The World of Goo is a physics-based puzzle game released in October of 2008.  It was favorably received by the gaming community, receiving many awards.

On the one-year anniversary of the product's release, the developers decided to undertake an e-commerce experiment.  They offered to sell the game (previously retailing at $20) to anyone for whatever price the customer was willing to pay: "...one cent, a million dollars, the usual twenty, or any creative number they let you type into the text field."

In the week that followed, 57,000 additional people purchased the game; the graph above shows what prices they opted to pay.  About 17,000 people paid $0.01, but another 16,000 paid $1.00-$1.99, and several hundred paid the full $20.00 original price.  Total sales = over $100,000 for the week.  And still rising, because they have announced that they are continuing the offer until October 25.

The developers discussion at their website includes their impressions of why people paid different amounts, and notes that they made no money when people paid less than $0.30 because of Paypal transaction costs.  For further discussion of this odd marketing strategy, see Rock, Paper Shotgun.

Via Metafilter.

A group of  researchers at Johannes Gutenberg University, reporting in the journal Nutrition Research,  have suggested that frequent drinking of white wine may damage the teeth.

In the lab, adult teeth soaked in white wine for a day had a loss of both calcium and another mineral called phosphorus to depths of up to 60 micrometers in the enamel surface, which the researchers say is significant.

The effect is pH-mediated, and is most noticeable with Riesling wines, and was exacerbated by brushing the teeth soon after drinking wine.  Red wines were noted to be much less damaging to teeth, and the researchers suggest that the deleterious effect of white wine might be mitigated by the ingestion of calcium-rich cheese.

BBC link.  Photo: Bacchus (Caravaggio)

"Mass games" are group athletic events in which the performance of the individual is deemphasized in favor of the performance of the group as a whole.  They are thus well suited to the philosophy embodied by socialist/communist states, but the components of such games are also employed for other major events such as Olympic opening and closing shows.

The video above includes the closing moments from the movie "A State of Mind," documenting mass games in North Korea.

YouTube link.

For the past ten years The Helmet Project has been assembling images of football helmets.  The current array includes professional teams (American, Canadian, Arena, and others) and NCAA divisions I, II, and III, and even NAIA and some junior colleges.  The time period covered goes back to 1960.

Please note that my interest lies only in the "helmet design", by which I basically mean the shell and faceguard colors, the logo decals (if any), and the stripes running over the top of the helmet (if any). No attempt is being made here to illustrate the physical variations of helmets produced by different manufacturers, or the many different styles of faceguards, nor do I intend to show changes in the physical structure of helmets over the decades (at least not in the near future); partially for these reasons, 1960 has been somewhat arbitrarily chosen as the cut-off date for all the historic helmets for now. I am also not attempting to display fine details like "award decals" that would not show up well in the image size I am using here, or those details that would not be visible from this perspective (such as numerals on the back of the helmet). It is not my intention to illustrate every variation worn by every individual football player on any of these teams, just whatever was "the" design for each team at a particular time.

Link, via Archaeoblog (!)

Chris Jordan has previously created art pieces utilizing garbage and junk to emphasize the role of consumerism in modern society. For his most recent project he has photographed the carcasses of albatrosses on Midway Island to document the deleterious effects of plastic on wildlife in the Pacific Ocean.

To document this phenomenon as faithfully as possible, not a single piece of plastic in any of these photographs was moved, placed, manipulated, arranged, or altered in any way. These images depict the actual stomach contents of baby birds in one of the world's most remote marine sanctuaries, more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent.

There are several dozen additional photos at the artist's website.

Efforts are underway to revive damaged Pacific coral reefs by actively gardening them (propagating and transplanting the coral).

This video was directed and produced by Jonathan Clay for the BBC's Natural History Unit as part of their "South Pacific" documentary. The resolution is high enough to make the video enjoyable at full-screen magnification.

Vimeo link.

The diving horses performed at Atlantic City's Steel Pier in the 1920s and 1930s.  The horse would jump into a tank of water, typically with a young woman riding on its back.

Some dove with their front legs straight out, while others tucked up their legs as if they were going over a jump.  One horse would twist in the air and land on his side, making it dangerous for his rider.

‘The riders (all women) would suffer one or two broken bones a year.  Most of the injuries came from getting out of the pool of paddling hooves. They made it look easy, but it wasn’t.  Years ago a rider by the name of Sonora Carver (in the late 1920’s) went blind from a bad impact with the water.  The jump was sixty feet at that time, but was then lowered to forty.

‘Another horse, I think his name was Patches, drew quite an audience.  After making so many jumps he no longer waited for his rider.  He would charge up the ramp to the tower and take a running jump off the diving board, leaving the rider behind.  A couple of the girls tried to leap on him as he flew by, only to be left sailing through the air mount-less.

Further details and additional photos at the http://www.petticoated.com/pdqwinter04/otherdocs/divinghorsesW04.html, via ty.rannosaur.us.

"J" is an autistic child who also has post-surgical and bowel-related chronic pain.  His autism manifested itself as aggression rather than simple withdrawal, resulting in severe behavioral problems.  Authorities in Rhode Island granted the parents a license to give their child medical marijuana (they opted to do so in the form of brownies).   The results were dramatic:

Pre-pot, J. ate things that weren’t food… His pica become so uncontrollable we couldn’t let him sleep with a pajama top (it would be gone by morning) or a pillow (ditto the case and the stuffing)… The worst part was watching him scream in pain on the toilet, when what went in had to come out… Almost immediately after we started the cannabis, the pica stopped. Just stopped. J. now sleeps with his organic wool-and-cotton, hypoallergenic, temptingly chewable comforter.

