Bird’s Eye: Who knew that Monopoly was a socialist game? What an amazing story! The “Slower Speed of Light” is a fun game (druggy effects masquerading as quantum science), and took me 10 minutes to complete. You don’t need to know any science…. and trippy ball play is druggy effects without the mask. Unbored is serious fun, and the excerpt has the best instructions on how to build a remote controlled water blaster you’ve ever seen.

* Monopoly Was Stolen From Socialist Land-Reformers And Perverted Cory Doctorow Boing Boing

Cory summarizes the story, and offers a link to the full article

Christopher Ketcham’s beautifully written Harper’s feature on the history of Monopoly, “Monopoly Is Theft,” traces the idealistic socialist land-reformers who created the game and modified it over decades, and the unscrupulous “inventor” who claimed to have created it and sold it to Parker Brothers. Monopoly’s forerunner was “The Landlord’s Game,” created by Lizzie Magie, inspired by Henry George, who believed in the abolition of land-ownership and created a powerful movement to make this a reality. Many of George’s devotees played The Landlord’s Game, learning about the evils of real-estate and rentiers, and they modified the rules together, creating the game as we know it, changing its name to “monopoly” (all lower-case). Then “an unemployed steam-radiator repairman and part-time dog walker from Philadelphia named Charles Darrow” copied it, patented it, and sold it to Parker Brothers. The rest is history.

* A Slower Speed of Light  MIT Game Lab

A Slower Speed of Light is a first-person game in which players navigate a 3D space while picking up orbs that reduce the speed of light in increments. A custom-built, open-source relativistic graphics engine allows the speed of light in the game to approach the player’s own maximum walking speed. Visual effects of special relativity gradually become apparent to the player, increasing the challenge of gameplay. These effects, rendered in realtime to vertex accuracy, include the Doppler effect (red- and blue-shifting of visible light, and the shifting of infrared and ultraviolet light into the visible spectrum); the searchlight effect (increased brightness in the direction of travel); time dilation (differences in the perceived passage of time from the player and the outside world); Lorentz transformation (warping of space at near-light speeds); and the runtime effect (the ability to see objects as they were in the past, due to the travel time of light). Players can choose to share their mastery and experience of the game through Twitter. A Slower Speed of Light combines accessible gameplay and a fantasy setting with theoretical and computational physics research to deliver an engaging and pedagogically rich experience.

* Trippy Ball Play via Reddit

* Unbored: The Essential Field Guide to Serious Fun — exclusive excerpt: “Remote-Controlled Water Blaster” - Boing Boing

The following project is excerpted from Unbored: The Essential Field Guide to Serious Fun, by Joshua Glenn and Elizabeth Foy Larsen, designed by Tony Leone, published in October by Bloomsbury.

I wrote the introduction to Unbored, and it is probably the best do-it-yourself and activity book for children I’ve seen. The variety of projects is astounding, and it’s modern and appealing to kids and adults. Many contemporary kids’ activity books are rehashes of the old “Handy Book For Boys and Girls” that aren’t much fun and, in my opinion, not very accurate. If you take a look at those old books, you might come to the same conclusion as me that the authors didn’t make the sail boats, wind carts, truss bridges, and other projects.Unbored, on the other hand, has real projects that were actually tested out. Here’s an example of a real project from Unbored….

SOAK AND DESTROY: Remote-Controlled Water Blaster Written and photographed John Edgar Park

Want to keep your brothers, sisters, and friends from breaking into your secret fort to dig through your comic books? Build a remote-controlled motorized water blaster so you can soak them while sneakily savouring the moment from a safe distance!