Monday Links from the Armchair Vol. XXIV

[NickFitz]

Yet more stuff you can look at instead of getting on with what you're supposed to be doing:

• How to write a "Malcolm Gladwell Bestseller" - John Graham-Cumming analyses the bestselling author's techniques: "Get a professor. If you are illustrating a complex point (such as the facial expressions in Blink) you'll want a professor to interview and quote from... This 'professor credibility' is a substitute for the idea actually being established scientific fact."
  
  
• Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python - "I learned how to program with a book similar to this one when I was 9 years old. That book covered games programming in the BASIC language. Python is a much more modern language that makes programming even easier... Unfortunately, BASIC is not nearly as widespread as it once was, so it's hard to find materials for kids to teach themselves programming. There are many software 'game creation kits' that are simple to use, but do not teach real programming languages and are limited to making only a few specific types of games. 'Invent with Python' is designed to teach real programming in Python." Al Sweigart's book aims to help people aged ten and upwards to learn about programming by having fun, the way we all did on our BBC Micros/Spectra/C64s/STs/Amigas. The book is free online, or you can buy a dead-tree copy at Amazon.
  
  
• The Recently Deflowered Girl - Scans of a bizarre book from 1965 by illustrator and author Edward Gorey.
  
  
• Display Myths Shattered: How Monitor & HDTV Companies Cook Their Specs - "Take everything you think you know about displays and throw it out the window. It's time for a clinic on what display specs really mean—brace yourself for the alarming truth... Most monitor and HDTV user-menu options are actually unnecessary features added for marketing purposes — gimmicks to suggest the display has unique features that other models lack. Even worse, most of these options actually decrease image and picture quality."
  
  
• How to Prove It - Dana Angluin's examples of commonly-used forms of "proof" was originally published in Sigact News in 1983: "proof by example: The author gives only the case n = 2 and suggests that it contains most of the ideas of the general proof... proof by ghost reference: Nothing even remotely resembling the cited theorem appears in the reference given."
  
  
• The Road to Clarity - In 2004, the USA started switching to a new typeface for road signs. It turns out designing road signs is more complicated than you might think: "In nighttime tests, Clearview showed a 16 percent improvement in recognition over Highway Gothic, meaning drivers traveling at 60 miles per hour would have an extra one to two seconds to make a decision."
  
  
• The Legend of FacilityFocus - "These are some strictly unofficial suggestions, for residents of the College House system at Penn, about how to win at FacilityFocus, the new interactive adventure game system for entering repair requests... OK, you might think that since you want to request work, you should click 'Work Request'. But DON'T! That will lead you off into a series of twisty little passages, all alike, where you'll be eaten by goblins." Mark Liberman is distinctly unimpressed by this almost unusable web application.
  
  
• Who killed the iceman? - "The murder of Ötzi the Iceman is perhaps the most challenging cold case in history. Archaeologists used a splay of forensic methods to piece together a detailed picture of his life – and death."
  
  
• The Spill, The Scandal and the President - "The inside story of how Obama failed to crack down on the corruption of the Bush years – and let the world's most dangerous oil company get away with murder."
  
  
• The 50 Worst Inventions - "From the zany to the dangerous to the just plain dumb, here is TIME's list (in no particular order) of some of the world's bright ideas that just didn't work out."

Happy invoicing!

[doodab]

[*]How to Prove It - Dana Angluin's examples of commonly-used forms of "proof" was originally published in Sigact News in 1983: "proof by example: The author gives only the case n = 2 and suggests that it contains most of the ideas of the general proof... proof by ghost reference: Nothing even remotely resembling the cited theorem appears in the reference given."

One of my professors had this list on her office door.