Spore is an epically conceived attempt to provide a game that lets you oversee your little creature from tidepool to galactic domination. While this sounds like an educational game about evolution, this is not a science based game about evolution by natural selection.
It’s a game about intelligent design. You have godlike powers over your creature’s abilities and appearance, and you can modify this to achieve your desired ends. There is no random variation, all of your creatures are identical. There is no selection, as death of your creature never affects the rest of the species. If you notice there is fruit hanging high in a tree, you can stretch your creature’s neck in a Lamarckian fashion.
Also, contrary to what I first thought, modifying attributes like your creature’s gait doesn’t appear to change their ground speed. That seems to be entirely dependent on whether they have +1 or +2 leg parts. Also, adding a second set of horns doesn’t increase their charging ability. Thus, most of the creature editor is aesthetic, and doesn’t affect the creature’s abilities other than as an inventory of parts.
To be fair it may be impossible to create a realistic evolution by natural selection game, by definition. If there is nothing for the god-like player to tweak, it’s not going to be a very engaging game-play experience.
It seems we’re always on the lookout for a workable inline code documentation system. The pros and cons of doing this are always fighting it out, with a significant con being that this tends towards overdocumentation.
At any rate, I just read that the Python documentation switched over from LaTeX to reStructuredText. One of the common drawbacks of inline documentation is that some nasty tags are required to markup the text. reStructuredText avoids this problem by using quite intuitive underlining, indentation and numeric lists, such that the documentation text is formatted essentially as one would format it for normal plaintext readability.
This is a sample python script documented with reST. You can paste one of the docstrings into this online renderer to see the sample output. Rendering would normally be done with Docutils.
I’ve been following the Long Now Foundation and their quest to build a 10,000 year clock for several years now. This episode of BoingBoingTV showcases some of the physical artifacts the foundation has machined, including an orrery, and a chime system developed in part by Brian Eno.
There are a lot of challenges associate with building a 10,000 year clock, from durable materials, to non-sticking bearings, to power sources, some of which are touched on in the video. The Foundation’s overriding purpose is to encourage more long term responsibility.
I need to explore the anecdote told by Alexander Rose in the video, where when it was time to rebuild the roof of the hall in New College Oxford after 500 years, it turned out that nearby they had planted the oak trees that would be needed when the building was originally constructed.
If traditional captchas are becoming more easy to crack with OCR software, I wonder if anyone has thought of doing a captcha where you identify the object in the image? It seems that it would be significantly harder than recognizing text for an automated system. If anything, it would at least spur research into object recognition algorithms which could be used for automated photo tagging on Flickr.
The user interface design snafu that bothers me the most is the “hit cancel for credit” routine while swiping your card at a local retailer. Clearly, it would be ideal to present a choice between credit and debit with separate buttons on the touchscreen, as opposed to defaulting to debit and requiring the user to take the obscure step of cancelling out and then going to credit. The interface is software, it can be changed, I don’t understand why this horrible user experience has persisted for so long.
One Laptop Per Child is an effort to produce a $100 laptop that can be distributed en masse to the school children of the world. The first pass attempt at the hardware was going for $200, featured a 400 MHz CPU, flash for storage and wifi. And it’s powered by winding.
That’s great, but the second generation machine looks very interesting, both the screen and keyboard portions, as we’d conventionally describe them, appear to be multi-touch displays, offering a number of ways to use the device. You have to check out these pictures to see what I mean.
Nicholas Negroponte’s TED talk describes the concept:
I’m not convinced this is the educational silver bullet it’s sold as, but I’m interested to see how it develops over time.
This has to be the coolest picture NASA has produced in awhile. It’s a shot from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter of the Phoenix lander descending toward the surface under it’s parachute. The original image that was released was a close-up, but apparently Phoenix was floating past this picturesque crater at the time. Live mission status can be had at Spaceflight Now.
I have a problem with this saying. I think it’s good and healthy to have a posture of skepticism when encountering any argument, especially one that is not backed up by evidence. You could say this evidence is essentially data. Data itself can easily be very unwieldy, and statistics is a tool with which a complex set of data can be summarized. For an example of this power, see Hans Rosling.
That said, often this old chestnut is whipped out when the data is not on the side of the debater. When I hear someone use this saying, it makes me want to examine the foundation of their argument more closely, because it is typically riven with cracks.
Really, at face value, “Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics” is saying that you can’t trust statistics, and by extension data, and hence nothing is really knowable.
I’ve long had a poor opinion of the plastic clamshell packaging encasing many products, especially electronic gizmos. Considerable technique is required with the scissors to avoid major injury, and indeed the packaging has been blamed for 6400 emergency room visits in 2004.
Seth Godin approaches the packaging from a slightly different angle, highlighting how ridiculous it is that the packaging is designed to prevent thieving in retail stores, and yet is still used by sites like Amazon and New Egg where that threat doesn’t exist, due to the desire of manufacturers to eliminate multiple modes of packaging.
Let’s hope at least a few companies will redress this issue, I can tell you I’d be more likely to order a USB hub from whichever company didn’t use the clamshells, rather than from technical specs.
