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Lamborghini’s Aventador SVJ bests its siblings in downforce
Last month I drove a Huracan Performante and marveled at the aerodynamic wizardry the automaker used to keep the supercar glued to the asphalt. Called ALA (Aerodinamica Lamborghini Attiva), the dynamic airflow system can create downforce on the both or either side of the vehicle. It's great.
Lamborghini’s high-performance Spyder turns physics into fun
If you're a car person, you've at least looked at a Lamborghini and wondered, "Are they as awesome as the mystique around them?" Sure, they conjure up images of guys wearing too much cologne while blasting bad covers of popular songs over an EDM beat. Also, there's probably a gold chain thrown in there somewhere. If you toss aside that weird stereotype and really look at the vehicles coming out of Italy, you'd realize they're more than just fodder for posters. They're actually pretty remarkable.
Penguin halts over-the-air Kindle borrowing again, this time it's serious
Penguin already signaled it'd stop providing newer titles to OverDrive's lending service, but apart from a temporary interruption last year, Kindle borrowing of older books has escaped largely unscathed. That's no longer the case: as of this month, Penguin says that "eBooks loaned for reading on Kindle devices will need to be downloaded to a computer then transferred to the device over USB." Why add the extra hassle, compared to direct wireless transfer via Amazon's servers? According to Infodocket, Penguin has simply indicated that this form of distribution breached the terms of its agreement with OverDrive. However, the American Library Association (ALA) has a more developed explanation of what's going on in this nascent industry. It says that publishers are worried about the lack of "friction" involved in eBook lending, compared to the effort required to visit a physical library. This, the ALA thinks, is leading to fears that readers will borrow more and buy less. So, perhaps the wireless delivery of borrowed titles to Kindles was just too easy for Penguin's liking?
Librarians need to play more games
At the annual American Library Association Annual Conference, a session was held about connecting with "digital natives," people who are used to doing things on computers, and who have in fact learned some information-gathering strategies from playing video games. One suggestion for reworking library services for gamers is to design tools and software to be explorable. Libraries currently have an obsession with thesauri and manuals and all kinds of stuff you have to read before you can do anything right. The best searches are the most complicated ones. But games teach us to learn new tools by messing around with them, and, according to James Paul Gee, a University of Wisconsin at Madison linguist.The session offered a list of suggestions for making the library more digital-native-friendly. The most obvious one, and the one that gets this on a game blog: play more games. It's totally the best way to understand the gamer mindset! As the picture above illustrates, some librarians were already on board, offering Guitar Hero and unspecified Wii games (no doubt Wii Sports) for free play at the conference.One final, vital suggestion, from us. libraries should hire more gamer librarians. And pay them extra.[Via Game|Life; picture from The Shifted Librarian's Flickr pool]
