Tuesday, June 05, 2007

Tuesday Links

An odd assortment for your reading pleasure.

First off is an article by Richard Cobbett called "Cirque du Strange," a compendium of the strangest moments in gaming history. It's a top-50 list, so some entries misfire, but there's a very high percentage of hits, along with some real gems. All in all, it's an excellent read, and you can find it here.

Next, an article over at Daily Tech titled "Pay to Play." Here's the setup:
Over the past three months, DailyTech put together a series of faux companies, product portfolios and trademarks. In a combination of phone and email correspondences, our team of journalists set out to find illicit and unethical review behavior in the English-print, computer hardware review industry.

Actual investigative journalism, and you can read it here.

Next is a breakthrough in superconductor research:
Using uniquely pure crystals created at the University of British Columbia, researchers from the University of Sherbrooke detected an elusive signature of electrons within a high-temperature superconductor, a feat that has eluded scientists since the exotic materials were first discovered in 1986.

...Taillefer predicted the discovery would lead to room-temperature superconductors within 10 years, triggering a technological revolution similar to the invention of the transistor.

It's always hard to tell if superconductor "breakthroughs" are what they're claimed, but it's an interesting story, and you can read it here.

Here's a link to an article titled "English 101 for Bonobos" which is completely fascinating. Researchers in Iowa are using lexigrams to teach bonobos how to communicate using a touch screen. Here's an excerpt:
The work at the Great Ape Trust grew out of a project begun more than 20 years ago in which researchers tried to use symbols – called lexigrams – to communicate with bonobos in a new way. They wanted to avoid criticisms of past language research, such as the possibility that apes were just responding to nonverbal signals.

They had little success with Matata, an older bonobo born in the wild. But when she was away from the research station one day, scientists discovered that her young son, Kanzi, had learned a dozen of the lexigram symbols – like "banana," "peanuts," "bite," and "tickle" – without any actual instruction, simply by being nearby. Today, Kanzi knows more than 360 lexigrams and understands several thousand spoken words of English.

It's an amazing story, and you can read it here.

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