Descent2 - Retro 3D space tunnel exploration game

The macosxhints Rating: (Score: 8 out of 10) Developer: Doverstreet. Price: Free! A little retro flashback this week. One of the first ‘3D’ games that I recall playing many many moons ago has now been released as freeware for OS X — Descent2. Near as I can tell, Descent2 was released for the PC in February of 1996, and I think the Mac version followed sometime soon thereafter. The basic premise is that you’re piloting a ship around inside a series of mineshafts, looking for a reactor, which you then have to trigger and get back out of the mine system. What made Descent interesting was the assortment of weapons and enemies. What made it sickening (literally, to some) was the complete freedom of movement — your ship could be right side up or upside down, and you had to be comfortable flying it in any sort of orientation…. (macosxhints)

The first rule of Chinese traffic: there are no rules
Interesting article in Salon about a new school of traffic design that says to imitate the Chinese and let bikes, pedestrians, and automobiles share the road equally. Remove the traffic lights, road markings, street signs. At first, I cringed… (Remains of the Day)

Goalie Hnilicka bolts Kings for Czech League
Hnilicka signs three-year deal with Liberec. PRAGUE, Czech Republic — Los Angeles Kings goaltender Milan Hnilicka signed a three-year contract with Liberec in the Czech League on Tuesday. Hnilicka, drafted by the New York Islanders in 1991, played in 121 games for the New York Rangers, Atlanta Thrashers and Kings with a 29-13-67 record and 3.31 goals-against average. Hnilicka helped the Czech Republic to victories at the 1999 and 2001 world championships and served as a backup goalie at the 1998 and 2002 Winter Olympics…. (ESPN.com - NHL)

Blimps… In… Space…
MSNBC reports a California company with an alternate launch site in Texas, JP Aerospace, is on their third test of a blimp system specifically designed to fly to space. Blimps. To Space. At payload costs around a dollar a ton to LEO. Their concept, first unveiled at the Space Access ‘04 conference in Phoenix last month (with a blog report here, include the Ascender, a ground-to-near-space blimp, which docks to a helium-inflated two-mile-long station at the edge of space, over 20 miles up. Another ship, also a blimp but specifically designed to reach orbit, takes the payload from there to LEO, using well-proven electric propulsion (AKA ‘ion drive’). That trip to LEO would take up to nine days, but that’s a good thing; for, what goes up fast, must come down fast, and speed is energy which must be bled off by either massive amounts of expensive and explosive rocket fuel, or through ablative heat transfer which has its own problems (as we have seen before). JP Aerospace has flown many PongSats — micropayloads the size of a ping-pong ball — for balloon or rocket-launch. Over 1,500 PongSats have flown to date, which demonstrates a track record in near-space few of the X-Prize contenders can approach. Oh, yes, the Air Force is interested. (Slashdot)

Ex-Cowboy Harris upset by Hall of Fame snubs
Harris frustrated by 20 years of being overlooked. HOT SPRINGS, Ark. — After being passed over for induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame for the 20th straight year, former Dallas Cowboys safety Cliff Harris finally let his frustration show. ‘I will have to say I was much more disappointed than I expected,’ Harris said during a trip to his hometown of Hot Springs for his annual golf tournament for the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. ‘What was really disappointing was that none of the three Cowboys — myself, (offensive tackle) Rayfield Wright and (wide receiver) Bob Hayes — made it to the Hall of Fame.’… (ESPN.com - NFL)

Mind your language
A friend forwarded me this article about the results of a survey conducted by Merriam-Webster: Top 10 Favourite Words. She also dared me to use them all in one sentence…. (robotjohnny.com)

Bettman hints at lockout, says CBA must change
‘We can’t live any longer’ under this CBA. TAMPA, Fla. — NHL commissioner Gary Bettman promised again Tuesday that owners are determined to reach a radically different labor agreement no matter how long it takes and warned the players union not to test that resolve. Owners and players representatives met for 2½ hours Tuesday, but Bettman reported no progress toward finalizing a deal both sides privately fear might not be reached until the 2004-05 season is lost…. (ESPN.com - NHL)

