Map: Welcome to the Blogosphere

From Discover Magazine: :The blogosphere is the most explosive social network you’ll never see. Recent studies suggest that nearly 60 million blogs exist online, and about 175,000 more crop up daily (that’s about 2 every second). Even though the vast majority of blogs are either abandoned or isolated, many bloggers like to link to other …

Aarde blog live on Earth Day

Creating a ”’brand new country”’ is a startling endeavour. And today is Earth Day. An excellent day to go public with my passion. I’m giving it my whole heart, soul, and mind. Previously code-named [http://wiki.aardrock.com/LandONE LandONE], I’ve renamed it to ”’Aarde”’. I’ve started the [http://aardsource.org/ Aarde blog]—domainnames aarde.org and aarde.net are already taken, so I’ve …

The Math of Text Readability

The Math of Text Readability: “An anonymous reader writes ‘Wired magazine has an article that explains The Law of Optical Volumes, a formula for spacing the letters on a printed page that results in maximum readability. Wired’s new logo (did anyone notice?) obeys the law. Unfortunately, Web fonts don’t allow custom kerning pairs, so you …

Second Life To Open Source Server Code

Slashdot writes: Second Life To Open Source Server Code. This is an ”’excellent step! And ”’resonating with my [http://wiki.aardrock.com/LandONE LandONE]”’ perspective: :LandONE also results in a flurry of new and serious multi-user games, to be played on-line, on game consoles, mobile phones and media centers. These games leverage the successes of games like The Sims, …

Apple to design for diabetics

Amy Tenderich writes about iPod design for diabetes care: :Why, oh why, do consumers everywhere get the most “insanely great” little MP3 player, while we whose lives depend on medical devices get the clunky stuff of yesteryear? ”’Excellent idea Amy!”’ Sure hope that Steve bites. And while at it, diabetes software can use an upgrade …

Luis von Ahn—Smart Games—Smart Software

Article in Automatiseringgids on [http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~biglou/ Luis von Ahn]’s [http://www.espgame.org/ ESP Game]—a.k.a. the [http://images.google.com/imagelabeler/ Google Image Labeler]—to smart tag images by human swarms. Ahn also created the spam-avoiding [http://www.captcha.net/news/ai.html Captcha]. Thank you very much Luis!