Part of what’s made Ark: Survival Evolved such a big hit is the blend of Stone Age tropes and resource gathering. Players feel like they’re surviving by their wits. Would the same mechanics feel as good on the moon? A new mod aims to give players the chance.
This is a historic day. Something happened this morning that will not happen again for a long, long time.
The last few weeks, my colleagues at work have been subjected to an almost nonstop barrage of images and facts from the New Horizons probe, courtesy of yours truly. Someone asked why I was so excited about this. It’s just a space probe, right? And Pluto’s not even a planet anymore, just a dwarf planet, right?
Because this is history being made. What’s happening today, July 14, 2015, will (very likely) not happen again while anyone alive right now is still around.
Pluto, yo.
This is the very last time (for a long time) the human race is exploring a large, unexplored body in our solar system.
Some of us are old enough to remember how amazing the days, weeks, and months were following the Voyagers 1 and 2 flybys of the four giant planets and their moons. So many new worlds! So much to learn! Most of us had to wait for our issues of Space or National Geographic to roll in months later to get the full story and see all the pictures for the first time.
Now, anything from New Horizons will be shared within seconds across the entire world. We’ll see pictures on Internet-enabled devices that didn’t exist when New Horizons launched, and post them on social networks that didn’t exist when New Horizons chugged by Jupiter.
But that’s not what’s truly historic about today’s flyby. With DAWN’s earlier orbit and exploration of Ceres, all of the large, explorable objects (that we know about) in our solar system have been explored. There are a handful more: Makemake, Eris, Haumea, and Sedna. The likelihood that any of these dwarf planets will be explored with a close flyby like the inner planets, their moons, or Pluto is almost nil—at least in our lifetimes.
For those of us raised on a diet of new information from Voyagers, Galileo, and Cassini, this is the capstone on forty years of exploration and learning about our solar system. For my daughter, who was born scant months after the Sojourner lander first started exploring the Martian surface, this will be the only time she’ll experience a burst of new information like this in person.
But her generation will be treated to a different kind of exploration. I sincerely hope that she’ll be alive when human beings first set foot on Mars. Maybe she’ll even follow in their bootsteps one day.
In the next twenty-four hours, we’re going to learn about a whole new world. What is its atmosphere like? What does the surface look like? Are there large mountains? Active volcanoes that reshape the terrain? Giant canyons? Liquids that carve riverbeds or lakes? If so, what are they made of? What conclusions can we draw about the Kuiper belt and the formation of the solar system from studying Pluto and Charon? How abundant is water ice that far out? Or materials we can someday use to build or fuel a generation ship that can take our species to a new home in a new star system altogether?
That, my friends, is why I’m excited about today.
Note: the thesis, that today is historic because it’s the last time we get to experience a flyby like this, is not mine but I cannot find a source to cite. I expanded upon it as it encapsulates my feelings perfectly.
Popular Seattle chef, restaurateur, and serial entrepreneur Tom Douglas serves up tips on getting a business up, running, and thriving quickly. These bite-sized pieces of advice have worked well for Douglas over the course of his long and successful career.
The post Iron Chef America winner Tom Douglas’s no-nonsense tips on running a business appeared first on Microsoft for Work.
Heroes. Champions. The oft-unseen glue that keeps our companies running. Meet the IT professional.
The post The IT pro: master of the technology universe appeared first on Microsoft for Work.
Kerbal Space Program, the space flight sim about sending millions of Kerbal astronauts to an early grave/advancing the space-faring dreams of the Kerbal nation, is now offering a wave of merchandise based on the game - a site which lets you upload your wildest Kerbal creations and turn them into 3D-printed models.
I'm going to keep this short.
Several months ago, Gary Winnick and I were sitting around talking about Maniac Mansion, old-school point & click adventures, how much fun we had making them and how amazing it was to be at Lucasfilm Games during that era. We chatted about the charm, simplicity and innocence of the classic graphic adventure games.
We had to call them "Graphic Adventures" because text adventures were still extremely popular. It was a time of innovation and taking risks.
