Interesting Snippets from 2012-04-09

• Mining Our Own Personal Data, for Self-Discovery - NYTimes.com

  Dr. Wolfram runs Wolfram Research, which is deeply steeped in data analysis, along with Wolfram Alpha, a computational search engine that provides many answers for Siri, the personal assistant for Apple’s iPhone 4S.

  Computers are good at spotting patterns, and Dr. Wolfram thought an analysis of his own personal data might reveal patterns in his life — for example, when he was most likely to come up with new ideas, “preferably good ones.”

  Dr. Wolfram, who lives in the Boston area, calls himself a “remote C.E.O.” — interacting with his company, which is based in Champaign, Ill., almost exclusively by e-mail and phone. He has accumulated data on the job for decades — whether for hundreds of thousands of his outgoing e-mails back to 1989, for 100 million or so of his keystrokes since 2002, or the time and duration of thousands of phone calls.

• Angry Birds, Farmville and Other Hyperaddictive ‘Stupid Games’ - NYTimes.com

  Game-studies scholars (there are such things) like to point out that games tend to reflect the societies in which they are created and played. Monopoly, for instance, makes perfect sense as a product of the 1930s — it allowed anyone, in the middle of the Depression, to play at being a tycoon. Risk, released in the 1950s, is a stunningly literal expression of cold-war realpolitik. Twister is the translation, onto a game board, of the mid-1960s sexual revolution. One critic called it “sex in a box.”

  Tetris was invented exactly when and where you would expect — in a Soviet computer lab in 1984 — and its game play reflects this origin. The enemy in Tetris is not some identifiable villain (Donkey Kong, Mike Tyson, Carmen Sandiego) but a faceless, ceaseless, reasonless force that threatens constantly to overwhelm you, a churning production of blocks against which your only defense is a repetitive, meaningless sorting. It is bureaucracy in pure form, busywork with no aim or end, impossible to avoid or escape. And the game’s final insult is that it annihilates free will. Despite its obvious futility, somehow we can’t make ourselves stop rotating blocks. Tetris, like all the stupid games it spawned, forces us to choose to punish ourselves.

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