Are You Playing a Game or Getting Played?

by | posted in: Ape Con Myth, External Images | 0

The more game makers consciously “tap into human psychological and sociological tendencies”, the more gamers must consider a game’s intention and the experience of playing it.  Are you having fun or, as in the example below, are you a monkey pressing a lever?

Reading through SCVNGR’s Game Mechanics Flash Cards could be part of a new mental self-defense kit, along with sets for logical fallacies and cognitive biases.

Search for Restuarants: within 380 Million Light Years

by | posted in: External Images, The Space Cadets | 0

Turns out you really haven’t been anywhere.  Below is an infrared view of your local universe of galaxies and dark matter out to 380 million light years.  …  Yeah, that isn’t even everything.  The observable universe was thought to go 14 billion light years out (equaling the age of the universe), is now considered to go 46 billion (age + 32 billion light years of universal expansion)  and one estimate of what we can’t see puts the universe’s total diameter at 150 billion…

Now consider how much you are paying for your apartment.  Square feet?  Let’s get off this rock!

[Image from Center for Astrophysics via New Scientist via Hacker News]

Wasted URLs: Unicorn.com

by | posted in: External Images, External Screenshot, Smog | 0

There’s pretty much no excuse for this redirect.  Of all the places in the IBM empire, something called WebSphere is where they send people looking for unicorn.com?

IBM_Unicorn

This is more what we’re looking for when the subject is unicorns…

Robot_Unicorn

This domain should be surrendered at once to a commission of elementary school kids who will be charged with its protection from non-awesome incarnations in the future.

Emperor Norton (c.1819-1890)

by | posted in: External Images, The Cultural Devision | 0

“Everybody understands Mickey Mouse.
Few understand Hermann Hesse.
Hardly anyone understands Albert Einstein.
And nobody understands Emperor Norton.”
– from The Illuminatus! Trilogy

“At the peremptory request and desire of a large majority of the citizens of these United States, I, Joshua Norton, formerly of Algoa Bay, Cape of Good Hope, and now for the last 9 years and 10 months past of San Francisco, California, declare and proclaim myself Emperor of these U. S.; and in virtue of the authority thereby in me vested, do hereby order and direct the representatives of the different States of the Union to assemble in Musical Hall, of this city, on the 1st day of Feb. next, then and there to make such alterations in the existing laws of the Union as may ameliorate the evils under which the country is laboring, and thereby cause confidence to exist, both at home and abroad, in our stability and integrity.”
– NORTON I, Emperor of the United States.

[To learn more: Wikipedia, Encyclopedia of San Francisco, Twitter]

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