Crave

Russ with Hova--no big deal.

(Credit: Russ Frushtick)

Russ Frushtick from MTV's Multiplayer blog joins us on today's episode of The 404 Podcast to give us the rundown of this month's upcoming video game releases, but first we have to give a quick head nod to the Yankees for winning the World Series and, of course, Matsui for coming through with the MVP of the series.

Also, were you as annoyed with the lame tech commercials during the game as we were? Between James Cameron's upcoming flop "Avatar" that looks like a 2-hour video game cut scene, the new Droid phone ripping Apple apart, and the rather malicious new Mac ads practically lying about past versions of Windows, we could barely watch the game!

Next, we run down a list of near-extinct tech that just won't seem to go away. The list includes items like the landline telephone, Twitter, vinyl, fax machines, Windows XP, and Sonic the Hedgehog, and although we agree with most of them, how are people supposed to send sandwiches to loved ones without a fax machine?

By far, the highlight of today's episode comes toward the tail end of the show during our classic Calls From the Public segment, where Jeff is the reluctant receiver of a huge spoiler to his current read, Lois Lowry's "The Giver." If you're planning on reading the book for the first time, you might want to click the mute button for the remainder of the episode, or risk suffering a similar fate. On the other hand, the look on Jeff's face when things get spoiled is too hilarious to miss.

This month in games: November 2009--photos

(Credit: Roku)

In its bid to put together a roster of compelling content, Roku has just acquired an ace.

Starting Tuesday, the set-top box--known to many as "the Netflix box"--will begin streaming Major League Baseball games. As with the current Netflix arrangement, you have to be a subscriber to the service, in this case MLB.com Premium, to access the content that normally would be available only on a PC or iPhone.

And while this is a boon to baseball fans, it's an even more important development for Roku. MLB.tv Premium is the first live content available on Roku's device, and by bringing that from the PC to the TV, the 50-person Saratoga, Calif., company is beginning to differentiate itself from similar consumer electronics products.

Roku currently has access to the Netflix Watch Instantly queue, as well as Amazon Video on Demand, which allows for rental and purchase of movies. More recently, Roku added content from Blip.TV and MediaFly, two content aggregators, for videos and podcasts.

MLB.tv will work the same way. It will be accessed via a new pane that can be reached via the small remote. Once a customer's account is synced, any live, out-of-market (as in, not your home team) game across the league can be seen, with the choice of both the home and away team's local broadcast feed. Games up to one week old are available in the archive, and previews appear of each team's scheduled games up to a week in advance. ... Read more

These days, it always seems to come back around to food, and analyzing each other's food issues is pretty enlightening. Here are some tools to appease the inner food critic.

Listen now: Download today's podcast

EPISODE 141

Flint woman invents Corner Cap to keep boxes of food from spilling

World’s smallest microwave also has world’s worst name

Aero Blue Robot prepares to dish out unemployment to Japanese waiters

Chocolate scented calculator is torture for dieters

Hot Dogs to Go (thanks, engnr_chik!)

Erica Boeke is on the show today to talk about her new book "GameFace: The Kick-Ass Guide for Women Who Seriously Love Pro Sports." On the show, we talk about women and their fascination with watching hockey players kick each others' ass. And Justin reveals that he has never played baseball, basketball, football, or hell, even played catch in his life.

Ericka Boeke in a 404 sandwich.

(Credit: Matt Fitzgerald/CNET)

We don't talk too much technology today, but we promise: we have a good time with sports and our general ability to turn any seemingly benign topic into a sexual innuendo. After Justin talks about men playing hockey, you'll never think about it in an unerotic way again.

Briefly on the show, we mention the war going on between Jon Stewart, host of Comedy Central's "The Daily Show," and Jim Cramer, host of CNBC's "Mad Money." Jon Stewart pretty much destroys Jim Cramer and the entire financial news media. We've never almost seen a grown man crying on cable television.

As usual, keep the voice mails coming: 1-866-404-CNET (2638). We still haven't found the right motto yet, but boy do we have a good time sorting through them. Or if you just want to leave a message about how Erica Boeke looks like Helen Hunt, that's fine too. Everyone have a great weekend, and you'll hear us next week when Jeff asks the Sleep Doctor Michael Breus how to stop farting in his sleep.

The (hypothetical) scene:

CNET meeting room, day. Three CNET editors sit at a conference table, surrounded by coffee cups. They're debating the merits of a new ultraportable laptop.

Editor 1
Great performance, great battery life, a great all-around machine. There's one feature that could be a major downside, though.

Editor 2
What's that?

Editor 1
Well, there's a pointing stick, but no touch pad.

Editor 3
Gah! That is an absolute deal-breaker. I hate those things!

Editor 1
You know, they don't bother me, but I know some people have strong feelings about them.

Editor 3
To me, this laptop is useless without a touch pad. There's clearly room on the case to fit one in, so why didn't they include it?

Editor 1
Haven't you ever been typing on a small laptop and accidentally grazed the touch pad? Your cursor winds up several paragraphs away. Infuriating!