I’m A Little Bit Kountry: Bobby and June’s Kountry Kitchen
Today I stepped into a time warp. The cast and crew of The Rocky Horror Picture Show were swapped for the cast and crew of O Brother Where Art Thou? Stepping into Bobby & June’s Kountry Kitchen was like stepping through the looking glass—-I came out the other side in a scene from 1956. I felt like Marty McFly gone country…. (The Amateur Gourmet)

Waugh versus Hollywood
Evelyn Waugh’s disdain for the cinema is revealed in memos he sent to the ‘Californian savages’ during negotiations over film versions of Brideshead Revisited and Scoop. Giles Foden decodes two unconventional treatments…. (Cinema Minima)

La pasta di Montalbano: i perciati ch’abbrusciano
Ever noticed the narrative power food has in stories? Imagine a hero (or heroine) of a book or movie. There he is, almost too perfect to be true: is anyone of us even remotely like him? Now imagine him eating in a down-trodden bar, making coffee on a campfire or sitting in his own kitchen. Immediately the atmosphere becomes warmer, more human and homely. The food eaten or served itself can have a meaning by itself. A special sweet might indicate a need for affection, an excessive dinner the exuberance or self-indulgence of a character and so on. A book with no mention whatever about food still feels weird, I must admit (but then, I write a food blog), as if it lacked contact to real life…. (Il Forno)

Exercise And The Brain
The damning evidence just keeps piling up. Sitting on your butt not only makes you fat, out-of-breath and cranky, it also makes you stupider than you might otherwise be. (dangerousmeta) (Futurismic)

A continuing series of noteworthy tidbits gleaned from all over.

(Today is (sic) day on Miscellanea.)

Blogs as Course Management Systems: Is their biggest advantage also their achille’s heel?
Elizabeth Lane Lawley, assistant professor at the department of information technology at Rochester Institute of Technology, has begun an experiment using Moving Type as a course management system for her ‘Introduction to Multimedia’ class. Already, her early efforts demonstrate the unique advantages blogs hold over conventional course management systems. But her work also uncovers what commercial course management systems offer that blogs lack…. (del.icio.us/tag/education)

Just deserts
This morning a dark, handsome, mysterious man appeared on my doorstep with an offer. I could use his time-machine for five round-trips. On each trip, I could kick in the shins the person of my choice…. (Rosemary for Remembrance)

Lizard in the Mailbox
Once upon a time there was a man who lived in Paradise. He lived with his great wife and his three great cats in a creamy yellow house that reminded him of sunshine. His job was to write. It was a fun job, and he did it eight hours a day sitting in front of his computer in an office in his house. The man went to work each day dressed in a bathing suit, a t-shirt and flip-flops, which was perfectly OK with his great wife, his great neighbors and all the great stores and shops in Paradise. Late one morning, the man took a break and walked to the end of his driveway to collect his mail. He was hoping to find the Quentin Tarantino DVD he had ordered through EBay. Instead, he opened the mailbox to find the usual small stack of junk mail. But this time something was different. A lizard was sitting on top of the stack of mail…. (Book of Life)

Pet Detective Kathy Albrecht
Albrecht is a former police officer who used to work with search and rescue dogs. She now searches for lost pets using her specially trained bloodhounds, and a Weimaraner. Along the way she is developing data about how lost animals behave, and how to best find them. Her new book is The Lost Pet Chronicles: Adventures of a K-9 Cop Turned Pet Detective. Albrecht also founded, and is executive director of, the non-profit National Center for Missing Pets in San Jose, Calif. (Fresh Air)

Coming Soon? Tour of California endorsed by state
ProCyclingTour.com | State Endorses Week Long Tour of California. The new event is expected to be part of the Pro Cycling Tour, along with the T-Mobile International in San Francisco, the BMC New York City Championship, and the Wachovia Cycling Series in Philadelphia, and will be run by Threshold Sports LLC and California Pro Cycling…. (Tour de France 2004)

