"Steven Strogatz, an award-winning professor, takes readers from the basics to the baffling in a 15-part series on mathematics. Beginning with a column on why numbers are helpful, he goes on to investigate topics including negative numbers, calculus and group theory, finishing with the mysteries of infinity." Lovely series of online articles at the NYT explaining maths. Lots of good stuff.

"Street Fighter is about everything games are about – all you’ve learned about positioning and strategy, every reaction tightened by every sudden twitch of your trigger fingers, every educated guess made at your opponent’s next move – all played out in a simple two-dimensional box where you test everything you’ve ever known about videogames. Street Fighter IV is the same old game of two-dimensional space control, strategy, and flat-out mind reading but it took whopping great polygons in an old-fashioned game to take a 2D fighter back to the masses." This is all true.

"To apply the same point to videogames, ‘we’ are exceptionally good at the analytic mode and extremely poor at the rhetorical persuasion. As a cohort, we’re remarkably analytical. There are not many writers, bloggers, critics, etc of videogames who are either committed to the persuasive communication of the veracity of their feelings, moods, and strange hunches about videogames, but there sure is a lot of people willing to point out the textual or dramaturgical features of XYZ latest game." This, many, many times over. It's one reason I tire of so much wordy criticism at the moment: it is exhaustive, but lacks direction. (This, for me, was the gap between my first years at university and my final year: finding the courage to make my own arguments, rather than just synthesizing everything around me).

Marvellous, touching, sad short story from Jonathan Safran Foer, about how families communicate.

The Spring/Summer 1985 Argos Catalogue, in its entirety, on Flickr. A slice of consumer history. Products, industrial design, toys, games, technology, all preserved. Hoping this doesn't get taken down.

This sounds great: Andrew Collins presenting a 30-minute documentary on a history of 3D – from perspective drawing through early stereoscopy to the present – on Radio 4 this week. Must remember to listen-again/iPlayer/huffduff/whatever it.

Christian Nutt interviews Jesse Schell Lots of really interesting stuff in here – to be returned to, I think.

Nice list of restuarants and pubs. One of my favourite things about The Trip is turning out to be the food.

"Next time somebody's trying to sell you on the awesomeness of their new data technique, ask to see a prototype. If they haven't got that far, it's snake oil." Everything in this article is, basically, true. It's a really good run-down of all the issues that emerge in the reality of dealing with data-driven products at any scale."

"I want to love books, but if the publisher treats them merely as interchangeable units, where the details don’t matter so long as the bits, the “content”, is conveyed as cheaply as possible, then we may be falling out of love." Phil buys a new volume of Pepys, finds it's now being printed on-demand, and talks a little about the perceived quality of such books. In short: if you're not expecting it, and it's a change to the usual, it makes you feel a bit like the publisher doesn't care about it.

"Boilerplate is not a framework, nor does it prescribe any philosophy of development, it's just got some tricks to get your project off the ground quickly and right-footed." Good documentation, lots of neat tricks in here, and some good jumping-off points for further research.

"I’ve been playing with glanceables and synecdoches for a while now, until I came up with something that had to be got out of my head, and into the world. So here it is: Romance has lived too long upon this river; a single-serving web page that tells you how high the tide is at London Bridge: explicitly close up, but also, roughly, at a glance". This is great. Also: James has an ear for domain names.