Links & notes for this month

• • io9 - New York Teenager Finds Weird, Introverted Supernova - Space
    "At 14, Caroline Moore became the youngest person ever to discover a supernova. But months later, we're still figuring out how her find, dubbed SN 2008HA, can actually exist, since it defies everything we thought we knew." Awesome.
    (tags: science awesome supernova amatuerastronomy citizenscience discover space )
  • Blue Lines Revisited - Peanuts: The Future Of A Radical Price
    "Frankly anyone who thinks you need anything else for a working online content model is living in the past." Hah!
    (tags: socialsoftware monkeys tomewing funny analogy media )
• • we are all screen readers now (tecznotes)
    "Fast-forward ten years, and I'm now using all those accessibility features on a daily basis. At some point during the dot-com bust it turned out that the written word was the payload, and regular people started using alternative (browsing) devices to access text from the web. Arguments about device-independent, semantic markup and graceful degradation suddenly have an additional halo of legitimacy because they affect everyone."
    (tags: text web reading mikemigurski words information accessibility content semanticmarkup doingitright )
  • Arduino Squid on Flickr - Photo Sharing!
    "LEDs pulse back and forth in the mantle to indicate roughly how many friends are on Xbox Live. It goes into red alert if anyone's playing Left 4 Dead." Nicely done; might poke something similar into life for myself, just for kicks.
    (tags: arduino xboxlive games friends play social electronics )
  • The Benefits of a Classical Education - O'Reilly Radar
    Tim O'Reilly on what he learned from studying the classics at University. Simply because of competence at the languages, I know more of the Romans than the Greeks, but this is thoughtful stuff. I was often asked at school by peers why I'd study something of "no practical value"; O'Reilly has some smart answers.
    (tags: education classics philosophy timoreilly learning history )
  • GameSetWatch - Opinion/Round-Up: The State Of Social Gaming
    "I think that there are really obvious reasons this isn't currently happening. Tech-oriented, web-trained, fast-paced, hard-nosed Silicon Valley culture is not really that similar to game developer culture. Outside of GDC Austin... I haven't seen a lot of opportunities for the two industries to mix. Most crucially, everybody's too damn busy trying to get their jobs done to really spend a lot of time or thought on the issue." That gap in culture is something that still fascinates me.
    (tags: games social facebook platform culture web socialsoftware )
• • Ray Smuckles on the passing of Michael Jackson
    "I don’t blame The Cure. That was your call. The Cure is just out there, like car horns or people who make noise when they cry. The Cure is a choice. When we hear Michael, it is not a choice to feel the beat. It is not a choice to cock your head and straighten all the fingers on your right hand." And, in a sea of media nonsense, still the best eulogy was written by an illustrated cat in a thong.
    (tags: raysmuckles achewood michaeljackson )
  • Scope (Schulze & Webb)
    "Design, culture, scale, space, superpowers. Key concepts: design and contributing to culture; ourselves as individuals and the big picture; taking action. ...other topics covered include million mile tomatoes, President John F Kennedy as a yogic master, superpowers and the tools of production." I am very lucky to work with smart people. I do not know what to do with my 100 hours.
    (tags: mattwebb reboot talks scope superpowers macroscope culture design )
• • Mashuptown.com: Mighty Mike's "Gloria Gaynor vs. Fall Out Boy"
    There is nothing about this that is not amazing.
    (tags: falloutboy gloriagaynor mashup music mp3 awesome )
  • BLDGBLOG: NYNEX, Embedded Angel of New York City
    "...halfway through the film, the Ghostbusters realize that NYNEX isn't a phone system at all: it's the embedded nervous system of an angel – a fallen angel – and all those phone calls and dial-up modems in college dorm rooms and public pay phones are actually connected into the fiber-optic anatomy of a vast, ethereal organism that preceded the architectural build-up of Manhattan. Manhattan came afterwards, that is: NYNEX was here first." There is no way this wouldn't be awesome. And: a great write-up from Geoff.
    (tags: bldgblog ghostbusters architecture tubes infrastructure city newyork telephones networks )
  • Apple - Support - Discussions - Entropy php5 with GD support and APC ...
    How to compile APC into the Marc Liyanage PHP5 package (which is clearly the most sensible one to be using on OSX). Though this is for Server, it works fine on desktop, and as such comes recommended.
    (tags: php apc installation server caching entropy )
  • Gallery - Picture of the day - Image 1 - New Scientist
    "This toaster was built from scratch by Thomas Thwaites, a design student at the Royal College of Art, London, as a project in extreme self-sufficiency and to highlight the effects of mass production we take for granted." And this is what it looks like.
