link dump

Link Dumpage for 2010-05-25

Notable links enjoyed today:

  • "Click, tweet, e-mail, twitter, skim, browse, scan, blog, text: the jargon of the digital age describes how we now read, reflecting the way that the very act of reading, and the nature of literacy itself, is changing. The information we consume online comes ever faster, punchier and more fleetingly. Our attention rests only briefly on the internet page before moving incontinently on to the next electronic canapé ... The internet has evolved a new species of magpie reader, gathering bright little buttons of knowledge, before hopping on to the next shiny thing."
  • Delicious tags: livingstone stanley history
    "History relates that it was on November 10, 1871, that Henry Morton Stanley walked up to Dr Livingstone in the market place of Ujiji, and uttered the immortal line, "Dr Livingstone, I presume". But was that what he actually said? Nowadays there seems to be some doubt. ... Since Stanley apparently tore up the pages of his diary for the momentous day, there's no way of knowing the truth. The greeting seems to have shrunk in the telling, as it rapidly became a famous catchphrase. Stanley himself was using the snappier version by the time he got back to London, as this speech to a rapturous audience at St James's Hall records."
  • Delicious tags: books art
    "Just because you don’t enjoy reading a good book, doesn’t mean there aren’t many other uses for all of those books piled up in the attic." Some incredible imagery here, both from single books, and collections of books.
  • Delicious tags: puzzles
    "I finally settled on building the device I describe here: a puzzle box that won’t open until it is taken to a certain location ... Mounted into the lid, perhaps incongruously, are an illuminated button, a small display, and a mysterious module that sharp-eyed readers might recognize as a GPS."

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Link Dumpage for 2009-10-27

Notable links enjoyed today:

  • "Public Domain Super Heroes is a collaborative website about comic book characters in the Public Domain ... This is intended to be an online encyclopedia of these characters, providing pertinent information to fans who want to learn about their history, as well as creators who may want to use them. Unless otherwise noted, all images and information are believed to be in the Public Domain. The information and images presented are intended to give a brief overview of the characters and provide a visual reference."
  • "He has written six books of puzzles, five of which center on the work of a mathematical detective by the name of Jacob Ecco, a biography about great computer scientists (coauthored by freelance journalist Cathy Lazere), and technical books relating to his various areas of research. In his non-academic writings, perhaps his greatest invention is the notion of omniheuristics, a kind of super-heuristics concerned with the ability to solve any and all manner of puzzles, conundrums, enigmas, and dilimmas. Owing their decidedly curious character, he has given particular note to puzzles that start off easy, but have apparently innocent variants that are particularly perplexing; he calls them 'upstarts'."
  • "Intertextuality is the shaping of texts' meanings by other texts. It can refer to an author’s borrowing and transformation of a prior text or to a reader’s referencing of one text in reading another. The term “intertextuality” has, itself, been borrowed and transformed many times since it was coined by poststructuralist Julia Kristeva in 1966. As critic William Irwin says, the term “has come to have almost as many meanings as users, from those faithful to Kristeva’s original vision to those who simply use it as a stylish way of talking about allusion and influence”."
  • Delicious tags: riffs dialogue mst3k wikipedia
    "MSTing is a method of mocking a show in the style of the television series Mystery Science Theater 3000 (MST3K) and, in particular, is a form of fan fiction in which writers mock other works by inserting humorous comments, called "riffs", into the flow of dialogue and events ... MSTing began in the early 1990s, as fans of the show, many of whom were involved in Usenet discussions in groups such as popular MST3K newsgroup rec.arts.tv.mst3k.misc, began adding amusing or critical remarks to others' posts, attributing them to the show's characters."
  • "The Urantia Book ... is a spiritual and philosophical book that discusses God, Jesus, science, cosmology, religion, history and destiny ... The Urantia Book is 2,097 pages long, and consists of an introductory statement followed by 196 "papers" divided into four parts ... The exact circumstances of the origin of The Urantia Book are unknown. The book and its publishers do not name a human author, instead it is written as if directly presented by numerous celestial beings appointed to the task of providing an "epochal" spiritual revelation to humankind. For each paper, either a name, or an order of celestial being, or a group of beings is credited as its author."