One Thing After Another
In the May/Summer issue of The Writer’s Chronicle, Karen Mattison offers an interesting essay (…) defending the use of coincidence in fiction. Subtitled ‘An Essay Against Craft,’ the essay commends the use of coincidence as a way of taking risk, which Mattison feels is discouraged in a literary world dominated by the workshop ‘rules’ implicitly taught in creative writing programs. Writes Mattison: ‘I don’t think directions or rules are available, just terms…that undeniably simplify discussions of writing and literature.’ Such simplification is at times useful, but ‘the problem arises when we begin to draw conclusions from succesful choices, assuming that what works once will work in every instance.’ … Although Baxter and Mattison don’t use the word, what they are both describing is the influence on early novels in English of the ‘picaresque’ narrative. The picaresque story—derived from the term identifying the protagonist of such stories, the ‘picaro’—was introduced by Spanish writers of the 16th and 17th centuries, and is essentially a journey narrative in which the picaro, usually a rogueish character, embarks on a journey in which, literally, one thing happens after another. There’s not really a sense of progression in the picaresque narrative, just a series of episodes, and usually the protagonist remains more or less unchanged, undergoing no transformation or ‘epiphany.’ The most famous picaresque novel is undoubtedly Don Quixote, in which Cervantes alters the form by making his protagonist a deluded but not antisocial or rascally character…. (The Reading Experience)

A continuing series of noteworthy tidbits gleaned from all over.

Script-O-Matic
Late last century, I was at the big annual film tech expo in NYC where companies show off the newest in everything from lens-cleaning tissues to weather-making machines. A major attraction was the new generation of digital video cameras that would radically simplify movie production. Far and away the biggest draw though was a relatively rudimentary piece of software—the first program that could write a screenplay for you. Dozens of black-clad young film types elbowed one another to hear the details. ‘In the not-too-distant future,’ boasted the company’s shill, ‘all you’ll have to do is select the type of hero you want, choose his name—or let the software select one for you—then, essentially, double-click ‘Plot Type,’ and a few minutes later you’ll have yourself a 120-page, perfectly-structured, three-act screenplay.’… [Rance]

Velocipedraniavaporiana
I.e. hot and heavy breathing while cycling, according to David Perry in the glossary of the Bike Cult Book. It quotes the Flemish author Stijn Streuvels, as he described the naming of the bicycle: I think of our Flemish word ‘rijwiel’ for ‘bicycle.’ Has any machine ever become so popular, so widespread in so short a time, and have we ever had more difficulty in finding a name for it? The new machine was like a revelation, everyone wondered how something so simple could have remained unknown for so long, why it had taken so long to discover it. Each nation gave it a name of its own in their own language. The French had little trouble with this and, as always when they have to name something new, they took a piece of Greek and a piece of Latin and stuck them together, giving us the ‘velocipede.’… [Velorution]

From Abstraction to Reality: A Half-Baked Essay on Food with a Generous Contest Offer in the Last Paragraph
Picture a cake. Let’s say a yellow cake with vanilla icing. The cheap kind that comes in a box; the kind you would sell at the Chess Club bake sale. Picture it strewn with rainbow sprinkles; the large rectangle carved into equitable squares. Now taste it. Do you have the flavor in your mind? The cake with its chemical richness—you can almost taste the yellow; the icing overly sweet, glopped on way too generously. And the crunch of the rainbow sprinkles in your teeth. What do rainbow sprinkles taste like anyway? Mini-sugar apostrophes that get caught in the teeth… [The Amateur Gourmet]

An Omelette and a Glass of Wine
…But this weekend I’m again working on online recipe databases and the associated loosely joined, lightly grilled web coolness. So, in the grand tradition of the outboard brain, here’s what I’m looking at. More popular than the EatDrinkFeelGood spec, is RecipeML. There are thousands of RecipeML marked-up recipes around the web…. [Ben Hammersley’s Dangerous Precedent]

Destination: Washington, DC
The Food Section travels to Washington, DC, this week for the inaugural edition of Moveable Feast, a new feature consisting of local food writing with a decidedly non-New York focus. District of Columbia-born and based food writer Emily Kaiser has graciously agreed to guest-edit and provide a week’s worth of on-the-ground reports on all things gastronomical in the nation’s capital…. [The Food Section]

Eggstraordinary
Apparently the latest chic (if you’ll pardon the pun) thing to do is keep chickens in your urban grasskerchief. We have a small garden ourselves, and I have to admit that I find the idea of keeping a couple of chickens for fresh eggs quite appealing…. [Singularity]

Other News: Secret Opera-Microsoft Deal
Microsoft reportedly paid off Opera, at $12.75 million, after making its browser look bad on MSN. (MacInTouch)

