http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2011/06/08/a-brief-history-of-the-corporation-1600-to-2100/

[O HAI I’d play this. -egg]

…EteRNA, an online game with more than 38,000 registered users. Featuring an array of clickable candy-colored pieces, EteRNA looks a little like the popular game Bejeweled. But instead of combining jewel shapes in Tetris-like levels, EteRNA players manipulate nucleotides, the fundamental building blocks of RNA, to coax molecules into shapes specified by the game. Those shapes, which typically look like haphazardly mowed crop circles or jumbled chain-link necklaces, represent how RNA appears in nature while it goes about its work as one of life’s most essential ingredients. No self-sustaining organism gets made without the involvement of RNA.

Tweaking molecular models in this fashion is surprisingly fun—and, it turns out, useful. EteRNA was developed by scientists at Stanford and Carnegie Mellon universities, who use the designs created by players to decipher how real RNA works. The game is a direct descendant of Foldit—another science crowdsourcing tool disguised as entertainment—which gets players to help figure out the folding structures of proteins. EteRNA, though, goes much further than its predecessor.

The game’s elite players compete for a unique and wondrous prize: the chance to have RNA designs of their own making brought to life. Every two weeks, four to 16 player-designed molecules are picked to be synthesized in an RNA lab at Stanford. “It’s pretty incredible to imagine that somewhere there’s a piece of RNA that I designed that never existed anywhere in nature before,” says Robert Rogoyski, a New York City patent attorney who has had 14 of his EteRNA designs selected for synthesis. “It could encode a protein that no one has ever seen, something that’s important in the discovery of the next blockbuster glaucoma or cancer drug. Or it could be the cause of the zombie apocalypse.”

via New Videogame Lets Amateur Researchers Mess With RNA – Wired Science.

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has submitted written testimony [PDF] to an EU committee investigating mass surveillance. Glyn Moody’s Techdirt post gives a great tl;dr summary of the document, but you should really read it for yourself. It’s ten single-spaced pages, but Snowden turns out to be an extremely talented writer who beautifully lays out his arguments, managing the trick of being dispassionate while simultaneously conveying the import of his subject matter.

via Edward Snowden’s magnificent testimony to the EU – Boing Boing.

[Some totally badass 3D-printed art. -egg]

Take a look at Joshua Harker’s Quixotic Headdress — you can easily lose yourself in the depth and complexity of his meandering, organic works. Harker is one of the most-recognized artists to pioneer digital sculpture and three-dimensional printing.

In the ’80s he created surrealist automatism drawings inspired by the loose, spontaneous twists and shapes of great artists like Miro, Dali and Picasso. But how could he turn his 2D drawings into 3D works? He knew he needed to build his expertise in CAD and prototyping, so he became a commercial sculptor and designer of toys and special effects, developing everything from motorcycles to medical equipment.

via 3D Printing: Art or Technology? An Interview with Joshua Harker.

Backyard lighting is as much about decoration as it is about safety, allowing you to enjoy your artificial oasis at night without the risk of accidentally stepping on a hidden rake. But why run lights to every corner of your yard when you can just mount a decorative Japanese lantern to a quadruped and simply have it follow you around all night?

That’s the genius behind Alvaro Cassinelli’s latest creation. As guests arrive for a nighttime garden party you could—in theory, at least—assign one of these glowing creepers to follow each person around as they mingle. The lantern bots are also equipped with infrared rangefinders so they won’t accidentally bump into someone, or wander into a koi pond.

via Robotic Garden Lamps Can Follow Your Guests Around the Party.

Centuries after Shakespeare wrote about King Lear’s symptoms, there’s still no perfect way to care for sufferers of dementia and Alzheimer’s. In the Netherlands, however, a radical idea is being tested: Self-contained “villages” where people with dementia shop, cook, and live together—safely.

via An Amazing Village Designed Just For People With Dementia.

