random links: june 21, 2009

Some evidence for anybody curious how well being good at Rock Band drums transfers to real drums.
The neuroscience of illusion; I’ll embed one of the videos so you can see the kind of thing they’re discussing.

(Via Kelley Eskridge.)
A pleasant network logic puzzle game. (Via User Friendly, which makes it essentially impossible to cite them correctly as a link referrer.)
Miranda asked me to buy her a copy of Bertolozzi’s Bridge Music about five seconds after the podcast started, and that was before she knew that the sounds the piece uses were actually generated by banging on the Mid-Hudson Bridge.
Little Wheel, a short adventure game. Pleasant enough, and a neat world, but there’s also some interesting design questions. In particular, should point-and-click adventure games always show you the current clickable objects in a given scene? (Via MTV Multiplayer.)
Speaking of adventure games, I will link to this Tim Schafer interview only because of the following quote:

My daughter, I think, is going to be very good at playing adventure games, even though she is only a year old. Because she’ll grab a toy and she’ll bang it on all of her other toys in the room. She’s trying every item in the room with every other item in the room to see if it does something. I was like, “You are a natural-born adventure game player.” She doesn’t steal objects and hide them somewhere on her body, though. In some secret orifice.

(Via @elenielstorm.)
And speaking of children trying things with other things, interesting testing in a sorting algorithm:

(Via @Vaguery.)
More on the theme of kids: kids and Greek rhetoric (via @Adjuster) and Mad Scientist’s Alphabet Blocks (via @garb.)
Just because I like Flanders and Swann, a lego take on The Gasman Cometh.

(Via @kateri_t.)
How culture and silos harm design. (Via @testobsessed.)
Remarkable cloud pictures. (Via @marick.)
Two TDD tweets: @KentBeck says:

francis bacon understood tdd: “truth emerges more readily from error than confusion”

and @mfeathers says:

TDD is a way of teaching software how to live at the scale of human understanding.
Will universities go the way of newspapers? (Via @marick.)
An amazing optical illusion.

(Via @SimonParkin.)
I don’t normally link to ads / corporate videos, but this one is delightful. Who is this Takashi Murakami guy?

(Via @Iroqu0isP1iskin.)