April 1, 2006

This Slate article's throwaway line about designers exstatic to be "in the same room with the guy who made Marble Madness" made me wonder: who did make Marble Madness? Turns out it was Mark Cerny (who also worked on Sonic the Hedgehog 2 -- which is actually a kind of similar game).

"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."

Nature responds to britannica (with a PDF, unfortunately).

In one instance Britannica alleges that we provided a reviewer with material that was not from the Britannica website. We have checked and are confident that this was not the case.

Britannica objects that Nature did not check the assertions of its reviewers. This is true; nor did we claim to. We realised that in some cases our reviewers’ criticisms would be open to debate, and in some cases might be wrong. But this applied as much to criticisms of Wikipedia as of Encyclopaedia Britannica. Because the reviewers were blind to the source of the material they were evaluating, and material from both sources was treated the same way, there is absolutely no reason to think that any errors they made would have systematically altered the results of our inquiry.

We note that Britannica has taken issue with less than half the points our reviewers raised. Both encyclopaedias have made corrections to some of the relevant entries since our article was published.

We do not intend to retract our article.

The Erdős number, honouring the late Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős, one of the most prolific writers of mathematical papers, is a way of describing the "collaborative distance", in regard to mathematical papers, between an author and Erdős.

Britannica's pissed at Nature. Most of the meat of the issue is here. Nature probably messed up (I'll be interested in hearing their counter), but a few of Britannica's arguments are silly.

"...it's a big responsibility being the definition of gay."

Micronations and Pirate utopias.

Abramović had had placed upon a table 72 objects that people were allowed to use (a sign infomed them) in any way that they chose. Among them were scissors, a knife, a whip, and, most notoriously, a gun loaded with a single bullet. For six hours the artist sat immobile, allowing the audience members to entirely direct the action.

The Economist: "the “open-source” label can now apply more broadly to all sorts of endeavour that amalgamate the contributions of private individuals to create something that, in effect, becomes freely available to all. However, it is unclear how innovative and sustainable open source can ultimately be."

The best and worst U.S. presidents. (Though that survey is a couple years old...)

Conveyor belt sushi is a sushi restaurant where the plates with the sushi are placed on a rotating conveyor belt that winds through the restaurant and moves past every table and counter seat.

The Luther Burger is a bacon cheeseburger which employs a glazed donut (such as a Krispy Kreme) in place of a bun.

"This is unexposed film of Greenwich Village because nothing ever happens there ... "

-- Weegee's caption for a completely black photograph in 'Naked City'.

Chandigarh is regarded as one of the most beautiful cities in India.

List of idioms in the English language

Simple brain-computer interfaces already exist in the form of Neuroprosthetics

Sleepy lions

I voted against the proposed redesign of the main page. Clutter is what drives people to Gollum.

Sparse rumors: Google/Wikipedia partnership?

The story of a glowing rod and its travels (and how it killed 1980s Brazillians who didn't know better). (Category:Radioactive waste)