The 50 greatest Hip-Hop samples according to Kon & Amir. [via]

This Pangram contains four as, one b, two cs, one d, thirty es, six fs, five gs, seven hs, eleven is, one j, one k, two ls, two ms, eighteen ns, fifteen os, two ps, one q, five rs, twenty-seven ss, eighteen ts, two us, seven vs, eight ws, two xs, three ys, & one z.

Nomic is a game in which changing the rules is a move. The Initial Set of rules does little more than regulate the rule-changing process.

• How to play Nomic
• Initial Set of Rules

Anthropologist David Graeber explores the 5000 year history of dept on the Long Now blog.

Old-school optimalism, which aims at pushing technological boundaries in order to fit in “as much beauty as possible”, versus new-school reductivism, which idealizes the low complexity itself as a source of beauty.

Tweets may soon include optional payloads of structured data. The purpose and usage of these annotations?

“Annotations are a blank slate that lend themselves to myriad divergent use cases. We want to provide open-ended utility for all the developers to innovate on top of.”
— Marcel Molina - Early look at Annotations

Possible Useful Annotations:

• The full URL of all shortened URLs that appear within a tweet.
• Longitude/latitude geo-locations when tweeting from GPS-enabled devices.
• Re-tweet history and/or attribution information.
• Multimedia URLs. Link a tweet to images, videos, and sound files.
• Multimedia data. The system should eventually support 2K payloads containing small images, sound clips, MIDI, etc.
• Microformats

See what your representatives are saying, and what laws they’re proposing.

Also, they provide a Hansards of the House API while in turn they make use of the How’d They Vote Postal Code API.

via

The principles of Christopher Alexander’s classic book on the use of patterns in architecture applied to the architecture of online social spaces.

Mr. Alexander’s ideas are also influential in the world of object-oriented programming.

If an activity can be learned;

if the player’s performance can be measured;

if the player can be rewarded or punished in a timely fashion;

then that activity can be turned into a game.

via: Lost Garden ✈ Ribbon Hero turns learning Office into a game