The Whuffie Game. Glenn Fleishman remarks on the social dynamics at ETCon. (Badge-surfing behaviour was a big topic of conversation at the conference.)
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I will almost certainly go to the GEL Conference and Blogger/Industry Networking Cocktails.
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Everything happened at once, and since there are so many things I should have posted here but didn't, I will allow those all to slip. I had a great time at the Emerging Technology Conference though I was almost totally out of it the whole time (it came on the heels of six weeks of sleep deprivation and contributed to even more of the same — more than one person asked if “always looked so tired” and Cory greeted me with “Jesus! You look terrible!”)

I had a few great things to post in situ but Blogger was consistently down every time I wanted to post. (If only there was a better way!)
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Software Development as a Cooperative Game, Games Programmers Play (annoying registraion required) and The Cooperative Game manifesto for software development by Alistair Cockburn (pronounced "Coburn", the Scottish way). And more of his articles.
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Sylloge rerun:looking for some stuff in FTP I noticed these two mp3s on the server, from sylloge posts a few years ago. So good!, this music! Sin City and Vai (Menina, Amanhã de Manhã). Go and be free, music!
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Philosophy Radio. Fantastic! (Via MeFi.)
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MATT HAUGHEY on growing old online.

(The changes in how people identify online are really interesting. Reflecting on my own time as the system-assigned “ui503”, “sbutterf” and “dsb26” and the transition to “stewart”, “sylloge” and now, often, “Stewart Butterfield” gives me mnemonic microslices of the person-instances I have been in various points in the time of my life online. (A new therapeutic tool?))
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On the other hand (see immediately below), we are working so freaking hard that I don't have time to post some very interesting things here! Go team!
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The kind of office we have is this: I am the boss and I am allowed to run across the room, leap on Klaus's desk and then sproing onto his shoulders, and then we are allowed to almost, but not quite, wipe out. (Update: later Jason squirted water all over me (and my keyboard).)
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Holly Samee of Collective Detective (BBC News story about them) pinged to let me know about a spinoff project called Collective Effect which is currently trying to help raise awareness (and hopefully money) towards an extremely rare case of conjoined twins —two Egyptian boys joined at the crown of their head(s).

• Egyptian Twins Awareness Project (official site)

There is a world of worthy causes out there, but for some reason this touched me as well.

... they can not sit, stand or crawl and have spent their entire lives on their backs. According to articles about the boys, they are active, alert and playful, “often reaching back to grab the other's ear or nose. They also appear eager to move, trying to push each other up.”

Perhaps the most interesting and practical question in biomedical ethics is the allocation of resouces: essentially, the “rationing” of service based on the need, the expectation of quality of life, the financial state and other characteristics of the patient.

Almost every death could have been prevented a little longer than it was, though the price becomes exponentially (or even geometrically) higher. Given that society as a whole has a finite amount of time, material, money, etc., to apply to the medical needs of all, who should get what? From a policy perspective, it is hard not to be a utilitarian, but when it is your children, and they are young and otherwise healthy, and there is a good chance of them living more or less normal lives after an operation, how much is too much?

It would take a 15 member team and a total cost of about US$2 million to perform the operation, though given donation of space, good and services, the family is left with having to raise only $125,000 of that.
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Wow, I really can't keep up with blogs. I guess I should check out that RSS stuff. But, some links: Tim Bray on Vancouver's Downtown Eastside (it is getting almost as bad on the west side of Granville between Nelson and Davie and on Davie between Bute and Thurlow). Jill Walker on hiding behind a blog (I know what it is like to not get personal in a blog) and Shelley Powers' comments on same (including some pretty lame details about a recent job offer). DaveNet on the Latest Google Misdeed (apparently they are “unable” to get around the natural language equivalent of the “no sufficiently powerful system can be both complete and consistent” corollary to Godel's incompleteness theorem — and any search engineers that can't solve simple fundamental problems in computational linguistics just can't be trusted.
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Like Sébastien Paquet this paragraph from Andy Phelp's Got Game blog caught my attention:

I yearn for the day that blogs are incorporated into virtual worlds (and thinking of building some stuff). I don't just want a 'blog site' I want a 'personal world'. I could hang out there and leave messages for other travellers. I could trackback through other peoples worlds and signs, artifacts they have left there. The dream of personal ownership of a piece of cyberspace that is *mine*, whose purpose is not predestined along the design of some set of game rules

Oya! That's what we like to hear!

