News You Can Bruise for 2008 December 23

You may or may not know that Sumana and I keep a pile o' bookmarks on del.icio.us (actually in my personal notebook and mirrored to del.icio.us, but close enough). I don't put them on the front page of Crummy with a fancy Javascript widget or anything, because it is part of my personal notebook and I often use it to talk to myself in an invented language while doing research for something I'm writing.

But I don't mind you looking at our bookmarks, so long as you don't consider it a "publication" of mine, and there's so much interesting stuff that didn't make it into NYCB I thought I'd do a series of posts highlighting the most interesting bookmarks from 2008 that are still interesting and whose links still work. Here are the best links from January and February of 2008. I'll post one of these a day.

• Fractal sculpture and fractal cookies. I await the Mandelbrot set rug.
• An official copy of "As We May Think".
• Real-time "strategy" games are actually tactics games, because the fighting is divorced from political context.
• The papers of Benjamin Franklin, made available under an oppressive "personal study" click-through license. Is that legit?
• Coveted LeGo sets of yore, of which I had five. (#3-#7)
• An excerpt from Born Standing Up, the best book Steve Martin has ever written. Contemporaneous comment: "Analyzing a joke kills it, but Steve Martin kills jokes as a matter of course, so it works out."
• The first ninety days in a new job.
• "Apologies All Around", the first story sold by my VP buddy Jeff Soesbe.
• Build your own magazine box.