jkdearden

Do you recall what the criteria were for the awards in the bottom-right of that page? I'm especially curious what one would have to do to merit the title of 'Kissing Pigs' or 'Golden Pickle'.

To elaborate a bit more: Diplomacy differs greatly from similar games (i.e. Axis and Allies, Risk) in that each army/fleet has the same 'strength'. There is no die-rolling involved to determine who wins in an encounter, it's just the number of units on offense/defense. It's impossible for a single army unit to capture a region so long as that region is occupied by an enemy unit, so taking territory requires either a concerted effort from multiple units that you own (which makes you weaker on other fronts), or it requires allying with other players in the game (which opens you up to being betrayed).

I wouldn't quite call it "the game that ruins friendships", but since it places a lot of emphasis on the social aspects of the game, rather than the strategic, it involves lots of lying and backstabbing, which can (understandably) strain relationships between the players.

There's also the Lyttle Lytton contest[0], which is a similar contest that limits entries to 200 words, plus has some additional contests. I'm a fan of the Found contest, which is a competition to find the most unintentionally bad/silly thing that's actually been published.

[0] http://adamcadre.ac/lyttle.html

That reminds me of this timeline on when we're going to exhaust certain natural resources (which has antimony running out at 2020):

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120618-global-resources-st...

A bit of a downer, but interesting to think about.

Another similar case (albeit a more modern one) is Anatoli Bugorski, who caught his head in the path of a particle accelerator beam:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatoli_Bugorski

It actually makes for pretty good power plants, usually they're called some variant of 'solar power towers'. The plants use a bunch of adjustable mirrors that focus sunlight in order to heat water and make it into steam that powers a turbine. There are also ones that use molten salts as a heating element, but that technology is a lot newer.

I'm definitely a fan of the brief 'About Moves' section they have at the bottom of the page. Too often these acquisition posts offer no details about what the app/company actually does, with the main website either not accessible through any links on the page or just gone completely.

It's analogous to the current situation with the metric and imperial unit systems - yes, it would make sense to switch away from imperial units, but it would require many people to fundamentally change how they think about distance, volume, speed, etc. (or time, in the case of the calendar).

Although in that case, we sort of have a wrapper, in that many labels list both types of units, but I tend to just look at the unit that I know, and haven't built up a correspondence between the two, so that doesn't really help adoption.

That reminds me of the book The Windup Girl - it's set in the 23rd century, and all of the natural resources we use today have been depleted, so energy storage is done by having genetically modified elephants manually wind up springs. Who knows, maybe your boss is just way ahead of his time. :D