Creepy-cool description of emergent behavior in ant colonies — complex survival strategies that develop when relatively dumb individual insects interact with each other in surprisingly complex ways. Back in the lab, Mlot deposited colonies of 500 to 8,000 ants in large beakers. When gently swirled, each colony spontaneously formed a sphere. Mlot dropped these spheres…
Doug Reside writes an informative blog about the digital legacy of the author of Rent. Like paper palimpsest drafts in which a revision is written over an early text (which is itself still visible), Jonathan Larson’s Microsoft Word files provide scholars and artists a fascinating glimpse into his creative process. For textual scholars practicing genetic…
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I’m really looking forward to this. I hope Amazon doesn’t find some way to make it suck. Amazon said on Wednesday that it will roll out a Kindle Lending Library later this year, which will allow users of the popular e-reader to borrow books from more than 11,000 libraries throughout the United States. While there…
The mansion in New York which some say F. Scott Fitzgerald partied is being demolished. The demolition was said to have started on Saturday. As reported earlier, the mansion will be replaced by five houses each with a $10 million tag price.Mansion in New York Believe To Have Inspired F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby”…
According to the Terminator clock, at 8:11 p.m. Tuesday, Skynet will become self-aware. And humanity will be screwed. —Skynet Becomes Self-Aware: How to Welcome Our AI Overlords | Underwire | Wired.com. Similar:The U.S. government and Facebook are negotiating a record, multibillion-dollar fine for th…Are you still relying on Facebook to fil…BusinessAfter Halloween where do all…
“The best way to define it is in terms of the offline consequences,” said Dr. Elias Aboujaoude, director of Stanford’s Impulse Control Disorders Clinic and author of the new book “Virtually You.” “Are we suffering in terms of our cognition and attention spans because of all the time we spend online? Is our professional life…
Short recalled a brief conversation she had with Chris Crawford at GDC in which he critiqued her and others interactive narrative games. “Youre not giving the player enough of a chance to respond; the game is doing all the talking and the player is doing all of the listening.”Said Short, “I assume what he wanted…
Sports journalism is full of colorful figures of speech, invented by writers who wanted to put a little variety into their writing. When given objective data about the game, a computer program has done a fairly good job of emulating sports lingo. The following story starts out by critiquing a sports news story that some…
When her boyfriend gave her copy of a travel guide for Wilder buffs, McClure added an itinerary of pilgrimages throughout the Midwest to her holiday plans. None of the Ingalls family’s several houses remains standing, but there are reconstructions of the little house in the big woods, the sod house from “On the Banks of…
Just finished listening to B. J. Harris narrate The Moonstone. The plot isn’t exactly rollicking, but I enjoyed the shifting narrators and in many paces Harris’s characterization of the fussy servant Betteredge made me laugh out loud. I really enjoy The Classic Tales Podcast, wherein Harris narrates about an hour of literature — a short…
The video clip on this page does not match the story, and there does not seem to be any way to post from my blog to the print version of the article. Looks like a silly attempt to control web visitors, in such a way as to prop up ABC’s slice of the dwindling TV…
Okay, I’ve posted enough of these to Twitter. Here are some more that I’ll leave here. That Can Be My Next Tweet reads your recent Twitter posts and mashes them up. These are probably only funny to me, but I’m chortling uncontrollably. Here are some more of the best ones. P. G. Wodehouse co-wrote the…
While I was at home recovering from a brief but dramatic illness, my wife took the kids to an educational event at our local library. When my son (who turned 13 last month) returned, he told this story — another example of his intersection of interest in both history and video games. I asked him to…
The incredible story behind an image we’ve all seen hundreds of times, possibly the most reproduced photograph in history It’s an iconic image we have all seen hundreds of times, possibly thousands, and probably the most widely reproduced photograph in history. Because it’s in the public domain it has been used for everything from car…
Today, a group of bloggers led by union organizer and journalist Jonathan Tasini will file a class-action suit against the Huffington Post, founder Arianna Huffington, and AOL, which acquired the news-and-blogs site in February. AOL, Arianna Huffington Hit with Class Action Suit – Jeff Bercovici – Mixed Media – Forbes. Similar:UNC student newspaper goes viral…
I chaired a session on Friday, and gave a talk on Saturday — in the very last time slot of the conference. The Friday session went well, and sparked lots of hallway and online conversations; looking forward to proposing a related panel and/or SIG for next year. The Saturday talk was better attended than some…
50 years ago. Yuri Gagarin: First Man in Space April 12 was already a huge day in space history twenty years before the launch of the first shuttle mission. On that day in 1961, Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin (left, on the way to the launch pad) became the first human in space, making a…
Not. The program says this panel, chaired by Scott Lloyd DeWitt and featuring Gail E. Hawisher, Richard J. Selfe, and Cynthia L. Selfe, is in Marquis Ballroom B, but there’s a different group there. No idea where this panel is. Maybe it was in an update I missed. Similar:It's Friday night in July, and I'm…
The essential problem of man in a computerized age remains the same as it has always been. That problem is not solely how to be more productive, more comfortable, more content, but how to be more sensitive, more sensible, more proportionate, more alive. The computer makes possible a phenomenal leap in human proficiency; it demolishes…