Design: December 2005 Archive Page

In the game, you listen to a story about someone's death and the events leading up to it. There are five characters in the story; your job is to rank them from most culpable for the death to least culpable. The trick is that the story should be balanced in such a way that any ordering is defensible, and thus each listener's list shows something about that listener. But that kind of balance is hard to achieve. --Adam Cadre --23,040 Bridges (adamcadre.ac)

According to the aggregated stats, there's one character who seems to be too culpable. Perhaps things will even out over time.

Strangely enough, the web took off very much as a publishing medium, in which people edited offline. Bizarely, they were prepared to edit the funny angle brackets of HTML source, and didn't demand a what you see is what you get editor. WWW was soon full of lots of interesting stuff, but not a space for communal design, for discource through communal authorship.

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So this is for all the people who have been saying I ought to have a blog. --Tim Berners-Lee --So I have a blog (timbl's blog)

Tim Berners-Lee is the inventor of the World Wide Web.

Interwoven into the scarf material are pixels containing red, blue and green light-emitting diodes (LEDs), so adjusting the brightness of each type of diode turns the scarf a different overall shade. --Chameleon scarf coordinates with your outfit (NewScientist.com (will expire))

O brave new world, that hath such gadgets in it!
(I Googled for photos but I found none. Thanks for the link, Rosemary.)

Folding seems clear; you might fold a card to fit in an envelope, or a pocket. But you're not supposed crease these cards; that would jam the machine. Punch cards aren't to be used in your ways, for your purposes, but for those of the company that issued them. "Spindle" is the word that most confuses people today. Spindling is an old filing system; a clerk would have a spindle, an upright spike on his or her desk, and would impale each piece of paper on it as he or she finished with it. When the spindle was full, you'd run a piece of string through the holes, tie up the bundle, and ship it off to the archives. (The custom still survives in some restaurants; the cashier spindles the bills as customers pay.) But you shouldn't spindle the cards: they are part of someone else's system of paperwork, not your own; they demand special attention.

"Mutilate" is a lot stronger than the other words. It expresses an angry intention on the part of the mutilator, or, from the viewpoint of the punch card user, a fear; people might take out their frustrations on their punch cards.... (Indeed, punch cards were mutilated: users could buy machines advertised to "recondition mutilated punch cards."[13]) Why would people mutilate punch cards? Punch cards were the interface between the public and the billing system. Metaphorically, they were where the person meshed with the corporate world. --Steven Lubar (Originally published in 1991.) -- (Steven Lubar's home page)

"Do not fold, spindle or mutilate" is right up there with "Abort, Retry, Fail" of the DOS era, "CTRL + ALT + DEL" of Windows, and the following dialogue from Marlowe's Doctor Faustus:

Faust. Come on, Mephistophilis, what shall we do?
Meph. Nay, I know not. We shall be curs?d with bell, book, and candle.
Faust. How! bell, book, and candle,?candle, book, and bell,
Forward and backward to curse Faustus to hell!

Computers were still huge assemblies of vacuum tubes and transistors when the German-Jewish émigré and computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum published a paper called ?ELIZA ? A Computer Program for the Study of Natural Language Communication between Man and Machine,? in Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery 9. It was 1966, and Weizenbaum programmed ELIZA to simulate the ?active listening? psychoanalytical strategies of the Rogerian therapy in vogue at the time.

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When so many other games these days incorporate decision-tree ethics ? good or bad choices constantly influence your digital avatar'smoral and physical evolution ? Nintendogs seems to be missing the finishing touches. Ding Dong will never fully suspend disbelief as a permanent puppy, and a cheerful one at that. Nintendo personnel have recently hinted that dogs in the next iteration would have a broader range of behavioral development and would age. They should go one further and let them die. Consciousness has no stakes if it'snever-ending. For machines to become man'sbest friends, there must also be the prospect of losing those friends. --Joshua Bearman --Pass the Paddles: Man's Best Friend (LA Weekly)