Interesting Links for 30-09-2012

• Don Draper with an iPhone? Candid behind-the-scenes photographs capture the stars of Mad Men on and off set
  (tags: photographs MadMen )
• The Case for Abolishing Patents (Yes, All of Them)
  (tags: patents )
• Little-known sexual orientations (I laughed)
  (tags: relationships sex )
• If you are Neil Gaiman the internet will make sure you don't forget your hat.
  (tags: WarrenEllis wilwheaton JohnScalzi neilgaiman hats internet )
• Britain now producing more cars than Germany: How the UK has become the car production capital of Europe
  (tags: europe manufacturing cars uk )
• Behind the scenes of the final moments of the latest episode of DrWho
  (tags: DrWho ArthurDarvill KarenGillan MattSmith )
• Embracing 3-D Printers, Manufacturer Tells Customers to Print Their Own Replacement Parts | Wired Design | Wired.com
  (tags: thefuture 3dprinting )

What Borderline Personality Disorder is like

Via luckylove who has it, and spent the day teaching nursing students what it's like. Her comment was:
The majority of students found it exhausting just to watch. That's when we said that's what our lives are like all the time. It's constant. And even when you have nothing to worry about and you've not been worrying for a few hours and you realise you're not worrying you start to worry about the fact that you're not worrying and *head explodes*

I had not realised how good bionics technology now is.

I started off by finding out that the NHS just paid for their first bionic hand, so I went looking to see how good it is. And was very impressed:

If he tenses his bicep the hand closes, if he tenses his tricep the hand opens. It's got multiple different shapes it can form, and the level of control is good enough for him to pick up eggs!

The question now is - how long until the technology is better than biology?

(The big missing thing, obviously, is feedback. That's not going to be an easy one to solve.)

More info here.

How I spent my weekend (lasers, demons, javascript and headcrabs)

This weekend was nice and relaxing, and after a few days of feeling like I was horribly low on sleep I finally felt somewhat better slept.

Saturday was johnbobshaun's birthday, for which I travelled to sunny Falkirk with Hugh, Meredith and Noah, and then shot people repeatedly with Lasers. I didn't come first, largely because Meredith was much better than me. I did come second though, with Hugh in third. Not bad for a game with 14 people in it! It was nice to see people, although I did then stagger back to Edinburgh rather than go onwards to Stirling to spend more time with them, due to a mixture of lack of sleep and wanting to go home to a still-ill Julie*.

Sunday I spent a few hours playing with Javascript and JQuery, working out how to generalise code so that I can make panels fly in from the sides of the page in a nice frameworky kind of way. Things are slowly falling into place, although I still am still loathing working without decent autocomplete or refactoring tools. I need to spend some time working out what the best tooling is for writing Javascript in.

In-between all of this I've been playing Torchlight 2 with Julie and Black Mesa by myself. Both of which continue to be excellent. I'd forgotten how much Half-Life was a series of set pieces. Were there earlier FPS games that were so structured? Or was it the first of its kind? In any case it's certainly very kind of so many scientists and soldiers to wait for me to walk around a corner into line of sight before they die in terribly unpleasant ways. The game seems gorier than I remember, but that's probably because the graphics are better, and the physics engine means that the people's remains bounce off of walls more realistically when I drop a grenade into the middle of them.

Torchlight 2 also continues to be great fun. It throws gorgeously painted isometric monsters at me, I click on them, it gives me new weapons to kill the next set of monsters. It's a beautifully symbiotic relationship, and one that we've lost several happy hours to.


*Who totally gave me an evening pass, which I would have used if I had been less tired. Stress seems to be keeping me from sleep well or sleeping in, which sucks.