a bunch of stuff

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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

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From Payback, Margaret Atwood’s new book of lectures on the mythology and psychology of debt.

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Sat Mar 14

“ Imagine a snowflake, which has a fraction of a gram, slowly falling down on to the deck of a supertanker. The acceleration that the supertanker experiences from that snowflake is comparable to the sensitivity of our instrument,” he told BBC News. Now that’s engineering.

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Wed Mar 11

Lovely hack for creating a super-cheap, low-tech heads-up map display for your car! Picture via here, concept via here.

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Tue Mar 10

Is it game controller — or an actual wheel from a Formula 1 car?

You guessed it: It’s a real steering wheel from a real car. (via Mark McClusky)