Tech Today w/ Ken May

( YouTube Link ) To say that the Uncharted video game trilogy is the most cinematic gaming experience ever would be an understatement, and crafty editor morphinapg has spliced together the proof and put it on YouTube. Each game in the series has been cut into an epic length movie, which speaks volumes about the major role storytelling plays in each game. If you’re afraid of spoilers because you haven’t gotten around to playing the Uncharted trilogy yet, then don’t watch the entire two to three hours of each video and your game won’t be ruined. Otherwise pop some corn, turn up your speakers and enjoy cinematic adventure game cutscenes at their very best. –via Geekosystem  

The Magic Mountain Lodge is a luxury resort set in a private nature preserve in the mountains of Chile. It’s built to resemble a hollowed-out mountain. Fountains at the top can pour water over the surface, making it look like a series of caves in a waterfall. You can view more pictures at the link. The photos showing the lodge after heavy snowfall are particularly striking. Official Website -via Offbeat Home

Got cash? Not necessary in Sweden, who has gone (mostly) cashless: Sweden was the first European country to introduce bank notes in 1661. Now it’s come farther than most on the path toward getting rid of them. In most Swedish cities, public buses don’t accept cash; tickets are prepaid or purchased with a cell phone text message. A small but growing number of businesses only take cards, and some bank offices — which make money on electronic transactions — have stopped handling cash altogether. “There are towns where it isn’t at all possible anymore to enter a bank and use cash,” complains Curt Persson, chairman of Sweden’s National Pensioners’ Organization. The upside? Crimes are down: The number of bank robberies in Sweden plunged from 110 in 2008 to 16 in 2011 — the lowest level since it started keeping records 30 years ago. It says robberies of security transports are also down. “Less cash in circulation makes things safer, both for the staff that handle cash, but also of course for the public,” says Par Karlsson, a security expert at the organization. Link – via GeekPress

( YouTube link ) A guinea pig in Rosyth, Fife, Scotland, named Truffles took a leap into the record books in front of Guinness-appointed witnesses, his 13-year-old owner Chloe Macari, and her scout troop. Truffles jumped for neither fame nor fortune, but for his favorite snack, cucumber. The jump was measured at 30 centimeters, which was 10 centimeters more than the previous record set in 2009. When Macari learned of the 2009 record, she knew her guinea pig could jump further, and petitioned Guinness officials for a chance to prove it. Truffles now goes into the record book, and Macari earned credit toward a community events scout badge. Link -via Arbroath

Tentsile has taken the hammock tent concept and pushed it to an extreme. The picture above doesn’t do it full justice. There’s a third segment projecting out the back. The entire assembly can house five to eight people. And Tensile’s website suggests that they’re working on a twelve -person tent. Is it a good choice for backpacking? Probably not. Link -via Gizmodo

( Video Link ) “Everybody was bear-fu fighting/ those swings were fast as lightning.” I don’t know about you guys, but I certainly wouldn’t want to take on this master martial artist. Via Cute Overload

Did you get your 8 hours of shuteye last night or did you spend the better part of the night wondering why conventional wisdom says you need 8 hours of sleep? Stephanie Hegarty over at BBC News Magazine explores the concept of the eight-hour sleep, which is actually not how humans have been sleeping, historically speaking: In 2001, historian Roger Ekirch of Virginia Tech published a seminal paper, drawn from 16 years of research, revealing a wealth of historical evidence that humans used to sleep in two distinct chunks. His book At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past, published four years later, unearths more than 500 references to a segmented sleeping pattern – in diaries, court records, medical books and literature, from Homer’s Odyssey to an anthropological account of modern tribes in Nigeria. Much like the experience of Wehr’s subjects, these references describe a first sleep which began about two hours after dusk, followed by waking period of one or two hours and then a second sleep. “It’s not just the number of references – it is the way they refer to it, as if it was common knowledge,” Ekirch says. During this waking period people were quite active. They often got up, went to the toilet or smoked tobacco and some even visited neighbours. Most people stayed in bed, read, wrote and often prayed. Countless prayer manuals from the late 15th Century offered special prayers for the hours in between sleeps. Ekirch found that references to the first and second sleep started to disappear during the late 17th Century. This started among the urban upper classes in northern Europe and over the course of the next 200 years filtered down to the rest of Western society. By the 1920s the idea of a first and second sleep had receded entirely from our social consciousness. Link