    (tags: toasterproject toaster industry massproduction )
  • The Toaster Project
    "I'm Thomas Thwaites and I'm trying to build a toaster, from scratch - beginning by mining the raw materials and ending with a product that Argos sells for only £3.99. A toaster." This is clearly amazing, and a timely reminder of, you know, what the age of mass production really means.
    (tags: technology toaster industry massproduction design project )
• • Michael Jackson, Tracks played per hour after his death on Flickr - Photo Sharing!
    "Fresh data straight out of our uber warehouse: As the news breaks, scrobbles soar as people go to pay tribute to one of the greatest pop artists of all times." I really didn't want to talk about this story at all - but at least there's some interesting data about it. So have some data.
    (tags: michaeljackson data lastfm currentevents kneejerk )
  • 4 Takeaways From the Social Gaming Summit — So Far
    "Pincus said game-based activity like this was an investment of what he called “social capital,” a means of maintaining contact with our growing network of friends and acquaintances. If the industry further emphasized this advantage in future games, Pincus argued with charming bullishness, social gaming could become as pervasive as social networks themselves."
    (tags: socialplay games socialsoftware socialcapital gaas facebook myspace platform )
  • Xbox 360 And Facebook Games Can Interact With Each Other - G4tv.com
    'With Facebook Connect coming to Xbox 360 later this year, could we see similar connectivity between Xbox 360 and Facebook games? "Absolutely," Facebook's head of platform Ethan Beard told me back at E3. "Yeah, totally. That's a simple one -- that's an easy one. There's probably things that we haven't even thought of [coming later]."' Hmmn. Worth a quotation, at least.
    (tags: interoperability facebook games xbox360 gaas socialsoftware platform )
  • potlatch: why capitalism is about to get burnt
    "...once we return to the sun, late on in our economic history, are we still innocent enough to view it this way? The sun isn't so very different from the Beatles back catalogue - there's a lot of it around, you can't control it, we value it highly, it's a 'public good problem' - but the Beatles are subject to various legal and political protections, most recently retrospective copyright extension. If EMI are allowed to profit from music that they didn't create, might not North Africa have some right to profit from energy that it didn't create?" Some brilliant stuff from Will Davies
    (tags: willdavies economics capitalism sun power )
  • Permanent Bedtime: poetry, sedative, or just a weather report? - The Globe and Mail
    "Prayer is an appropriate analogy: So many prayers are poems, and most are repeated to the point at which they become pure sound, a soothing sequence of syllables which remind us of something. “Hallowed be thy name” is not a phrase, for example, which immediately gives up its meaning in everyday English, and yet it still comforts those who intone it. The shipping forecast shows a bit, I think, how both poems and prayers work." A top trump of the web today: S3FM, RIG, the shipping forecast and numbers stations all in one post. Blimey.
    (tags: rig shippingforecast prayer poetry numbersstations conetproject s3fm )
• • Anger: Managing the amygdala hijack « Life at the Bar
    "The amygdala is the “fight or flight” and emotional memory part of the brain. Its job is to protect by comparing incoming data with emotional memories. An amygdala hijack occurs when we respond out of measure with the actual threat because it has triggered a much more significant emotional threat." Wow, there's actually science behind that feeling. Useful to give it a name, too.
    (tags: amygdala psychology brain happiness anger calm )
  • The blue and the green | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine
    "This is why I tell people over and over again: you cannot trust what you see even with your own eyes. Your eyes are not cameras faithfully taking pictures of absolute truth of all that surrounds you. They have filters, and your brain has to interpret the jangled mess it gets fed. Colors are not what they appear, shapes are not what they appear (that zoomed image above is square, believe it or not), objects are not what they appear." This is crazy - and one of the few optical illusions I've seen that still works when zoomed-in super close. It's so hard to make head or tail of.
    (tags: opticalillusion perception images illusion colour science )
  • io9 - Michael Bay Finally Made An Art Movie - Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
    "So, to sum up: Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen is one of the greatest achievements in the history of cinema, if not the greatest. You could easily argue that cinema, as an artform, has all been leading up to this. It will destabilize your limbic system, probably forever, and make you doubt the solidity of your surroundings. Generations of auteurs have struggled, in vain, to create a cinematic experience as overwhelming, and as liberating, as ROTF." This review is, essentially, amazing, and has elevated ROTF to a must-see for me.
