Another big catch-up post

[dougo]

I apologize for the excessive diarylike nature of that last post. Here's a more conventional big-pile-of-links-with-commentary. Sorry I've forgotten where I got some of them, these have been accreting for months now.

Live Oak Games has a page of free games. Some of these are games I remember from my junior high school lunch cafeteria in South Jersey, and I'm shocked that anyone else knows about them: quarterball, quarterpuck, and spacewars. Quarterball and quarterpuck are practically identical to what I remember. (I built a quarter basketball game for the diner on TimeTravellerMUCK, if anyone remembers that.) We played a slight variant of spacewars: it was about tanks, not spaceships, and in order to move a tank, you drew ten "tracks"—parallel horizontal lines, like the treads of a tank—and moved the tank to the end of the tracks. Also, we had reflectors, which if you hit them gave you another shot from the point of contact.

One other game in this family that I remember was paper football. I was about to describe the game, but on a hunch I searched for "paper football" and found the exact same game that I remember. The Internet is cool sometimes.

This one comes from jwz: The Aargh Page, a study of all the different ways to spell "aargh" according to Google. What it neglects to mention is that the OSPD3 includes three different ways to spell it: AARGH, AARRGH, and AARRGHH. It also has BRR, BRRR, HM, HMM, and SHH. (Note that these are all interjections, not verbs, so you can't add an S to the end.)

The Squeezebox plugs into your stereo system and plays mp3s that it gets via a wireless connection to your computer. I'm not convinced it's worth $299, but it sounds neat. And the server software is all open source.

From heaneyland comes hip-hop music about anti-virus software from Symantec. No, really.

From talking_sock (I think): A catalog of Bad Human Factors Designs, and Feltron Seven's annual report. Also, from boardgamenews: an alternate design for Settlers of Catan.

costikyan posts about the possible end of Moore's Law. (Small world, it's in response to a comment by my college roommate, a.k.a. Stinglai.) He also mentions the Uncanny Valley principle, which explains why robots (and computer animation) get more disturbing as they get more realistic. Actually it doesn't really explain why, it just notes the effect. I think this is related to why I hate the recent 3D-ish style of Looney Tunes (e.g. Space Jam).

Subjective time: science confirms that "time seems to go faster as you get older". More concretely: "Say you are forty and you will live to eighty. According to one set of calculations, your life, as subjectively perceived, is already seventy-one percent over."

From jwz and jtemperance: Bacteria and parasites can cause schizophrenia and obesity. (The Straight Dope also weighs in on the former.) These kinds of things always astound me—another example is that ulcers are caused by bacteria. I'm waiting for them to find the bugs that cause insomnia, ADD, restless leg syndrome, acne, acrophobia, and unhappiness.

Some eye candy: an intricate animated GIF and some awesome Rube Goldberg machines (with sound). The latter is apparently a collection of intro sequences from a Japanese TV show. Anyone know what the show is about? Is it worth tracking down? Mainly I just want better-quality video for the intros...

And finally, some videos for your nightmares: an island overrun by crabs, and a giant centipede preying on a mouse. Seriously, if you're at all arthropodophobic, don't watch these.