ctrl.altered.mind

Paul Stamatiou mentions that the folks at Global Gaming League (GGL) have compiled a very impressive list of the top 10 colleges that excel at gaming - not for teaching gaming, but for supporting a conducive environment with a strong gaming community and frequent LAN tournaments, not to mention a fast campus-wide network. While it comes as no real surprise that my alma mater, the University of Colorado (at Boulder) is not in the top ten list (although its gaming community is respectably large), it feels stimulating to see that the Twin Cities campus of the University of Minnesota has made it to the top ten (and stands at position eight).

The complete details and survey results are available on the GGL site. Its probably time to sign up for a course at the U of M so I can get connected to the gaming swarm.

There has been much talk about how Google Calendar has made a lot of people toss out Apple’s iCal (atleast from their docks). However, with Google’s latest Mac-only upgrade for the Gmail Notifier, now called the Google Notifier for Mac, I can see many more people quit their iCal applications for the last time, myself included. The new notifier adds a Google Calendar icon along with the standard Gmail notifier icon in the menu bar, letting you access your Google Calendar, create a new event, and get reminders of upcoming events with a single click. The mail notifier has also been vastly improved. It now indicates the last time it checked your mailbox, and sports a Growl-like dark glass message preview for new messages (not to mention some new icons and custom notification sounds).

Google has already made much needed performance improvements for Safari users, so this new notifier should bring back some staunch Mac users back to their door. Personally however, I’m content with the new Firefox 2.0 beta for Mac, which is quite responsive and seems to have been rid of the memory leak issues plaguing Firefox 1.5 on the Mac.

Get Google Notifier for Mac.

Farecast.com is a new tracker service that can promise to put a stop to getting ripped off for domestic flight tickets. The service that originally started as a beta web application for flights departing from Seattle and Boston, has now expanded to over 55 cities. I received a invite to test the beta version a few months back, but it was hardly useful at the time. Little wonder, that I was happy to find an email notifying me that Minneapolis-St.Paul (MSP) is now part of Farecast. The site utilizes predictive technologies and data-mining to improve the online travel experience. The airfare prediction engine technology, which evolved from a University of Washington research project, works well to indicate trends in airfare over the next few days or weeks, allowing better chances of getting a good deal on tickets. The site also links customers directly to airline websites, thereby avoiding booking fees (and ensuring registration for frequent flier miles).

The feature I like most is the ability to set up and track custom airfare predictions via an RSS feed. Now all that remains is to give the service a spin while planning my next trip and hope it saves me some greens.

Sir Richard Branson’s very successful Virgin brand has stepped into the Indian comic books scene - a market that has been left untapped and neglected for a long time, since the glorious era of Indrajal Comics. Virgin Comics now takes a place along with DC and Marvel - but has the edge of catering to a larger audience with Indian superhero characters. Virgin Comics has a strong vision, tapping into the very influential Indian culture and westernizing it just enough in comic book form, to establish a unique genre in US and other western markets - and hopefully gain the same level of popularity as Japanese anime and manga. Virgin Comics has amazing talent on board, with the likes of Oscar-winning director Shekhar Kapur and lifestyle guru Deepak Chopra.

The (free) promotional copy of Virgin Comics #0 is available on IGN. Click here to read.

The BBC reports that there are more overweight people across the globe today than the malnourished ones. The ratio stands today at 1.25:1, with about 1bn obese individuals compared to about 800m hungry people.

It is interesting to note that the biggest increases are being seen in parts of Asia - a continent whose people are not generally envisioned as being obese. In India, for example, fitness and weight loss is on more resolution lists than it is on schedules. This is probably true in the West as well, but to a lesser extent. The findings in the article suggest cheaper foods in the US as a dominant factor contributing to obesity, which is widely accepted as a lifestyle related disease. This also reminds me of Dr. Nikhil Dhurandhar’s studies that strongly suggest that obesity may be caused by a virus.

I saved the BBC article caption because of a typographical error, that made me wonder what the ratios might be, in terms of collective weight in pounds.