News You Can Bruise for 2006 February 3

• "Throwing-sticks in the National Museum"
• An Introduction to the Study of Browning

Neither as interesting as you'd think on first glance.

Also of interest: The New York Subway: Its Construction and Equipment. And from the classics section I recommend My Bondage and my Freedom, which among other things includes a novel reason for not revealing spoilers:

Keen is the scent of the slaveholder; like the fangs of the rattlesnake, his malice retains its poison long; and, although it is now nearly seventeen years since I made my escape, it is well to be careful, in dealing with the circumstances relating to it.

Today instead of writing the book I wrote rules for a game (don't worry, Lyle is okay. I mean, don't worry, I got my book quota for the day done eventually). It's called Shoot The Messenger and it still needs some work, but it's got an interesting mechanic (simulating a language barrier using the inaccuracies introduced by online translation services) and a good source of paranoia. A lot of the games the Dispatch people come up with have a theme of paranoia. I wonder why that is. I wonder who else wonders why that is.

I was pretty excited about Polynomial Hierarchy Collapse, but then the PDF loaded and it was just une histoire drôle like the kind I used to write for Segfault. Pretty drôle, though.