Eve Online: The Most Thrilling Boring Game in the Universe
The massive engineering challenge of building a fusion reactor
Some strange history of the very alien Asmat people in New Guinea
Few games have such a conflicting outward image. Eve Online is famously exciting, but also notoriously dull. Eve Online will lure in players with its stories of spying, trust and betrayal, but even long-time players will say that most people tune out before they even get past the tutorial. Eve Online is the most fun you’ll ever have in a game. Eve Online will put you into a coma.
via Eve: The most thrilling boring game in the universe | Polygon.
No one knows iter’s true cost, which may be incalculable, but estimates have been rising steadily, and a conservative figure rests at twenty billion dollars—a sum that makes iter the most expensive scientific instrument on Earth. But if it is truly possible to bottle up a star, and to do so economically, the technology could solve the world’s energy problems for the next thirty million years, and help save the planet from environmental catastrophe. Hydrogen, a primordial element, is the most abundant atom in the universe, a potential fuel that poses little risk of scarcity. Eventually, physicists hope, commercial reactors modelled on iter will be built, too—generating terawatts of power with no carbon, virtually no pollution, and scant radioactive waste. The reactor would run on no more than seawater and lithium. It would never melt down. It would realize a yearning, as old as the story of Prometheus, to bring the light of the heavens to Earth, and bend it to humanity’s will. iter, in Latin, means “the way.”
Michael made a scouting trip there during a mid-May break in filming. Only in the mid-1950s had a few Dutch missionaries and government officials begun pacifying the Asmat, but even by 1961 many had never seen a Westerner, and inter-village warfare and headhunting remained common. “Now this is wild and somehow more remote country than what I have ever seen before,” Michael wrote. In many ways, the Asmat world at the time was a mirror image of every taboo of the West. In some areas, men had sex with each other. They occasionally shared wives. In bonding rituals, they sometimes drank one another’s urine. They killed their neighbors, and they hunted human heads and ate human flesh.
via What Really Happened to Michael Rockefeller | History | Smithsonian.