"Wouldn't it be fun to make one of those again?", Gary said.
"Yeah", I replied as a small tear forming in the corner of my eye*.
A few seconds later I said "Let's do a Kickstarter!".
After a long pause, Gary said "OK".
We immediately started building the world and the story, layering in the backbone puzzles and forming characters around them. From the beginning, we knew we wanted to make something that was a satire of Twin Peaks, X-Files and True Detective. It was ripe with flavor and plenty of things to poke fun at.
So we're doing an Kickstarter for an all new classic point & click adventure game called "Thimbleweed Park". It will be like opening a dusty old desk drawer and finding an undiscovered Lucasfilm graphic adventure game you’ve never played before. Good times for all.
Please join us on Kickstarter!
* The small tear in Ron's eye was added by the author for dramatic effect. No tear actually formed.
Anyone who believes that all laws should always be obeyed would have made a fine slave catcher.
—John J. Miller
We had a shooting up here in Canada the other day. Like most things Canadian it was a modest, self-effacing affair, nothing that even a couple of losers from Columbine would write home about: a single death, a geriatric hero. A Prime Minister cowering in the closet, scribbling back-of-the-napkin notes on how best to exploit this unexpected opportunity.
He didn’t have to think very hard. Harper’s always seemed almost pathetically eager to turn Canada into a wannabe iteration of the US— think the dweeby eight-year-old, desperate to emulate his idolized older brother— and the Patriot Act has, I suspect, always been his Beacon on the Hill (or his Castle Anthrax grail-shaped beacon, depending on your cultural referents). So our beloved leader is once again trying to resurrect all those measures he couldn’t quite sneak into C-52, or C-10, or C-30— all those measures that no sane citizen would ever oppose, unless of course we chose to “stand with the child pornographers“. You know the list: lowered evidentiary standards. Increased powers of police surveillance. Increased powers of detention and “preventative arrest”. Increased data sharing with the US.
Basically all that stuff they were doing anyway with impunity, only now more of it will be legal.
But here’s an interesting proposition: new legislation making it illegal to “condone terrorist acts online“. The money shot from Ivison’s story:
There is frustration in government that the authorities can’t detain or arrest people who express sympathy for atrocities committed overseas … Sources suggest the government is likely to bring in new hate speech legislation that would make it illegal to claim terrorist acts are justified online.
Read that again, just to make sure you’ve got it. We’re not talking about real hate speech here. We’re not talking about advocating genocide, or gay-bashing, or threatening real violence of any type. We’re talking about looking at people the government doesn’t like and saying You know, maybe those people have got a point. We’re talking about criminalizing statements like— oh, for example, “Omar Kadhr was a kid on a battlefield, under attack by the US Military: why wouldn’t he fight back?”
And don’t even get me started on what they’d do with this.
It would be bad enough if it stopped there. I don’t think it will. Look what happened in the US, once the word “terrorism” acquired its magical power to short-circuit higher brain functions and call down showers of government cash at the invocation of its name. It took about thirty seconds for anything any right-wing nutbar didn’t like to be reclassified as a terrorist act. Here, for example, is a piece of US legislation that would literally define taking pictures of animal abuse as an act of terrorism.
Stolen from Dennis Meneses, I think…
Call it “Terrorist Creep”.
Harper has always taken his lead from his idols to the south— perhaps that’s why, just a couple of weeks ago, a bunch of bird-watchers got threatened with a tax audit after writing a concerned letter on the plight of honeybees affected by government-approved pesticides. (Nor is this an isolated incident. Harper’s ideological antipathy to science is notorious around the globe. I’ve heard first-hand accounts of government biologists being reprimanded for using the term “tar sands” instead of “ethical oil” in casual conversation, of field biologists being told there’s no need to monitor wildlife populations this year because they already did that last year. Just last week the Union of Concerned Scientists— one of the few US organizations Harper does not seem eager to emulate— sent our esteemed PM an open letter signed by 800+ scientific professionals, protesting the routine muzzling of Canadian scientists by their own government.)
