"The Instinctive Drowning Response [does] not look like most people expect. There is very little splashing, no waving, and no yelling or calls for help of any kind."

Turning public domain photography drudgery into a game. "Use the scavenger hunt list provided by Wikipedia (posted soon) to take shots and cross off as many subjects on the list as possible. Upload shots to this group with the correct Creative Commons license required by Wikipedia and we will tally the scores." Includes the V&A.

"Funded by Transport for London Walk London has worked with the local authorities to develop an impressive network of quality walking routes."

"During the show, the huge dish of the telescope will act as a giant video screen displaying images of early space exploration, astronomy, engineering, the history and future of radio astronomy and the construction of the Lovell telescope itself."

"Imagine reading a book and getting to a difficult passage in chapter three. And then imagine the book won't let you skip to chapter four until you have signified you understand that passage. This is how many video games are designed."

"Thanks to the recent discovery of 90-year-old police files, unearthed by researchers at the National Archives in Kew, England, one can say with some confidence that - in England, at least - 'modern' photographic surveillance began in September 1913."

Octopus intelligence and personality. "The cephalopods that survived [the Triassic] were the zoological counterrevolutionaries that turned the vertebrates' weapons against them."

"A lot more people talk about making games than actually make games. Anyone can make a game with some cut up paper and a few crayons. Whatever excuses you are making for yourself are bad ones."

Camcorder-jamming. "The beam saturates the CCD with varying intensities of light, [forcing] the camera's electronics to constantly adjust, and ultimately producing large white splotches that cover about one-third of the recorded scene."

"Using information the government has collected on noise levels within London, a map has been plotted of the capitals most silent spaces." It almost hurts to look at.

Slightly spurious Nintendo DS brain-exercising games. "The games are aimed at older and more casual players who aren't likely to be drawn to the more common action, adventure and racing games."

"In midtown they have [kiosks] at street level with [maps]. But this seems like overkill for mostly mixed and residential neighborhoods. So how hard would it be for the MTA to paint a little direction indicator on the pavement near each subway exit?"

"Mining the information would require building a database of at least 40,000 surnames and the Y chromosome profiles associated with them."

"In order to maintain 'real' relationships, you have to put in a tremendous amount of effort: making phone calls; returning emails; planning weekends together; etc. To maintain para-social relationships, however, all you have to do is flick on the TV."

"The side that frames the argument usually wins. As long as media attention focuses on 'violent video games making kids more violent,' few parents will think of playing the games with their kids."

"Eccky is the name of a game where two parents can make, name and raise a virtual child [which] will be added to their MSN Messenger contact list, just like a regular buddy. [...] The game will end in 6 days when Eccky will celebrate its 18th birthday."

"All but 400 of the 3,000 students at San Antonio Warren High School either didn't show up or walked out of class today due to [shooting] threats against the school posted on a popular teen web site [by other students]."

"One long-term aim of our research is to exploit this understanding to build seeing robots that, like the bee with its mere one million neurons, can learn to find a simple flower in a meadow, which no machine can do at present."

"The most popular robots are, unexpectedly, the ones that demand we take care of them. They trigger our nurturing impulses, the same ones we deploy toward infants, the elderly or any other vulnerable creature."

Interesting way to look at the user experience - considering a site's internal-search logs as a record of what its users were thinking, and the pages they were looking at when they thought it.

EIEF panel discussion on sociability in MMOGs. "Some of the development companies focus on Human-Computer interaction. I think that's so 20th century. We need to focus on the human-to-human interaction."

"justcurio.us is an anonymous question and answer system, open to anyone, with one simple rule: to ask a question, you must first answer someone else's question."

"Kou has asked several Chinese software companies to develop a system that will stop players' scores from accumulating after a certain point. [...] Those games who do not have the anti-addiction system will not be approved for distribution in China."

More language and memory tangents: "There seems to be an inverse relationship between the ability to categorize and the ability to remember details." File under brains/memory/language.

Gambling on the drop-off destinations of six GPS-fitted taxis. "Every time one of the other cabs stops outside one of your properties, you get paid rent. Any time your cabbie lands on a property you don't own, you pay up."

GPS games. "'Can You See Me Now?' exploits these shadows and blackspots, which can be extensive and vary with time as satellites move. [Players] have to build up knowledge of where the shadows and blackspots are, and then exploit these hiding places."

"Visitors will be able to challenge each other to a game of 'chicken' on the Painstation, play table tennis with a difference on MIT Medialab's PingPongPlus or take part in a human-scale 'PacMan' game using Spacehoppers."

"The benefits of being in a social group often depend on its stability. That means conflict resolution is likely to figure large in groups where aggression will really rock the boat - if the size of a group is important for its successful functioning."

'The Curiosity Shop', touring the north-east in a succession of abandoned shops. "The museum is built from scratch at each new location, then packed up again when the time comes to move to its next venue."

"Disney also put a bend in the walkway from the train station to the gate, to make sure the flow of positive energy, or chi, did not slip past the entrance and out to the China Sea." Feng Shui versus fire regulations is wonderful.

Steven Johnson on the healthy informational complexity of modern television. "The mind also likes to be challenged; there's real pleasure to be found in solving puzzles, detecting patterns or unpacking a complex narrative system."

Steven Johnson on the healthy informational complexity of modern television. "The mind also likes to be challenged; there's real pleasure to be found in solving puzzles, detecting patterns or unpacking a complex narrative system."

"Using a network of cameras and computers, the bonobos can see visitors who ring the doorbell -- and will be able to choose through a computer touchscreen who will be permitted into a secured viewing area."