a bunch of stuff

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Sun Jun 21

Wow — the Ford hybrid Fusion has explicitly game-like incentives on the dashboard: The “greener” you drive, these little green vines grow in the corner of your sightlines. (I love this given that I just wrote about game-like incentives in everyday life …)

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Wed Jun 10

I don’t think Cavafy would have much liked Twitter or Facebook. This version of the poem is from Daniel Mendelsohn’s superb new translation.

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Tue May 12

“ Let me make this very clear. No one can learn to think without having something to think about. If you try to teach someone how to think in the abstract, you are not going to get anywhere. If you try to make education “easy”, by removing the content, you are cheating your students out of the most important thing you have to offer: the chance to do something hard. Only by mastering a difficult body of knowledge can a child develop into a confident, thinking adult. The point is, it doesn’t necessarily have to be the same difficult body of knowledge that the child’s parents learned. Fascinating conversation on whether it’s cognitively good or bad for students to rely on the math-software Mathematica.

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Wed Apr 22

“ Alexithymia is condition where a person seems devoid of emotion because they are functionally unaware of their emotions. By extension, alexithymics are also unable to appreciate the emotional motivation of others, and generally find emotions of others to be perplexing and irrational. Such a person may be pleasant and highly intelligent, but will be humorless, unimaginative, and have some unusual priorities in decision-making. http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=80

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Tue Mar 31

“ So what is 2D Boy’s next title? According to a comment at the end of the lecture, it’s going to be *The Sophomore Effect: An Intentionally Mediocre Game.* Ahahahahahahah

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“ Imagine an RTS where you can send your units back in time to destroy your opponent’s units before he’s even built them,” opened Chris Hazard, thoroughly confusing everyone in the audience, a confusion that never quite seemed to lift. A description of Achron, an upcoming experimental game presented in the incredibly-cool-sounding “Experimental Gameplay” session of this year’s Game Developer’s Convention, written up here by Simon Carless on GameSetWatch.

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Thu Mar 26

Most awesome Master of Science thesis ever.

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Wed Mar 25

I had to ask! I was investigating getting DirecTV for my new office when I saw this pop-up window …

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Sun Mar 22

“ From an acoustical perspective, music is an overstructured language, which the brain invented and which the brain loves to hear. Basics - In One Ear and Out the Other - NYTimes.com

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Fri Mar 20

“ No wonder young people find mainstream journalism uninviting; it would almost be more frightening if they embraced what passes for news today. The Death and Life of Great American Newspapers (Page 2)

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Thu Mar 19

Printing The NYT Costs Twice As Much As Sending Every Subscriber A Free Kindle

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Wed Mar 18

“ Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.” — Edward Abbey Via Thor Muller’s twitter stream.

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“ Grants generate more than scientific knowledge: they generate new researchers. Graduate students and postdocs, who do most of the hands-on research, are apprentices, and most of them hope to run their own laboratories someday. To do more research, professors need more hands, which means taking on more trainees. Under this system, producing more science is inseparable from producing a growing population of scientists, who will also need future support.

This explosion of human infrastructure makes the research enterprise highly sensitive to any slowdown in funding.

Brilliant column by Olivia Judson on how to avoid “the Malthusian boom-and-bust cycle” of funding-then-not-funding science: Set up a “Research for America” foundation where young people — including those who do not plan to become scientists — can participate in scientific work by doing the cool hands-on work in experiments, gathering data, etc.

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A lovely video of hundreds of sheep, covered with LEDs, set to run across night fields! (via Tom Igoe’s twitter stream)

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Tue Mar 17

“ The team demonstrated [that] individuals with extreme behaviors, or a greater awareness of the incentives of others, may actually improve the collective performance of the group. Put simply, stubbornness or extremism may pay off when it comes to social welfare. It’s The Network: Penn Researchers Examine Behavior, Consensus Building Influenced By Network Structure: University of Pennsylvania