Article on Procrastionation from New Yorker

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2010/10/11/101011crbo_books_surowiecki?currentPage=all

'Leaves of Grass': Edward Norton's Tribute to Pot and Walt Whitman - Benjamin Mercer - Culture - The Atlantic

Leaves of Grass Written by Tim Blake Nelson

Science proves that you can compare apples and oranges - Boing Boing

http://m.boingboing.net/2010/10/14/science-proves-that.html

Four Reasons to Tithe

1. It is a joy -- A celebration the bounty that we have received.

2. It is a privilege -- An opportunity to share what has been so generously given to us.

3. It is an act of trust -- An affirmation of the belief that the gift will be put to good use without knowing the details.

4. It is a blessing -- A confirmation that the true gift is often to the giver.

Fr. Tom Furrer Sunday, October 9, 2010

Old School Lunar Lander

Play here.

Water Droplet Bouncing on a Superhydrophobic Carbon Nanotube Array

Trust me on this one.

Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition

Don't talk to all your employees, all your users or all your prospects the same way, because they're not the same.

The Dreyfus model of skill acquisition posits that there are five stages people go through:

1. Novice
--wants to be given a manual, told what to do, with no decisions possible

2. Advanced beginner
--needs a bit of freedom, but is unable to quickly describe a hierarchy of which parts are more important than others

3. Competent
--wants the ability to make plans, create routines and choose among activities

4. Proficient
--the more freedom you offer, the more you expect, the more you'll get

5. Expert
--writes the manual, doesn't follow it.

If you treat an expert like a novice, you'll fail.

From Seth Godin

The Fundamentals of Game Design

Starting out creating an interactive experience, of any sort really, can be rather daunting. In this tutorial, we’ll run through the basic components of a game, so we can get a handle on what the next steps are when you make the jump from the training tutorials to your own projects.

Often people have trouble when conceptualizing a game. The idea, after all, is often the easy part. It’s actually making it, and figuring out where to start, that is the hard part.

A friendly warning, though! Just like writers have different ways of working, and some composers write music in their head and others at an instrument, different game designers are going to have different ways of working. Some work better “in the code” and others like doing everything on paper beforehand. Some think in terms of story and narrative, and others are systems designers first and foremost. So this tutorial may actually run a bit against the grain for you, depending on your natural temperament.

In what follows, I am going to use the language of games, but really, every piece of advice in this article applies equally if you are designing any sort of interactive project whatsoever. So just because I say “game” in what follows doesn’t mean this article won’t be useful to you when you start making a classroom experience or a chat room or some other application.

Pope Says Technology Causes Confusion Between Reality and Fiction

Pope Benedict XVI has warned that people are in danger of being unable to discern reality from fiction because of new technologies, and not old books. "New technologies and the progress they bring can make it impossible to distinguish truth from illusion and can lead to confusion between reality and virtual reality. The image can also become independent from reality, it can give birth to a virtual world, with various consequences -- above all the risk of indifference towards real life," he said.

From Slashdot

Epic Fail of the Bechdel Test

The test, named after 80s lesbian cartoonist Alison Bechdel, asks three questions:

1. Are there two or more women in it that have names?
2. Do they talk to each other?
3. Do they talk to each other about something other than a man?

Just about every movie I like fails this very reasonable test. I am clearly a sexist pig.

I Heart Carmex

There have been "improvements" to the packaging which allow less material to enclose more Carmex. Fair enough, but I do like the old glass containers better.

Ninth Circuit Approves Warrantless Searches?

If this is true, it's certainly disconcerting.

Seth's Blog: Beware the Nile perch

A blog post about how depending on a temporary fix can cause long-term problems.

It's going to get worse

Douglas Coupland's guide to the future. Spoiler -- it's not pretty.

RSA Animate - 21st century enlightenment

Clark's Law

Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice. -- Clark's Law.

Adapted from Clarke's Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Ballmer does not get full bonus

Steve Ballmer reportedly didn't qualify for his full bonus this year, based on the failure of the Kin mobile phone and platform. I know someone who worked on this phone, so this feels very relevant to me somehow.

Body Part Size Proportional to Brain Volume For Control

This picture shows how the human body would look if the size of the body parts were proportional to the percent of the brain dedicated to their control. I realize I need a picture of a unicorn or a rainbow afterwards to clear your palate. Sorry about that.

Thomas Malone on collective intelligence

Interesting idea: “that features of the group can be more important than features of the individuals that make up the group, for determining outcomes.” Not surprisingly, the collective intelligence of a group correlates with the number of women in the group.

How rich are you?

This site will tell you, based on your annual income, where you stand compared to everyone else.