Mssv

There’s no doubt that there are many who love Marmite, but personally speaking, I can’t stand the thing. Clearly MetaFilterites don’t agree with me though: “The marmite is not too strong for us. It is we who are too weak for the marmite,” and “Bow before the Gods of Yeast Extract! Bow damn you!”

Seen on Usenet, about spacecraft yachts for the rich: “Larry Ellison would probably go for it — but even he isn’t rich enough. Here’s an idea, though: An orbital timeshare. Ellison can use it six months of the year; Bill Gates gets it the rest of the time.”

I’m getting quite annoyed with MetaFilter, again. It’s not that the posts aren’t good - they are, I’ve seen some moderately good ones recently. It’s that I cannot sum up the enthusiasm to take part in discussions any longer. A thread about the link between autism and vaccines caught my eye today, and I was […]

Learned about an interesting thing in a developmental biology seminar today called the ‘Community Effect’. If you transplant a very small group of cells into a foreign, non-self environment, the cells will lose their identity and assume one identical to that of the surrounding cells. However, if the group of cells that you transplant is […]

A humbling experience - one man’s amusing tale of how he made a fool of himself in front of SF writer Greg Benford.

It’s now just over a week until I go to Mars - or more accurately, to the Mars Society’s Mars Desert Research Station. Things are looking up - the Station took delivery of three new Kawasaki ATVs recently, and when I get there, the hab will have been in use for a month, meaning that […]

Who will play wise, old men in 5-10 years? It’s an interesting question which deserves some attention ever since they’ve been looking for a replacement for Richard Harris as Dumbledore in Harry Potter. “Old British Actors, a non-renewable resource?”

Is ragging - making new initiates/players/students perform pointless tasks - the key to forming a strong community?

Take a look at the LambdaMOO constitution (about halfway down the page). It confirms my belief that the most efficient and often best form of governance for an online community is essentially a benevolent dictatorship. LambdaMOO is basically an virtual online world.
In their constitution, the LambdaMOO administrators (’Wizards’) explicitly state that they will sometimes make […]

A few days ago, the world (for me) passed another technological milestone - I now had full and unmetered Internet access for 99% of the time*. I’d just bought the Orange SPV Smartphone.
This phone is quite a nice piece of kit; it has a decent sized colour screen with a reasonably fast processor. Importantly, it […]