Entry #1.5: Revenge of the Blog.

I figured I'd get the cliched title out of the way early... Anyways, I do still have a little to say on the subject of other blogs. Starting off with corporate blogs...

 

While surveying blogs to look for ideas and tips, I came across a number of blogs written by big name companies, such as Wal-mart, Google, and McDonald's. I tried to read a few different ones, and found most of them very dry and boring. I kind of expected that though. After all, these aren't the blogs of chefs, moms, or artists. These are the realms of business, where the dollar rules all. That doesn't necessarily these are bad blogs either. The ones I looked at were just too up-tight for my taste. Maybe if I ever start to play the stock market, I'll find an interest in them.

Since corporate blogs seem to be my least favorite source of reading, I guess I better balance this out with some positivity. Even if it's positivity about negativity. Benjamin "Yahtzee" Croshaw is one of my favorite " internet celebrities", famous for his weekly webseries, "Zero Punctuation", within which he nitpicks a new release video game for 5 minutes. His wit is razor-sharp, his views are cynical, and he's not afraid to call a big-name, high profile game like Call of Duty a variety of foul names for not doing anything original in terms of story, gameplay, mechanics, or anything else. When he isn't berating triple-A games for lack of imagination, he's putting other fun offerings up on his blog, including podcasts, videos, random musings, or news about his most recently developed games or novel. The humor might not be for everyone, but he makes me laugh everytime.

Storing Data in DNA

Finally, this has nothing to do with blogs, it's just awesome. A team of scientists in Europe were thinking about how efficiently DNA stores the blueprints of the human body, and got to wondering if it could do the same with digital data. The result? Well, the scientists created strands of custom DNA containing all 154 of Shakespere's sonnets, a portion of Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech, a photograph, a classic scientific paper,  and the formula used to convert the bytes of data into DNA in the first place. AND IT ALL WORKED PERFECTLY! The biggest concern at this point is the cost of producing the custom DNA, but with the potential storage rate estimated around 2.2 PETABYTES in a single gram, the perfection of this technology could revolutionize digital storage. (In case you're wondering, a petabyte is a thousand terabytes, which in turn are each equal to a thousand gigabytes. The largest, commercially available hard drive I've seen is only 3 terabytes, and those are already nearly impossible to fill up by a private citizen.) Just click on the link above to check it out if you're intrested.

  Even if you're not interested, I thank you for listening to me ramble, and I look forward to my next entry. I am working on something special, and I hope I'll have it ready soon. Adios!