A short film by Jeremy McIntosh about IF; covers some nice ground, and at ten minutes, is about the right length.

"In what cultural anthropologists are calling a "colossal achievement" in the study of white-collar professionals, the popular radio show has successfully isolated all 7,442 known characteristics of college graduates who earn between $62,500 and $125,000 per year and feel strongly that something should be done about global warming." Ahehehehehe.

"When I was a kid, there are two things I wanted badly and never got… A real dog and a Kenner AT-AT Walker." Linked everywhere, but – utterly charming.

"People are understandably jittery, after the numerous social networking data breach debacles of three years ago that seemingly turned a generation off of oversharing. MTC have gone to great pains to assure users of the system that their data is safe from "getting zucked", and they've begun to provide free personal monitoring services to users of Clipper." Mike writes future-history, and in the midst of it, coins a lovely neologism.

Some interesting things here – most notably, the link on 180º shutter; something I wasn't aware of until now.

"What a person desires in life<br />
   is a properly boiled egg.<br />
This isn’t as easy as it seems."<br />
(this is good).

"Even if you don’t find Starship Troopers as prescient as I do, the years have been kind to it, if only because it’s now removed from the context of whatever expectations people might have had for it at the time. It seems absurd now to write it off as some silly piece of escapism, as its detractors complained, and the amount of detail Verhoeven and Neumeier… I suspect its future is bright: The line between the world of Starship Troopers and Sarah Palin’s Twitter feed gets thinner every day."

"Smells like Dwarf Fortress". An illustrated account of a the nightmares of one particular fortress of dwarfs. Pretty, funny, and I still can't quite get my head around that game.

"Money is just a type of information, a pattern that, once digitized, becomes subject to persistent programmatic hacking by the mathematically skilled." (Lots of other good stuff here, but I wanted to note this one down).

"Oddly, it feels a bit weird to watch the videos from inside MAST. There’s something about the combination of these being taken in the visible light spectrum inside a reactor, at super high speeds, with a CCTV-like aesthetic, makes me feel like I shouldn’t be able to observe what’s going on. Somehow reams of sensor data is fine, but watching the actual reaction feels… wrong. Like you’re looking into the soul of something amazing."

"High time resolution video of a MAST plasma showing the L-H transition (transition from low to high quality confinement) and ELMs (a form of instability in the plasma)." Wow. And: this is visible-light spectrum. Double-wow.

"Winner of the Best Visual Illusion of the Year Contest 2010" Beautiful/awesome.

"In 1872, the British government and the Royal Society launched the first major oceanic expedition, transforming a two-hundred-and-twenty-six-foot naval warship into a floating laboratory…the ship, with five scientists, roamed the globe for thee and a half years. The crew was constantly dredging the ocean floor for specimens, and the work was repetitive, and brutal; two men went insane, two others drowned, and another committed suicide." I am looking forward to Bill Harris telling me more about this.

"The Economist has published a deliberately weird 'heroes of New Labour', to mark the end of a political decade that they dominated politically. But I think that New Labour's pantheon can only be truly understood in terms of the band that they modelled themselves on: Blur."

And, with their 119th update, Valve helpfully included the list of all their previous patches, as well. Just look at the amount that's changed – and how swiftly. A proper, living game (unlike the stillborn 360 version). Can't wait to play it on the Mac; it's almost like a different game to the one I played at the beginning.

"Ben Gimpert is a friend of the Open Library. He and I got together over lunch a few months ago to talk about big data, statistical natural language processing, and extracting meaning from Open Library programmatically. His efforts are beginning to bear some really interesting fruit, and while we work out how we might be able to present it online, we thought you might be interested to hear what he’s been up to." Answer: good things. Ben is awesome, and this work sounds great. (I can't quote a suitable passage, so George's intro will have to do).

A few short tips on find; one of the bash tools I use least, and should probably use more.

"Diller, Brill, and Murdoch seem be stating a simple fact—we will have to pay them—but this fact is not in fact a fact. Instead, it is a choice, one its proponents often decline to spell out in full, because, spelled out in full, it would read something like this: “Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use, or else we will have to stop making content in the costly and complex way we have grown accustomed to making it. And we don’t know how to do that.”"

You know the guy who did the 70-minute Phantom Menace review? He went to see Avatar. Yes, it's good.

ARel looks brilliant, but blimey, those are some *big* changes to ActiveRecord. Pratik's post here is probably the most comprehensive I've seen, and well worth your time.

Great round-up of all the stuff out there about Rails 3. If you're as behind as I am on preparing for this, there's some really good stuff here; nice to have it all in one place.

"The laser has become vital for our way of life, yet no researcher who worked on it after Einstein's paper could have predicted what would emerge. If Mandelson had had anything to do with it, we'd be reading barcodes by flashlight."

Via Waxy; a lovely, lovely, and very rare late NES game (from 1992). This is a lovely video, too – the annotation is well-done and entertaining. And it saves me having to play something that's clearly ferociously difficult.