Anachronistic Mom Blog

Have you heard of foldit, where you play games to help science?

Protein folding?  Playing games to help with science?  Yes, Virginia, we really ARE in 2008.  This is cool.  See you on the playing field!

want to see some cool images? Check out Modis

Here are Nasa's "best pictures" from recently, taken by the Modis Rapid Recovery system.  Modis is a satellite that might be right above you, right now. Check it out.  Here's their Satellite Overpass Predictor.  It really IS 2007!

Poetry in spreadsheets - be still my OCD symptoms

Masago and friends have a spreadsheet called "Rengay through the seasons."

Amazing.

As a big poetry fan and someone who has written quite a bit in her life, I can appreciate wanting to track things, but seriously, just reading this blog is enough to make me want to try a nice antidepressant.  Yikes.

fun economics talk (believe it or not)

So I found this immensely impressive website (the topic of which makes my eyes roll back in my head) called 'The big picture: macroperspective on the capital markets, economy geopolitics, technology and digital media."  Whew.  Highly intimidating.  Until I got to the part titled "today's infoporn" and realized "Hey!  This guy's an info geek too!  But his includes CHARTS!!!!  (ooooooooh)

The infoporn is great fun, BTW.

Geekdad and the star trek indoctrination of children

I love Geekdad.  I don't read him enough, but his brain works well, and he's always amusing.  What more can you ask?

Today he was talking about trying to teach his kid why the 60's star trek episodes were good.  They WERE good - sort of.  Well written.  Respected science fiction writers and thinkers put those episodes together.  Yeah yeah.  That is, if you can avoid the rampant sexist crap -- the alternate crotch shots (aka short dresses) and T and A action from women with teased up blonde hair, you know?

My husband, he of the "collect every piece of media that you can find," has every damn star trek episode ever made. And not only that, but he's got them in TAPES, which means that they take up about two and a half bookshelves!  The other day I was trying to find one to show to my seven year old -- something that wouldn't terrorize him, either from a science fiction/zombies/robots/aliens perspective OR from a "strange older lady with teased blonde hair will hump your leg if things get rough"  (seriously, some of the "romance" on that show was icky).  Well, I couldn't find "trouble with tribbles" or whatever it's called.

Note: No, I am not a trekkie.  I do not (gasp!) have the names of the episodes memorized. 

Perhaps I can get my husband to recommend a different episode, because I really think that star trek has potential..

The Digital Cuttlefish: I'm in love

Today I got pointed to this lovely reading of Sally Kern poetry  by someone called "The Digital Cuttlefish.

The Digital Cuttlefish?  Oh boy.  I googled him.

AWESOME!

Check out "I thought I saw an atheist coming down the street." 

I love this guy's mind - and his comics too

Have you seen the XKCD website?  Here's one of his comics.

Check out his blog post describing his new ball pit in the living room.  Too bad that the balls don't come in Etruscan tones or I'd put one in my living room as well.  But primary colors are such a downer, man.

New Gift for your Mom: A Genome Kit!

I am a WASP.  (White Anglo Saxon Protestant.)  At times I have argued in favor of being called a WASA (sub "agnostic" for the Protestant), but the lineage remains the same:  I am descended from hordes of light-skinned, sun-challenged people, many of whom probably have depressive tendencies, lack a predisposition to "let loose" in public, and like to lounge around the sidelines socially, cracking jokes and quaffing alcoholic beverages.  The wildest bunch is the Norwegian relatives, although if you've ever been privy to any of the Lutheran joke websites, you'll just roll your eyes at that one.

I tell you this because, while I am tempted to generalize and say that MANY mothers in their fifties like to work on the family tree and genealogy-type stuff, my husband has admonished me clearly about this. "In my (Jewish) family," he said, we don't HAVE a family tree.  They were all killed.

Stops me cold, every time.

But a part of me still has a sneaking theory that family-tree research is a type of late-life nesting activity in older women.  Perhaps from the hind brain?  Something uncontrollable, like small animals digging nests in newspaper, their feet flying as they dig?  Hard to say.  And of course don't even get me started on how the bizarre scrapbooking phenomenon (Amazing video - excuse the ad) might be subliminally tied into the hampster-type family nesting urges.

Today, though, I got an earth-shaking email.  My husband forwarded me the website of 23andme.  Have you heard of them?  It's what vulcan chess is to checkers, my friend.  It's ... your own personal genome research service! Seriously, this is perfect for the extremely self-interested, overly-indulged, with $1K to spare on gifts for themselves person in what is politely called the "family tree" stage in life.  Yes, folks, I think that 23andme has developed (repeat after me) THE PERFECT BOOMER GIFT.

I have long nursed the opinion that the boomers personify narcissism. I mean, seriously.  Their Generation ... defined the new world order! Or something like that.  It certainly defined a new era in the perception of self as center of the universe.  And how nice to know that the boomers need never let their clutching hands relax from their life focus: themselves.

