1. Scott sent me this video of Sims-creator Will Wright demonstrating his new project, Spore, at the Game Developers Conference. The video is 35 minutes long, but he's demonstrating new functionality throughout all of it. The game looks flat-out amazing. It revolves around guiding the evolution of a species from its existence as a single cell to colonizing the galaxy — all with complete flexibility and customization. The way your species walks, dances, develops a culture and builds structures are all emergent behavior that comes from algorithms examining your choices, rather than canned actions. This is the most excited I've been about a videogame in a while — if it were anyone but Wright, I'd think this was just a slick demo. But he seems likely to have actually pulled this off.


2. Catherine sent me this real-life Simpsons intro, via waxy. Awesome.


3. This and this are probably the clearest, simplest explanation of Fourier Series that I've ever seen (admittedly, that may not be saying much). Perhaps not everyone's cup of tea, but I find it kind of fascinating. This is the essential mathematical insight that allows digital compression of analog information. Without it MP3s, digital video, our modern phone system, JPEGs, and a whole bunch of other essential stuff wouldn't exist.

UPDATE: Fixed the Spore link.

Amanda takes on one of my pet peeves, and expresses her irritation with people who don't know that punctuation is generally supposed to go inside quotation marks. She's right to be irked: this is elementary school shit. Amanda, if it's any consolation, I know that this rule exists. I just ignore it.

File it under "ways computers have destroyed my brain", I guess (along with the rest of this blog). But when I'm writing I look at clauses as logical units, and punctuation as the modifiers, operators and delimiters that one applies to those units. In the first sentence of this paragraph I intended for ways computers have destroyed my brain to remain an atomic, whole unit that operates as a plural noun. A trailing comma isn't part of that unit — so why should it go inside the quotation marks, which function as the unit's delimiters?

I admit that this probably sounds like gibberish to people who aren't programmers, logicians or other varieties of weirdo. And I'll admit I'm somewhat inconsistent on this score: when dealing with dialogue I follow the rules. I've tried to break them, but it doesn't work. "Hmm," I'll think, "That just doesn't look right." I excuse this hypocrisy by arguing that the clause of which the quote is the object generally ought to be inserted into the quote at a point where a comma would naturally reside — thus making the comma a part of the quote-unit, and properly included within the quotes. But as you can probably tell from the length of the preceding sentence, I'm really just fooling myself.

It doesn't matter, though. At this point these are tics I can't help any more than I can avoid constant overuse of emdashes. My English-teacher grandmother would be crushed if she knew.

in other news, today is both the birthday of charles and my father! happy happy to them! may they both get incredibly drunk tonight. well, my dad, anyways.

my dear friend claire agre, who i met while working in milan and who is now a graduate landscape architecture student at harvard, is in the new york times today! woohoo! it's an article about the environmentally responsible redevelopment of a historic piece of former mining land in colorado. check it:

Academics and experts on mine reclamation---one of the biggest environmental problems of the West, where there are perhaps 500,000 abandoned mines---say that Breckenridge's groundbreaking path could change how mine reclamation works. With ownership of the pollution and control of the land, they say, comes the power to shape the post-mining landscape in a way that goes far beyond just cleaning it up.

"Breckenridge can lead the way," said Alan Berger, an associate professor of landscape architecture at Harvard and founder of the Project for Reclamation Excellence, a group at the design school that works on reclaiming land damaged by resource extraction. "The opportunities of what the town and county can do here are completely open-ended."

And so are the burdens. The property is hatch-marked by miles of unmarked and unmapped trails carved by generations of backcountry users at a time when no owner was around to say boo. The new owners are bracing for what they expect will be contentious public meetings beginning this spring as managers decide which trails to keep open and who may use them. The town favors things like hiking and biking, while the county wants to make sure that motorized users have their say as well.

Mining's legacy on the forest is another headache. In gold's heyday, lumber was needed for mills and tunnels, and by the late 1800's the Horseshoe was stripped. The result today is a narrow monoculture in which the oldest trees are about 120 years old---mostly lodgepole pines.

Pine beetles, which have ravaged vast parts of the West, are just hitting this part of Colorado. Local officials warn that the bugs, which love mature lodgepoles, could kill 80 percent of Horseshoe's trees.

But Breckenridge, which has carved a tourist niche around its mining history and historic buildings also wants to incorporate the story of the Horseshoe into the fabric of the local economy. That means thinking about mines and miners, and how they gave rise to Breckenridge.

That is where Claire Agre, a Harvard graduate student in landscape architecture, enters the picture.

you'll have to read the rest to find out what superhero claire agre is doing to save the world!

you can see my world-renowned series of "claire, pensive" photos here, here and here.