If it’s an act of terrorism to document instances of industrial animal abuse, what about documenting governmentally-induced disasters from the collapse of Atlantic cod populations to the toxic catastrophe spreading across northern Alberta? What about whistleblowing the wholesale spying on Canadian citizens? What about writing a polite letter of concern about colony collapse disorder?
What about just publicly sympathizing with the folks who are doing those things?
So far, it’s legal to say “Yay Edward Snowden” when his revelations uncover abuses by the Canadian government. But at least one MP quoted in Ivison’s story seem to think we need “new offenses” on the books.
A segment of society—the largest segment, in all likelihood — believes that we all have a duty to obey The Law, whether we agree with it or not. Society, they say, isn’t some kind of Red Lobster buffet where you get to pick and choose what statutes to obey. If everyone availed themselves of the freedom to decide right and wrong for themselves we’d have— why, we’d have Anarchy! (The argument generally ends there; nobody feels especially compelled to spell out what exactly would be wrong with anarchy, presumably because its consequences are so self-evidently horrific. Although it seemed to work well enough on Annares.)
But there’s a down side. If they pass a law saying you can’t criticize the government, you gotta shut up and like it. If the law says that flinching while being attacked by the police is “resisting”— or even “assault”— there’s not much you can do about it. Historically there are so many laws allowing the government into your bedroom— telling you what kind of sex you’re allowed to have, or which way you have to swing if you want The Law to regard you as Human— that we’ve had to store them out in the garage. (Here in Canada, you’re SOL if you get pleasure out of pain; a lot of BDSM between consenting adults is illegal because you’re not allowed to consent to “assault” whether it gets you off or not.)
This little statute over in the corner sends you to jail for documenting cases of animal abuse. That big five-hundred-kilo behemoth on the coffee table says the gummint can do whatever it likes to whoever it brands a “terrorist”, and that one with the FISA tattoo on its butt says Big Telecom isn’t liable if they help the gummint do that. And if the law presumes guilt unless you can prove innocence— well, that’s just the Canadian Tax Code.
We’ve already seen laws down south, lurking in the shadows, that define you as a terrorist if your ethics run sufficiently counter to Big Agro. Now, up here, we’re hearing whispers behind closed doors that maybe we should criminalize the mere suggestion that “terrorists”— whoever they are this week1— might have a point. And most folks will shrug and say Yeah, it sucks, but you know. Gotta obey the Law.
Personally, though? If someone were to take another crack at Parliament— get into the House of Commons with a loaded Tavor, mow down everyone on the blue side of the aisle— I might just say, let’s not be hasty.
Maybe they’d have a point.
I know many people who don't like Gamergate who are tired of it. They're not alone. I was talking to a Gamergater last week who seemed tired: tired of all the Tweeting, tired of all the arguing. I watched a video of a Gamergater who seemed downright exhausted. And then another: he seemed tired, too.
Europe's Rosetta spacecraft was orbiting only 16 miles away from Churyumov-Gerasimenko when it captured this mosaic of images showing jet activity at the neck of the comet. These jets are the product of ice sublimating and gases escaping from the comet's nucleus through cracks and pores on the surface.
Yes, it's happening. No more vague tweets about a possible return; co-creators David Lynch and Mark Frost have come together with Showtime to announce via video that TWIN PEAKS IS BACK!!!!! UPDATE.
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I mentioned in a recent post the concept of the “family-centered child”. The opposite concept is that of the “child-centered family”. I thought I would revisit this to explain a bit more about what we as a family understand by these concepts, and how we are implementing our choice. We came across this idea from a wise friend with his own great family.
The home of a child-centered family is one where the children become the centre of attention, and remains so beyond the baby years. In this family the family structures itself unconsciously around the needs and schedules of the child, to try and not inconvenience the child. The parents/family adapt themselves to ensure that the child is prioritized as much as possible and suffers OTHER inconveniences to do so.
