because they are tournament legal.

As if the owners would ever play with them 🙂

As I have mentioned before I have a collection of basic lands, which is now upwards of 650 unique basic land cards. It makes me feel strangely happy to know that as complete as my collection almost is, there exists ‘holy grail’ lands like these that I will never, ever, ever own 🙂