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Link Dumpage for 2009-10-23

Notable links enjoyed today:

  • "Here, 100ft down and hidden from public view, lies an astonishing secret - one that has drawn comparisons with the fabled city of Atlantis and has been dubbed 'the Eighth Wonder of the World' by the Italian government. For weaving their way underneath the hillside are nine ornate temples, on five levels, whose scale and opulence take the breath away. Constructed like a three-dimensional book, narrating the history of humanity, they are linked by hundreds of metres of richly decorated tunnels and occupy almost 300,000 cubic feet - Big Ben is 15,000 cubic feet."
  • "Submerged stone structures lying just below the waters off Yonaguni Jima are actually the ruins of a Japanese Atlantis—an ancient city sunk by an earthquake about 2,000 years ago ... Some experts believe that the structures could be all that's left of Mu, a fabled Pacific civilization rumored to have vanished beneath the waves."
  • "When a carpenter ant is infected by a fungus known as Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, the victim remains alive for a short time. The fungus, however, is firmly in the driver's seat. It compels the ant to climb from its nest high in the forest canopy down into small plants and saplings in the understory vegetation. The ant then climbs out onto the underside of a low-hanging leaf where it clamps down with its mandibles just before it dies. There it remains, stuck fast for weeks. After the ant dies, the fungus continues to grow inside the body. After a few days, a stroma—the fungus's fruiting body—sprouts from the back of the ant's head. After a week or two, the stroma starts raining down spores to the forest floor below. Each spore has the potential to infect another unfortunate passerby."
  • "One of Aesop's fables may have been based on fact, scientists report.
    In the tale, written more than 2,000 years ago, a crow uses stones to raise the water level in a pitcher so it can reach the liquid to quench its thirst. Now a study published in Current Biology reveals that rooks, a relative of crows, do jut the same when presented with a similar situation ... Footage of the experiments shows the rooks first assessing the water level by peering at the tube from above and from the side, before picking up and dropping the stones into the water. The birds were extremely accurate, using the exact number of stones needed to raise the worm to a height where they could reach it."
  • "A team of archaeologists has found a sanctuary in central Bulgaria where the nymph cult used to be celebrated in ancient times. The sanctuary was found by archaeologists in the vicinity of the Nicopolis ad Istrum ancient site, located near the town of Veliko Tarnovo in central Bulgaria ... Nymph worshiping, according to the archaeologists, can be traced back to Ancient Greece, where the mythical female creatures were usually part of the retinue of a god, such as Zeus, Hera and Aphrodite."
  • Delicious tags: games achievements collecting
    “People work for intangible rewards all the time ... Money and love, for example. A paycheck may seem ‘solid,’ but it represents an abstraction. And what’s more abstract than earning an ‘A’ in philosophy?... Small things can be quite rewarding. A smile from a cute girl may be a small thing, but it can make a teenage boy’s week.”
  • "A hidden metapuzzle threads through the pages [the May] issue of Wired magazine, which is built around the theme of magic and mystery ... Below the surface of the May issue lurk 15 puzzles, all of which combine into a giant metapuzzle ... The metapuzzle was designed to be completely invisible to the casual reader."
  • Delicious tags: youtube horror lovecraft music
    Innsmouth: The Musical. Carol of the Old Ones. Shoggoth, Shoggoth, Shoggoth. If I Were A Deep One. I Saw My Mommy Kissing Yog-Sothoth. Away In A Madhouse. Freddy the Red Brained Mi-Go. I'm Dreaming of a Dead City. Awake Ye Scary Great Old Ones. The Cultist Song. Byakhee, Byakhee. Bonus Feature: Shoggoth on the Roof - A Play Performed with puppets.

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Link Dumpage for 2009-06-19

Notable links enjoyed today:

  • Delicious tags: pixar up cancer movies death sad
    "The company flew an employee with a DVD of Up, which is only in theaters, to the Curtins’ Huntington Beach home on June 10 for a private viewing of the movie." Wonderful story, peacefully ending with "Colby died about seven hours after seeing the film." Especially poignant to me, at least, was "Pixar officials declined to comment on the story or name the employees involved.", which screams "This was not a marketing stunt. Leave us alone." Good job, Pixar.

