Rough Drafts

Somebody wrote a giant message to his sweetie in the Utah desert. A satellite captured a picture of it, and now you can see it thanks to Google Maps. (via Googlesightseeing)

I’m wasting way too much time playing shooting arrows into oncoming hordes of medieval soldiers, archers, and ogres. I haven’t had this much fun with trajectories since Gorillas.

Here is one cool 8-year-old: Hey, Klingons Have Feelings Too “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United Federation of Planets, and to the galaxy for which it stands, one universe, under everybody, with liberty and justice for all species.”

“Anytime you lose a high-profile customer, that hurts in ways that are not quantifiable but that still hurt.” –Sageza Group analyst Clay Ryder, who clearly has no clue how to read a budget and calculate the loss of a major customer’s business. Apple to ditch IBM, switch to Intel chips

MIT’s Technology Review has a little piece on the first computer game ever, 1962’s Spacewar for the DEC PDP-1. Also see Stewart Brand’s 1972 writeup.

What happens if oil isn’t cheap anymore? Our farming and food systems collapse, the suburbs implode, a period of violence ensues, and in the end, we’re all living in small farming communities, riding bikes and milking cows by hand. So says James Howard Kunstler, who predicts this all may start to ha

It’s 1:50. Plus 1,439 other minutes–all illustrated with multiple photos–at the curiously engrossing Human Clock. A new shot every minute, of course.

Bodies embedded in plastic for display in San Francisco’s Masonic Center are now decomposing, while on display, and they’re leaking. “The bodies were not degreased properly before they were filled with plastic,” says ABC News. (via BoingBoing)

I’ve sat through Wagner operas that moved the plot forward faster. Sure, the computer generated imagery is amazing–but overwhelming. It quickly become so ubiquitous that it’s no longer all that impressive (Coruscant looks a bit like Las Vegas at night, oh and look, here comes another floating droid)

Sci fi author and EFF publicist Cory Doctorow (see my 2003 interview with him) has some good advice on writing. “Every morning I get up and I spend half an hour writing 250 words on the novel and a year later I have a book.” Plus three rules of thumb for novel writing: “… at […]

Wired News reviews Steven Johnson’s book Everything Bad Is Good For You and wonders: If video games are making us smarter, why can’t we solve problems like Iraq and Social Security? The answer’s easy: Make a killer first person shooter called Iraq: The Game and a gripping multiplayer online game cal

John Scalzi is not worried about the state of book publishing in an age of easily made, widely-distributed digital copies: I write books, but you know what? I’m not a book writer, any more than a musician is an LP musician or an MP3 musician. The book is the container. It’s not destiny. Want to […]