News You Can Bruise for 2007 December 6

The roll continues, with pictures from Florida. Includes the Fawlty Towers Motel, and Atticus and Samuel trying to get us to play Ticket to Ride.

Neolithic job fair: "Join wheel economy!" "Our business on fire, selling fire." "Work on cutting edge making cutting edges."

So around 1957 was the International Geophysical Year, which Arthur C. Clarke always wrote about as if it were a turning point in world history, and because of that I've long wanted to write a story about the kind of world where we can think back and say "Yes, it all started with the International Geophysical Year..."

My point is that right now we're in the middle of an International Polar Year! In celebration, the USGS has put a web interface on high-resolution photos of Antarctica. Via Google Sightseeing I also discovered that Google Maps also has high-res photos (but not medium-res photos) of Antarctica. I remember when the whole continent was just a smear of pixels on Google Maps. Of course, that was before the INTERNATIONAL POLAR YEAR. Coming soon: the International Polar Bear.

An old edition of Hoyle's is online, but unlike today's fact-packed edition it covers very few card games, and has an unhealthy obsession with gambling. It's practically a manual for squandering the family estate!

This list of period game rules is more interesting from a ludology perspective, containing things like the 16th-century precursor to Blackjack.