May 06 2008
The Venture Capital Journal is a finalist in the prestigious Maggie Awards for 2008, given out by the Western Publishing Association. Stories by Joanna Glasner and I were finalists in four categories.
The best part of the experience was traveling to Los Angeles to get the awards with Joanna and our editor, Larry Aragon. The presentation ceremony was a blast!
Mar 30 2008
No, it’s not a zen koan, it’s a trick of the mind. I wonder what this does to your liver?
Yay for the British, a magical people. All educated at Hogwarts.
Mar 27 2008
Nintendo released “The Legend of Zelda” in 1987 with a marketing flourish that any five-year-old might appreciate: a gold cartridge casing.
I got the game for Christmas in the late eighties and remember how cool it made me feel. The other kids on my street came to my house to play it and I felt like I had friends. It later became an object lesson in childhood fickleness when those “friends” left as fast as they had come.
The game has simple rules that lead to wide array of complex outcomes. The simple version is this: your elfin character tromps through a kingdom and beats monsters to eventually save a princess. Wikipedia has a lengthy discussion of the game’s plot, history and other intricacies.
Reviewer Dave Warmington has a theory on why people like the game and it certainly rings true with me. Most games of the time had a “quest” that directed you from one point to another and required certain actions be performed to advance. The quest was what you did in the game.
But Zelda was different. It has a quest, to be sure, but it also gives the game player a lot of freedom to roam around the digital world and explore its ins and outs undirected. It felt more like play than work.
Programmers caught on and have expanded the variety of potential interactions a player may have with the virtual world of a game.
If a little freedom is a good thing, than more of it must be better…but somehow it isn’t when it comes to an environment such as Second Life: a virtual world people participate in for reasons unknown to me.
I found a service that hosted a java-based emulator of the original Legend of Zelda game. The site hosting the service has since been taken down, but not before I beat the Second Quest–a feat that any player of the game will recognize as noteworthy.
I found something interesting in the experience. I wanted more of the game. I wanted a Third Quest in the same Legend of Zelda world with new challenges, puzzles and maybe even a new map to explore. Consider it an open challenge to any programmer/gamer out there. I’d pay $75 for a Third Quest.
[Image thanks to VideoGamesBlogger.com and Wikipedia]
Feb 24 2008
Okay, the latest from the world of informational warfare is only a little off topic for an economics blog. But since encryption underlies every ecommerce transaction and all kinds of protected communications, anything that shakes that foundation is worth knowing about.
John Markoff, an awesome reporter for the NYT, writes about Princeton professor Ed Felton’s latest hack: physically freezing a computer’s DRAM to slow it down and make it spit out the encryption keys that should have only been momentarily stored there.
It’s not the sort of thing that a hacker could exploit from far away, you actually need to pop the computer open and spray the chip with air.
Physical hacks are becoming increasingly popular as computers become more portable. Laptops follow employees home from work or walk out the front door with thieves–often with reams of “private” data.
Now it will be even easier to swipe data from those computers. And unlike software, there’s no easy way to send out a “patch” for this exploit.
[Thanks to iit.edu for the pic]
Feb 23 2008
The Amber Room, a gift from Prussian King Frederick I to Russia’s Peter the Great in 1716 and looted by Germans during WWII may now be found.
The ornately detailed room is believed to have been lost in Königsberg, Germany as the war ended. But German treasure hunters discovered a man-made cavern 20 meters underground in Germany near the Czech Republic, that may contain the looted remains of the Amber Room, they say.
It will take several weeks to dig up, the treasure hunters say. Read the whole story here.
[Image of a reconstructed Amber Room from Wikipedia]
Jan 17 2008
We usually don’t cover politics—though its bond to economics is undeniable.
The link between the two disciplines stands to be even more overt in the Czech Republic, which will vote on a new president this February. The incumbent, President Václav Klaus, is facing a real challenge this year from economics professor Jan Švejnar.
Švejnar currently serves as the chairman of CERGE-EI, the Czech Republic’s most prestigious economics institute and Volha’s alma mater. He is also the chairman of one of the country’s largest banks.
Martin Jan Stránský has an interesting post about the race. He writes that it may be time for change in his country and says the progressive Švejnar is the man to do it:
Švejnar is running on a platform of EU integration, economic reform and open dialogue.
Klaus is not running on a platform based on anything, but instead claims that we should all be “familiar with his positions” based on his “previous statements and actions.” Continue Reading »
Dec 03 2007
I just found the Photo-Mania blog of black and white photography that recently won the Jury Award at the Deutsche Welle International Weblog Awards 2007, Blognation Russia reports. There are some truly inspirational and great photographs of Minsk, Belarus here. Worth taking a look. The blog is one of many hosted on the now-Russian-owned LiveJournal.
Dec 02 2007
CyrillicPartners sister site 9Choirs has a great slide show of spiritual movies to see. Maybe it’ll be a good starting place for your Christmas shopping this year.
I can’t help feeling that the site missed several obvious choices though. Where’s It’s a Wonderful Life
It’s worth a visit: Perfect gifts for Christmas: Our top 9 spiritual movies
