links for 2008-07-30

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Temporally Controlled Modulation of Antihydrogen Production and the Temperature Scaling of Antiproton-Positron Recombination "Our observations have established a pulsed source of atomic antimatter, with a rise time of about 1 s, and a pulse length ranging from 3 to 100 s. " (tags: physics science…
The Final Frontier: The Science of Star Trek: Scientific American "To get a sense of how much actual science has made its way into the science fiction universe of Star Trek, ScientificAmerican.com spoke to Lawrence Krauss, author of The Physics of Star Trek, the first edition of which appeared on…
birds are gross - rosemary mosco The awesome turkey vulture. (tags: comics biology science silly) nanoscale views: Combined single-molecule electronics and optics "The two-sentence summary: we can do simultaneous electronic and optical measurements on single molecules (!) by using our…
A Tribute to Paul Newman | Popdose "What the world will miss most about Paul Newman isn't his artistry as an actor and a director, both of stage and film, but it is his kindness and all-around stature as a good man." (tags: movies society culture) Study of Standardized Admissions Tests Is Big…

Does it strike you that EA Games (who developed the 'legitimate' version of Scrabble for Facebook) dropped the ball?

I wonder how much they spent writing, testing, and debugging the one they had. I bet it was more than it would have cost them simply to buy Scrabulous itself and adapt it. Certainly cost more in time.

If they'd just bought Scrabulous and tweaked it a bit to make it legitimate (rename it, add some branding, whatever), everyone might have won - users, EA, the Scrabulous developers, Hasbro.

As it is, only the lawyers are happy. They get paid, no matter how much goodwill is lost to their clients.

Maybe buying Scrabulous wasn't possible; maybe they tried - I have no idea. Still...

Thanks, Chad. I've been lamenting the demise of Medium-Large for months now, so I hadn't been checking. One of my favorites: "Things That Confuse Sean Hannity."