Let us imagine some day in the future:

A querulous old-lady boomer, sitting at her computer, checks in with her "save the whales investment community" website.  Afterwards, she decides to go onto her latest Web 2.0 site and meet new friends.  She clicks on "GenomeFriend.com" and checks to see with whom she has the most matches. Sure enough, it's "Guy545." From yesterday, she already knows that she and Guy545 share 72 SNP's (single nucleotide polymorphisms, pronounced "snips").  Some of them are kind of ... weird, like the one for wet earwax, and the ability to taste bitter flavors, but others are fascinating, like good verbal memory, tendency to gain weight when eating fatty foods, and... oops, I'm running out of examples from the New York Times article by  Amy Harmon.

After discussing themselves for a while, old-lady boomer logs off.  She wanders in and plays virtual shuffleboard on her 3rd-generation Wii for a while, and then settles down to her favorite toy.

Just kidding.

The point is, though, that we're opening the doors onto entire new obsessive landscapes with this product.  For some people, the self has always been more fascinating than just about anything else.  What do you bet we start hear about Genomefans Anonymous meetings in a few years?  Buckle up.

Published originally on the Silicon Valley Mom's Blog

How on earth did I ever miss this site?

Check it out:  Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories.  What's not to like?

Want a really cool science project for your kid?  I love this site!

It solves the age-old question of:  How to hack LEDs into LEGO minifigures for Halloween!

And of course, for the aesthetes among you, hereeee's the  Cylon Jack-O-Lantern.

Seriously, this is a most excellent site. All sorts of fun that you can have with technology at at first glance none of them seem in involve blowing things up OR large amounts of dry ice.   And their candyfab piece had me bowing to them.

Where are the building simulation games for kids?

I vaguely remember several years ago spending a lot of time looking for a computer game that would let my son build, say, something with gears, and then start it going, so that he could understand it and visualize it on the computer.  Unfortunately, my memory has apparently spackled over whether or not I actually found such a game.

However, I found the following excerpt (my apologies to the original poster; it is a clipping) from my email box, and thought that especially the Kinko's worker video game sounded wonderful. Who needs a trip to France?  Experience socialistic ennui right here at home, with your handy keyboard!  Check it out:

http://www.aforcemorepowerful.org/game/

nonviolent strategy game

A unique collaboration of experts on nonviolent conflict and veteran game designers has been developing AFMP for the last three years. The ICNC encourages the use of civilian-based, non-military strategies to establish and defend democracy and human rights worldwide. York Zimmerman Inc. is an independent film and video production company located in

Washington

,

D.C.

that produces documentaries about people and ideas that change the world. BreakAway Games Ltd. is a leading developer of computer games with particular expertise in strategy games and historical simulations.

Veterans of recent nonviolent campaigns assisted in the development of the game, including Ivan Marovic of Otpor, the Serbian resistance movement which played a critical role in ousting Slobodan Milosevic. Political scientists, sociologists, and economists also provided advice.

Article on social change video games

http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1535474/20060629/index.jhtml?headlines=true

 

EXCERPTS

Pax Warrior" is a Canadian project that lets users try to prevent the 1990s genocide in

Rwanda

. Its developers say it already has 250,000 users.

 

Had he played "Peacemaker," a strategy game that tasks players with settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by steering the leadership of either side? Had he tried "Earthquake in Zipland," a cartoonish game that stars a moose trying to assemble a giant zipper to merge the separate islands upon which his parents are drifting apart, an extended metaphor about divorce?

 

Had Koster played the prototype of "The Organizing Game," which is designed to teach grassroots activists basic skills like recognizing which doors in the neighborhood are the good ones to knock on? Had he tried "Homelessness: It's No Game," a simple game that challenges players to keep their homeless character alive and out of trouble for 24 hours of video game time? Did he harbor no enthusiasm for Ian Bogost's anti-Kinko's game, "Disaffected" (see "Game Lets Players Step Into Toner-Stained Shoes Of Kinko's Workers")?

And had Koster not been encouraged by the announcements earlier Tuesday, when mtvU General Manager Stephen Friedman announced his network will issue 10 $25,000 grants to college students making games for change? MtvU had sponsored the creation of the Sudan awareness game "Darfur Is Dying" and, Friedman announced, will launch a student-made game called "Squeezed" that depicts the lives of immigrant farm workers — a "first-person picker" — on mtvU.com in September.

Friedman's emphasis on student-created games sat well with Games for Change conference founder Suzanne Seggerman, who said the MacArthur Foundation recently issued a $1.2 million grant for the creation of game-making tools designed for students. Such moves, she said, squarely position young people as the future of advocacy-driven games. Major game companies have largely ignored social-change games.