mssv

  • Mars beckons

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    It’s now just over a week until I go to Mars – or more accurately, to the Mars Society’s Mars Desert Research Station. Things are looking up – the Station took delivery of three new Kawasaki ATVs recently, and when I get there, the hab will have been in use for a month, meaning that…

  • Old British Actors

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    Who will play wise, old men in 5-10 years? It’s an interesting question which deserves some attention ever since they’ve been looking for a replacement for Richard Harris as Dumbledore in Harry Potter. “Old British Actors, a non-renewable resource?”

  • Ragging

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

  • Benevolent

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    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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    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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    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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    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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    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…

  • Films

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    Not many updates recently, alas. I’ve been watching The Princess Bride and reading The Code Book, both of which I heartily recommend. I’ve also been emailing my crew mates for my upcoming mission at the Mars Society Desert Research Station in December and writing content for the MetaFilter wiki. I plan to write a couple…

  • Wiki-wiki-wah!

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    I’ve finally done something I’ve been meaning to do for months; set up a wiki. Or to be exact, three wikis. Wikis are webspaces in which any material can be edited or added by anyone; a bit like a community whiteboard with hyperlinking, if you will. It sounds like a recipe for disaster, but after…