mssv

  • Columbia destroyed

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    The Space Shuttle Columbia was destroyed today; one of the worst disasters in spaceflight history. See this Metafilter thread for more information and commentary.

  • Dispatches From Davos

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    Dispatches From Davos – an ongoing report of the Davos World Economic Forum conference by Wired’s editor, Chris Anderson. Fun and interesting stuff.

  • Nanosecond bats

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    While doing some research into neural coding, I came across a reference for a paper that claims bats have nanosecond acuity with echolocation. Say what? Nanosecond? Apparently so. I can’t really tell how they came to this conclusion by the abstract, but it’s been reliably cited in another paper. I’m definitely going to check this…

  • A few good ways

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    Yesterday, I went to an interesting talk by Simon Conway Morris (Professor of Evolutionary Paleobiology at Cambridge) – it was one of those great lectures that starts off from a simple premise, in this case convergent evolution, and then takes that idea on a wonderful journey that touches upon the inevitability of intelligence, culture, social…

  • Misunderstandings

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    Yet again, people are being confused by Kevin ‘Captain Cyborg’ Warwick’s work. Wired has just published an article about Tech Predictions for the Decade, and here’s a quote: Other futuristic technology poised for human consumption is the implanted sensor. Gantz pointed out that University of Reading professor Kevin Warwick, who has a sensor implanted in…

  • Uplink

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    Something tells me that Uplink would make a marvellous massively multiplayer immersive fiction game, or at least a decent component of one.

  • SimCity 4

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    I’m seriously considering buying SimCity 4 at the moment; all the reviews I’ve read have been fairly positive and it seems that with a bug patch the game should be very playable. Plus, I’ve always been a big fan of SimCity. The most interesting thing that I’ve read so far is that the best way…

  • Rewarding Behaviour

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    While browsing through hot-shot Cambridge lecturer and security expert Markus Kuhn’s homepage, I came across these two articles about the detrimental effects rewards can have on performance: For Best Results, Forget the Bonus and Studies Find Reward Often No Motivator. While some may view these articles as part of the backlash against behaviourism, I do…

  • TerraQuest Axed

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    TerraQuest game axed. I talked about TerraQuest earlier in mssv.net. I can’t say I’m particularly surprised about this development; not only were they offering a $250,000 grand prize, but also six prizes of $25,000. The total prizes alone are $400,000, and that doesn’t even take into account the production costs. Sure, they said they had…

  • Undercover marketing

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    Is this Lord of the Rings Winamp Skin really by New Line Cinema? It certainly looks like it, and if so, it’s quite a clever piece of work. It’s had almost half a million downloads so far, and for the price of however long it took an artist to design it, it’s generated an incredible…