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Link Dumpage for 2009-05-29

Notable links enjoyed today:

  • "The Story Behind The Looking Glass Laboratories' Alternate Reality Game. The official reasons as to why this ARG was created are: There are several friends and business associates that didn't understand the concept of an "alternate reality game." Some of these friends are prospective writers who did not understand the concept and how it can be used to portray a storyline. We hope we have expressed some of those possibilities. To see what it really is like on the other side of the curtain. You can never understand the amount of work and dedication a "puppetmaster" has to put in to a project until you become one; now having been one, we have more respect for PMs than you can possibly imagine."
  • Delicious tags: movies horror classics
    "This is when I decided to make my own list of horror movies that A) people don’t know about, B) should be talked about more often, C) are as good as the known classics, and D) need to be seen, for Heaven’s sake!" Includes: And Soon the Darkness..., The Exorcist III, Bunny Lake is Missing, Hour of the Wolf, Long Weekend, The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, Who Can Kill A Child?, Just Before Dawn, Magic, and The Innocents.
  • Operation: Sleeper Cell postmortem broken up into preparation and design, fundraising, project management, marketing, mission design, game design, live events and website, tech, and then a recap with player comments and statistics.
  • I love reading postmortems and summaries of ARG-y things (even for ones I was a judge/consultant on, like this one:) "Operation: Sleeper Cell was made by Law 37 to raise money and awareness for Cancer Research UK as a result of the Let's Change The Game competition. The game ran for ten weeks in late 2008 and we raised £3668 in total. Everybody who worked on the game did so in their spare time as volunteers."
  • Delicious tags: movies endings
    "We'll just fix that in post!" has always been the rallying cry for filmmakers in the middle of a troubled production. Unfortunately, sometimes things have a nasty habit of actually getting broken in post-production, usually thanks to studio interference. Victims include: I Am Legend, Superman II, Dawn of the Dead, Live Free or Die Hard, and Blade Runner."
  • Delicious tags: sex wii games
    "Dark Room Sex Game is a Wiimote enabled game in which players try to climax with their partners - with no on-screen visuals whatsoever ... Dark Room Sex Game is an erotic multi-player rhythm game without any graphics, played only by audio and haptic cues. The game can be played with Nintendo Wiimote controllers or a keyboard. In Dark Room Sex Game, the player works with his or her partner to find a mutual rhythm, then speeds up gradually until climax. In four-player "orgy" mode, players swap partners randomly and compete to reach orgasm the fastest."
  • Delicious tags: scientology religion history
    "Operation Snow White was the Church of Scientology's name for a project during the 1970s to purge unfavorable records about Scientology and its founder L. Ron Hubbard. This project included a series of infiltrations and thefts from 136 government agencies, foreign embassies and consulates, as well as private organizations critical of Scientology, carried out by Church members, in more than 30 countries;[1] the single largest infiltration of the United States government in history[2] with up to 5,000 covert agents."
  • Delicious tags: design gamedev games
    "After last year's column I got a flood of new suggestions from frustrated players and developers, so here are nine new Twinkie Denial Conditions for the ninth installment of Bad Game Designer, No Twinkie!: Failure to Explain Victory and Loss Conditions; Time-Constrained Demos; Obvious and Cheap Reskins (also known as Cookie-Cutter Games); Computer Crashed While Saving? Game Over!; Friendly AI Characters That Do More Harm Than Good; Fake Interactivity; Bad Gamepad-to-Mouse/Keyboard Conversions (and vice versa); Setting the Player Up to Fail; Your Only Save is Immediately Before Your Death."
  • Delicious tags: video corpus clock youtube
    "The Corpus Clock has been invented and designed by Dr John Taylor for Corpus Christi College Cambridge for the exterior of the college's new library building ... The clock has been designed by the inventor and horologist Dr John Taylor and makes ingenious use of the grasshopper escapement, moving it from the inside of the clock to the outside and refashioning it as a Chronophage, or time-eater, which literally devours time."
  • Delicious tags: achievements games
    "What in-game objectives ought to merit achievements? How can games best be designed with achievements (and achievers) in mind? What further rewards can be tied to achievements to enhance their effective use in games? How much worth do game achievements truly have? In order to better approach these and other questions, GameCyte consulted Rene Weber, a professor of psychology and telecommunications, and Patrick Shaw, a game designer/developer, who recently collaborated to research and define player types and motivations in modern gaming. Weber and Shaw offered us their considerable expertise in order to examine why game achievements have become such a vital part of our gaming experience."

