The game itself is very simple; you’re a blob of energy or somesuch, and you grow bigger by consuming blobs smaller than you. You can move around by expelling small pieces of your mass, this makes you smaller and more vulnerable to other blobs.

Sounds maybe too simple? Well! Not quite, the blobs have inertia, there is repulsing blobs and so on.

Also, the presentation is simply so wonderfully calm and beautiful. Set on an ambient music background, playing the game has some sort of tranquilling effect on me. It’s kind of like watching a lava lamp, and playing it too.

Check out the Osmos demo, and if you like it, buy it. It’s only $10. I bought it and I think it’s well worth the money.

PS. See item 63 for description why 239 is a nice number.

Check out a quite interesting/entertaining/sad article in the Rolling Stone magazine. It’s a story about corruption on so many levels.

It’s like gambling on the weather. If your bondholders are expecting you to pay an interest rate based on the average temperature in Alabama, you don’t do a rate swap with a bank that gives you back a rate pegged to the temperature in Nome, Alaska.

Not unless you’re a fucking moron. Or your banker is JP Morgan.

(Cheers to Global Guerrillas for the link.)

He’s planning to sail a catamaran created from recycled plastic junk to an area in the Pacific Ocean, where all kinds of plastic junk is circulating and destroying the wildlife.

We’ll sail through some of the world’s most ecologically threatened regions, including the Great Eastern Pacific Garbage Patch, where currents converge and marine debris — 90% plastic — gathers. As this debris consists of microscopic fragments, it’s getting straight into the food chain.

Here’s the 10/GUI video by C. Miller.

Why do I like it?

Basically, I agree with Mr. Miller’s points and motivations. I don’t like the mouse either so much, anymore. Mouse is fine and good just like a steam engine train is fine and good: it works, but technology has progressed far enough to provide better alternatives.

In 10/GUI, the Xeroxian UI paradigm of overlapping rectangular windows is radically transformed into application windows residing in a non-overlapping smooth continuum.

The clutter of a desktop is dramatically reduced. Reduced clutter means more efficiency, more time in the zone, and more stuff done.

To paraphrase Mr. Weiser when he talked about ubiquitous computing: technology will fade into the background, will not jump at your face, will not demand constant attention, but just lets you do your stuff. And meanwhile, everything is calm – and you’re staying in the zone.

Now, if only the 10/GUI could somehow combine the keyboard with the touch-part, or have an onscreen predictive keyboard and no physical keyboard at all…

Meanwhile, he installed a solar-powered mechanical pump, donated by well-wishers, above a borehole, adding water storage tanks and bringing the first potable water source to the entire region around his village.

When he ran into bugs, he had to debug and refactor the original design a little:

He upgraded his original windmill to 48-volts and anchored it in concrete after its wooden base was chewed away by termites.

It’s ingenious stuff, check it out.

The timing of the article is to create media noise for the upcoming (?) US-China trade war. Howeeeeeever, that’s not the most interesting part of that article. This is:

Mark Bregman, chief technology officer at security firm Symantec said he left his MacBook Pro behind in the US and took his MacBook Air whenever he flew to China. Bregman said he only ever used the Air in China and re-imaged the machine every time he returned home.

Interesting? Very much so: the CTO of one of the biggest providers of anti-virus/security products for Windows doesn’t even use Windows himself! He uses an Apple MacBook. That tells you something, doesn’t it?

The grand edifice of brand-name consumerism rests on the narcissistic fantasy that everyone else cares about what we buy. (It’s no accident that narcissistic teenagers are the most brand-obsessed consumers.) But who else even notices? Can you remember what your partner or your best friend was wearing the day before yesterday? Or what kind of watch your boss has?