Lessons from Valve – How to Build a Designer's Paradise →

Valve hires the very best. They'll wait for a year for the right candidate to become free instead of hiring someone who is merely great, and immediately available. "Once you're here, you don't leave," one Valve designer told me. There's a reason for that – Gabe Newell knows how to make a designer's paradise. Here's how.

'Willpower', Glucose, and Self-Control →

In 1998, Roy Baumeister co-published a paper suggesting that self-control decisions drew on some limited resource. After resisting cookies and chocolates, he found, subjects had less self-control at a subsequent task. In Willpower, Baumeister and John Tierney convincingly describe another addendum: willpower depends on glucose as an energy source.

As a control, some subjects drank a "large, tasteless concoction of low-fat dairy glop." But the researchers found that both the ice cream shakes and the joyless glop reversed the effects of depletion. It wasn't pleasure that rejuvenated willpower, it was the calories, a discovery they confirmed by measuring glucose levels after self-control tasks, and, by comparing the effects of lemonade with sugar versus lemonade with Splenda.

Winging It: America's Cup Racers Push the Sailboat to Its Limits →

The next America's Cup race takes place in 2013, but one thing is already sure: The event's pioneers wouldn't recognize their sport now.

72-foot high carbon-fiber winged catamarans traveling 48 mph? Yeah, doesn't sound like my dad's version of sailing...

War Plan Red →

The following is a full-text reproduction of the 1935 plan for a US invasion of Canada prepared at the US Army War College, G-2 intelligence division, and submitted on December 18, 1935.

"Red" was apparently the military color code for Britain, where Canada was appropriately "Crimson", and the U.S. was "Blue". Also interesting, besides them naming every major city in Canada a "strategic interest"?

In 1934, War Plan Red was amended to authorize the immediate first use of poison gas against Canadians and to use strategic bombing to destroy Halifax if it could not be captured.

(via Tory Briggs)

IBM's New Transactional Memory: Make-or-Break Time for Multithreaded Revolution →

The BlueGene/Q processors that will power the 20 petaflops Sequoia supercomputer being built by IBM for Lawrence Livermore National Labs will be the first commercial processors to include hardware support for transactional memory. Transactional memory could prove to be a versatile solution to many of the issues that currently make highly scalable parallel programming a difficult task.

Apparently the memory supports transactional code blocks in atomic fashion using processes similar to "load-link/store-conditional" (PowerPC) and "compare and swap" (x86), and it's all done using FPGAs. Pretty nifty.

Alexa Meade: Real-Life Painting-Performances →

American artist Alexa Meade creates her representational paintings directly on her subjects, covering people and objects in layers of acrylic paint before photographing them. The works offer an unusual conflation of painting, installation, and photography, as the three-dimensional forms are collapsed in space, taking on a 2D appearance in the prints. In her exhibitions, Meade frequently paints over small rooms in which a human subject sits for the duration of the show, offering a performative aspect to her work.

Bizarre, but creative, for sure.