- Sleep Patterns — my friend Tom has been tracking his baby’s sleeping patterns. We learnt that over the last month or so, our 5 month old baby has never gone to sleep before 10pm. We were trying to get him to go to sleep at 7 or 8pm and this was not working at all. Now it is playtime until 10 and then he just goes to sleep with no trouble, stress or crying at around 10 or 10:30. Data captured with Baby Care android app (over 500k installs) and graphed it in Python. As a father of two, this is the best ad for the quantified self I’ve seen.
- Playspent — a web app that challenges you to balance dollars like someone on the poverty line. This makes the constraints of poverty real in the same way that Sims brings city planning to life.
- Context vs Core — transcription (albeit an imperfect one) of Geoffrey Moore’s excellent talk about separating context from core, innovation, and business. Most of what you do is context, not core, and the most frustrating thing in your life is that the context gets in the way of the core that your context. [...] If you don’t get up in the morning and say, core before context, you’ll come to the end of the day and find out that your e-mail trail beat you to death.
- Coders for Social Good (Dave Neary) — notes on the Humanitarian track at the FOSS World Forum. This is stuff that matters. There’s even open source microfinance software.
ENTRIES TAGGED "simulations"
Four short links: 6 October 2011
Quantified Baby, Poverty Simulation, Context vs Core, and Social Good
Web 2.0 Expo Preview: Will Wright, Sims and Simulations
Will Wright has been the foundational genius behind a thirty year string of blockbuster games, from the early Raid on Bungeling Bay in 1984 to the first truly fun urban simulation, Sim City. From there he delved deeper into the lives of the individual inhabitants of those cities with the Sims, a game that let players actually shape how his simulated people interacted with one another (while making them increasingly life-like and sophisticated in their own actions). In 2008, he released Spore, where the simulations focused on the evolution of life in a massively parallel game system. Scheduled for June 2009, Wright will release the much awaited Sims 3, in which for the first time, the Sims can explore their world. Wright will be speaking on the Sims and games in general at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. O’Reilly editor Kurt Cagle caught up with Will Wright to ask a few questions.
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