mssv

  • 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…

  • Nano Ring

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    The Nano Ring – the Lord of the Rings parody thread has been circulating around the Internet for a while now, but if you’re a fan of Peter F. Hamilton, there’s a great send up of his neverending propensity to make up reams of technical specifications and acronyms in The Nano Ring…

  • MREs

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    Son of Spam – a fun article about the US military’s latest advances in creating edible and long lasting food for troops on the move. Says Darsch: “It wasn’t the four-letter words” in soldiers’ letters that caused his lab to abandon its “father knows best mentality” about MREs [meals ready to eat]. “It was the…

  • Kill Bill

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    Kill Bill Teaser Trailer – it’s one of those trailers where you think, ‘I don’t care if the film is shit, the trailer is amazing.’

  • Nine degrees of separation

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    Steppe by step – a nice article about a journalist testing out Milgram’s theory that any two people in the world are only separated by a chain of six acquaintances. The journalist decided to see how many people it would take for her to meet a Mongolian herdsman.

  • Another two weeks on Mars

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    Mars in Utah – my friend Katie is part of the Mars Society Desert Research Station Crew 11 (I was in Crew 9) and she’s writing a weblog about her experiences. If you enjoyed reading my Two Weeks on Mars weblog and would like to have a different perspective that perhaps doesn’t concentrate so much…