Link Dumpage: Juan Caballero y Ocio
No! I did not collect this a few days ago and hope to trick you with "regular" updates!
- Outlandish theories: Kings of the (hollow) world: "Symmes's story is told well in "Banvard's Folly" by writer Paul Collins, who has reconstructed the stories of a series of madmen. Some were geniuses in their way, scientists who staked their entire careers on false hypotheses. He discusses the lives of men such as respected French physicist René Blondlot, who discovered N-rays in the early 20th century. N- rays didn't exist, but they threw the scientific community of the day into turmoil."
- Experiencing déjà vu?: "Experiments suggest that déjà vu can be triggered independently, without a real memory to prompt it ... Recognising a familiar object or scene is believed to unleash two processes in the brain ... Exploring this two-step theory, a team at the University of Leeds in northern England showed volunteers 24 common words, then hypnotised them ... Ten of the volunteers said they felt an odd sensation when they saw new words in red, and five others said this sensation definitely felt like déjà vu."
- Man hangs dead from the ceiling, yet remains online: "A play about a man who hangs dead from the ceiling of his apartment while his computer program maintains the facade that he is still alive was among the top entries in a new competition for plays about science and technology. That play, titled "On-line" and submitted by Minneapolis playwright Mark Steven Jensen, earned finalist status in the first Scientists, Technologists, and Artists Generating Exploration (STAGE) competition."
- Interactive Narratives Revisited: "My lecture contained a critique of the whole concept of interactive movies, and in fact I ended up saying that I didn’t believe there was any such thing as an interactive movie at all, a remark which produced prolonged cheering in my largely techie bad-attitude game developer audience. The challenge of the interactive movie, I concluded, was to make decent computer games in spite of the fact that the marketing department will insist on sticking this idiotic label on your box. So I abandoned interactive movies as a design concept, because I couldn’t figure out what they were supposed to be, and looked at interactive narratives from an abstract, theoretical point of view. In that lecture, I identified three key problems that I felt made it difficult to create interactive narratives. So the idea behind this lecture is to look back and see how things have changed since I named those problems... to see if, perhaps, any of them have been solved."
- The Latest on Long-Running Experiments: "We are happy to report that three of the world’s longest-running scientific experiments are indeed still running. It has been a number of years since anyone checked on all three ... In 1984, the European Journal of Physics published three remarkable reports, each describing a different experiment that had been continuing for decades. The youngest -- the pitch drop viscosity experiment at the University of Queensland in Brisbane -- had been started in 1927. The oldest -- the now-and-then-famous Oxford electric bell at Oxford University, was begun in 1840. The third experiment, the Beverly clock at the University of Otago in Dunedin, was commenced in 1864."
