Airships
A real-time strategy game where you design airships and then fight with them. The aim is to have pretty chaotic explodey fights and interesting ship design choices.
Andrew Chen, Gilt: Designing For China | Design Driven NYC
Andrew Chen, Director of Product at Gilt, spoke at December 2014’s edition of Design Driven NYC and outlined all of the considerations that went into redesigning the Gilt experience for China. He discussed a variety of lessons learned, from the efficacy of infinite scroll to constraints around use of CDNs. Here are the highlights
Poker-playing program marks breakthrough in AI, researchers say – SD Times
A group of researchers from the University of Alberta have created an unbeatable poker program that they say marks a milestone in artificial intelligence and game theory.
What It’s Like Living in the Coldest Town on Earth | WIRED
It got down to -24 degrees Fahrenheit in Oymyakon, Russia, over the weekend. As frigid as that seems, it’s typical for this town, long known as the coldest inhabited place on Earth. If that kind of number is hard to wrap your brain around, such a temperature is so cold that people here regularly consume frozen meat, keep their cars running 24/7 and must warm the ground with a bonfire for several days before burying their dead. It’s hard to know why anyone would want to live in such a place, and harder still to imagine why anyone would want to visit. But photographer Amos Chapple just couldn’t resist.
Why Do All Records Sound the Same? — Cuepoint — Medium
Desperate to get their music on the radio at all costs, record labels are employing powerful software to artificially sweeten it, polish it, make it louder— squeezing out the last drops of its individuality
Reimplementing TeX’s Algorithms: Looking Back at Thirty Years of Programming
Glenn Vanderburg, director of engineering at LivingSocial, gave an interesting recount of his effort to implement TeX’s algorithms in Clojure at the last ClojureConj conference. In the process, he discovered how much programming has changed in the last thirty years.
Ex-Google Engineers Have Created A New Android Tablet, Copied From Microsoft Surface In Every Other Way
A new startup called Jide Technology founded by three ex-Google engineers who were working on Google Search, Google AdWords and Google Maps has developed a new Android tablet named ‘Ultra Tablet’. ‘We can’t stand the drawbacks of the tablets and laptops on the market today and we wanted to do something about it’, said the team behind this startup. So, what did they come up with? An absolute rip-off of Microsoft Surface.
Free speech vs. hate speech: Why is it legal to insult Muslims but not Jews?
How can we ban hate speech against Jews while defending mockery of Muslims?
Het falen van de islamkritiek | MO
Voor de nuchtere beschouwer komt het over als een wat merkwaardige strategie: extremisme onder moslims bestrijden door hen voor te houden dat de islam van nature gewelddadig is, vijandig aan het westen en tegengesteld aan de moderniteit. Door moslims te vertellen dat als zij ervan uitgaan dat hun religie vredelievend en barmhartig is, dat zij de Koran dan verkeerd hebben gelezen. Nog even los van het waarheidsgehalte van een dergelijke insteek, lijkt dit bij voorbaat weinig productief. Toch is dat de grondslag van de Nederlandse traditie van islamkritiek, sinds de opkomst Geert Wilders en Ayaan Hirsi Ali, zo’n tien jaar geleden.
Cartier-Bresson’s classic is back – but his Decisive Moment has passed | Art and design | The Guardian
It’s the book that changed photography forever. But why republish The Decisive Moment after 62 years, when it cements such out-of-date ideas?