NOW IT'S ALL BANKS AND STARBUCKS

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Medium

"SimCity," the classic PC game that makes mayors out of middle schoolers, turned 25 last week. Well, actually that’s a common misconception  —  the IBM version of "SimCity" was released in October of ‘89, but the original came out in February. I found this out from Will Wright, the game design guru behind "SimCity" and the genre of games it spawned, whose mental history of the legendary game is far more accurate than the Internet’s. “I think everybody just puts too much trust in Wikipedia,” he said.

UNRAVELLING A MODERN LABOR MYSTERY

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Digg Video

​Mark Zuckerberg. Bill Gates. Steve Jobs. Most of the big names in technology are men. But a lot of computing pioneers, the ones who programmed the first digital computers, were women. And for decades, the number of women in computer science was growing. But in 1984, something changed. The number of women in computer science flattened, and then plunged.

WHAT'S THE DEAL WITH AIRPLANE FOOD?

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Phenomena

Your genome is the same right now as it was yesterday, last week, last year, or the day you were born. But your microbiomes — the combined genes of all the trillions of microbes that share your body — have shifted since the sun came up this morning. And they will change again before the next sunrise.

WHAT YOUR DOCTOR LOOKS AT WHILE YOU WAIT

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The Awl

What Figure 1 does is take conversations that doctors or students might have had in private — over email, over coffee, at the golf course, after class — and puts them in a semi-public place. They are therefore conducted with professional familiarity verging on casualness. They read like I imagine actual doctors talk, when they're looking at something weird or novel or horrible or confounding or even funny.

THE HUMOUROUS LOGICK OF JAVA-SCRIPTE

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Quartz

"While it’s easy to dismiss coding as rote exercise — a matter of following rules — it’s worth remembering that natural language is subject to rules of its own: grammar, syntax, spelling. [...] With that in mind, I wanted to apply the quirks and transgressions of the great authors to JavaScript, to see where that pushed the language."

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