This is a nice greasemonkey script to add mirrors to digg links. I found another one to remove adverts from digg but since I use adblock I didn’t even know digg had ads (although I thought the large white space under the header was a bit screwy).
A friend brought this preview of a game to my attention that has blown me away and considering that I’m not really much of a games player, thats saying alot.
The basis of the game is evolution [oh yes, the ID crowd will love this!!]. You begin as a single cell lifeform, eating bits of food until you reach the stage where you can reproduce and lay an ‘egg’. At this stage you can select what direction to evolve by choosing body parts which determine what you can eat, how you can defend yourself when attacked by foes, kill your prey or increase mobility, thus opening different paths to evolve throughout the game. The game enviroment also evolves according to the choices you make. Pure emergent game play.
This really excites me as I don’t like the main stratergies of what most games are built on: you hold a gun and kill everything in sight or you organise armies on an overview level to conquer and kill everything in sight.
What I also like about this game is that it is a different mental challenge and so will create and reinforce different neural pathways in the minds of the people who play it. For too long, the vast majority of games have been about annihilation and so instill/install that the best method to respond to a situation is ‘KILL! KILL! KILL!’. It is only games like The Sims, et al, that through emergent based gaming systems, that provoke a different mental response to situations. Build, sustain and evolve rather than destroy and conquer.
I’m tingling through the thought of how software programming has evolved so that games like this are now a possibility. I have been since reading Steven Johnson’s book ‘Emergence’. (thanks for that one Anthony!).
There is this 30 minute preview video with running commentary describing gameplay and possibilties of evolution, etc on video.google. The official site is here:
Did I say I was excited about this?
I had a phone interview with Google today. I took notes; some of the questions they asked were interesting. We were allowed to ask questions. The interviewer didn’t ask many questions in response to my answers, except to occasionally say “interesting”. There’s almost certainly more than one answer to each of these, and a few are probably wrong answers or could be improved in some way; I only include my answers for comparison. Any intermediate questions that I asked for clarification or otherwise have been omitted.
Without further ado, a few of the more interesting ones:
Q: “You are shrunk to the height of a nickel and your mass is proportionally reduced so as to maintain your original density. You are then thrown into an empty glass blender. The blades will start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do?”
(my answer): Take off all my clothes, wedge them between the blades and the floor to prevent it from turning. Back up against the edge of the blender until the electric motor overheats and burns out. Using the notches etched in the side for measuring, climb out. If there are no such notches or they’re too far apart, retrieve clothes and make a rope to hurl myself out.
My answer: go down to the base of the blades and duck. Mixer blades in blenders normally have a gap underneath them, and in some blenders, the blades are curved. You could survive for a long time crouched down there. With your fingers in your ears.
Q: “How would you find out if a machine’s stack grows up or down in memory?”
(my answer): Instantiate a local variable. Call another function with a local. Look at the address of that function and then compare. If the function’s local is higher, the stack grows away from address location 0; if the function’s local is lower, the stack grows towards address location 0. (If they’re the same, you did something wrong!)
My answer: The last time I programmed in Assembler was 1979.
Q: “Explain a database in three sentences to your eight-year-old nephew.”
(my answer): A database is a way of organizing information. It’s like a genie who knows where every toy in your room is. Instead of hunting for certain toys yourself and searching the whole room, you can ask the genie to find all your toy soldiers, or only X-Men action figures, or only race cars — anything you want.
My answer: A database is like a pack of Top Trumps in its plastic box. Instead of Gumball Cars, Fast Boats or other Top Trumps stuff, you can make up your own deck. You can then do all kinds of Top Trump like things, comparing cards and stuff like that.
Q: “How many gas stations would you say there are in the United States?”
(my answer): A business doesn’t stick around for long unless it makes a profit. Let’s assume that all gas stations in the US are making at least some profit over the long run. Assume that the number of people who own more than one car is negligibly small relative to the total American population. Figure that 20% of people are too young to drive a car, another 10% can’t drive because of disability or old age, 5% of people use public transportation or carpool, another 5% choose not to drive, and another 5% of the cars are inventory sitting in lots or warehouses that a dealership owns but which no one drives.