[Spoiler: they didn’t go away because they don’t work. The available evidence suggests that they work almost eerily well. They went away because they were legislated out of existence. I don’t think that can last, long-term. -egg]

WHETHER THE REVIVED INTRADE or Predictious succeeds may depend on how their legal issues resolve. But there is also the unsettling possibility that they will fail because the product they deliver—accurate predictions about the future—is not a product people actually want. For all its promise, Intrade never expanded its user base far beyond the niche world of gamblers and hobbyists, and its employee head count never rose above double digits.

via Death at the Summit: How the Feds Killed a Market Oracle.

Eve Online: The Most Thrilling Boring Game in the Universe
The massive engineering challenge of building a fusion reactor
Some strange history of the very alien Asmat people in New Guinea

Few games have such a conflicting outward image. Eve Online is famously exciting, but also notoriously dull. Eve Online will lure in players with its stories of spying, trust and betrayal, but even long-time players will say that most people tune out before they even get past the tutorial. Eve Online is the most fun you’ll ever have in a game. Eve Online will put you into a coma.

via Eve: The most thrilling boring game in the universe | Polygon.

No one knows iter’s true cost, which may be incalculable, but estimates have been rising steadily, and a conservative figure rests at twenty billion dollars—a sum that makes iter the most expensive scientific instrument on Earth. But if it is truly possible to bottle up a star, and to do so economically, the technology could solve the world’s energy problems for the next thirty million years, and help save the planet from environmental catastrophe. Hydrogen, a primordial element, is the most abundant atom in the universe, a potential fuel that poses little risk of scarcity. Eventually, physicists hope, commercial reactors modelled on iter will be built, too—generating terawatts of power with no carbon, virtually no pollution, and scant radioactive waste. The reactor would run on no more than seawater and lithium. It would never melt down. It would realize a yearning, as old as the story of Prometheus, to bring the light of the heavens to Earth, and bend it to humanity’s will. iter, in Latin, means “the way.”

via Raffi Khatchadourian: Can an Audacious Plan to Create a New Energy Resource Help Save the Planet? : The New Yorker.

Michael made a scouting trip there during a mid-May break in filming. Only in the mid-1950s had a few Dutch missionaries and government officials begun pacifying the Asmat, but even by 1961 many had never seen a Westerner, and inter-village warfare and headhunting remained common. “Now this is wild and somehow more remote country than what I have ever seen before,” Michael wrote. In many ways, the Asmat world at the time was a mirror image of every taboo of the West. In some areas, men had sex with each other. They occasionally shared wives. In bonding rituals, they sometimes drank one another’s urine. They killed their neighbors, and they hunted human heads and ate human flesh.

via What Really Happened to Michael Rockefeller | History | Smithsonian.

[Slightly facile but interesting. -egg]

While I am far from a Luddite who fetishizes a life without tech, we need to consider the consequences of this latest batch of apps and tools that remind us to contact significant others, boost our willpower, provide us with moral guidance, and encourage us to be civil. Taken together, we’re observing the emergence of tech that doesn’t just augment our intellect and lives — but is now beginning to automate and outsource our humanity.

But let’s take a concrete example. Instead of doing the professorial pontification thing we tech philosophers are sometimes wont to do, I talked to the makers of BroApp, a “clever relationship wingman” their words that sends “automated daily text messages” to your significant other. It offers the promise of “maximizing” romantic connection through “seamless relationship outsourcing.”

via Today’s Apps Are Turning Us Into Sociopaths | Wired Opinion | Wired.com.

[Thoughtful essay by Ramez Naam. -egg]

Yes. Yes we can. The last year has brought with it the revelations of massive government-run domestic spying machineries in the US and UK. On the horizon is more technology that will make it even easier for governments to monitor and track everything that citizens do. Yet I’m convinced that, if we’re sufficiently motivated and sufficiently clever, the future can be one of more freedom rather than less.

via Can We Avoid a Surveillance State Dystopia? – Charlie’s Diary.