Monkey Ball - Freestyling

Those of you with any knowledge of gaming must have heard about the Monkey Ball series. Created by Sega and first appearing on the Gamecube (I never thought I see the day that Sega games appeared on a Nintendo console). The game plays like a modern version of Marble Madness, but given a 3rd person perspective and a dose of typical Japanese quirkiness you find yourself guiding a monkey inside a hamster-style ball through puzzle filled levels. I originally bought it over a year ago, but it sat gathering dust as My friend Matt and I frantically tried to finish Mario Kart: Double Dash. Once we'd got bored of that though, we turned our attention back to Monkey Ball.
Incredibly simple to learn - the entire main game is controlled with only 1 analogue stick to tilt the landscape to get the ball to move - but almost impossible to master with later stages becoming fiendishly difficult: sort of a modern day Tetris. One evening we found this web site which offers videos of so called Monkey Ball "world records". We downloaded the file and sure enough the video (it's about 90mb) contained every level being completed in a ridiculous time with an absolutely phenomenal amount of control on display. Instead of progressing through a level as the designers intended, these super players veer off coarse, hitting edges and causing their monkey to soar over most of the obstacles. Matt and I named these techniques freestyling. By this point, I had acquired Monkey Ball 2, offering more levels to challenge us. Again, there was a video (~170mb) of this game being completed quickly. Again the amount of skill on display is outrageous, but we have been learning from it - weaving left and right at the start of levels coming off the ramped sides builds up speed to allow some pretty naughty jumps, although we have nowhere near the skill of these guys. The music for these videos is pretty cool (although we can't quite explain the presence on Enya on there).
Our alumni friend, Brooks also has the games so when he comes up at weekends, we often get some 3 player action going. In addition to the regular game, Monkey ball offers up to 12 bonus games including racing, target (try to fly your ball on a target to get points), fight (giant punching gloves attached to the ball), golf (with some crazy courses), bowling (again with the option for some weird lanes), billiards, boat (row your ball down a river coarse), shot (a virtua cop style game), dogfight (aerial combat), soccer, baseball and tennis. All these subgames have extra features to unlock: in fact whilst "researching" this blog entry I've managed to unlock the second stage of crazy bowling...

Monkey Ball 2 features a single player "story" mode tacked on to the original level-after-level style. This again demonstrates the surrealness of the Japanese designers and I really pity who ever had the unenviable task of translating the game into English. Suffice to say it features an evil Monkey, Dr Bad-Boon (sigh), attempting to steal all the bananas fro our hero Monkeys and also marry Meemee - one of the playable characters. World 7 sees Bad-Boon returning home for a bath even though he's being chased by the Monkeys. Truly bizarre.
The down side of course that now we are world 7/10, the levels are (almost)impossible so the amount of swearing and bad language that comes out my room would make a sailor blush. Mind you, we though the world 6 levels had us beaten as well...

Nanotechnology - Beware the Hype

Chemistry isn't really the most glamorous of the sciences. Tough to get your head around at school and even harder to understand at degree level, chemistry is in dire need of some positive press. National Chemistry Week has just ended here in the UK and I bet hardly anyone realised. The work of chemists is invaluable to the way we live our lives today - everything from the clothes, we wear, the food we eat, all our entertainment mediums and the drugs that have prolonged our life expectancy. So you'd expect that chemists would be well received members of community and children would actually want to be chemists when they grow up.

Unfortunately, it isn't like that at all. The overwhelming perception of chemists is that when they're not arsing around in white coats, they're polluting the planet, torturing animals or mercilessly ripping off third world countries. Quite how this has happened isn't too apparent, but by and large the only thing you read about in the news are the bad sides of chemistry: testing drugs on animals, massive plants bellowing out smoke, drugs with bad side effects... but this rant isn't about that.

The one positive we're getting as chemists is in the form of nanotechnology, but even that is about to go wrong. Yesterday we received a talk from Professor Tony Ryan (right) on nanotechnology. Despite looking like Sam from Lord of the Rings, Ryan is one of the UK's most high profile chemists and presented the 2002 Royal Institute Christmas Lectures - the only time in the 10 years or so I've been watching them that chemistry was featured. His group at the University of Sheffield are working on synthetic muscles, but the first part of his talk was about the dangers of hyping up these new ideas with no science to back them up.

The term was coined by the Japanese in the 70s to suggest synthesis and analysis on an atomic or molecular level. The bandwagon started it's roll to the current-day expectation when in the early 80s, Eric Drexler released the book Engines of Creation. His imagery of "Grey Goo" - a vision of a future where nanobots escaped the labs and endlessly replicated and broke all matter down.
He predicted that Star-Trek-esque machines would be able to assemble anything atom by atom if we knew which atoms were needed where... The worst thing that could happen did: the popular press and a bunch of pseudo-scientists cottoned on to it. Cue the setting up of the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing in 1991, which to this day has manufactured precisely bugger all save for some pretty computer images of "molecular machines".

Even such widely read magazines as Time Magazine ran cover stories picturing small machines the size of a human blood cell that would one day be able to swarm around our bodies in their trillions patching us up, performing surgery at a microscopic level and keeping us healthy. Of course, most A-Level students could tell you straight away that these just won't work and aren't feasible. Look at the picture and despite their seeming well intentioned ideas, it don't doesn't hang together. Let's forgo the fact that anything as small as proposed (in the fashionable "human hair" units - I guess 10^-9m would intimidate most people) would never be able to have such intricate detail and think back to basic chemistry and physics. At the microscopic levels, any science student will tell you that small particles move randomly due to Brownian Motion. Given that you can see particles displaying this phenomenon on a macroscopic level - you can imagine how unsteady these robot surgeons would be. If something is going to operate on my insides I rather it didn't shake around randomly... Moving on, most people will have heard of Van der Waals forces - instant spontaneous polarisations that make small molecules stick together. For a machine this small, all that would happen is that not only would they stick together, they'd also attract all the gunk that normally floats around our bodies - essentially getting lost in the biological gunk that makes us up.