In the prototype we had this widget that GNE testers could include on their personal sites which would display their online status (in the game) and allow visitors to their site to send them messages in the game — the messages were “notes” which were game objects that people could pick and drop and pass back and forth.

A few dozen pixels to the right, you should see a button that says "GNE neighborhood browser" (as long as you are reading this something around April 2003). It shows the people in my social network in GNE who listed websites in their profiles: click the names to view the sites or the magnifying glass icon to switch the focus to someone else's neighborhood.

This is just a drop in the bucket and fairly trivial first steps, but it points to where we want to go.
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Fantastic presentation (3.2MB PDF) on interaction design history by Marc Rettig. I especially liked it because the last half paralleled my own path: moving from interface and interaction design for individual tasks to designing systems for groups of people to connect to each other. (Via Peterme.)
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Spacewar: original 1961 version, in an applet.

... Martin Graetz provided us with a printed version of the source. We typed in in again - it was about 40 pages long - and re-assembled it with a PDP-1 assembler written in PERL. The resulting binary runs on a PDP-1 emulator written as a Java applet ...

I win!
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Good posts from Liz Lawley's blog on gender and IT and Tom Coates' social software anxieties.
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If I really took advantage — I mean really went for it — with all the spam I get, I'd have my house so refinanced it hurt (aft mustwrd), and I'd be pulling in thousands a day while my penis grew to oversized novelty proportions (rock hard all the while and able to “shoot” a remarkable distance).

For the very few things that weren't free I'd be getting 90% off retail (8nCv|oorjh1frp), I'd secretly know what everyone thought about me and I'd know the TRUTH about them (sadfle strsng ggsfi cmtnvxfb), all the people who have crushes on me would be revealed, I'd look younger and feel healthier while legally copying full-length DVD movies (dq nburnlzff w j).

I'd lose weight in a way that was recommended by doctors (keybfard holdpr) and I would not fear my creditors while meeting hot singles in my area (GNQYVP). My collection of university degrees, stock tips, printer cartriges would be unrivalled, my privacy would be protected and I would not receive unwanted email (7198mWEJ6-255crYH7517N-21) though I would have several CDs filled with other peoples' email address AND unbeatable cash-making programs to take advantage. And none of this even gets into the huge amount of truly filthy porn that I would have access to (LEWVFMXEA).

Sounds pretty sweet right? It gets better:

From: King [bkht@advizemark15.com]
Subject: , Complimentary Macaroni and Cheese for you!


Enjoy a Whopper(R), Fries and a Pepsi(R)
And we'll pick up the tab!

Dear ,

We'd like to treat you and a friend to lunch at Burger King(R) on us.

[link removed]

Enjoy a Whopper(R), Fries and a soda… or maybe you'd rather have a Grilled Chicken Sandwich with a side of onion rings and a thick chocolate milkshake.

[link removed]

No matter what you choose - it's on us.

To get your Burger Bucks visit our site now by clicking the link below.

[link removed]

Sincerely,

Mark Allan
General Manager
The Savings Register

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CNN ‘Fighting in the Streets’ Infographic.
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A game I'd like to try.

(Hey, by the way, pretty soon we are going to start looking for people who have made good abstract and puzzle games in Flash in order to license them as games-within-the-game for GNE. Point me any pointers you may have.)
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Yay Meg!

(Also, somewhat related, meant to point this out a few weeks ago but forgot: AKMA and me on religions in GNE.)
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The Poetry of D.H. Rumsfeld. The first piece reminds me of Aristotle's deep insight in Book IV of the Metaphsyics.

To say of what is
that it is not,
or of what is not
that it is,
is false,
while to say of what is
that it is,
or of what is not
that it is not,
is true.

I used to have a T-shirt with that on the back. Dork.
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Welcome back, Peter.

I was also growing increasingly frustrated with the echo chamber effect of weblogs. A meme drifts out there, and then 38 different people post their take on that meme, and they all link to each other, and, as a reader, you bounce from post to post, the semantic feedback growing until it's deafening.

Quakermeme! Oh. Sorry.
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Saddam's Rule the Worst in World History, U.S. Says. I'm getting the distinct impression that Reuters has it out for the Bush administration, and is having fun inserting these little barbs.

The worst ruler in world history is Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, the Pentagon said on Monday.

And then below, their clarification for the morons:

... but historians generally agree that Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler and Soviet leader Josef Stalin were responsible for killing more people than any other dictators in world history.

Generally.
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