• Ragging

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    4–6 minutes

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    3 comments on Ragging

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

  • Benevolent

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    1–2 minutes

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    1 comment on Benevolent

    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…

  • Milestones

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    2–3 minutes

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    No comments on Milestones

    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,…

  • Xylophone

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    1–2 minutes

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    Saw four people busking with xylophones and glockenspiels in Cambridge city centre today – I think it’s been the first time for years that I’ve felt compelled to give a street performer some money. Their performance of Blue Danube was pretty damn impressive. On another note, I have two long posts that I have in…

  • How to get rich

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    1–2 minutes

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    No comments on How to get rich

    How to get rich – an interesting lecture by Jared Diamond, the author of Guns, Germs and Steel (a very good book, on the whole). Fairly woolly, but it has some useful points.

  • Life online

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    1–2 minutes

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    No comments on Life online

    Putting your life online – recording and organising all of your emails, conversations and other life events on a computer to serve as a supplemental memory system. This isn’t a particularly new concept, but it is likely to be the first decent implementation. Very interesting stuff – I wonder how it’ll affect kids growing up…

  • School

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    2–3 minutes

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    No comments on School

    I was feeling a bit bored this evening* and decided to have a look at my old school website. I was pleasantly surprised to see that it had been updated recently, and what’s more, it had some inspectorate reports online. Before the website was created I’m not convinced that it would’ve been easy to get…

  • Musical

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    1–2 minutes

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    No comments on Musical

    The soundtrack CD of Spirited Away I ordered from Play.com arrived today, and it’s wonderful. While I wouldn’t go so far as saying that I don’t like Disney songs – there are, after all, some great ones – would it really hurt them that much to make a film without a single song? If they…

  • Spiritng Neal Stephenson Away

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    9–13 minutes

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    No comments on Spiritng Neal Stephenson Away

    A review of a lecture by award-winning SF author Neal Stephenson, on ‘Newton/Leibniz’, together with a review of Miyazaki’s film ‘Spirited Away’.

  • Kurzweilwatch

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    1–2 minutes

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    No comments on Kurzweilwatch

    Interesting to see that Ray Kurzweil (so-called AI pioneer) is still using his same old Ramona demonstration at conferences nearly two years on from when I first saw it. Come on Ray – it wasn’t that good the first time round, and it certainly isn’t now.