Friday, September 07, 2007

Friday Links!

Tons of links today, and maybe another installment in the Armageddon Empires Play Guide later.

First off, after mentioning SSD drives on Wednesday, Rob Swaringen sent me a link to a review of a SanDisk 32GB SSD with an SATA interface. Some of the performance numbers are amazing, and you can read the review here.

Here are links to two articles about scientists learning how to create out-of-body-experiences at will. Pretty fascinating stuff, with potential gaming applications someday, and you can read the articles here and here.

I've linked to articles several times about the mysterious collapse of the American honeybee population. Now, thanks to some tremendously clever gene sequencing analysis, a likely cause has emerged, and you can read about it here.

Here's a link to an interesting article about lithium-ion battery technology and why there seem to be so many problems (thanks Slashdot). Read it here.

Sirius sends in a link to a bizarre scientific discovery:
Scientists at the University of Rochester and the J. Craig Venter Institute have discovered a copy of the genome of a bacterial parasite residing inside the genome of its host species.

The research, reported in today's Science, also shows that lateral gene transfer—the movement of genes between unrelated species—may happen much more frequently between bacteria and multicellular organisms than scientists previously believed, posing dramatic implications for evolution.

Read it all here.

From Steve Davis, a link to an article about the discovery of gliding ants. It's amazing, and it's here. There's also an FAQ on gliding ants here.

Rob Varak sent in a classic link to an aptonym contest. It's tremendously funny, and you can see the contest results here.

N'Gai Croal has an interesting article over at Newsweek titled "Monday Morning Quarterback: An Armchair Analysis of Videogame Sales for July 2007," and you can read it here. It's long, but there is some interesting analysis if you keep reading.

From Gamasutra, an article titled "Game Design Essentials: 20 Difficult Games." Curiously, Stargate is on the list, which was one of the only arcade games I could play really well (to this day, I have no idea why). Lots of old favorites are mentioned, and you can read it here.

Here's a second link from Sirius, to a story about Phantasmagoria shows. They were horror stage shows, extremely popular in the late eighteenth century, and here's an excerpt:
While most in the audience must have known there was a scientific explanation for these phantoms, their hearts fluttered and jumped nonetheless. Fainting among the ladies was de rigour and it wasn't unkown for a "gentleman" to run from the theater. These terrifying spectacles were so frightening that they were banned in Vienna.

Read all about them here.

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