Editor 3
Yes, but that's minor compared with the frustration of that tiny stick, which is a pointless legacy feature.

Editor 2
You know, I prefer a touch pad myself, and I'd bet that most of our readers do, too.

Editor 1
Well, we should ask.

Editor 2 and Editor 3 (in unison)
Agreed.

So, dear reader, please let us know your laptop navigation preference in the poll below, and feel free to elaborate in the comments.

(Credit: IEEE)

It may look like one of those iPod hats or something worse, but this baseball cap is more sophisticated--in its technology, if not fashion sense.

The cap is designed to analyze the brain's electroencephalogram (EEG) waves, determining whether you're too fatigued to drive safely. It is just one use for a device developed by researchers at various Taiwan universities and the University of California at San Diego, who hope to expand the technology for applications in myrid other facets of everyday life.

There are other devices with similarly ambitious goals, but many of them require direct contact with the scalp, often needing constant application of gels to improve the conductivity of brain signals. The cap device aims to avoid that inconvenience in a more discreet and portable device, unlike more elaborate systems developed for 3D game equipment.

However, this latest version still requires "five embedded dry electrodes on the wearer's forehead and one electrode behind the left ear," according to PhysOrg, which transmit signals through a Bluetooth connection so they can be analyzed with a dual-core processor in real time. In any case, if gaming becomes one of its eventual uses, it will definitely be preferable to something like Toshiba's 3D helmet.

SAN FRANCISCO--If you were at the Exploratorium here the other day, you might well have needed to be wary of flying objects.

That's because, way in the back of the world-class science exploration museum, senior scientist Paul Doherty was giving a primer on why the curveball--one of the most important pitches in baseball--curves.

Of course, being a hands-on kind of scientist, one who had kindly taken time out of his day to explain the physics of baseball, the only way Doherty could explain the science was to demonstrate it. So he was flinging balls everywhere, and boy were they curving.

Exploratorium senior scientist Paul Doherty demonstrates how to put spin on a ball and make it curve. The demonstration was part of a talk he gave on the physics of baseball.

(Credit: James Martin/CNET Networks)

Fear not, however. These were just foam balls, and even the one kid who got hit in the head barely noticed.

What was amazing, though, was that the kid who did take the ball in the head was far, far off the straight-line trajectory the ball began on. In fact, I would say that each time Doherty flung the ball--using a hand-made contraption designed to put a lot of spin on it--it must have curved off that trajectory by at least 45 degrees.

That's unlikely to happen with a real baseball, however, because of its weight. Whereas this foam ball weighed almost nothing.

Click here for video on baseball science: CNET News.com's Kara Tsuboi checks out the sweet spot on the bat and the stitches on the ball with the Oakland A's and with scientist Paul Doherty.

It turns out that for years, there was a whole school of thought that denied that a baseball could curve at all. Some, Doherty said, believed that because a ball falls with gravity, the "curve" was an illusion and wasn't in fact a side-to-side motion but rather a much easier to understand drop.

In 1949, according to an article in Science News, aeronautical engineer Ralph Lightfoot used a wind tunnel and high-speed photography to demonstrate conclusively that a pitched baseball could, in fact, curve.

And not just a little bit, Doherty said: Up to 17 full inches.

But why does the ball even curve in the first place? That's what my colleagues and I were there to find out, and Doherty did indeed learn us.

The answer boils down to the fact that the seams on a baseball "interact" with the air around the ball as it spins.

"It acts like a little rocket motor," said Doherty. "The spinning ball throws air down and behind" it.

One thing that's clear is that the ball must be spinning really fast, Doherty said. That explains why not everyone can throw a good curveball: It takes a lot of strength in a pitcher's arm and wrist to make the ball spin so quickly.

In actuality, the theory behind the curveball is quite simple. And if you extrapolate, it explains other pitches, and even rules in other sports, Doherty explained.

For example, he said that it is illegal, in golf, to use a ball that only has dimples on the sides because the ball will self-correct in flight and won't, in the end, curve way off track. Being able to control a tee shot, then, is what separates the pros from the weekend duffers. Really being able to control tee shots is what separates Tiger Woods from the rest of the pros.

But what about a knuckle ball or a spit ball?

Doherty said that a proper knuckle ball is thrown in such a way that the ball barely rotates at all--maybe one-and-a-half times between the pitcher and home plate.

With little spin, he added, the air goes turbulent as it encounters and flows around the ball and gets deflected to the side. And that means it's rather impossible to predict what the air will do and how the ball will move. A good knuckleball, in other words, wobbles all over the place and can be nearly impossible to hit.

Ah, but throw the knuckleball wrong and trouble happens to a pitcher.

"If you get it wrong," Doherty warned, "then you get a nice, fat, slow pitch that goes right across the plate."

In the big leagues, that's the recipe for a home run.

Speaking of home runs, the best way to hit one is to hit a pitch with the "sweet spot" on the bat.

So Doherty also spent some time explaining what that is, and why it matters.

Doherty also explained the physics of the 'sweet spot' on a baseball bat. To do so, he showed what happens when you hit a bat in various places with a mallet. Depending on where you hit the bat, energy goes to different places. When you hit the sweet spot, the energy goes straight into the ball.

