Butterfly in the sky, I can go twice as high

Linked to by Ryan North:
Excerpts of Amazon reviews of Time's top 100 books, in which the reviewer gave the book one star out of five



Back in my sophomore year of college I participated (after a fashion) in Blizzard's beta test of Starcraft: Brood War. Needless to say, they were still fiddling with the details to try to get everything perfectly balanced. They'd given zerglings a new ability, but then zergling rushes became too popular, so they had to reduce the spawn rate of hatcheries, and the week after that they reduced the cost, but then increased the build time, etc etc. As it happens, they continue changing the unit stats around well after the games have been released. (tangential thought: "Gosh, this must be exactly what it's like to be Tycho". Uh except of course that Tycho is funny, and his news is usually a little more recent.)

So yeah, that little sendup there made me smile, even though Chess is really just a terrible example to use. For instance, the en passant rule is actually very much like Patch 1.01. The "pawns can move two spaces when leaving their starting position" deal was introduced early on in order to speed up the game, but suddenly people were worried that one might be able to "pawn rush" past an already-deployed pawn in the adjacent file, so they tweaked the rules in an obscure and incredibly specific way to prevent this from happening. Castling was another innovation that happened around this time.
But historically infelicitous or not, it's an amusing essay, I thought.

(this commentary has been brought to you by the ILOP)

Head games...and I can't take it anymore

Just a quick update today, then I'm off.

First, the Speech Accent Archive. I don't know why I'm so into this, but hey. Maybe someone else is too. This has some pretty interesting material on the subject as well.

Here is a blog that collects links to interesting and/or entertaining brain news. I don't actually read it regularly (though I've been meaning to start), so I don't know whether it's any good or not. It looks pretty poppy, but there does also seem to be some nifty stuff to be found there, so I'll try not to be swayed by my prejudices.

Oh uh and if you fly a lot, this will tell you which seats are good or bad. This is kind of alien to me, but I can see how it would be a nice resource to have.

Counting flowers on the wall, that don't bother me at all

Ok, as promised, some novel content.
Flowers!
(note that I did not promise good content)
No, but these are neat. Some of you may be familiar with the Oncidiinae intergenerics I got from Trader Joe's, Tank and woo bus.
Yes, I name my orchids. Screw you.

These are my most recent acquisitions (They are not yet in bloom, but here are some pictures from Lynn's terrifyingly comprehensive pleurothallid site, which helped me decide which ones to get)

Goliath
Ponyboy
Fang

Impressive, huh?