http://boakes.org/apple-ipod-space-advert -- more details

"The invisible hand of the market is jerking me off here."

"The GNE Museum is a guide to the Game Neverending Prototype game. Running from September 21st 2002 to January 31st 2003, the protype tested many concepts which will later appear in the real game. The GNE Museum contains numerous screen shots and a little commentry to explain how the prototype worked."

http://www.gnespy.com/museum/making.php -- the making process

"the Grue is wonderfully wordlike - stubbornly non-visual, a signifier with no signified, a legend, an idea, a 'sinister, lurking pressence,' an almost-abstract cause of death with unseen jaws."

Generally implemented userland functions described here (mail, keys).

Generic class and verbs described here.

Command parser described here.

"You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike" -- this is the very experience of writing and debugging functional-style code.

"Alan uses John McCarthy and Lisp as an example of real science in computer science. He showed us that you can build a system that's also it's own metasystem. Lisp is like Maxwell's equations." "Cathedrals have 1 millionth the mass of pyramids. The difference was the arch. Architecture demands arches." "Squeak is written in 230,000 lines of SmallTalk. They think it could be 20,000. There are 59,000 methods in 3.5Mb of object code, for about 59 bytes per method. There are about 5 million objects and it was implemented by ten people. The system is self-bootstrapping, so it's all in there. Learning how to do this ought to be part of computer science but regrettably it's not." "To do creative work in computing, you must get past what you think is normal. Write down the 20 things you think are true of computing and try to demolish them." "The good guys (late binders) lost in the late 70's. The early binders won." "The secret of PARC's success was to design the best virtual machine we could and then to build hardware that optimized that. We've got that concept backwards today."

Online spreadsheet has web services built-in. "The new wkcHTTP function, described next, can return any type of value: numeric, text, or HTML."

Today's huge Ning update has a gorgeous new look and a ton of new features. Recloning and merging apps is great, and Undo for apps makes the whole thing super playful.

http://blog.ning.com/2006/02/backup_and_restore_our_easy_re_1.html -- rewind/undo for app codin

http://roshambo.ning.com -- I've updated my app to the new look, with Ning's help. Give me a game

S&W has been consulting for the company that posted this ad. It's a seriously great project. "We're looking for applicants who have a broad knowledge of the state of the art in web application development; who can manage a small development team as well as coordinate with contract developers and consultants; who have a strong point of view and are passionate about creating a great user experience; who will sweat the details; and who are eager to build services that can be extended to by other developers (professional and enthusiast) through open APIs."

Best diagram ever. Found while researching perception of affordances.

Some plants can turn dirt into strawberries. True!

via boingboing

Tiny, tiny things that aren't.

Good brief timeline. GeoCities hosted 1 million sites by *January 1998*, organised into neighbourhoods, and was 7th most popular site on the internet. They had their IPO later that year, peaking at $100 afterwards. GeoCities was bought by Yahoo for $3.57 billion in May 1999. $3.57 billion!

http://www.bladesplace.id.au/geocities-neighborhoods-suburbs.html -- list of neighbourhoods

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeoCities -- Wikipedia history of Geocities

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?&range=10y&size=large&compare_sites=blogspot.com;myspace.com&y=r&url=geocities.com#top -- traffic comparison to Blogger/Blogspot and MySpace, since 2001

I think the GeoCities dip is when it was only accessible as geocities.yahoo.com, maybe? But wow.

"I love fats like I love all food. I particularly like the way fats carry flavour. Food technologists refer to 'mouthfeel' but what they really mean is the delicious way a fat coats the tongue and holds the flavour against the tastebuds. Fats are an essential food group and, at any time other than the self-obsessed present or for any culture a little closer to the edge of survival than ourselves, the most vital and desirable."

In depth look at the evolving UI of Microsoft Office. Excellent; fascinating. Everything from the colour picker to how to signify incomplete icons to the QA team.

"From space, the aurora is a crown of light that circles each of Earth's poles. The IMAGE satellite captured this view of the aurora australis (southern lights) on September 11, 2005, four days after a record-setting solar flare sent plasma-an ionized gas of protons and electrons-flying towards the Earth." Mysterons.

Good phrase: "I want you all to know that this is the oldest I've ever been."

Good phrase: "they flock to you like bees to moldy bread."

Photos from about of cities and landscapes that look like tiny plastic models. "Barbieri 'achieves the distinctive look by photographing from a helicopter using a tilt-shift lens -- a method, he says, that 'allows me to choose what I really like in focus: like in a written page, we don't read [it as an] image but one line at a time.''"

JSTOR: Child Development: Vol. 55, No. 4 (Aug., 1984), pp. 1646-1650. I *think* this is the paper that says that children of a certain age classify dolls as alive and plants as not. Animism is a stage. I'm not sure whether this is a definitional difference, or there's something deeper going on. I'd like to read the whole paper--can anyone send it to me? Abstract: "12 3-, 4-, 5-, 7-, and 9-year-olds, and 12 adult control subjects were asked 20 questions about 2 exemplars of each of 16 categories of animate beings and inanimate objects. Questions were selected to probe a wide variety of animate properties. Although the 3- and 4-year-olds made the greatest number of errors, these errors were not distributed differently than the adults' errors and were not skewed toward animism. Instead, animism was strongest in the 5-year-olds. Analysis of the errors indicated that apparent self-movement and physical similarity to animates contributes to animistic bias. 7- and 9-year-old subjects answered in a manner demonstrating no animism, indicating an earlier end to the phenomenon than has been previously suggested."

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&c2coff=1&q=link:iBzd4GDHwv0J:scholar.google.com/ -- papers that cite this one also look good

Also includes history and mythology. Fascinating to read about the meaning of pillars, or to find out more about the kappa.

"Bedroom You are in your luxurious palatial boudoir, all of ten feet square. There is a four-poster bed, and not much else. A portrait hangs on the wall. An exit leads north."

"Felice Varini paints (lines, concentric circles, triangles) on things (tunnels, castles, groovy interiors). A seemingly random smattering of elements that, viewed from a specific point in space, coalesce into a tangible planar element."

Really good, comprehensive and terse. I'd forgotten that Kuhn doesn't just point out the shifts--he speculates that the way we flip-flop from working in one way to the other (pursuing a paradigm then breaking it) is part of how the scientific method works.

Pope John Paul II on evolution and the triangulation of the truth. "It is indeed remarkable that this theory has been progressively accepted by researchers, following a series of discoveries in various fields of knowledge. The convergence, neither sought nor fabricated, of the results of work that was conducted independently is in itself a significant argument in favor of this theory."

Fucking gorgeous weblog design, and I really want to go to their exhibitions.

Generative art made with the Processing language.