Biweekly links for 11/16/2009

• Deconstructing the “Fry Event Horizon”
  • “It turns out that, following this simple analysis, the date that everyone in the world becomes a @stephenfry follower is not that far away: March 8 2010 to be precise. Yes, March 8 2010 is is when the “Fry Event Horizon” will occur, and nothing will be the same again.”"
• infochimps — Find Any Dataset in the World
  • An online marketplace for data.
• Can D.I.Y. Supplant the First-Person Shooter? – NYTimes.com
  • “Video-game companies were once nimble trailblazers born in the countercultural spirit of the 1970s. But it didn’t take long for the industry to grow into a kingdom of conglomerates, spending tens of millions of dollars on big titles. Soaring development costs squeezed out small publishers and stifled creativity… Hence the growing opposition. At the conference, the indie community gathered daily, halfway down one wing of the basement, in Room 131, where Rohrer and dozens of other speakers discussed what you might call games for games’ sake. “
• China’s empty city
  • Stunning video of a brand new city built in China, for one million people, but standing empty. Starts about 1:10 in.
• What Are the Most Sucessful Examples of New Media Science Communication? | The Intersection | Discover Magazine
  • “blogging is not the best or most effective form of existing science communication online… But trying to be positive rather than negative, I’m also going to point out what is: Viral YouTube videos that introduce nonscientific audiences, in the millions, to scientific thinking in a very thoughtful and memorable way.”
• Igon Value Problems Over Dilettante Matrices : The Quantum Pontiff
  • What are Igon values?
• Dutch muggers caught on Google street view camera
  • A 14-year old Dutch boy was mugged; unfortunately for the muggers, they mugged the boy just as Google was taking photos of the area for Google Street View. A few months later, the boy was surfing Street View, and saw himself and the two muggers, who have since been arrested.
• Protein Power § SEEDMAGAZINE.COM
  • “The growing stockpile of protein data has, in the last few years, enabled development of smarter computer algorithms that are giving scientists the power to redesign proteins virtually and with greater speed and accuracy. These “computational design” algorithms are able to scan through truly staggering numbers of potential sequence and structure variations — far more than would be possible in a lab — and serve up the best designs.”
• SimsBlog: Top 10 Lies Newspaper Execs are Telling Themselves
  • From Judy Sims, the former VP Digital Media at the Toronto Star.
• Open source enters the world of atoms: A statistical analysis of open design
  • First Monday article on open source design.

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