Today's essay.

I just posted an essay called Reward the Behavior you Want in my willcodeforfood journal. I didn't manage to do any catching up today, but at least I haven't fallen further behind.

Pornography causes Blindness!

A recent article in slashdot points to some research being done that shows that when a person is confronted with an emotionally charged image, they go blind for a few tenths of a second. This has been found to be true for both extremely gruesome as well as highly erotic images. They point to a flash program that can demonstrate this, but I haven't tried it out as they chose to use highly gruesome images rather than erotic ones for the demo.

It figures that in the US its politically more defensible to show decapitations than to show erotica.

Hour Rotation.

I should be waking up now. Instead I haven't managed to fall asleep yet. It looks like I will have to do the hour rotation thing. I expect my sleep/wake cycle to be rather strange for the next few days as a result.

Real money from virtual worlds.

My last article I posted to technaut had a major subtext about making money from virtual worlds. This is becoming an ever bigger issue. Now I just read this article about someone who was actually arrested in Japan for having created a robot player that mugged other players so his owner could sell the virtual goods for real cash. I'm sure that nowhere else in the world have the cops caught on to the idea of virtual crimes.