Maciej Ceglowski on the discovery, loss, and rediscovery of the cure for scurvy — fascinating story of bad science and the unintended effects of new information #

8-Bit NYC, Brett Camper's videogame map of New York — he's using Kickstarter to expand to 15 other cities worldwide #

Sleep Is Death, Jason Rohrer's new conversational two-player game — watch the slideshow for details; I just wish it was on the web instead #

Obama appoints Edward Tufte to advise on stimulus transparency — "Maybe I'll learn something." #

PS22 Chorus sings Phoenix's Lisztomania — I love how expressive they are #

Echo Nest and SCHED's guide to SXSW Music — very nicely done, uses Echo Nest's recommendation engine #

GameInformer's Portal 2 exclusive cover story — scans, since it's not on GameInformer's site yet; Valve hired the TAG: The Power of Paint team right out of Digipen #

Cal Henderson on gaming probability in World of Warcraft — he's collected 118 pets, some of which only drop 1 in 10,000 attempts #

LiveJournal rewrites outbound links with affiliate codes — looks like the regex was a bit greedy #

NYT on Chinese "human-flesh search engines" — very similar to the H+ article on the topic from last year #

YouTube launches auto-captioning for all videos — a free, automated audio transcription service based on YouTube should be viable now #

OK Go's "This Too Shall Pass" — Rube Goldberg machine built by Synn Labs in Los Angeles #

Roger Ebert starts subscription service — $4.99 for a year, goes up to $5.00 on April 1 #

Yelp's official response to the business extortion accusation — nicely lays out the case against the conspiracy theories #

Valve updates Portal with mysterious achievement and ARG trailhead — radio transmissions convert into Morse code and images pointing to a telnet BBS with ASCII screenshots #

Unit Testing Achievements — I'm still waiting for a ticket tracker with game mechanics (via) #

The Skull of Regret — even Pictures for Sad Children's guest comics are great #

NYT's auralization of crossing the Olympic finish line — hear the women's 1,000-meter speedskating gold medalist win by .02 of a second (via) #

Activision shuts down 8-year King's Quest fan project — even though Vivendi, the former IP owners, granted them a non-commercial license (via) #

Bioshock's lead level designer remakes Arcadia in Doom 2 — don't miss his companion article about Doom as Robotron #

Pictures for Sad Children, "Play Play Play" — Level End (via) #

Nieman Labs tallies original reporting vs. rewrites for the Google/China hacking story — 121 different versions of the story, but only 13 did any original reporting #

Joel Johnson's extremely painful, personal story of sexual abuse — so horrible I hesitate linking to it, but I will, if only for Google justice #

Casey Neistat's excellent short film about Chat Roulette — includes demographics, vernacular, and how men and women are treated differently #

NYT on Bloom Energy's public debut — groundbreaking fuel cell tech used by Google, eBay, others; Mashable liveblogged the launch #

Yelp accused of extortion in class-action lawsuit — I maintain that business owners are confused over both sponsorship and the algorithm; a former Yelp account exec debunks the claims #

The Effing Typeface — a NSFW font by designer Alex Merto #

YouTube removes most popular, fan-uploaded Rickroll — update: it's back, Google says it was a mistake #

Neurosonics Live — real-time holographic projection synced to turntables and drums (via) #

Andrew vs. the Collective's "Search Engine Optimization" — short fiction about an alternate-reality Internet gone amok, using words and phrases created by Kickstarter backers (via) #

Italian court finds Google Video guilty of privacy violation for uploaded video — astonishingly terrible decision, here's Google's response #

danah boyd on ChatRoulette as a throwback to the early web — I've been thinking the same thing; related: Hearts, Hugs, and Kisses on ChatRoulette #

The Spy at Harrington High — digging into the tech behind the high school webcam spying scandal #

Sushi Cat — damn you, Cal (via) #

4chan on Jeopardy — you thought Dooce's mention was surreal? now your grandma knows about /b/ #

Interview with the manager of Coney Island's Cyclone — from Last Summer at Coney Island, a documentary about Coney's revitalization #

The Gruber 10 at Macworld — thoughtful look at the top issues facing Apple, with an eye to their past (via) #

Auto-Tune the News #10 — a return to form after autotuning ads for Kotaku (great) and Sony (awful) #

Passage in 10 Seconds — from the creator of You Only Live Once; some context #

Twitter releases growth stats for first three years — 50 million tweets per day; compare to Kottke's cumulative estimates from 2007 #

Matt Haughey's updates on Mechanical Turk human spam — the numbers are relatively small compared to the amount of spam, I wonder where the rest's coming from #

Slate on the government's alcohol poisoning during Prohibition — by some estimates, over 10,000 Americans were killed drinking tainted alcohol #

Filipinos scared to sing Sinatra after "My Way" karaoke murders — superstition stemming from the song's popularity in karaoke bars (via) #

Jesse Schell's DICE talk about Facebook, reality, and the future of pervasive gaming — from the author of The Art of Game Design (via) #

CodeOrgan — listen to your favorite website, the "About" explains the methodology (via) #

Google prototypes real-time OCR and translation in Google Goggles — incredible demo, simply tying existing pieces of Google tech together #

Music Journalism Is the New Piracy — the problem isn't Google, but the DMCA and litigious media organizations #

OK Cupid covers the effects of age on dating and attractiveness — as always, some incredible dataporn mined from their community (via) #

Please Rob Me — amusing, but only dangerous if someone knows where you live #

Bunnie Huang's forensic research into irregular MicroSD cards — "Kingston is revealed as simply a vendor that re-marks other people's chips in its own packaging" (via) #