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Adam and Jamie, hots of the known MythBusters show compared a CPU vs a GPU to explain parallel processing and the GPU drew an ACTUAL mona lisa drawing using paint balls in 80 milliseconds!!!!!!!

I’m a fan of both paintball and having a beefy GPU. This video was so right up my alley. Plus how wicked is it to see paintballs blast a Mona Lisa in 80 milleseconds? The GPU vs CPU display was done as part of NVision08. NVision08 was a kind of mega event described as “Featuring over 55 hours of jaw-dropping visual wonderment - from today’s hottest games and movies, video, science, mobile and computer technologies - you will get to experience, touch and feel the latest visual technologies that will change your life. And let you see into the future.”

For the record:

• By the end of the swimming program, Phelps played a part in 47 percent of America’s 17 overall gold medals and three-quarters of its 12 swimming medals. The contribution is made more significant by the fact that no Americans took silver in any of his five individual events.

• His 16 career medals – eight gold in Beijing and six gold, two bronze in Athens – rank him only behind Soviet gymnast Larissa Latynina, who won 18 medals in three Olympics from 1956 to 1964.

• His eight gold medals are the most ever by an athlete in a single Games. His 14 career gold medals are also a record. In fact, he nearly equaled the previous record for most career gold medals – nine – in this Olympics alone. The record was held by Latynina, American swimmer Mark Spitz, American sprinter and long jumper Carl Lewis, and Paavo Nurmi, a Finnish long-distance runner from the 1920s.

• He broke or had a part in breaking seven world records in his eight events. Only in the 100-meter butterfly did he or his relay team not establish a world record.

Simply put, this man is simply a machine. But there’s more… during the 200-meter butterfly he started off with water in his goggles. That’s right, he was handycapped from the beginning and still broke a world record.

Phelps said, “I could just swim, that’s the only thing I could do at that point. I couldn’t take them off; I had two caps on. I couldn’t rip them off; I couldn’t fix them. I couldn’t empty the water out. …I couldn’t see. I was trying to see the T on the bottom, trying to judge my turn and the finish, but I was more or less just sort of counting strokes. I sort of know how many strokes I take per 50 and I was hoping that I was going to be dead on and that I was going to be able to hit the wall perfectly. I was able to get my hand on the wall first and it was a best time, but I think I was just disappointed that, that I know I can go faster than that and it just disappoints me that my goggles — I did have a malfunction — but there’s nothing I can do and I handled the situation the best way that I could.”

As hardcore gamers play existing video games, casual gamers are taking over the whole video game console market in the U.S. ahead of the summer season (my dad even has a Wii!). Recently released figures by NPD Group indicate not only increase in the general spending on video entertainment, but also overwhelming advantage of Nintendo gaming platform over the Microsoft Xbox and Sony PlayStation.

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Direct from CollegeAtHome:

Video and computer games aren’t always associated with their educational value, but as virtual media grows and develops, educators are finding that games are a great way to get children engaged in learning while still allowing them to have fun in their classes. Not every game is well suited for the classroom, but there are loads out there that have something of value to teach, guide and grow the interest of kids both inside and outside of school. If you’re looking for something educational for your own kids to play or for a game your students can enjoy that applies to their lessons, here are some to consider.

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Forget touchscreen, or uber “green” solar powered coffee tables… Kyle Downes has modded the coffee table into its best version ever: a retro-tastic NES controller. The high quality finish and classy glass top isn’t the end of this awesome mod… it actually works. Don’t believe it? Check out the video after the gallery.

Kyle spent months putting this together, starting with a scanned image of his original NES control. This he then simply scaled up, carefully crafting each piece out of MDF and hacking his own wiring onto a broken old controller board. The glass top was the final touch, to protect those giant buttons, and inside there’s plenty of storage. I guess if you’re up for some giant 8-bit game-controlling action you’d probably need someone else on hand.

A pair of Harvard researchers are saying what everybody who’s grown up with a controller in their hand already knows, violent video games don’t turn children into killers. According to a newly published book, ‘Grand Theft Childhood: The Surprising Truth About Violent Video Games and What Parents Can Do’, psychologists Lawrence Kutner and Cheryl Olson dispel common myths about violent games. In their two-year study, they found that there was no data to support any causation between games and real-life violence.

Kutner and Olson studied 1200 middle-school children in a $1.5 million federally funded study. Instead of studying the children in the laboratory, like other studies, the pair actually sat down and talked to kids after long bouts of game playing – sometimes in excess of 15 hours a week. The lucky kids played a variety of games from the very non-violent The Sims to grandma shooting, pedestrian bashing Grand Theft Auto.

They discovered that children who played violent video games – those rated Mature or above – were just relieving stress. Some children did exhibit some playful fighting after playing games, but this was similar to what children have always done after watching action or Karate-type movies.

51% of male children who played 15 hours or more of violent games per week were involved in fights in the past year compared to 28% who played regular video games. For girls, 40% of the violent game players were in fights compared to 14% of the non-violent players. Despite the figures, Kutner and Olson say this is just a correlation and that the fighting was probably due to an underlying psychological problem that children had before playing the video game.

Perhaps the most startling finding (at least for people the likes of Jack Thompson) is that boys that don’t play any video games at all are now considered to be socially inept. A danger sign for boys is “not playing video games at all, because it looks like for this generation, video games are a measure of social competence,” says Kutner and Olsen.

I wonder if Kutner and Olsen will now do a follow-up study to find out if the children who play GTA4 will have increased carjacking skills?

You can get the book online from Amazon for about $16.