Architecture student Vincent Ocasla decided that Sim City could be a platform for intense experimentation in regimentation, control, and efficiency. This is in contrast to what most of us do in the game -- make a city of our dreams, or at least struggle to. Instead, Ocasla made a city of nightmarish efficiency, taking four calendar years to complete. (He actually made several cities in sequence, refining his urban planning process, until he arrived at Magnasanti, the "ultimate city.") Viceland Games... READ ON

My friend and co-blogger here on the _floss, Rob Lammle, had an awesome post a few weeks back: How to Tweet Your Way Out of a Job. While I wasn't able to find quite as many people who tweeted their way INTO a job, there's at least one in the list below, and a bunch of other cool people who used the Web to their advantage in unusual ways. By all means, if you have a similar story, something personal, share it with us in the comments below. 1. Eugene... READ ON

Claude Shannon is famous among geeks; he's considered the "father of information theory." He built one of the earliest chess-playing computer programs, and he worked on early wearable computers, and he made a killing applying his research to gambling. But Shannon was also a bit of a joker; he invented something called the "Ultimate Machine," a machine whose sole purpose was to turn off a switch that had been turned on by its user. Sneaky little bastard. Wikipedia says: One of [Shannon's] more... READ ON

Ivan Sutherland created a computer program called Sketchpad in the early 1960's as his PhD thesis. These were the days of punch-card programming, which meant that making a complex interactive program was extremely challenging -- particularly if it needed to use an interactive Graphical User Interface, which was unheard of at the time. But that's what Sutherland did -- Sketchpad was an interactive drawing program in which the user drew with a light-pen while pressing switches alongside the screen.... READ ON