Projo Subterranean Homepage News

RoboZZle "A simple puzzle game."

A tutorial shows you how to program the arrowhead around the maze to pick up the stars. The solution above, mine, works: Go straight until you hit a green square, then turn right. F1 makes it a repeatable pattern. The last arrow moves it off the green square, and the pattern repeats.

Players are invited to create their own puzzles for others.

Some are easy, once you get the hang of it, some devilishly difficult.

The Dead Rock Stars Club is the way the Web used to be. Established 4-10-1998, and it looks it. Charmingly antique Web design -- html anchors, navigation via table cells with spans of dates, different repeating musical motifs as page backgrounds, no photos, thousands of annotated entries with links. And now with a small jukebox.

It's an encyclopedia of dead rock, jazz and country musicians from the '50s to now, eminently browsable. A credits page thanks dozens of contributors. A labor of love.

The Food Lab: Perfect Boiled Eggs

Given that you're using large eggs (eggs are remarkably well-sized, and are very consistent from carton to carton), that the eggs came from the fridge (around 37 degrees), and that you're starting with a volume of 180 degree water large enough that it doesn't significantly drop in temperature when you lower your eggs into it (three quarts of water is enough for anywhere from one to a half dozen eggs), then the only other variable remaining is the length of time you cook it for.

After a couple cartons of eggs, and a whole mess of egg salad, and what initially seemed like an un-winnable shell game, I determined that time to be eggs-actly 6 minutes, delivering the soft-boiled beauty you see above. Since whites set at 155 degrees and yolks set at 158, you have a tolerance of three degrees to work with, which translates to about 15 seconds in either direction. Use a timer!

Instructions for hard-boiled eggs, too. Lots of pictures, scientific attitude.

You Get Old. An essay by 68-year-old author Pat Jordan in Men's Journal. Poignant, funny.

You get old, you eat dinner at 4 pm, with your wife. You talk about the day, then save half of each of your pork chops, wrapped in Saran wrap, for tomorrow's dinner. Your refrigerator is stocked with leftovers. Susie wants to throw them out in a day or two, but you stop her, turn the wilting asparagus, the sautéed mushrooms, a few grape tomatoes into a lovely frittata for dinner. You get old, you hate to waste things.

You get old, you see your wife in her tight T-shirt with the words 'It's Not Pretty Being Easy' scripted across her breasts, and you get an idea. But it's only three o'clock in the afternoon, so you file it away for future reference. When you were young, you'd put that idea into action anytime, anyplace. Now you talk about it with her, make plans for sex. She puts on her silk negligee before she gets in bed. Then you both begin watching Ballykissangel, getting so caught up in it (will Father Peter leave the priesthood and marry Assumpta?) that the next thing you know you're waking up at 4 am.

Free programming lessons at Reddit. Using the social bookmarking site's spare interface, lessons:

A comprehensive real-time course on programming for everyone from total beginner to experienced programmer.

Read each lesson, one at a time. Start at lesson one. Master the material in each lesson before proceeding to the next one.

Do not worry about falling behind. Take as much time as you need on each lesson. Do not skim. Ask questions and read the discussions on each lesson. All lessons are actively monitored for questions.

Via Metafilter, where commenters chime in. My favorite:

This is a good little primer. Perfect for someone who fell into programing by tripping over HTML in the art department.

Noted:
5 Surprise Passages From the Full Augustine Report. "NASA released the full text crafted by its Review of Human Spaceflight Plans Committee (the so-called Augustine committee) today. The 157-page examination lacked an endorsement of an overall strategy, but there are a few passages of interest that were not included in the summary that was released in September. Here are a few passages that leapt out at us..." At Popular Mechanics.

Seven questions that keep physicists up at night. At New Scientist.

Go Pats.