Games

This is how the web works; you go to a site for one thing and you find other great things while you are there. In this particular case I went to read about the (very technical) details about the 3D rendering engine for 1998's Thief: The Dark Project. The other thing on this site was a non-3D but very addictive laser-based puzzle game. Go ahead, download it; it's only 39,936 bytes.

Papers

Suppose a company received donated written material which was then reviewed by other people for free.  Should the company then turn around and sell that material for thousands of dollars?  It sounds absurd, but it's basically how academic publishing works. Seriously, Harvard can't afford these prices.  Open access outfit Public Library of Science (PLOS) charge less to publish and is free to view, but PeerJ have gone one better- $99 buys you lifetime membership, their peer-review system promises a refreshing openness and they've even reduced the notoriously long time from submission to publication.  Sounds like a step in the right direction for fair access to knowledge.

Weather Report

"And so ye faithful,
there is no shadow to see
An early Spring for you and me."

 -  Punxsutawney Phil, Seer of Seers, 127th Groundhog Day

Old Computer

The Harwell Dekatron is officially the world's oldest working digital computer, again.  (I missed the story of its restoration last year, but El Reg pointed me to it yesterday). The Dekatron part of the name refers to the 10-position clock-face style glowing number valves, which were the best thing at the time for storing digits until the transistor changed everything a few years later.  It was no faster at sums than a man with a mechanical calculator, but the point was that humans get tired, and this beast could chug along for hours. Its 2.5 tonne bulk is now over at Bletchley Park.

Moon Flyby

You may know that the GRAIL lunar orbiters finished their mission of mapping the moon at the end of last year; the JPL just released a cool video they took of flying low over the moon.

Pioneering

The Pioneer space probes are slowing down, and we didn't know why for quite some time. This article seems to indicate the mystery is solved (hint: it wasn't anything too mysterious). Along the way there are many interesting and nerdy nuggets of info like what those things on the end of those poles are (radioactive power sources). Anyway, the story ends with a plea to make sure raw experimental data is kept readable though the years; one poor guy had to get transmission data off some mouldy tape that was found "under the stairs" at the JPL.

Space Game

Elite was a game that allowed you to freely explore several galaxies in a 3D spaceship, at a time when games had to fit in 32 kilobytes of memory. You show your age if you admit to playing the original game, but who cares about that when there is a sequel planned that uses the full power of modern PCs, with their hardware graphics and 8 gigabytes of memory?