Interesting Links for 23-3-2011

• 75 million years in the making: The $11m iPad 2
  (tags: ipad apple wealth)
• Protein found in brain cells may be key to autism
  (tags: autism genetics health science brain psychology)
• Bioware's awesome response to complaints that they neglect "straight male gamers" in Dragon Age 2.
  (tags: bioware gaming lgbt relationships computer_games)
• Trapped (this was how I felt through a lot of my teens and early twenties)
  (tags: xkcd epistemology philosophy socrates comic funny)
• Barack Obama's top secret tent (Not an Onion article, really)
  (tags: security barackobama privacy surveillance technology)
• An interview with John Norman, the philosophy professor who created the barbaric world of Gor
  (tags: Gor JohnNorman scifi)
• The grammar of Apple - a question for our modern times.
  (tags: apple grammar)
• NHS satisfaction at record high
  (tags: nhs uk healthcare)
• How different strains of Toxoplasma gondii affect human and mice behavior differently
  (tags: Parasites psychology brains behaviour)
• Volcanoes' role in origins of life found after 50 years lost in a lab.
  (tags: volcano life science)
• Amazon’s Android App Store Launches - USA only at the moment. Hopefully going worldwide soon.
  (tags: amazon android usa)

Tappity tappity tap, clunk, ching!

Over on Twitter Niall Harrison mentioned that he was surprised that in the first season of The Wire looked so nineties, rather than 2000s, and mentioned the appearance of typewriters as one sign of this*.

Which made me think about when I last saw typewriters in the office...

(Treat "1991" as "1991 or before", not that many places shifted away from typewriters much before then, AFAIK.)

[Poll #1721492]


*Ok, so he mentioned the typewriters over on FB, but I can't link to that, and as I'm in work I can't easily link to Twitter either. You'll just have to trust me.

I shall be buying this game

Although I am quite tempted to wait for it to be on special before I do, as I now have an allergy to paying full-price for computer games.

(via johnbobshaun over email)

God help the outcasts, or nobody will

So, it turned out that Julie hadn't seen Mulan or The Hunchback of Notre Dame, so we watched the two of them over the last couple of days, in an attempt to fill the gaps in her Disney knowledge.

I'd forgotten that Hunchback had actual reference to God in it, although it was rather obvious that with a massive cathedral playing a major role in the plot it would be tricky to avoid. Very nicely handled too. Julie spent the fifteen minutes afterwards reading about the original novel and being amused at the number of awful things that hadn't happened in the Disney version :->