What are the lessons of MMORPGs today?

Raph Koster (author of Theory of Fun) has put together a list called What are the lessons of MMORPGs today?

Here are some of them -- go read the rest...

Lone heroes can’t slay dragons. It takes an army.
People are only good at one thing.
That’s why it takes six people (all doing different jobs) to kill most anything.
You can be the best in the world at your job.
But so can everyone else.
And you will all do it exactly the same way.
You can’t be in two places at once. But places can be in two places at once.
There is no such thing as obesity.
All women are beautiful and all men are either handsome or darkly mysterious.
Somehow, this means that nobody is beautiful and there is no mystery.
Nobody’s really from here, they just live here.
The tide never washes in and out.
The birds never migrate.
Strawberries are never in season.
Nothing sleeps.
Nothing dreams.
There is art and beauty in the world, but you can’t be responsible for any of it.
There is no death; there is simply a failure to show up.
Because of this, there is also rarely any mourning.

Excellent comments section too. Please, go give it a read.

Oh, the similarities are too great

So many of you know that I have no love lost for ratemyprofessors.com[*], but here's a story about a site that has a similar purpose: it's for British citizens to rate the responsiveness of their elected officials (writetothem.com). Well, apparently one of the "officials" decided to send a bunch of fake ratings - the site claims he was trying to unfairly manipulate his ratings. He claims he was just "testing" the statistics of the system. BBC NEWS | Politics | Site axes MP over 'fake' e-mails

[*]footnote: mainly I have issues with their security and their 1996-era technology, NOT whether or not it should exist, which I think it should, with the important caveat that it should be implemented properly, darnit!, which it's not...the security set up for who can/can't post is really lame. Basically I could write a program to automatically send positive (or negative) ratings to everyone on the system that I like. Hmmm, that might be a fun project. (I'm totally kidding. I am FAR too busy for this. Even if it is only about 100 lines of perl.) I'd almost rather see facebook be used for the purpose of rating profs. At least they ensure a .edu email address, and since it's a community where faculty are welcome, it would be more of a conversation and less of a "magic marker on a bathroom wall" type of thing. It's still not perfect, but it's something.

The Interplay Between School and College

Pedablogue has a blurb about the Chronicle of Higher Education publishing soon an article called The Interplay Between School and College. An excerpt:

The issue will include articles that explore how much or how little cooperation there is between schools and colleges; why colleges think schools are failing -- and vice versa; whether schools and colleges are meeting the needs of businesses and society; what state governments are doing to coordinate reform efforts to improve the preparation of college students; and whether education schools part of the answer or part of the problem.

I thought this was timely and interesting since I heard (can't remember where, sorry if it was YOU who told me this) about some movement to build a private high school near Elon to be called "Elon School". This sounds like just the sorts of interplay issues such a partnership would be able to study.

A Lost Interview with the ENIAC Co-Inventor

Computerworld has Q&A: A lost interview with ENIAC co-inventor J. Presper Eckert:

Are there any of your circuits still in use in today's personal computers?

No, but that's true of any first invention. Edison's original light bulb bears no resemblance to a modern bulb. They do the same thing but with totally different components. Same with the computer. What did survive were the concepts, not the hardware. The idea of a subroutine was original with ENIAC....We invented ways to run the same subroutine without any mechanical input. The idea of using internal memory was also original with ENIAC.

pigeon bloggers

Or, as I like to call it, the union of the the arts and sciences:

This summer, watch as a flock of pigeons takes to the skies wearing tiny backpacks. These birds are the first iteration of pigeon bloggers, set loose with GPS receivers, air pollution sensors and a basic cellphone. They have been given the task of measuring the levels of air pollutants and their tools allow them to beam back the results to a real time blog.

The pigeons will be released August 5, and you can track their progress on the web with interactive maps and regularly updated air quality reports. This project was dreamed up by an artist AND researcher, Beatriz da Costa. (Full Story)

rules to live by

Or, rules to think about, at least -- from George Dyson's column in the latest issue of Make.
1.

Never step on anything you can step over, and never step over anything you can walk around.

2.

Never buy anything you can make, and never make anything you can find.