This is burning up the Internets, but it’s so very cool:

[Tags: robots ]

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My nephew Joel Weinberger wonders why computer games we loved when they were new, ten or so years later aren’t as much fun to play. If Doom was a great game in 1993, why isn’t it still a great game? (To refresh your memory, you can play the first level of Doom online here.)

It seems to me that it’s particularly games that simulate the spatial world that suffer from this sort of aging. I find it remarkable and a little embarrassing that Doom had me crouching in my chair in fear, and got startle reactions out of me. Now my body hardly responds to it at all, although it’s still pretty much fun to play through. It seems that when Doom came out, it was so much better than the preceding run-and-gun games that my body treated it as if it were one step away from real. Contemporary games (say, the latest F.E.A.R., or Bioshock, or Dead Space) are orders of magnitude more photorealistic, but they don’t get me crouching any lower or startling any higher. It’s as if the brain has a Constant of Realism that invests the current highest-end simulation with the same maximal amount of attachment.

[Tags: games computer_games ]

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This is from Martin Gardner’s upcoming book (!), as reported in WordWays:

Take any nine cards from a deck. Any nine. Shuffle as much as you want.

Divide them into three piles of three, face down. Pick up any pile, look at the bottom card, and remember it.

Assemble the three piles, putting the pile you chose on top (all still face down).

Spell the number of the card you remembered. For each letter, deal one card off the top of the deck, face down. So, if it were a three of clubs, you’d spell T-H-R-E-E, resulting in a pile of five cards. If it’s a face card, spell out its name.

Put the remaining cards on top of the pile. So, if it were the three of clubs, you’d put the four remaining cards in your hand down on top of the five on the table. Pick up all nine.

Now spell “OF” the same way, putting down two cards and putting the remaining seven on top.

Now spell the suit (e.g., C-L-U-B-S) the same way. Again put the remaining cards on top.

Spell “MAGIC” the same way. Turn the “C” card over. It’ll be the one you’re remembering.

This trick was invented by Jim Steinmeyer

[Tags: magic_tricks card_tricks puzzles martin_gardner ]

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Doc does a yeoman’s job (were there yeowomen?) pulling together some links in which copyright is debated. I haven’t made my way through all of them, but I can already recommend the post…

[Tags: copyleft copyright ]

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Flavorwire posts about a project studying microcommunities that takes online flamethrowers as its topic:

The premise is simple; to showcase kids and their homemade flamethrowers. However, the concept behind the premise isn’t as cut and dry. Not just a music video, the ode to flamethrowers and the kids who make them is also the focal point of a case study being conducted by the Web Ecology Project, Tim Hwang of ROFLCon/Awesome Foundation and Sawyer Carter Jacobs, bassist for Family Portrait. Together the research team, which formed while working together at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, are using the video to highlight the “often overlooked universe of micro-communities flourishing in the nooks and crannies of the web.”

I’m a Tim Hwang fanboy, so I’m looking forward to what the project comes up with. You can vote for including a panel on microcummunities (with flamethrowers as its example) at SxSW.

On the other hand, I’m old, so I look at the video and say “HOLY MOTHER OF CRISPIES, YOU KIDS PUT THOSE THINGS DOWN THIS INSTANT!!!”

Seriously, someone should take these kids to a burn ward as part of a Scared Flame-Retardant program. And then Smoky the Bear ought to give them a singed-knuckle sandwich.

[Tags: culture internet_culture flamethrowers microcommunities ]

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I’ve just sent out the August 18, 2009 issue of JOHO, my newsletter. (It’s completely free, so feel free to subscribe.) It’s all new material (well, new-ish) except for one piece.

[Tags: joho newsletter technodeterminism news journalism media cluetrain ]

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Amusing Dilbert today, for those who can’t resist a good taxonomy joke. (Thanks for the tip, Helena!)

[Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous comics dilbert humor taxonomy ]

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Facing a budget shortfall, the town of Andover, MA, has decided to turn off 600 streetlights, leaving 900 on. How much do you think that will save Andover per year, according to the article in the Boston Globe?

This is an Order of Magnitude Quiz, which means you win if your answer is correct within an order of magnitude. It also means, however, that there’s nothing to win.

Click here for the answer

[Tags: puzzle andover ]

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RecapTheLaw.org has a Firefox extension that both gives access to public docket records and makes them actually publicly accessible. The courts charge for access to these dockets, including every time you search and for every page of search results. The system is called PACER. RECAP gives you access to PACER (and is PACER spelled backwards). When you use RECAP to view a docket through PACER, RECAP uploads it into the Internet Archive, since the docket info is in the public domain even though the courts charge you for accessing it. The next time someone goes through RECAP to find that docket, she’ll get it for free from the Internet Archive. RECAP also adds helpful headers and other metadata.

RecapTheLaw comes out of the Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy. Well done!

[Tags: law courts dockets ]

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My new MacBook Pro 15″ is a thing of beauty. But not everything is as I expected. Here are some notes on the transition, from my first few hours with it:

In the past, when moving from one Mac laptop to another, I’ve just connected the old to the new via Firewire, and the new one pulls over all your old data and settings. It’s like moving into a new house except everything is exactly where you left it. This time, something went very wrong. While the new one recognized that there was another Mac plugged in to it, it timed out in the transfer after just a percentage or two were done. Worse, it behaved the same way whether I connected via Firewire or ethernet (with two different ethernet cables and multiple restarts). It eventually restored from Time Machine, but even then there was a glitch: It said “About one minute remaining” for about two hours. However, once it was done, my new laptop has just about everything I wanted from the old one.

I saved an image of my Windows partition onto my Mac partition via the free WinClone app (thanks for the pointer, Max!), and it restored it back easily, although it complained that the 32GB partition I’d made wasn’t big enough … even though that was the size of the partition on my old Mac.

I’m enjoying the multi-touch; I’d already been using the two-finger scrolling, but four-fingered task switching is a natural.

I had to look up on the Internets what the F5 and F6 keys do: They adjust the backlight under the keyboard.

Note to self: After installing XP in a Boot Camp partition, don’t forget to boot into XP and insert the OS X disk so that it can load all those delectable drivers.

The gorgeous screen is so large I don’t think it will ever be simultaneously clean in every spot.

With the aluminum unibody, I’m not worrying so much about holding it by the left front, which in the plastic MacBook is where the hard drive is. The aluminum also heats up real good, which will be a comfort during those long Boston winters. (Possible new tag line: “MacBook Pro 15: For Men who Have Moved Beyond Sperm Counts.”)

A small disappointment: The model I have has two graphics cards, but you have to log out in order to make the switch. A larger potential disappointment: With a fully charged battery and not too much running (but wi-fi on), I’m only getting about 4.25 hours of battery life. It promised more. But we’ll see. I haven’t tried minimizing all the power draws.

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