The home of a family-centered child is one where the child is welcomed into a family that already exists (a husband and a wife ARE a family already!) and already has an established identity, values and priorities. The child takes up their place as a new member of the family and joins the family in following its values, and its routines and priorities, in spite of any inconvenience to the child in doing so! While obviously some adaptations are made for the child, the priority is the family, its values, and the best outcome for ALL members of the clan, not just the child concerned.
We as a family believe implicitly that the only wise and sustainable choice for parents, and the most likely system to create well rounded and socially mature individuals, is the family-centered child model. It is the family “DNA” we have chosen to learn, and to try to impart to our children and through them to their future children (our grandkids… yikes!).
To be fair, all families are a blend of the two, and not completely one or the other. Also, it’s very important to clarify there is no desire to paint the child-centered family as not having the child’s best interests at heart.
At the end of the day, this is all about what we believe is a wise allocation of resources and time for us as parents, and a vision of the best possible “normal” we want to create for a child. It’s personal for everyone, and I respect that.
♦◊♦
In the home of a family-centered child, the idea is that the BEST structure for a child is one that is sustainable and consistent, and gives them a pre-ordained place, and a context in the world. This context is the family, which they join as the newest member. And they have a place in that loving family appropriate to their age and their needs.
They are under the loving and caring leadership and stewardship of their parents, who deliberately prioritize for the whole family based on their vision of the best use of time and resources for the whole family. The family is a team, with many players. All contribute to each other’s world, and all receive the benefits of this.
The priorities are determined largely by the parents, with the following in mind, as far as we can see:
What does all of this look like in reality?
We are still busy learning and building it for ourselves, so we are certainly no experts and we probably have more examples of how it should NOT look, than vice versa 
.
♦◊♦
Being such a work in progress, and still so very early in the parenting stages, I would prefer to draw on examples of what I have seen from other marriages and families (Obviously these are not exclusive only to “family-centered child” models but they are consistent at least in the families I am thinking of)
What are your thoughts on this? I would love to hear from you.
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This article originally appeared on Notes From The Roadside.
Photo credit: Parker Knight/flickr
The post The “Family-Centred Child” Model appeared first on The Good Men Project.
This video begins with some bored Australian kids. It ends about as John Woo as you can get without doves flying out of something.
The great Chubby Checker once recorded a song to be used for a Dig-Dug commercial, only it wasn't, and the song hasn't been publicly heard (or heard of) until this week. History is so awesome.
Map of Titan, the largest moon of Saturn
The global VIMS map of Titan’s surface displayed here as a false-color composite using the VIMS channels at 4.8–5.2 μm as red, at 2 μm as green, and 1.27 μm as blue including Titan’s recent nomenclature (from Stephan et al., 2009). The map is displayed in a simple cylindrical projection centered at 0°N and 180°W.
Heck, it practically is Sweden. At a scale of 1:20-million, the Sweden Solar System (SSS) spans nearly the entire length of that country. Our parent star is represented by the Ericsson Globe in Stockholm (below the fold), the largest hemispherical building in the world.
Ittyblox has created over a dozen buildings that can be be 3d-printed to create your own miniature skylines based on New York (above), Chicago, and Miami:
Wasteland 2 will be coming out on September 19, according a tweet from creator/designer Brian Fargo. You can read an interview with Fargo right here.
"In a nutshell, Hard West is a turn-based squad tactical with adventurous world exploration. Think X-Com combat with Heroes of Might and Magic world map". Well hello there perfect game description.
It's been a long, slow trek for Rosetta to catch up to Comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko, but, more than 10 years after it was launched, it will finally meet up with its intended target within the next 16 hours — and you can watch it as it does.
The Maze of Games plunges you into a tale of Victorian-era siblings lost in a strange, fantastical maze filled with more than 50 linked puzzles, goaded by the ghastly Gatekeeper. Author and puzzlemaker Mike Selinker gave us a peek into the maze, and shared a clip of Wil Wheaton's audioboook narration.
