Neil Gaiman’s ‘Graveyard Book’ Wins Newbery Medal – NYTimes.com.
I think all I can say is “Hurray!”
This means that your children will be assigned Neil Gaiman in school at some point. 🙂
Rogue Leaders
Habitat title screen
Gamasutra is running an excerpt from Rogue Leaders, a new book on the history of LucasArts. The excerpt in question is about Habitat, which is of course one of the seminal virtual worlds. It’s short and worth a read, especially just to marvel at the reason givn for the project’s shelving: fear of success.
Essentially, if 500 users were so committed to playing Habitat that they remained online long enough to eat up 1 percent of the network’s entire system bandwidth, a full-run production that could attract Rabbit Jack’s Casino numbers could boost that bandwidth number to 30 percent. “The way the system was built, the server software wasn’t capable of hosting that population while still being successful,” recalls Arnold.
Ultimately, these business challenges caused Habitat to be cancelled after the launch party, but before it had gone into full production and reached retail shelves. It would simply be too popular, and the necessary server fix would be too expensive to make the project viable. And so this massively original, inventive, and cutting-edge project was shelved for U.S. release.
Offworld spotted (or helped create?) this one.
Clearly, there’s a line in these. We’ve seen Quake and Pac-Man. How about Super Mario, Joust, M.U.L.E., Defender, Chu-Chu Rocket, and Command & Conquer next please?
The Guardian picked “1000 novels everyone must read.”
I have read 183 of them. What’s your score?
I am annoyed that I get no credit for reading, apparently, the wrong Isherwood, wrong Stapledon, wrong Sayers… ah well.
I still pay a lot of attention to social networking theory (not the stuff about the sites, but the research around how humans form networks of influence), ever since doing all the research that led up to my 2003 “Small Worlds” presentation. So this Reuters report that scientists have found a genetic component to having tight friend clusters was interesting to me.
To dig into what’s going on here a little bit: social networks are very discontinuous. They “clump.” We know from datamining that some people have many friends and some have few. The ones who have many are often referred to as hubs or connectors. These folks are also often the ones that “bridge clumps.” And when we say they have friends, we mean, like, they have a crazy amount more than ordinary people do. (The distribution of “number of friends” follows a power law, so the folks at the high end are very very very rich with friends, to a radically disproportionate level).
I suppose it isn’t surprising to think that there is likely some genetic component to this aspect of it. Most people are not like those guys. Continue reading »