What Professor Ryan brought home to us was that politicians read these kind of books and magazines. I'd never thought about this much before, but it's true - to pretty much guarantee funding for research all you have to do is mention nanotechnology and people will be falling over themselves to give you money without really understanding where it's going. Indeed, my research group is part of the Durham Nanomaterials project. The problem is that the 1980s were actually a long time ago (scary) and so far not much has been delivered. Journals are full of "promising" materials, but not much has made it to market.


My field of OLEDs has long been touted to replace LCD screens, but despite being on the verge of release for the last 5 years we're not really inundated with thin flexible, low powered screens. In fact, in the mean time LCD technologies have improved drastically and alternative technologies such as SED as gearing up for launch early next year in Japan. The public expects, and pretty soon, the policy makers are going to wonder where all their money went and chemistry won't even have the white knight of Nanotechnology to promote itself.

Meanwhile, Drexler and his apostles have been attacking anyone who dares to doubt his vision of nanomachines that can outperform nature, including Nobel Prize winner Richard Smalley. That nature has created nanoscale machines suggests that we one day might get close, but after all, nature has had several billion years to get things right...

Well that's just great...

Tonight I went out with some friends for a pair of birthdays to the Chinese restaurant in Durham and very nice it was too. However, after the meal we all got given fortune cookies. Everyone else had really affirmative fortunes (such as Positive thinking yields positive results) but mine actually manage to insult me... here's a picture of the offending item - I did manage to see the funny side, but I wonder...

Just what exactly are they saying about me??

Colin Hay - A Follow Up

It's been over a month since I started listening to Colin Hay. Starting with his more recent albums, Going Somewhere and Man At Work and moving on to some of his older works that I've finally tracked down on the Durham University network.

Going Somewhere is folk guitar at it's simplest - one man and his guitar. Hay's voice is pretty unique and soothing and his songs all tell stories. For example, the opener, Beautiful World is all about taking joy from the simplest of things:

My my my, it's a beautiful world/I like swimming in the sea

even though the world isn't perfect:

She says she doesn't love me, but she enjoys my company/For now that's good enough for me

Title track, Going Somewhere features a very catchy guitar progression and vocal hook, whilst My Brilliant Feat combines a playful melody with some touching lyrics about someone whose 15 minutes are long gone. One of the stand-out tracks though is Waiting for my Real Life to Begin - known to anyone who saw the Scrubs episode My Philosophy. Presented here as a solo guitar piece, the song is an anthem for those whose lives haven't amounted to anything yet, but who live on in hope that one day they will:

Any minute now my ship is comming in/ I'll keep checking the horizon

When I awoke today nothing happened/But in my dreams I slew the dragon

And you say "be still my love/open up your heart and let the light shine in"/Well don't you understand I already have a plan?/I'm waiting for my real life to begin

On a clear day I can see/See a very long way

In this, my 7th year at university I know the feeling of waiting for something to come along and change my life all too well. The album "finishes" with Maggie a very happy sounding track which becomes sadder in tone until you realise what story is being told... The US special edition is rounded off with an acapella version of I don't know why from a live performance and then radio edits of Waiting for my real life... and the song I just don't think I'll ever get over you which you may know from the fantastic and oft-mentioned Garden State OST. A simple guitar quietly announces the track before Hay's voice - sounding even more resigned and world-weary than usually - comes in:

And when I'm done I feel like talking/Without you here I have less to say/I don't want you thinking I'm unhappy/What is closer to the truth/That if I lived till I was 102/I just don't think I'll ever get over you

Despite being a beautifully lehthargic song of resignation and acceptance, this radio edit clocks in at just 4:31. The full verison is available to the album Transendental Highway.

Man @ Work is something of an odd-ball: it combines classic Men At Work reworkings, with alternate versions of some of Hay's best solo songs and a few new compositions. An alternate version of Beautiful World (that is actually how it was originally recorded) containing a full band (including a wonderfully minimalist slide guitar part) but oddly misses out the verse about "Marie" which to me sums up the whole song. Next up is an acoustic version of the best known Men At Work song: Down Under: sounding suitably laid back compared to the 80s version yet still playful enough to be raise a smile. Continuing the 80s theme is an acoustic version of Overkill as featured in the Scrubs season 2 premiere performed by Hay in cameo. The song was perfect for the episode in which all the characters have fallen out and aren't talking to each other:

I can't get to sleep/I think about the implications/Of diving in too deep/And possibly the complications/Especially at night/I worry over situations/I know will be alright/It's just overkill

Storm in my Heart returns to a fuller band sound with a very springy beat. Waiting for my Real Life... makes another appearence - for the original full band version (without the final lines) you'd need to get a hold of the fantastic Topanga. Some new recordings with a destinctly regae sound follow before a completely new recording of Down Under finishes the album in style with another regae-ish sound and brass section boosting to give a completely different feel to the previous version.

I'm still listening to the rest of the back catalogue, but if you want some excellent folk/singer songwriter/easy listening yet involved songs I fully recommend you track down some of Hay's albums.