Here is Westeros recreated in obsessive detail within a game of Minecraft.

Thank you, Wired.

It’s a brisk read, and a nice perspective on some of the things that have really been bothering me lately about Google. It’s not news, but who doesn’t love to hear their own opinions, written well, by a person in the know?

The TL;DR version could easily just be the third paragraph:

The Google I was passionate about was a technology company that empowered its employees to innovate. The Google I left was an advertising company with a single corporate-mandated focus.

Now, I miss the old social Google Reader more than almost anything else on the internet. It was the perfect social networking site, if you ask me. Google plus is a lukewarm replacement, with one bright shining star: Google Hangouts.

The recent announcement of the final death of Google Reader is a pretty severe blow. I still use Reader extensively. No other single site or service has had such a profound effect on the way that I use the internet. I am deeply saddened by Google’s insistance that I am using my internet wrong, and while I know that I will find other, new, better internets, it’s always sad to turn an era over and move on. Google has turned into that friend you still see and hang out with (gmail, gdrive) but don’t really connect with deeply any longer (I use Bing for search, twitter and instagram for social networking, and the day that Reader dies I’ll be on Feedly).

So for now, goodbye old Google. I hope you come back. I really do.

Why I left Google – JW on Tech – Site Home – MSDN Blogs.

EDIT: I entirely forgot to include this wonderful interview piece with Chris Wetherell, creator of Google Reader. This article is worthy of it’s own post.

Then the author of the video admitted it was fake.

100% Fake.

As in: the entire video was computer animated.

Here’s the Wired article.

Here is a zombie movie, that will be released for free under the Creative Commons agreements, that was shot at the Large Hadron Collider, by scientists working at the Large Hadron Collider,  and news of its release came to me on Dogmic’s birthday!

Special thanks to Wired and this article, without which this great day would have been slightly more boring.

I don’t think there’s even anything for me to say about this.

Click through for the full story from NPR.

Five Men Agree To Stand Directly Under An Exploding Nuclear Bomb : Krulwich Wonders… : NPR.

Show me yours and I’ll show you mine!

 Which Candidate do You Side With?

(The Quiz does not rate how much you care, or how tired you might be of the whole “democracy” thing.)

From NASA’s Picture of the Day.

APOD: 2012 April 2 – Tungurahua Erupts.

Put a nuke wherever you like, and see what the results might be. Try not to scream and weep from the unmitigated Cold-War-esque horror that subsequently engulfs you.

No wonder our parent’s generation was so warped. Have any of you seen the old nuclear attack readiness videos?

Anyway. Go play with the NUKEMAP

NUKEMAP by Alex Wellerstein.

Click through for the full primer on the G8 from Ben Joravsky at The Reader.

 

On December 14, Mayor Emanuel introduced several proposals related to the summits. The ones that got the most coverage would have raised fines for resisting arrest and imposed new requirements for parades and demonstrations. And the other—as we talked about already—granted him the authority to hand out contracts without a normal bidding process or City Council oversight.

At a hearing in January, a broad range of activists and other citizens, from death penalty foes to right-to-lifers, testified against the parade and protest regulations. When Emanuel agreed to cut the fine increases, most aldermen were convinced that he’d given enough ground to make the ordinances palatable.

via Your NATO/G8 primer | Feature | Chicago Reader.

I now follow Criterion on an embarrassingly high number of sites. I am almost certain that Scott is growing tired of hearing me talk about Criterion. I might have a problem.

The Criterion Collection.

Here’s the accompanying Wired article.