There’s about 280 million people in the US; subtracting 50%, that means there’s about 140 million automobiles and 140 million drivers for them. The busiest city or interstate gas stations probably get a customer pulling in about twice a minute, or about 120 customers per hour; a slower gas station out in an agrarian area probably sees a customer once every 10 or 15 minutes, or about 4 customers per hour. Let’s take a weighted average and suppose there’s about one customer every 90 seconds, or about 40 customers an hour. Figuring a fourteen-hour business day (staying open from 7 AM to 9 PM), that’s about 560 customers a day.
If the average gas station services 560 customers a day, then there are 250,000 gas stations in the US. This number slightly overstates the true number of gas stations because some people are serviced by more than one gas station. [Actual number in 2003, according to the Journal of Petroleum Marketing: 237,284, an error of about 5%.]
My answer: There are too many gas stations and too many cars in the United States of America.
[…]
http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=299692
via digg (The big DRM mistake)
After it arrived, I took out the first DVD and stuck it in my Linux box, expecting that I could start looking at the collected issues
[…]
It turned out that The New Yorker added DRM to their DjVu files, turning an open format into a closed, proprietary, encrypted format, and forcing consumers to install the special viewer software included on the first DVD. Of course, that software only works on Windows or Mac OS X, so Linux users are out of luck (and no, it doesn’t work under WINE … believe me, I tried).
via Spyblog (re Computer Misuse Act):
For the purposes of subsection (1)(b) above the requisite intent is an
intent to do the act in question and by so doing—
(a) to impair the operation of any computer,
(b) to prevent or hinder access to any program or data held in any computer, or
(c) to impair the operation of any such program or the reliability of any such data,
whether permanently or temporarily.
I’m sure that the DRM problems described in the first story fall into the emboldened sections of the legislation.
Does this mean UK government will be outlawing DRM? It’s a nice thought anyway.
Take a look at http://wink.com
Where you can look at people’s collections of related links; for example:
This is SandervanderHeide’s Search Guide. You can look at SandervanderHeide’s tags, check out the newest links, or add the favorite “Collections” to your private page. This is a great way to stay updated on the things you care about from people you trust.
If you look at this users page, you can see, for example, all of his links that are to do with the NSA’s domestic spying.
You will remember that Higher Though works (heh, will work) by users manually linking together URLs that are related to each other, so that you will be able to browse them as collections of semantically linked pages, or images or any other type of object that can be accessed with a URL.
Wink doesn’t do this however; it merely allows people to collect related links together in a static list. To make it more like HT, they would need to allow you to go to another related link from any link, instead of the links only available destination being straight to the article.
HT works better than tagging. For example, on this users page, he has a colection of URLS all tagged witht the word ‘citizen’. Now, this tag essentially sits between any two URLS as a semantic mediator. The word ‘citizen’ doesn’t in and of itself contain the meaning of the two links, so if I click on any of these tags in his list, in the Wink results, I get a wildly different set of links, all tagged with this same word.
Higher Thought eliminates the semantic ambiguity of tags, by directly linking two URLS; the urls themselvs are the tags. Since the URL has the meaning of its content ‘encoded’ into it, if the HT connection is made correctly, once you jump into the HT stream of linked tags, each one will relate to the next without ambiguity. The objects a URL represents have very subtle meanings; this is why you have to use multiple tags to pin down the category of a blog post or news article. By linking URLS together directly, you eliminate the need for multiple tags, and allow the meaning of the information to organize itself.
Think of HT as a way of implimenting ‘fractional tagging‘, in the same way that an imaginary object in fractal geometry has a demensionaltiy that is between two whole numbers, the beauty of HT lies in the subtle graduations of meaning that single, one dimensional words can’t convey very well.
Obviously, we can build a moderation system so that bad users links (noise) are pushed out of site. Once we have a critical mass of users, good users links will all connect to each other, and the broken bridges between clusters of HT links cause by bad uers will be eliminated.
It would become a self organizing, semantically correct cloud of all objects with urls, with entry points at each url, from which you will be able to surf from one node to another, viewing semantically linked collections and lines of related urls.
I made a buzzword….
‘fractional tagging‘
‘fractal tagging‘
‘fractagging‘
‘fraagging‘
