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The technology can be used to program cells to make virtually any protein, even some that donâ™t exist in nature, the scientists said. That may allow production of helpful new drugs, chemicals and organisms, including living bacteria. It also opens the door to ethical concerns about creation of processes that may be uncontrollable by lifeâ™s natural defenses.
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Some nice visualisations
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Donâ't make it a whacking huge deal if you say something racist, or something others perceive as racist.
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The scans showed that two brain regions were involved in opinion-forming, the almond-shaped amygdala, which is linked to regulating emotions, and the posterior cingulate cortex, which is active in making financial decisions and putting values on the outcomes of situations.
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Yet more proof that the stuff down at a quantum level makes no sense when thought about using metaphors derived at a human level.
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Go on. You know you want to.
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Fascinating piece on why PopCap managed to launch a hard-core game without realising it.
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I reall,y really hope I never turn into this person.
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With some comments on why jamming in more pixels can make your cameras _worse_.
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Programmers, as a rule, are delighted by it, and managers, invariably, get more and more annoyed as the story progresses; true mathematicians, however, fail to see the point.
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The Economist makes sense
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Dedicated to the misuse of Chinese characters in Western culture.
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andrewducker
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Date: 2009-03-09 04:16 pm (UTC)Peggle (which I don't much like, to be honest), is a special case; it is both more and less skillful than it initially appears. More skillful because you can do huge amounts to control where the ball goes; far more than you think you can. Less skillful because the programming's dead clever; the game adjusts your shots imperceptibly to make them better than they are. So you are more likely to make a 'lucky' shot than if it were pure ball physics. Popcap games are full of these sorts of things; for example, in Bookworm Adventures the letters that fall down often 'just happen' to spell words that are relevant to the scene you're in.
I've been meaning, for ages, to write about all this for Plokta.
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Date: 2009-03-09 04:20 pm (UTC)When I think of casual games I think of ones that you don't have to devote hours to. You can play Bejewelled for 10 minutes and then go do something else, whereas doing that with most hardcore games is much harder - they require that you spend half an hour to get anything back out of them. Not always true, but it seems like the best dividing point I've seen.
Also, less shooting demons in the face.
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Date: 2009-03-09 05:33 pm (UTC)And you are right about shooting demons in the face; lots of FPS are plenty trivial enough to be casual games, but the casual game market finds them offensive; 'moms' again. A couple of Popcap games have skirted that line -- Heavy Weapon is a good example. My personal line is drawn somewhere between Fate and Diablo; the former is fine to play around my tiny children, and the latter isn't.
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Date: 2009-03-15 09:50 pm (UTC)I agree that casual games are generally aimed at people with less time, and more family. Which makes it likely that they'll want less offensive content, and gameplay that, at least initially, demands less of them.
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Date: 2009-03-09 04:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-09 04:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-09 06:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-09 06:49 pm (UTC)3) Don’t make it about you. Usually the thing to do is apologize for what you said and move on. Especially if you’re in a meeting or something, resist your desire to turn the meeting into a seminar on How Against Racism You Are. The subject of the conversation is probably not “your many close Black friends, and your sincere longstanding and deep abhorrence of racism.”
I think it's a great site, and some great points there, but having read some of what's been bandied about the interweb in recent weeks, I think that this bit is slightly unfair. There are plenty of cases (and not just in regards to racism) where someone says something, means it in a particular way (which is utterly innocent), and then is pulled up for being racist/sexist/etc by someone who is making a mountain out of a molehill/is overly sensitive. It goes both ways, and I don't think that it's always the case that someone should apologise for what they've said if it has been utterly misinterpreted. And that applies to both sides of the giant debate that's ongoing.
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Date: 2009-03-10 10:24 pm (UTC)