Ten games to play with traditional cards, inspired by modern games such as Ticket to Ride and 7 Wonders.
Simple things like "find the nearby treasure sticker", "back up as far as you can, then see how close you get to the sticker with your eyes closed"
HSL is problematic for uses such as randomly generating colour schemes because the human eye does not perceive all hues the same way. With HUSL it is much easier to, say, compare the lightness of two colours to determine if there is adequate contrast. Very interesting!
The model of the tape is as follows. A series of Zombie tokens controlled by Alex represent the tape to the right of the current head: the creature one step to the right of the head is 1 toughness away from dying, the next one over is 2 toughness from dying, etc. A similar chain of Yeti tokens, also controlled by Alex, represent the tape to the left.
Each token has two other creature types, indicating what "colour" the corresponding space on the tape is...
The reality of software patents, from a pseudonymous employee in Microsoft's future planning think-tank:
Right now anything you make violates someone's software patent. Nothing you do will not violate something someone holds. ... MS has a huge legal team that will do an evaluation before something is released to see what the predicted cost of infringement will be. I've never seen a number that reads 0 from that prediction, even for the smallest of features.
Lots of nice touches on the version live on Google Maps, including a secret boss at 0.0000,0.00000 and an 8-bit street-view.
Fascinating essay on the "second coming" of scurvy, caused by vitamin C deficiency, which we're usually taught was "cured" in the British navy in mid-18th century by requiring sailors to drink lime juice daily (hence "limeys"). In reality, it was lemon juice, and the later shift to limes from the West Indies was only one of the blunders, against a milieu of inaccurate scientific and medical assumptions, that caused the simple cure to be lost.
Research showing that extroverts are more likely to make survey responses at extremes (such as 1 or 5 on a five-point scale), more likely to use words like "sweltering" over merely "hot", etc.
Simple auction/word game for three players: two ("givers") get a random word and bid for the number of words they will have to provide the third ("guesser") for them to guess it. On success, the winning giver gets 2 points and the guesser 1; on failure, the giver who lost the auction gets 1 point.
Part of the Thousand-Year Game Design Challenge.
For those of us who remember JavaScript as a toy, only used for superfluous "DHTML", it's amazing to see it used as a real language -- capable of running an x86 emulator. If nothing else, people will have to stop pointing at Gmail as an example of an impressive client-side web application.
All people have a "tact filter", which applies tact in one direction to everything that passes through it. Most "normal people" have the tact filter positioned to apply tact in the outgoing direction. Thus whatever normal people say gets the appropriate amount of tact applied to it before they say it. [...]
"Nerds," on the other hand, have their tact filter positioned to apply tact in the incoming direction. Thus, whatever anyone says to them gets the appropriate amount of tact added when they hear it. [...]
When normal people talk to each other, both people usually apply the appropriate amount of tact to everything they say, and no one's feelings get hurt. When nerds talk to each other, both people usually apply the appropriate amount of tact to everything they hear, and no one's feelings get hurt. However, when normal people talk to nerds, the nerds often get frustrated because the normal people seem to be dodging the real issues and not saying what they really mean. Worse yet, when nerds talk to normal people, the normal people's feelings often get hurt because the nerds don't apply tact, assuming the normal person will take their blunt statements and apply whatever tact is necessary.
Public domain library of vector symbols -- man, parking, stairs, coffee, hairdresser...