KODA

Tonight I read an article off reddit by alluringly titled: Common Benign Dog Tumor May Actually Be Ancient, Immortal Dog Turned into Virus. After reading the article completely, I am stunned… what a concept, cancer cells mutating and propagating into a communicable disease of their own! The real clincher is that the article suggests that this “transmissible tumor” has distinctly different DNA from its host body, which is proposed to have originated from a single dog or wolf several centuries ago! Do check out this article, because it is truly fascinating. This is a concept in biology I had neither heard nor concieved of before.

However, possibly even more interesting was Wikipedia’s page (linked in the article) on HeLa cells. According to Wikipedia, this is an “immortal cell line (it does not age) used in medical research and a proposed new single cell species [...] derived from cervical cancer cells taken from Henrietta Lacks, who died from her cancer in 1951.”

More proof of the elegance of simplicity. Clicky clicky:

Schrodinger’s Comic

I haven’t laughed this hard in quite a while.

Here’s a fun little game I’ve been playing today. You might remember Flash Earth, a flash interface to the satellite imagery available through Google and Windows Live Local. While nifty, the one great limitation of this application is the almost complete lack of labels and location input in the interface. But this provides the perfect challenge for a game.

Take this app and find your home on Earth, from the completely zoomed out position, using only the imagery as your guide. Can you find it? Try to think of landmarks, find your city, and follow the streets. Pretend you’ve been abducted by aliens and are now trying to show them where to drop you off. Because heavens, you never know when such a skill could come in handy.

Now zoom out again and find the Empire State Building. The Great Pyramids of Egypt. The Eiffel Tower. Your old school.

Over the past few days I’ve become hopelessly addicted to the game Tremulous, ever since reading about it on NewsForge. While I originally thought of the NewsForge author’s opinion of Tremulous as “The best free software game ever” seemed a bit excessive, after trying it out and getting into the game, I have to agree. This is a seriously great game.

What piqued my interest was the fact that it was based on the Quake 3 engine, GPL’d, and would run on Linux. After downloading it and
giving it a spin, I must say I was shocked I had never heard of it before. It is possible that this is because the standalone 1.1.0 version was released less than 4 months ago, though with the quality and polish of this game, I would have expected to be seeing and hearing about it all over. The game looks and feels fantastic, and all of the graphics and user interfaces are very professionally designed. I really love the concepts of the buildings and units as well as the creativity shown in the popular maps, with tons of interesting and well-themed nooks and crannies. Tremulous also has a unique fast-paced mixture of Real Time Strategy and First-Person Shooter gameplay, which makes it fun but also strategically interesting.

Unbelievable. Just unbelievable.
After seeing the last one on Thursday, they lost any last chance of my business. Now I’m just frustrated and appalled. Good riddance.
I suppose I’ll have to be finding a new home page now…

Yesterday I was treated to this lovely deviantART subscription nag screen, which would not retreat from the site until I clicked the little “no thanks” button at the bottom. How very lame. My feeling is, if I wanted to continue using their service I would care enough to notice and renew it. As it stands, their bargain price of 8 cents a day is about twice what I pay for hosting here at NFS. I’ve been on the fence for a while about leaving the website all together, and this is pretty much the end. If I were Fella, I’d be crying at how dissapointing his site has become.

	Firefox	75.6 %
	Safari	9.7 %
	MS Internet Explorer	5.8 %

Sorry to those 5.8% (!) who are using IE, things will be looking pretty ugly here from here on out since your browser does not know how to display standards-compliant web pages properly…

For the other 94.2% of you out there, I think your taste in web browsers is damn cool.

http://browsershots.org/website/1152960/

I just fell through a Trapdoor, and I must say I won’t be coming back for a long time. A “Sketchbook for a group of programmers, graphic designers, psychologists, writers” — quite simply, this one of the most astounding groups of projects I have seen in a long time. There’s kiwi, “the wiki for sketching,” an editable (unfortunately shockwave driven) world of imagery in the style of MS-Paint… NodeBox, a fascinating bit of image generation on OSX using Python…

But by far most intriguing to me is Replica, a scarcely explained collection of full articles pertaining to art, design, computers, machine learning, consciousness, philosophy — the good stuff. And boy, is it good. I am amazed by “On artificial creativity”, where computer-generated art, words, artificial intelligence, and the internet meet. This is very interesting stuff, both artistically and conceptually. To me this seems to be the closest thing I’ve seen to a synthesis of modern philosophy, technology, art, and psychology. I am so impressed and inspired.

Oh, why are there such incredible people here on the internet?

Oh, so that’s how it’s done!

http://www.turnofftheinternet.com/

I logged into Last.fm today, spotting a new message notification waiting for me in the top right corner. Only, something looked different in my status box today. My user icon was a different color – a subscribed color…

As you might have noticed, one of our profile servers (which your account is on) has been rather slow recently. Affected users are noticing that their charts are taking ages to update, and neighbours are not calculated fast enough. This is due to the changes we’re making in the way profile data is stored and searched. [...]

To sweeten the deal we’re upgrading your account with a free 1 month subscription. (or extending it if you already subscribe). Along with the usual subscriber perks, you’ll have access to the beta test of the new site update (in early June). This will give you a chance to try out the new charts system before everyone else, and tell us what you think before it’s launched.