mssv

  • Haiku 2

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    1–2 minutes

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    The folks at New Mars won second place in the Kuro5hin haiku contest for the princely sum of $24! See the reaction at the New Mars forums.

  • Garden path

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    2–4 minutes

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    2 comments on Garden path

    There’s an interesting phenomenon in language comprehension called the ‘garden path effect’. Proposed by Frazier and Fodor (1979), it basically meant that when you are reading or hearing a sentence, you split it up into chunks (you parse it), and due to something called ‘late closure’ you keep on adding as many words as possible…

  • Sid Meier

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    1–2 minutes

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    Sid Meier (creator of the Civilization games) had this to say about massively multiplayer games: “It’s a new, exciting, but at the same time repelling world. I don’t know. Really.” Absolutely.

  • Microwaves

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    1–2 minutes

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    While perusing the manual for the new microwave* in the kitchen upstairs, I spotted a nifty way of making sure whether utensils are microwave-friendly (i.e. won’t blow up or give off sparks if you put them inside). All you do is to put the utensil in the microwave next to a bowl of water and…

  • Culture books

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    Join the Culture list Book Group! We’re reading The Princess Bride by William Goldman to start off with.

  • SLI

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    News about NASA’s Space Launch Initiative aimed at producing the next generation Space Shuttle, and some really funky looking pictures of the contenders.

  • New comments system

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    1 comment on New comments system

    I’ve added a new comments feature to the ‘middling’ column, since due to the nature of ‘massive’ I hardly ever post there. They won’t be activated on all posts however, but I’ve put them on this one in case people have anything interesting to say about previous posts.

  • Buran

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    1–2 minutes

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    The reason why the Russian Space Shuttle ‘Buran’ only flew in space once…

  • New Mars

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    2–3 minutes

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    1 comment on New Mars

    I mentioned on Tiny that the New Mars forums had hit 1000 posts three days ago, after first coming online last September about eight months ago. That might not seem like a lot of traffic – in fact, averaged over 240 days that’s only a bit more than four posts a day. I write more…

  • Flight 990

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    1–2 minutes

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    An excellent piece of journalism on the crash of EgyptAir 990 from the Atlantic Montly.