This brand new Interstellar takes us all a little bit further into the vast universe that director Christopher Nolan is ready to explore. Watch as Anne Hathaway and Matthew McConaughey blast off into beautiful space.
A map by Stanford University shows how long it would have taken to travel around the Roman empire and how much the trips would have cost, on average and according to simulations based on historical evidence
[Photo: Bottle & Bull/Facebook]
Gastropub Bottle & Bull is opening in Kirkland this fall. The concept from the owners of Marcy's Bar & Lounge in Walla Walla is centered on an eclectic mix of Cuban, Spanish, Italian, and North African food.
Former Miller's Guild sous chef Stephen Paulson is developing a farm-to-table menu that, per the restaurant, will allow diners to "experience the travels of Ernest Hemingway through craft cocktails and the culinary flavors of Havana, Paris, Florence and Pamplona." Bastille and Stoneburner bartender Silas Manlove is creating the drink list.
Paulson tells Eater he's hoping to open the restaurant on his birthday, September 17. "That's not an official opening date, just a target," Paulson says. Stay tuned for more details on Bottle & Bull's space and menu.
· Bottle & Bull [Facebook]
· All Coming Attractions [-ESEA-]
Hey, writers…
The July/August issue of F&SF turned out well enough that publisher Gordon Van Gelder has asked me to guest edit the fiction again.
Next guest issue: March/April 2015
Reading period: August 1-15, 2014
Online submissions form: http://submissions.ccfinlay.com/fsf/
That’s the nitty-gritty. Here are the details…
All stories for this issue must be submitted through the Moksha online submission system, located at http://submissions.ccfinlay.com/fsf/. Please do not email your submissions. If you want to submit hard copies of your submission, please follow the regular submission guidelines and they’ll be considered for other issues.
The submissions form will ask for your name, email address, cover letter, story title, and story. Cover letters aren’t required, and I usually don’t read them until after I read the story. But I like them! So if you do include one, mention your publishing history (if any) and any other relevant information like related expertise. For example, if you write a hard science fiction story about space travel, and you’re an scientist/astronaut who has actually been on the International Space Station, that would be good to know.
After you submit your story, you’ll get a tracking number and an automated email confirmation. The tracking number will allow you to check on the status of your submission through the website.
F&SF has no formula for fiction and there is no special theme for this issue. I am looking for stories that will appeal to science fiction and fantasy readers. You know what kind I’m talking about. The SF element may be slight, but it should be present. I prefer character-oriented stories. F&SF receives a lot of fantasy fiction, but never enough science fiction or humor.
For this submissions period, I will consider fiction up to 10,000 words in length. Stories should be attached as .doc or .rtf file. For a good article on standard manuscript preparation, see: www.sfwa.org/2008/11/manuscript-preparation/.
Payment is 7-12 cents per word on acceptance. F&SF buys first North American and foreign serial rights and an option on anthology rights. All other rights are retained by the author.
Although Gordon and I are different editors, F&SF is still the same magazine. So if either Gordon or I previously rejected a story, try sending me something new this time.
Let me know if you have any questions.
I’m looking forward to reading your stories!
Microbiologists have learned that certain strains of bacteria are capable of using energy in its purest form by eating and breathing electrons. It's a discovery that demonstrates an entirely new mode of life on Earth — and possibly beyond.
JmicalIf they kill her off for getting too close to Constantine... then they will have succeeded.
Judging from the extended featurettes we've seen so far, the pilot for NBC's Constantine focuses on John Constantine's meeting with the ordinary woman Liv, who gets caught up in demonic business and needs to team up with Constantine to survive. But don't get too attached to Liv.
We're in love with Babs Tarr's new design for Batgirl , and so are many artists who have already taken to the Internet to celebrate Barbara Gordon's new look. Check out just a few of the Batgirl fan illustrations featuring her new costume.
The Heartland Institute, a prominent, Chicago-based organization opposing climate science, has teamed up with the creationist Discovery Institute to launch a smear campaign against a group promoting the nationwide adoption of updated science education guidelines.
