December 2007
70 posts
Jane McGonigal: design games for world happiness
Jane McGonigal is one of the most exciting future thinkers out there, working on alternate reality games to create more happiness. This Slideshare deck illustrates her view of the purpose of ARGs, and this Christian Science Monitor editorial argues that many of the world’s problems can be solved with the brain cycles of game players if only a game can be designed to harness them. Her look...
WatchThis Google Tech Talk discusses object and scene insertion. It cleverly reframes the problem of “model[ling] the object to be inserted and then adjust[ing] the perspective, scale, and lighting” to “finding an appropriate object that already has the right perspective, scale, and lighting”. Similarly for scene insertion. They can do it because they’re leveraging on a...
Synthetic biology is starting off on the right... →
“If biology is to morph into an engineering discipline, it is going to need similarly standardized parts, Knight said. So he and colleagues have started a collection of hundreds of interchangeable genetic components they call BioBricks, which students and others are already popping into cells like Lego pieces.”
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Young Chinese are going back to the old classics... →
“We miss more by not seeing than by not knowing.”
– Sir William Osler
“It is built on a hypnotic iteration of the interval G and B, which chimes...”
– Alex Ross’ “intense and visceral” description of Schoenberg’s Six Little Pieces for Piano in The Rest is Noise. I’m always fascinated by how people translate ephemeral sound into permanent descriptions; this is another way of doing it.
Applying circuit theory to model gene flow →
“In a circuit, for example, resistance slows down the flow of a current; the flow of genes can be slowed down as well. Two populations of a species may be linked by a narrow corridor, lowering the odds that any animal will move from one population to the other. One way to reduce the resistance in a circuit is to add extra wires. Likewise, the flow of genes increases with extra corridors....
How Google measures search quality (an interview... →
Testing the accuracy of search results is quite a difficult problem. I like how Google does it implicitly (and explicitly, but implicit is cleverer): We test it in lots of ways. At the grossest level, we track what users are clicking on. If they click on the number-one result, and then they’re done, that probably means they got what they wanted. If they’re scrolling down, page after...
“To get along with machines, Dr. Norman suggests we build them using a lesson...”
– From an article on Donald Norman in the NYT.
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“Social technologies that make things more efficient reduce the cost of action....”
– danah boyd on how inefficiencies are sometimes good for a system, particularly social technologies. linked from here
KnitML - a machine-readable knitting language →
Knitting is a very mathematical, algorithmic hobby. (GP took up knitting for topological reasons.) Now knitters are uniting to produce KnitML, which will help standardise knitting patterns and much more: Render a pattern in either written directions or a chart, dependent on a preference setting Render a pattern in any language, using conventions familiar to that language and dialect Validate...
“More and more, you hear about philosophy grad students who are teaching...”
– Kwame Appiah writing on experimental philosophy (or X-phi as it’s hippily called)
How a simple cognitive aid can save thousands of... →
This New Yorker article by Atul Gawande shows how a checklist - a simple enough tool - has the power to do more for patient care than any recent drug. Many medical mistakes are made because of the harried, complicated nature of life in the ICU, but a checklist to remind doctors and nurses what needs to be done can solve most of those problems. Despite its demonstrated efficacy, the idea’s...
WatchRon Eglash gives a really interesting talk showing that fractals are a shared technology in Africa. It appears in architecture, in games, and it doesn’t just appear because it looks pretty, it also maps to the social and cultural structure. He also traces how African geomancy led to a computer (back to Douglas Adams’ stick theory): African geomancers scratching lines in a binary code...
“Euler’s invention of the tonnetz—a two-dimensional lattice diagram for...”
– John Derbyshire in an article on Leonhard Euler, one of the greatest of mathematicians (I’m interested in the mathematical basis for musical theory.)
“A lot of employers put too much stress on money as an incentive and not enough...”
– Tyler Cowen author of Discover Your Inner Economist: Use Incentives to Fall in Love, Survive Your Next Meeting, and Motivate Your Dentist in an interview with Knowledge@Wharton
Bloodless surgery techniques developed for... →
Jehovah’s Witnesses, with their injunction against accepting blood transfusions, posed a problem for the medical community. Doctors in Pennsylvania developed bloodless surgery techniques, which recycle the blood naturally lost in surgery back to the patient. These techniques can of course be applied to everyone else, and may be safer than transfusions, since there’s less risk of...