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Link Dumpage for 2009-05-28

Notable links enjoyed today:

  • "As almost everyone knows by now, various major daily newspaper published, on July 10 2008, a photograph of four Iranian missiles streaking heavenward; then Little Green Footballs (significantly, a blog and not a daily newspaper) provided evidence that the photograph had been faked ... For me it raised a series of questions about images. Do they provide illustration of a text or an idea of evidence of some underlying reality or both? And if they are evidence, don’t we have to know that the evidence is reliable, that it can be trusted?"
  • "Because so little primary historical work has been done on the classic text computer game "Colossal Cave Adventure", academic and popular references to it frequently perpetuate inaccuracies ... This paper analyzes previously unpublished files recovered from a backup of Woods's student account at Stanford, and documents an excursion to the real Colossal Cave in Kentucky in 2005. In addition, new interviews with Crowther, Woods, and their associates (particularly members of Crowther's family) provide new insights on the precise nature of Woods's significant contributions."

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Link Dumpage for 2009-02-10

Notable links enjoyed today:

  • "If you listen closely, you’ll find that the earth is full of sounds. Some are things that you hear every day, some are truly remarkable and some sounds hail from origins completely unknown. What follows here is a list of “sonic mysteries” for your pleasure - many of them include audio." Includes the Bloop, Hum, Hell Hole, Mistpouffers, and the Slow Down.
  • "On Saturday morning, December 13, 2008, research director and amateur photographer Brook Tyler was walking across Sheridan Creek in the Rattray Marsh Conservation area in the Greater Toronto Area when he stumbled upon a strange feature within the thin ice covering the waters: “It was a perfectly round circle with about two inches of slush and water around the sides, and it was spinning. I was so excited to see if I could capture the movement”, so he took some photos... " Video available too.
  • "Fiction - including poetry - should be taken just as seriously as facts-based research, according to the team from Manchester University and the London School of Economics (LSE). Novels should be required reading because fiction "does not compromise on complexity, politics or readability in the way that academic literature sometimes does," said Dr Dennis Rodgers from Manchester University's Brooks World Poverty Institute."
  • I never knew it had a literal name. "Exquisite corpse (also known as "exquisite cadaver" or "rotating corpse") is a method by which a collection of words or images is collectively assembled, the result being known as the exquisite corpse or cadavre exquis in French. Each collaborator adds to a composition in sequence, either by following a rule (e.g. "The adjective noun adverb verb the adjective noun") or by being allowed to see the end of what the previous person contributed."
  • "Part state of mind and part QA philosophy, the term "Egoless programming" was coined by one of my favorite authors, Jerry Weinberg, back in 1971 in his highly influential book, The Psychology of Computer Programming. Weinberg was describing a development environment that involved heavy use of peer technical reviews."
  • "The Vela Incident (sometimes referred to as the South Atlantic Flash) was an as-yet unidentified double flash of light detected by a United States Vela satellite on September 22, 1979. It has been speculated that the double flash, characteristic of a nuclear explosion, was the result of a nuclear weapons test."
  • I love Ebert. "Employers are eager to replace us with Celeb Info-Nuggets that will pimp to the mouth-breathers, who underline the words with their index fingers whilst they watch television. Any editor who thinks drugged insta-stars and the tragic Amy Winehouse are headline news ought to be editing the graffiti on playground walls. As the senior newspaper guy still hanging onto a job, I think the task of outlining enduring ethical ground rules falls upon me."

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Link Dumpage for 2009-02-03

Notable links enjoyed today:

  • "According to legend, Genghis Khan lies buried somewhere beneath the dusty steppe of Northeastern Mongolia, entombed in a spot so secretive that anyone who made the mistake of encountering his funeral procession was executed on the spot. Once he was below ground, his men brought in horses to trample evidence of his grave, and just to be absolutely sure he would never be found, they diverted a river to flow over their leader’s final resting place."
  • "The Saqqara Bird is a bird-shaped artifact made of sycamore wood, discovered during the 1898 excavation of the Pa-di-Imen tomb in Saqqara, Egypt ... The function of the Saqqara Bird is unknown, due to lack of period documentation, but there has been a great deal of speculation regarding the significance of the Saqqara Bird."
  • "As the ceremony got under way with a dramatic, drummed countdown, viewers watching at home and on giant screens inside the Bird's Nest National Stadium watched as a series of giant footprints outlined in fireworks processed gloriously above the city from Tiananmen Square ... What they did not realise was that what they were watching was in fact computer graphics, meticulously created over a period of months and inserted into the coverage electronically at exactly the right moment."
  • "In Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach, Tumbolia is "the land of dead hiccups and extinguished light bulbs", "where dormant software waits for its host hardware to come back up ... In the later dialogue "A Mu Offering" (named after Bach's Musical Offering), the Tortoise gets rid of a knot in a string by tying a second one, and both disappear to Tumbolia; apparently, this is "The Law of Double Nodulation" (a parody of the law of double negation)."
  • "In 1934, Otlet sketched out plans for a global network of computers (or “electric telescopes,” as he called them) that would allow people to search and browse through millions of interlinked documents, images, audio and video files. He described how people would use the devices to send messages to one another, share files and even congregate in online social networks. He called the whole thing a “réseau,” which might be translated as “network” — or arguably, “web.”"

