I’ll likely be tied up for most of tomorrow, so links o’ the day shall have to take a day off. I’ll find some way to make up for it…
Busy, busy
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Blasts from the past
Sonic the Hedgehog is apparently Britain’s favourite computer game character, beating Mario by about 3% of the vote. The vote is a nice mix of oldies and newbies, with four of the top five featuring in games from the 80s and early 90s (Lara Croft was third). The other old school characters in the top 10 were Link (Zelda) and Blanka (Street Fighter).
Unfortunately there’s no indication in the story about when the survey was conducted, or among who. If it was a general poll of gamers, then it really shows how far more recent games have to go before dislodging the classics. If it was done among people in the industry, well in all fairness they would have been around longer, and so the likes of Sonic and Mario could have dominated their formative years in computing.
EDIT because I hit “publish” instead of “save”: I would have liked a bit more detail on the survey itself; they story just says “among gamers”. Was it a web poll? How many gamers? How old were they? Regardless, the poll shows how far more recent creations have to go before they dislodge the old favourites.
I had neither a Sega nor a Nintendo in my youth, so my vote might well have gone to Guybrush Threepwood.
Links o' the day, 21/10/2008
The program for a supermajority. (Crooked Timber)
Ctrl-Alt-Del. (Robert Cringley)
Florida woman goes to jail over $7.45 bill. (AP)
Inconsistency irks with letter of the law. (Football365)
Reviving the fine art of cafe culture. (The Irish Times)
European economic weather map. (FT.com)
Group says US used Ethiopia for dirty work. (The National)
And special mention for behind-the-times headline of the day:
Greens, greens, they’re good for your heart: study (AFP)
Diets worldwide that are rich in fried and salty foods increase heart attack risk, while eating lots of fruit, leafy greens and other vegetables reduces that risk, a groundbreaking study showed.
(The study was groundbreaking because it included developing countries, but this information is buried in the story.)
Am I evil…
…for finding this funny?
A horse had to be cut free with a chainsaw after it managed to get its head stuck in a tree.
The young filly needed to be freed from the tree after curiosity got the better of it and it wedged its head between separate sections of the trunk.
Although in my defence, I would have been horrified if it had been unable to free the horse, or if it had been badly hurt (it just suffered a few cuts).
One man and his donkeys
I have a very long way to catch up with Luis Soriano, who brings his mobile library from village to village in Colombia.
“I started out with 70 books, and now I have a collection of more than 4,800,” said Soriano, 36, a primary school teacher who lives in a small house here with his wife and three children, with books piled to the ceilings.
“This began as a necessity, then it became an obligation, and after that a custom,” he explained, squinting at the hills undulating into the horizon. “Now,” he said, “it is an institution.”
I haven’t quite got to the “piled to the ceilings” point, although I do have a few hundred books scattered about the place and in some interesting, if impractical for use, stacks.
Passports for phones
Cory Doctrow doesn’t seem too impressed with Britain’s plan to require passports for the purchase of mobile phones; the move is aimed primarily at prepaid/pay-as-you-go phones. His objections are understandable enough, given the implications for civil liberties. As The Times reports:
The pay-as-you-go phones are popular with criminals and terrorists because their anonymity shields their activities from the authorities. But they are also used by thousands of law-abiding citizens who wish to communicate in private.
The move aims to close a loophole in plans being drawn up by GCHQ, the government’s eavesdropping centre in Cheltenham, to create a huge database to monitor and store the internet browsing habits, e-mail and telephone records of everyone in Britain.
The “Big Brother” database would have limited value to police and MI5 if it did not store details of the ownership of more than half the mobile phones in the country.
I understand the concerns, I really do. However, I had to provide a copy of my passport when I went to buy a mobile in the UAE (and had to provide a copy or the original document for just about anything) and didn’t find it a big deal. I’m certainly someone who enjoys his privacy, so I guess I was just rolling with it. That said I’m fairly sure the UAE didn’t keep my details for use by the intelligence services.