I’ve agreed to do a review of the Hasbro Interactive Diplomacy game for the Diplomatic Pouch, the webzine for the internet Diplomacy community. First impressions: looks good, great for learning the game, doesn’t come near matching having seven human players sitting around a table.

SPRIL News is the official newsletter of the Subatomic Particle Rights League. This was published in print form by Tom Jones primarily at New Mexico Tech, and consisted mostly of “psuedo-scientific satire”. After Tom left Tech, a few issues were published on-line, including a selection of Dr. Staff’s Greatest Hits. Dr. Staff is/was a scientific genius who taught about a third of all classes offered at Tech (that is, if you went by each semester’s course catalog) who took the time to answer reader’s questions. Tom also served as student body president and editor of the official school newspaper, Paydirt. He brought a new new era of quality to the paper, but having a satirist n charge of the official news brought forth some very interesting issues.

I can’t say enough good things about Mike’s Weblog. The content this last week has been beyond compare, and includes a few places he just beat me to.

French geophysicists have proposed the theory that gravitational tugs by the sun and moon have caused mass volcanism at key times in Earth’s past, the most recent responsible for the rise of the dinosaurs. This article, from the BBC, doesn’t get into any of the details, like why it’s only happened a few times. I need to see the original research I guess to understand this.

Resistance, nothing. I found Diplomacy (see below) on sale, and have already bought it. At first glance it looks real good, but I’ll let you know more as Iplay it.

You Are Where You Live shows off the power of gathering demographics. Type in your zip code and get told what kind of people live there. Where I grew up: “Shotguns & Pickups” and “Back Country Folks”. Yeah, that’s true. Where I live now: “Towns & Gowns” and “Southside City”. If you’re a travelling salesman, you gotta know the territory, and this’ll get you almost all of the way there. (fromRobot Wisdom)

The Forum Romanum is your portal to all things of the Roman Empire. Among the many goodies here is the full text of the ancient cookbook De Re Coquinaria by Caelius Apicius. If your Latin’s not so good but you still want to have an authentic toga party, English translations of many of the dishes can be found here.

The Galileo spacecraft is scheduled to begin today what’s described as a daring low-altitude flyby of Jupiter’s moon Io. The craft will pass within 186 miles of Io’s surface (closer to the surface than the International Space Station is to Earth’s), passing over the moon’s south pole. Closest approach will be tomorrow evening. On its way, it will pass by the moon Callisto tonight and the scientificly-popular Europa tomorrow morning.

Where have I been? Habro Interactive has released Diplomacy for the Mac & PC. Avalon Hill had a version in the 80’s that was very poor, even for then, and that’s all there’s ever been available commercially. This game looks fantastic, and includes full AI players (that you can negotiate with) and multi-player capabilities. It even accepts input from (and output to!) the various Diplomacy Adjudicators out there. One of the giants in the email diplomacy community, Marcus Hand, published a sneak peek into the game earlier this year. At $50, it may be more than December’s budget will allow me, but I don’t know how I can resist buying this game.

Kevin Smith, director of Dogma , protested his own film in his hometown of Eatontown, N.J. I sure do like that guy.