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andrewducker ([personal profile] andrewducker) wrote2011-03-31 12:00 pm
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Interesting Links for 31-3-2011

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matgb: Artwork of 19th century upper class anarchist, text: MatGB (Default)

[personal profile] matgb 2011-03-31 02:01 pm (UTC)(link)
FYI: just opened a chunk of hte above links, and got a trojan warning. No idea which one though.

[identity profile] drainboy.livejournal.com 2011-03-31 11:13 am (UTC)(link)
Why cats are not doctors....didn't work for me purely because the joke acted as if cats were doctors. As a joke structure that fights against itself.

"Why cats are not doctors: While informing patient's family of their loss, doctor suddenly loses interest and walks off"

vs.

"Why cats are not doctors: While informing patient's family of their loss, doctors don't suddenly loses interest and walk off"
nameandnature: Giles from Buffy (Default)

[personal profile] nameandnature 2011-03-31 11:34 am (UTC)(link)
Death anxiety prompts people to believe in intelligent design, reject evolution, study suggests

This seems to come under the heading of Terror Management Theory.

In similar experiments, priming with thoughts of death leads to worldview defence reactions in people who believe in an interventionalist God: see Richard Beck's blog post, part of his series The Varieties and Illusions of Religious Experience.

simont: A picture of me in 2016 (Default)

[personal profile] simont 2011-03-31 12:34 pm (UTC)(link)
It's interesting that the Angry Birds article cites as contributing to the game's addictiveness some things that seemed to me to be precisely what caused me to get fed up with it and stop playing.

They say it's a good thing that the flight of the birds takes time, so you can watch what happens. That's as may be when you're playing a shot you haven't tried before, but once you're at the stage of replaying your first two standard shots for the 40th time in order to try lots of options for the third one, it just contributes to an artificial delay between the trials and errors you're really trying to concentrate on. (Not to mention what happens if you get one of the first two slightly wrong.) It's like trying to solve Rubik's Cube under the constraint that between any two adjacent moves you have to put the cube down, answer a question from your multiplication tables, and pick it up again: it makes the action difficult in a way unrelated to the intrinsic difficulty of the underlying problem.

And this bit just dropped my jaw, after observing that you get a quick look at the structure and then it scrolls away as the screen pans over to the firing point:
These little characters [the twittering birds sitting by the catapult] are engaging in a way that for the most part erases the player’s memory of the structure design, which is critical to determining a strategy for demolishing the pig’s house. Predictably, the user scrolls the interface back to the right to get another look at the structure.
And, in my case at least, the user mutters "Why the hell do I have to do this every bloody time?" and gets progressively more annoyed and eventually gives up on the game.

And yet those features are cited as positive aspects of the UI which apparently contribute to the game's addictiveness for a hell of a lot of users who I can only suppose are utterly unlike me. Fascinating!

Is it me, or...

[identity profile] zornhau.livejournal.com 2011-03-31 01:20 pm (UTC)(link)
...is that article on the DDoS attack on LJ itself on a distinctly dodgy site?

[identity profile] undeadbydawn.livejournal.com 2011-04-02 12:03 pm (UTC)(link)
Google have refused to release the Honeycomb source code, making it not open.

[the reason I have read for this is that they rushed it to keep up with iOS, and it's not ready for developer fiddling. If that is the case, I call total BS on the whole Android argument]
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