The bed that made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs

From Kayla Kromer, creator of the famed Hamburger Bed, comes a must-have bed for Star Wars fans: The Millennium Falcon. Like the “real” Falcon, the bed features hidden compartments (for smuggling, though I didn’t think I’d have to smuggle myself in them) working headlights, and a radar dish pillow (try not to knock it off the bed when fighting the second Death Star.) The bed can even accommodate multiple action figures inside its cockpit.

[Via Neatorama]


Game sales figures tell many stories

Market researchers NPD have released their estimates for video game sales figures for November. For what’s theoretically a simple enough figure – $2.7 billion – there are plenty of lessons to be learned:

Everything is a matter of perspective. If you’re feeling the blues, it’s a depressing 7.6% slump on last year’s November figures, suggesting “Christmas stockings are going to be a bit on the empty side this year.” But if you’re full of seasonal joy, it’s the second best November figure on record, beaten only by 2008 being an “incredible year”.

It may or may not have been the result of airport terrorism controversy, but Modern Warfare 2 was a true blowaway hit. With more than 6 million sales, it’s destroyed all records for a newly-released game. And without it, overall sales would have been down by a much more significant margin.

Online gaming is becoming more important in driving sales. While there are only about 25% more Xbox 360 users than PS3 users, Modern Warfare sold more than twice as many copies on the Xbox. A spokesman for Microsoft made the credible, if somewhat biased point that this may very well be down to the idea of playing the game online being more appealing to Xbox Live users.

The price cut that came with the PS3 Slim certainly seems to have done the trick, with sales almost doubled from last year. It’s still in third place, but at 710,400 sales for the month, it’s closing in on the Xbox at 819,000 (which is barely changed from last year). The Wii remains out in front at 1.26 million, though that’s down from over 2 million at the same point last year, despite a recent price cut.

Subjective game quality is not necessarily reflected in sales. A report by Metacritic for 2009 as a whole found that while the Xbox had the highest quantity of games rated highly, the PS3 had the highest average rating as well as making up five of the 10 best rated individual games. And while the Wii has far more titles released, a clear majority of them were poorly rated. The site takes its ratings by averaging the scores awarded by a range of game review sites.

How much information do our brains “download” each day?

internet vs tv

If you were to transcribe every word you saw or heard during a week, the result would be longer than War and Peace. That’s one of the statistics thrown up by a report that finds the average person now reads three times as much as their 1980s counterpart, thanks mainly to computers in general and the Internet in particular.

The headline statistic from the research by the Global Information Industry Center is that the US population as a whole consumed 3.6 zettabytes of information during 2008. That fact appears to have been given prominence mainly so that the authors can show off having heard the unit “zettabyte”: it’s equal to one million million gigabytes.

Expressed in a slightly more manageable way, the figure works out as 1005000 words and 34 gigabytes per person each day. That’s 4.72Mbps, meaning we receive data quicker than many broadband connections could supply it. (It’s also equivalent to 2.1GB of data each hour, which would be enough for my cable provider to throttle my brain if it had the chance.)

The data figure is based on all information users experience, including TV pictures. The study only covers information consumed at home rather than work, and notes that on average we spend 11.8 hours per day receiving information at home. Throw in sleep and work and that doesn’t seem to make sense until you remember to account for weekends, holidays and people who don’t work. Probably more significantly, the same hour can be counted twice if somebody is, for example, “watching” TV while using the internet. Even with that in mind, it’s clear that for the average citizen there is very little time when they aren’t receiving information.

The most surprising note is that video games are responsible for 55% of the information received by people at home, simply because of the level of detail in animated graphics.

The figures recorded for the study are purely for the information which the consumer actually hears or consumes. The authors note this leaves out data such as the content of commercials which are recorded on a DVR but skipped through.

While consumption of print media is on the decline, the presence of the internet means people today actually read considerably more. Indeed, whereas in 1980 only around 12% of the words people came across each day were read rather than heard, today that figure is around 36%.

The study also looks back at figures gathered since 1980 and notes that although improvements in technology has meant the potential information we can receive increases by around 30% each year, the actual information we receive only increases by a little over 5 percent. However, that does add up to a four-fold increase over the past three decades.

The main reason for this relatively slow rate of increase is that TV dominates our information consumption, but the level of information carried by a broadcast has changed little over the past 30 years because the technology itself is virtually identical. That’s likely to change significantly as people switch to more detailed high-definition pictures.

As you’d imagine, the data is drawn from a variety of sources and includes a huge degree of estimation and extrapolation.