    (tags: review io9 scifi transformers michaelbay movies cinema film art awesome )
  • kewlchops: Blog all dog-eared pages: The Best Australian Stories 2007 / Repossession
    "I'm continually drawn in by the belief that everyone finds their own way through life, age, cities, networks, whatever. And as Meehan's tale recounts, it's the whispers we leave on the wind that entice others to follow our hints." Just go and read the story; it's wonderful, and the fragments George picks out so carefully constructed. That made my evening.
    (tags: stories narrative shortstory storytelling conversation )
• • Now even houses can 'tweet'... as homeowner wires his cottage to Twitter | Mail Online
    "The Tower of London tweets every time it opens and shuts..." Nice sub-editing, Daily Mail!
    (tags: towerbridge twitter journalism lazy sloppy fail )
• • Social Animals - Eurogamer
    "Even the platform holders are excited about the potential for social networking to tie into games. At E3, Microsoft proudly announced integration of Facebook, music network Last.fm and Twitter with Xbox Live. The latter pair are fairly irrelevant, admittedly. Last.fm is solely a music service, while Twitter isn't actually a social network at all - it's a one-to-many broadcast system, which isn't quite the same thing." Oh. But that's where you're wrong, Rob. Sorry.
    (tags: games socialnetworking socialmedia platforms xboxlive lastfm twitter facebook yawn )
  • Gamasutra - News - DICE 09: Valve's Newell On 'Using Your Customer Base To Reach New Customers'
    '“The degree to which you can engage your customer base in creating value for your other players” is key, says Newell. “When people say interesting or intelligent things about your product, it will translate directly into incremental revenue for the content provider.”' Masses of good things in here - think I've quoted it elsewhere - but it's not on my Delicious, so in it goes.
    (tags: distribution games steam valve gabenewell gaas awesome )
  • Gamasutra - News - DFC: Left 4 Dead Demonstrates Potential Of Online Distribution
    "DFC's main takeaway from the study is that the flexible, quickly-adaptable nature of online distribution services like Steam allow for developers to use a broad variety of promotions and incentives to keep their game communities fresh; individual promotions like the Survival Pack had a positive effect on both platforms, but it was the one-two punch of that DLC plus the followup free weekend through Steam that had the most meaningful impact on the game at any point on either platform."
    (tags: valve steam l4d left4dead distribution analysis gaas games platforms )
  • WALL·E end title sequence + Jim Capobianco & Alex Woo interview | The Art of the Title Sequence
    Art of the Title interview the chaps behind Wall-E's end credits, which knocked me out the first time I saw them, and still give me the loveliest buzz to this day.
    (tags: pixar animation walle motiongraphics titles credits design film )
  • The 1Kb CSS Grid by Tyler Tate :: A simple, lightweight approach
    Generates a tiny file to do the most basic things, from the looks of it.
    (tags: css grid layout generator code framework web design )
• • Rock, Paper, Shotgun: The Force is The Method » Fuel: Around The World In Eight Hours
    "I was, instead, going to see what it would take to drive around the world in a single sitting. It would have to be a single sitting because, without unlocking the game, I could not easily return to where I had driven to, or save my location. I was going to drive without the safety-net of a saved game, or even a checkpoint." Jim takes a tour of a properly big open-world; Fuel's not a game I'm very interested in for its mechanics, but the world always seemed interesting, and it's nice to have that confirmed.
    (tags: games fuel openworld narrative jimrossignol writing exploration )
• • stevenf.com - It’s 4 AM and — no joke — I literally got out of...
    "Multiplayer online Benny Hill. Please, game modding community, hear my cry." +1 to this, methinks.
    (tags: l4d left4dead games humour bennyhill awesome )
  • BBC - Adam Curtis
    "This is a website expressing my personal views – through a selection of opinionated observations and arguments. I’ll be including stories I like, ideas I find fascinating, work in progress and a selection of material from the BBC archives." Adam Curtis has a blog.
    (tags: adamcurtis bbc blog )
  • Have videogames and reality TV given us 'narrative exhaustion', asks legendary screenwriter Paul Schrader | Film | The Guardian
    "Storytelling began as ceremony and evolved into ritual. It was commercialised in the middle ages, became big business in the 19th century and an international industry in the 20th. Today it is the ubiquitous wallpaper of the postmodern era." I still think there's some separation of plot/narrative to be considered, you can't deny Schrader makes some sensible points.
    (tags: narrative media plot storytelling film paulschrader writing )
  • Tep Talk: Awesomely Bad Tattoos
    Yes, they are.
    (tags: tattoos bad awful horrific patrickswayze )