‘A Sound of Thunder’ Movie This Summer
Ray Bradbury’s classic short story ‘A Sound of Thunder’ is being released thus summer as a movie. It’s directed by Peter Hyams, who’s done the time travel thing before, but it appears that some of the major characters from the Bradbury story aren’t in the credits. (Slashdot)

Creator of the Gaia Hypothesis Urges Nuclear Power
Professor James Lovelock, creator the Gaia Hypothesis and long-time intellectual leader of the Green movement, says that global warming is a dire threat, more urgent than was previously realized. He compares the threat of global warming with the threat of the Nazis in 1938, and says that in both cases, the Left was not able to grasp the urgency of the situation and see the necessary solution. What is the necessary solution to stop the global warming problem? He says it’s nuclear power. Needless to say, the Greens don’t agree with him, and he chides them as having irrational phobias of a safer, cleaner energy sources. Even if the ‘Left’ isn’t fully aware of the urgency of the world’s energy problems, it seems like Slashdot is. (Slashdot)

Armstrong wins final stage at Languedoc
Eurosport.com | Make way for Moreau Lance Armstrong showed his Tour de France preparation is right on schedule with a mountaintop win in Sunday’s final stage of the Tour du Languedoc-Roussillon. Christophe Moreau of Credit Agricole won the overall, 46 seconds ahead of US Postal’s Viatcheslav Ekimov. ‘At this time of the year, I know where my fitness level should be — I think I’m there,’ said Armstrong, confirming that he will race the June 6-13 Dauphine-Libere, his last major racing test before the Tour de France kicks off in Liege, Belgium on July 3. (Tour de France 2004)

Project Gutenberg Made Accessible
Mazarin is an open-source interface to Project Gutenberg’s library. Mazarin increases the accessibility of Gutenberg’s 10,000+ books as it formats the books for HTML display — providing paginations in addition to generating table of contents and other advanced markup features — along with enabling users to carry out full-text searches on the entire library. (Slashdot)

Spaceport to Rise in California’s Mojave Desert
A desert airdrome in Mojave, California is on the final glide path to getting government approval for becoming an inland gateway to space. The Federal Aviation Administration’s Associate Administrator for Commercial Space Transportation (FAA/AST) is expected next month to certify that the Mojave Airport Civilian Flight Test Center as a non-federal spaceport to handle horizontal launches of reusable spacecraft. (SPACE.com)

A continuing series of noteworthy tidbits gleaned from all over.

Style as Moral Failure
The Mumpsimus points me to an essay on Angela Carter in which Carter is quoted as saying ‘I’ve got nothing against realism…(b)ut there is realism and realism. I mean, the questions that I ask myself, I think they are very much to do with reality. I would like, I would really like to have had the guts and the energy and so on to be able to write about, you know, people having battles with the DHSS, but I, I haven’t. I’ve done other things. I mean, I’m an arty person, ok, I write overblown, purple, self-indulgent prose - so fucking what?’… (The Reading Experience)

Randy Johnson’s Perfect Game
Baseball fans already know about this. I wrote this blog post for all of you who aren’t baseball fans. A man has done something that no one believed was possible. I hope his feat inspires you as it did me…. (Book of Life)

Digital restoration of U. S. Library of Congress audio
The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory signed an agreement with the U. S. Library of Congress to digitally restore the many thousands of early blues or jazz recordings it has in its archives. The results are spectacular…. (Roland Piquepaille’s Technology Trends) (Cinema Minima)

Vivavi and Green Fashion
Josh Dorfman writes to recommend his company Vivavi (‘Life. Style. Planet.’), the latest place to shop for green clothes, furniture and accessories. It’s really pretty cool. There’s stuff on there I want cause it looks good (like the Big Chaos bookshelf, the Side Chair and the Eco Sneaks), which to me is the acid test of green design — would I want this if I didn’t know it was better for the environment?… (WorldChanging)

More trouble with Troy
From Rogueclassicism: ‘The Ankara government has come under fire from lawmakers for failing to take advantage of the mega-budget Hollywood movie Troy, starring Brad Pitt, to promote Turkey where the ancient city is located….’ (ɔɅɓɃÉ√É«ÉÀ)

today’s quote
‘Living at risk is jumping off the cliff and building your wings on the way down’ - Ray Bradbury…. (self-aggrandizement)