Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Lots O' Links

First off, a Puzzle Quest link. If you live outside the U.S./Europe and want to order Puzzle Quest, you can order it from CD WOW here. Thanks to Julian Bell for letting me know.

DQ reader Neil Sorens has an excellent think-piece over at Gamasutra titled "Rethinking the MMO," and you can read it here.

Kevin Wozniak sent me a link to a story about the Wii craze sweeping the world of senior citizens. Read about it here.

Nintendo would be well-rewarded if they sent free Wiis to assisted-living facilities--they would get an exponential amount of publicity and exposure.

From Sirius, a link to a visual representation of the relationship between scientific paradigms. It's in the TextArc style, since it was created by W. Bradford Paley. It's an amazing image, and if you're curious about W. Bradford Paley, who must be one of the most interesting people on the planet, his website is here.

If you've never checked out TextArc, by the way, it's mind-blowing.

From Jeremy Fischer, a link to a story at the Washington Post about a team of mathematicians who have successfully mapped the "Lie group E8." What is it?
"To say what precisely it is is something even many mathematicians can't understand," said Jeffrey Adams, the project's leader and a math professor at the University of Maryland.

The solution, according to the article, involved sixty times as much data as the Human Genome project. Maybe that's because the Lie group E8 has two-hundred and forty-eight dimensions.

Read all about it here.

And here's the daily amazing fossil discovery:
The fossil of an ancient amphibious reptile with a crocodile's body and a fish's tail has been unearthed in Oregon. Scientists believe the creature's remains were transported by geologic processes nearly 5,000 miles away from where it originally died more than 100 million years ago.

See it here.

Wait, here's one more:
An underground den of dinosaurs now reveals the first evidence that at least one species of “terrible lizards” could burrow.

...Paleontologists first caught hints of the new dinosaur in 2004 in fragments of bone on a hillside off the shoulder of the Rocky Mountains in southwestern Montana. In 2005, they excavated the scattered bones of what appears to be a family consisting of an adult and two juveniles. They apparently dwelled in a den burrowed into mud and clay that later became filled with sand.

The full article is here.

Here's another article as a follow-up to what I linked to last week concerning the use of fossilized mites to track the course of civilizations. Totally fascinating, and it's here.

Site Meter