mssv

  • Sid Meier

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    Sid Meier (creator of the Civilization games) had this to say about massively multiplayer games: “It’s a new, exciting, but at the same time repelling world. I don’t know. Really.” Absolutely.

  • Microwaves

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    While perusing the manual for the new microwave* in the kitchen upstairs, I spotted a nifty way of making sure whether utensils are microwave-friendly (i.e. won’t blow up or give off sparks if you put them inside). All you do is to put the utensil in the microwave next to a bowl of water and…

  • Culture books

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    Join the Culture list Book Group! We’re reading The Princess Bride by William Goldman to start off with.

  • SLI

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    News about NASA’s Space Launch Initiative aimed at producing the next generation Space Shuttle, and some really funky looking pictures of the contenders.

  • New comments system

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    1 comment on New comments system

    I’ve added a new comments feature to the ‘middling’ column, since due to the nature of ‘massive’ I hardly ever post there. They won’t be activated on all posts however, but I’ve put them on this one in case people have anything interesting to say about previous posts.

  • Buran

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    The reason why the Russian Space Shuttle ‘Buran’ only flew in space once…

  • New Mars

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    1 comment on New Mars

    I mentioned on Tiny that the New Mars forums had hit 1000 posts three days ago, after first coming online last September about eight months ago. That might not seem like a lot of traffic – in fact, averaged over 240 days that’s only a bit more than four posts a day. I write more…

  • Flight 990

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    An excellent piece of journalism on the crash of EgyptAir 990 from the Atlantic Montly.

  • Scrabble

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    Played Scrabble at the pub last night – got 309 points, most of which came from oxygen, squadron (used all seven letter – extra 50 points) and fazed (triple word score).

  • Foreign emoticons

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    Inspired by a post on the Culture mailing list, I was going to write something about the universality of emoticons on the Internet between different cultures and languages here. I then realised that it was far more interesting than I first envisaged and so it deserves a full write up. Expect a new article in…