Posts by matt

Every hour of every day for a year, this man filmed himself punching a time card. (AskMe.)

Aeons ago, Clive Thompson wrote up this humdinger about the economies of virtual worlds — MMORPGs and the like. Because people have begun assigning real-world monetary value to in-game items, the article explained, it’s possible to study these games as if they were real economies.

So we can, for example, calculate the Gross National Product of Everquest, as Thompson’s economist Edward Castronova decides to do — it’s $2,266 U.S. per capita. (“It was the 77th-richest country in the world,” Thompson writes. “And it didn’t even exist.”)

And of course, we can actually profit from our in-game activities, Thompson reports, enough to pull in a six-figure salary or even power a whole company, with 100 full-time staff members.

The 6,200-word article is somehow chock full of fascinating little revelations. My favorite moment is when Thompson points out that Everquest began as a perfect meritocracy, “the world’s first truly egalitarian polity,” making it the economist’s ideal social laboratory. That realization leads to this:

Read more…

Via MetaFilter, check out the cornucopia of Flashtasticness that is The Greatest Story Never Told digital storytelling contest. Including such greats as Craziest and Help.

Is The New York Times celebrating the Presidents Day weekend with touchy-feely stories about Presidents and their buddies?

Wondering where I’ve been for the past two weeks? (Feel free to not answer that.) I haven’t abandoned Snarkmarket; just the opposite, in fact — I’ve been hard at work, in consultation with Robin, on a new design for the site.

We’ve tried to make a page that looks distinct, but respects its roots. We’ve been brainstorming ways to bring more attention to the ever-excellent discussion, so you’ll see some experiments in that direction in the new design. We wanted to separate some of our longer, more thoughtful discursions from our quicker pass-alongs, so we’ve given those shorter items their own look.

And there isn’t enough paisley on the Web.

But before we make the design official, we want to take some time with it, use it for a while and see what we like and don’t like, and most of all, solicit your feedback on what works and what needs work in the new layout.

We have two very similar versions of the page available for testing. When you first see the page, it will look totally janky. Click on one of the two links at the bottom of the black sidebar at right — either “change to ornate layout” or “change to simple layout” — and it will pull in one of two stylesheets.

We would love it if people would try out each one for a few days and give us their thoughts. If you bookmark the redesigned page, it should store a cookie remembering which stylesheet you viewed last time, so you don’t always have to pick one.

With your help, we’ll solidify a final layout over the next couple weeks, change over the individual pages, and take over the world continue to dish out those actually-not-that-snarky ditherings we’ve been dishing for a year and change.

Thanks, sports fans.

A more rational mind than mine would begin fearing the power of Google.

The Wikipedia Unusual Articles page is clearly the best thing ever. Look! It’s your friend and mine, Jennifer 8. Lee! Project Mohole! OS Tan!

Because I periodically like to find myself a host of excellent stuff to read in my spare time, here’s something you microscope junkies might enjoy. What follows are Web reprints of 18 of the 23 stories published in The Best American Science Writing 2004. Tell me if there are any good ones.

• Jennifer Kahn – Stripped for Parts
• John Updike – Mars is as Bright as Venus
• Oliver Morton – Strange Nuggets (well, not exactly, but close enough)
• Keay Davidson – Mapping of Cosmos Backs Big Bang Theory
• Neil DeGrasse Tyson – Gravity in Reverse
• Dennis Overbye – One Cosmic Question, Too Many Answers
• Sherwin B. Nuland – How to Grow Old
• Ian Parker – Reading Minds
• Tom Siegfried – The Science of Strategy
• Kaja Perina – Cracking the Harvard X-Files
• Tom Bissell – A Comet’s Tale: On the Science of Apocalypse
• Elizabeth Royte – Transsexual Frogs
• Susan Milius – Leashing the Rattlesnake
• Michael Benson – What Galileo Saw
• Barbara J. Becker – Celestial Spectroscopy: Making Reality Fit the Myth
• Kevin Patterson – The Patient Predator
• Michael Pollan – Cruising on the Ark of Taste
• William Langewiesche – Columbia’s Last Flight

This one’s for Robin.

The New York Times: Five Years on the Web. From January 20, 2001. Including a chat with Martin Nisenholtz and Bernard Gwertzmann (assorted NYT.com gurus), a super-fug Flash movie showing the history of the site, and a 1991 article announcing that “the development of a nationwide data network will allow personal computer users to tap sources as large as the Library of Congress or receive their own personalized electronic newspapers.”

Filed under: Traditions I love.

Every year since 1949, a mysterious man has stolen to the grave of Edgar Allen Poe on January 19 to lay down a part-empty bottle of fine cognac and a trio of roses. The man, who’s known as the “Poe Toaster,” wasn’t deterred by this year’s cold spell.