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Link Dumpage for 2009-02-02

Notable links enjoyed today:

  • Delicious tags: puzzle puzzles game arg design
    "But some of that furniture and some of those walls conceal secrets — messages, games and treasures — that make up a Rube Goldberg maze of systems and contraptions conceived by a young architectural designer named Eric Clough ... The letter directed the family to a hidden panel in the front hall that contained a beautifully bound and printed book, Ms. Bensko’s opus. The book led them on a scavenger hunt through their own apartment. But not all at once. The 18 clues were sophisticated and in many cases confounding."
  • "At noon, it was black as night. It was May 19, 1780 and some people in New England thought judgment day was at hand. Accounts of that day ... include mentions of midday meals by candlelight, night birds coming out to sing, flowers folding their petals,and strange behavior from animals. The mystery of this day has been solved by researchers at the University of Missouri who say evidence from tree rings reveals massive wildfires as the likely cause, one of several theories proposed after the event, but dismissed as 'simple and absurd.'"
  • "It is a strange phenomenon: thousands of large, perfectly round "forest rings" dot the boreal landscape of northern Ontario ... From the air, these mysterious light-coloured rings of stunted tree growth are clearly visible ... They range in diameter from 30 metres to 2 kilometres, with the average ring measuring about 91 metres across. Over 2,000 of these forest rings have been documented, but scientists estimate the actual number is more than 8,000."
  • "People love a good conspiracy theory ... So where does your average conspiracy buff go to learn about shadowy plots that aren't pure tinfoil hattery?" Includes FDR overthrow, Hitler/Valkyrie assassination, the Tuskegee Experiment, Operation Snow White, and, yawn, MKULTRA.

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Link Dumpage for 2009-01-29

Notable links enjoyed today:

  • "So instead of players viewing a screen and projecting their identity elsewhere as in other digital learning games, ARGs actually require the player to play themselves, embodying themselves fully in the fantasy scenario, providing fully-situated meaning. If it can be argued that experience of projective identities contributes to deep learning, in that gaming requires players to 'see themselves in terms of a new identity..., the kind of person who can learn, use and value the new semiotic domain', then experiencing a new domain *as yourself* is likely to increase this contribution."
  • "Project Loyola [was] an alternate reality game (ARG) and senior-level project by students in the Game Design program at Savannah College of Art and Design ... The team members worked together over 10 weeks to develop the project under the guidance of Prof. Brenda Brathwaite."
  • "They [managed to create ball-lightning-like fireballs] by putting pieces of silicon or one of a number of other solid materials inside a shoe-box-sized cavity and zapping the material with microwaves from a metal tip. Once the material had melted, the researchers pulled the metal tip away, dragging material from the molten hotspot. That created a column of fire which then detached itself to form a floating, quivering fireball."
  • "[The regenerative powder] is a substance made from pig bladders called extracellular matrix. It is a mix of protein and connective tissue surgeons often use to repair tendons and it holds some of the secrets behind the emerging new science of regenerative medicine. ... Corporate America, meanwhile, already believes regeneration will work. Investment capital has been pouring in to commercialize and mass produce custom-made body parts."
  • "A neckband that translates thought into speech by picking up nerve signals has been used to demonstrate a "voiceless" phone call for the first time. With careful training a person can send nerve signals to their vocal cords without making a sound. These signals are picked up by the neckband and relayed wirelessly to a computer that converts them into words spoken by a computerised voice."
  • "In the warm-glow view of philanthropy, people aren’t giving money merely to save the whales; they’re also giving money to feel the glow that comes with being the kind of person who’s helping to save the whales. ... “Giving is not about a calculation of what you are buying,” Karlan said. “It is about participating in a fight.” It is about you as much as it about the effect of your gift."

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