Interesting Links for 23-3-2011

[andrewducker]

• 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)

Comments

[zz]

"omnivorous" is a much better term than bisexual (or any of its offshoot terms) :D

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

It's interesting how he sees Dom/Sub lifestyle play as completely different from BDSM.

While I've always found the Gor books boring I've never really understood the controversy about them. People write erotica about all sorts of fetish stuff and if his thing is Master/Slave stuff there are plenty of subgirls around into it, so what's the big deal.

Getting upset over Gor is like getting upset over Malfoy/Harry noncon slash fiction.

[hravan.livejournal.com]

The Apple Grammar link caught my eye. For an iWidget at the start of a sentence I'd just keep the lowercase i.

It's not like the folks at Cupertino are the first to inject crazy exceptions into our already crazy language.

[call-waiting.livejournal.com]

The grammar problem is one that I'm sure we've all faced when writing about code. Identifiers or type names in case-sensitive languages can't be capitalised without changing their meanings. The usual course of action is to just avoid placing them as the first word of a sentence (unless they already begin with a capital)

[dalglir.livejournal.com]

"I'm sorry. We can't send a search-and-rescue team to Plato's Cave."

Lol!

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

Would that be the same Bioware who left man-on-man romance out of Mass Effect 1 and 2 because they didn't want to cause controversy?

[andrewducker]

Which would either make this a team-by-team thing, or a change of direction by head office.

Obama's Tent Of Silence

[hravan.livejournal.com]

Nevermind The Onion - Obama's War Tent sounds more like something out of Get Smart.

I particularly like ...Nothing in a SCIF is allowed to operate on a remote control because that's a frequency that can be tapped," he says. "Much of what is distributed is done on fibre, not copper as fibre as yet can't be hacked into...

Fiber optic tap connector and method. (http://www.freepatentsonline.com/4741584.html)

And that's just a 30 second Google search :>

Re: Obama's Tent Of Silence

[andrewducker]

I assume they meant "hacked into from a distance", as that tap requires physical access, while you can monitor signals in a copper wire from a distance.

Re: Obama's Tent Of Silence

[hravan.livejournal.com]

Heh

I thought it might be something like that :D

No harm in *trying* to be a smart arse, right?

Re: Obama's Tent Of Silence

[andrewducker]

It's what life's all about!

[lizw.livejournal.com]

When I used to hang out on BDSM forums, there used to be a general consensus that people who talk about consensual slavery the way John Norman does in that interview typically have zero practical experience of it.

Which might account for his dislike of that community, of course.

[andrewducker]

He strikes me as being like most libertarians I've bumped into. Full of interesting ideals that translate badly into practice.