Next, we started seeing changes in J.’s school reports… An aggression is defined as any attempt or instance of hitting, kicking, biting, or pinching another person. For the past year, he’d consistently had 30 to 50 aggressions in a school day, with a one-time high of 300. The charts for June through July, by contrast, showed he was actually having days—sometimes one after another—with zero aggressions.

This post is likely to elicit strong opinions; I would encourage everyone to at least browse the original source articles rather than basing judgments only on the excerpts above.

The article is written in two parts.  Link for original article.  Link for followup.

Via Metafilter.  Photo credit Marie Lee.

Don't laugh.  This young man gives a remarkable rendition of the third ("Presto") movement of the "Summer" concerto from The Four Seasons.

If you enjoy this, be sure to also view the accordion versions of Rimsky-Korsakov's Flight of the Bumblebee and Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.

YouTube link.

Update 10/14/09 by Alex - the guy is Alexandr Hrustevich, and you can see many more excellent clips on his YouTube profile page.

It appears that this started out as a ordinary instructional cooking video, and then someone overdubbed it with basic nutritional information.  She is careful to caution that her recipe is "not your conventional macaroni salad."

Link.  Via Reddit.

William Kamkwamba, a teenage boy in Malawi, saw a photo of a windmill in a textbook at the library and decided that if he could build one it would be useful to his village.

Mr Kamkwamba, who is now 22 years old, knocked together a turbine from spare bicycle parts, a tractor fan blade and an old shock absorber, and fashioned blades from plastic pipes, flattened by being held over a fire...

Soon the whiz kid's 12-watt wonder was pumping power into his family's mud brick compound...

Out went the paraffin lanterns and in came light bulbs and a circuit breaker, made from nails and magnets off an old stereo speaker, and a light switch cobbled together from bicycle spokes and flip-flop rubber.

Before long, locals were queuing up to charge their mobile phones...

Meanwhile, he installed a solar-powered mechanical pump, donated by well-wishers, above a borehole, adding water storage tanks and bringing the first potable water source to the entire region around his village.

He upgraded his original windmill to 48-volts and anchored it in concrete after its wooden base was chewed away by termites.

Jude Sheerin's story at the BBC has more details about the life of this remarkable young man, who is now the subject of a new book, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind.

Link

This video demonstrates that the human eye (and the visual cortex of human brain) are better at detecting edges and contrasts than they are at determining actual shades of colors.  There is a discussion thread about this illusion at Reddit.

YouTube link.

The figure of a lady which has adorned the front of Rolls-Royce automobiles for the past century is modeled on a real woman - Eleanor Velasco Thornton, the lover of automotive pioneer John Walter Edward Scott-Montagu.  He commissioned artist Charles Robinson Sykes to design a mascot for the bonnet of his Silver Ghost.   In the original version - "The Whisper" - the lady was pressing a finger against her lips to symbolize the secret nature of a love affair which could not be publicized because of her lower social status.  Over the years "The Whisper" evolved to the current "Spirit of Ecstasy" (also known as "Ellie in her Nightie").

...Sykes called it "A graceful little goddess, the Spirit of Ecstasy, who has selected road travel as her supreme delight and alighted on the prow of a Rolls-Royce motor car to revel in the freshness of the air and the musical sound of her fluttering draperies."

Today's Spirit of Ecstasy stands at 3 inches and, for safety, is mounted on a spring-loaded mechanism designed to retract instantly into the radiator shell if struck from any direction. There is a button within the vehicle which can retract/extend the emblem when pressed. She can be made of highly polished stainless steel, sterling silver or 24-carat gold, the sterling silver and gold being optional extras.

Futher details about the ornament are available at Wikipedia and The Telegraph, via the New Shelton wet/dry (whence the photo).

That's the opinion of the Trustees of Pooh Properties, which manages the estates of author A. A. Milne and illustrator E.H. Shepard.  They have authorized a new sequel in the Pooh series.  Return to the Hundred Acre Wood has generated some controversy among Pooh purists, who argue that the original books were about growing up and moving on, and that if the creators had wanted sequels they would have generated them...

"The whole point is that the boy has to go away from his childhood, from this very idyllic pastoral world of his childhood," she said. "This is an absolutely perfect ending, and doing anything beyond this is pointless."

The trustees of the estate believe the sequel will be true to the original...

"The good professor and other great lovers of Pooh will have to form their own conclusions," Brown said. "And they may say, 'oh, it's not quite as good, it's not quite the same.' I can't help that. All I can say is we tried very hard to do something that's not offensive, shall we say."

Jennifer Quinn of the AP has more details at the StarTribune.  The BBC has a writeup on a new character - Lottie the Otter - created for the sequel.  And The Guardian makes note in passing of the possibility that Pooh may have had OCD.

Image credit: Wikipedia.

The last week in September is Banned Books Week.  To mark the event, an interactive map has been created that shows requests for removal of books from public libraries and school libraries for the period 2007-2009.  The map is created from cases reported to and documented by the American Library Association.

The image above is a screencap.  The interactive map itself can be accessed at this link.

The ALA also has a listing of the top ten most frequently challenged books for 2008.

http://bannedbooksweek.org/Mapofbookcensorship.html, via.