I just gotta say... This is pretty intelligent design.

And it’s on a t-shirt!

Via Blag Hag.

The Guardian reports:

The Strasbourg court ruled it was unlawful for police to use the powers, under section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000, to stop and search people without needing any grounds for suspicion.

The widely-drawn ruling said that not only the use of the counter-terror powers, but also the way they were authorised, were “neither sufficiently circumscribed, nor subject to adequate legal safeguards against abuse”.

Vindicated!

I was delighted yesterday to discover that Ed Brayton, who used to host one of my all-time favourite political podcasts, Declaring Independence Radio, has recently started hosting a new show: Culture Wars Radio.

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This makes me pretty happy. Mike Ando has created a real, working Myst linking book.

Well, actually it’s a Myst-playing PC inside a hollowed-out book identical to the original Myst book, but it’s still gorgeous.

I am a lifelong fan of Cyan Worlds’ Myst games, especially the first two. They occupy a special, formative part of my mind.

Something else which I am excited about, but which I have yet to fully investigate is Mystcraft, a Minecraft mod which allows players to create linking books and write descriptive books and use them to travel between worlds. That seems to rank among the best ideas.

Oh this? Just a film of landing on Mars.

PS. If you haven’t seen NASA’s “Seven Minutes of Terror” video, it’s worth checking out. Those folks are crazy.

Conway’s Game of Life is a well-known cellular automaton in which, every tick, the state of each of the cells on a giant grid is determined only by the states of its immediate neighbours in the previous tick. Despite its extremely simple definition, it is famously Turing-complete, which is roughly to say that it can compute any computable function.

And so, of course, someone has written a Life emulator, in Life.

Perhaps it’s Life all the way down...

I just mentioned Conway’s Game of Life as an example of a Turing-complete system.

Though it’s called the “Game” of Life, and some people describe it as a zero-player game, it’s not really a game in the traditional sense of the word.

For an unexpected example of an unambiguous game which is also Turing-complete, check out Magic: The Gathering. It has been shown that a Universal Turing machine can be constructed inside Magic, and hence that it is Turing-complete.

I played a lot of Magic in high school, though it’s too expensive of a habit to keep up for long. If, like me, you remember Magic fondly, but don’t play it so much any more, might I recommend Mark Rosewater’s Drive to Work podcast?

A while ago, Vi Hart (who I’ve mentioned before here as an author of the cool interactive essay Parable of the Polygons) made this fantastic short film about mathematics, meaning and music.

It’s really something special.

I love people making weird instruments out of weird things. Here’s an organ made out of a matrix of mechanical floppy drives.

You can read more about it on Ars Technica.

Vi Hart (who you may recall, I think is amazing) originally became known (to me) by her “doodling in math class” series of short films.

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Looking through a turn-of-the-century almanac of graphic design, I came across this absolute gem:

Just look at this. A cutting edge communications device from an alternative 1950. But designed and fabricated by a person on their workbench, like the raddest cyberpunk street tech.

The creator, Justine Haupt, actually sells them in kit form. But watching her guided build instruction video makes me think it’s a little beyond my skill level with a soldering iron.

Actually, this (hour long!) build video is really worth watching. Not only does it detail the creator’s design philosophy, she’s also really good at explaining the history of her design and the reasons behind many decisions.