(Credit: James Martin/CNET Networks)

Essentially, the sweet spot is the one area on a wooden baseball bat where, if the ball hits it there, the bat won't jump at all in the hitter's hands and where all the energy of the collision between the bat and the ball goes into the ball.

If the ball hits anywhere else on the bat, he explained, at least some of that energy is directed into the batter's hands, meaning the ball won't be hit as hard and also that there might be some pain involved.

"When you hit a ball with a baseball bat," he said, "sometimes it stings your hand and other times the ball just flies off the bat."

In other words, sometimes you don't hit the sweet spot, and sometimes you do.

To explain why hitting a ball sometimes hurts, he held a bat by the knob and smacked it over and over with a mallet. Where he hit it affected how the bat flew out of his hand.

When he hit the bat right in the center of its mass, he showed how the bat doesn't spin. And that results in the energy transferring to the batter's hands.

That's in part, he said, because the collision between the ball and the bat produced 8,000 pounds of force for a thousandth of a second, much of which goes into the hands.

The final score of a game, like this one between the Oakland A's and the Cleveland Indians often depends on who has more success, a pitcher trying to throw good curveballs or a hitter trying to hit pitches with the sweet spot of the bat.

(Credit: James Martin/CNET Networks)

If, on the other hand, the ball--or in this case, the mallet--hits the bat at the bottom of its barrel, it does spin.

So over and over, he smacked the mallet on the bat, and the bat flew, spinning, out of his hand. It must have been a rather odd sight for any passers-by.

This doesn't produce Hall of Fame hitters, he suggested. Instead, lots of ground outs.

But somewhere in between the barrel and the center of mass, there's a small point where, when hit by a ball--or a mallet--the bat produces a loud, satisfying "crack" and either the ball flies off it, or the bat shoots off the mallet without spinning, dropping directly away.

"It's the center of percussion," he said, "the place where you hit it, and it doesn't jump in your hands. There's a couple of inches to hit that home run."

The trick is, Doherty explained, the sweet spot is different on every bat. So in order to find it, it takes trial and error. We know it's between the center of mass and the end of the barrel, but where exactly depends on the individual bat.

But, regardless, the message is clear: "If you want to hit that home run on opening day," Doherty said, "hit that sweet spot."

Rick Astley and Mr. Met: A match made in heaven?

(Credit: Sarah Harbin/CNET Networks)

The title of this post was inspired by Deadspin commenter BlastItBiggs.

After April Fool's Day, it got horribly gauche to practice the art of "Rickrolling"--tricking people into watching the video for Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up," or surprising someone by playing the corny pop song. The goofy Internet fad was so utterly overblown on 4/1/08 that the Web seemed to collectively agree that nobody should ever subject anybody to it again.

The New York Mets, however might have to deal with it for a little while longer.

Innocently enough, the baseball team decided to hold an online contest to determine the tune for its traditional eighth-inning sing-along. Despite the fact that the "Stephen Colbert Bridge" debacle should've taught the world a lesson about the perils of online polls, the contest included a write-in option. Prank-friendly geek hubs Digg and Fark linked to the poll, and sure enough, "Never Gonna Give You Up" came out on top.

MetsBlog.com reported that the song played at 4:03 p.m. EDT during the Mets' season opener against the Philadelphia Phillies, who ended up beating the Mets 5-2.

But this might be the only Mets game to get Rickrolled. Gawker Media sports blog Deadspin reported that when the Digging and Farking masses flooded the contest with votes for "Never Gonna Give You Up," the powers-that-be at Shea Stadium decided to issue a mulligan, sort of.

"Rather than commit to that as the new eighth-inning tune since it probably doesn't reflect the fan base's wishes, the Mets will play the top six selections once apiece during the first six games of their home stand," a New York Daily News article linked on Deadspin read. "The one that draws the largest crowd response will stick." Hey, Rick's still got a chance.

And considering the Mets haven't won a World Series since Rick Astley was popular the first time around, "Never Gonna Give You Up" might be a good choice regardless.

CNET News.com's Tom Krazit contributed to this report by noticing the Rickroll mention as he obsessively hit "reload" on MetsBlog.com all afternoon hoping to learn that his beloved Kings of Queens had actually won a game. Sorry, dude.

Two classic NES games are available for download this week on the Wii virtual console. Choose between a classic baseball-arcade sim and a puzzler inspired by everyone's favorite dinosaur sidekick.

• Yoshi's Cookie (1992, NES, 500 Wii points): Nintendo really tried to cash in on the whole Tetris era by developing many Nintendo-branded spin-offs. In Yoshi's Cookie, you'll take on 100 stages of cookie-themed puzzle action.
  
  
• Bases Loaded (1988, NES, 500 Wii points): A true classic, Bases Loaded brought arcade-style baseball into the home. Great gameplay combined with innovations, such as the first-ever view from the pitching mound, allow for this game to be fun even when played today.

What games do you think are missing from the Wii virtual console? Sound off here!