Here & there

A bit of catching up from around the blogosphere:

• Video games: The invisible middleman of the industry by Ted Kritsonis. It seems that Canada is not only a world leader in video game production, but in software shops that build the tools the developers use to build their games.
  
  
• Get a First Life! Reminds me of about a million science fiction stories about virtual worlds where people become so addicted that their physical selves wither away and die. There should be bibliography out there somewhere...
  
  
• Biologists helping bookstores. It seems that people are moving ID, etc, books out of science sections in bookstores and into other sections. Hmmm. Sounds like a good idea. I should make sure we don't have any ID books classified as science in our collection.
  
  
• The Seven Signs of Bogus Science. A bit of an older item, but still well worth reading. Pin it up on the notice board in your library, even.
  
  
• Issues in Scholarly Communication blog. It's new to me, but it seems like a very worthwhile blog to watch.
  
  
• Rebecca at Adventures in Applied Math has a great ongoing series which makes up a kind of Course on Supercomputing. It includes sections on parallel programming, Unix, batch scripts, makefiles and other topics. It's obviously not done yet, but I certainly look forward to more installments. Some of its a bit hairy, but well worth the effort to get the gist.