-
Walkout
·
1–2 minutes·
3 comments on WalkoutAnother BBC News story about schoolkids walking out over war. To my mind, this is just nuts. Obviously university students can do what they like (although interestingly most people in Cambridge haven’t done any walking out), and I can just about see sixth formers being of sound mind to do it. But 11-16 year olds?…
-
Worth trying
I spent part of yesterday afternoon engaged in playing games on a friend’s computer; very productive. When I fired up Age of Mythology, the volume on the speakers was off since I’d been having a chat. Just as it was getting into the nice intro sequence, I thought, maybe this would make more sense if…
-
Mozilla 1.3
With the recent release of Mozilla 1.3, I’ve been seriously considering switching to Mozilla Mail from Outlook Express. The only real reason why I want to do this is because Mozilla has Bayesian spam classification, and given that I am getting increasing amounts of spam these days, it would be very useful. My concerns are…
-
Freelancer
I’ve spent the last four days playing Freelancer. Freelancer has this interesting thing that allows you to track the amount of time you’ve spent in the game; over those four days I spent a bit over 20 hours on it, so let’s just say right from the start that it is pretty damn playable and…
-
Artificial hippocampus
There’s a fair amount of excitement on the Internet about efforts to make an artifical rat hippocampus. This idea strikes me as, well, pretty weird. I am a little doubtful as to whether it could work (I can think of a lot of reasons why it wouldn’t) but to be honest, it doesn’t matter whether…
-
Copenhagen
I’ve just come out of a production of Copenhagen at the ADC Theatre here in Cambridge. A more complete post and review will have to come later, but I have to describe what I felt. Through the stages of revisions and unveiling of hidden and assumed meanings throughout the play, at the end it seemed…
-
Collective Play
Collective Play – Justin Hall’s notes on a recent conference at UC Berkeley on ‘collective gaming’ (read as: massively multiplayer online games of the AI/Majestic ilk). Interesting to see that the academic world is thinking about this sort of thing, and it appears that Sean Stewart (author for the AI game) was a speaker there.
-
GDC2003
Game Developers Conference 2003 Coverage – Adrenaline Vault’s providing a nice ongoing summary of the highlights of this year’s GDC. Avault generally does these types of things well – they have a high quality of writing that feels much more personal.
-
Webcams for schools
Putting webcams in classrooms to catch problem pupils – seems like a great idea to me, you wouldn’t believe the number of parents who think their kids can do no wrong. As for privacy concerns, I think maybe some kind of key escrow agency might be a good idea, wherein (say) at least two out…
-
The Drugs Don’t Work
Over the past two days I’ve had an excellent two-part workshop in my neuroscience course on addiction, covering what we know about the causes of drug addiction at a molecular, cellular and cognitive level, reward pathways in the brain and possible treatments, vaccines and cures for drug addiction. Definitely one of the most thought provoking…