The Most-Loved Car, Bikini Baristas Put On Notice, and Some Bitch-Slapping

1. What car delivered the most satisfaction this year? Probably a Lexus, or a Prius, right? The answer may surprise you.

2. Snohomish County, just north of Seattle, takes aim at the latest menace to society: bikini baristas.

3. Papa John’s, which is donating all profits from pizzas sold yesterday and today to the families of the four police officers who were gunned down near Tacoma last month, is so overwhelmed with business that all but three of its 20 Seattle-area stores have stopped taking orders. I love the community response, but this left us scrambling for other dinner plans.

4. Perez Hilton gets bitch-slapped.

5. Speaking of bitch-slapping, have you been weighing the Barnes & Noble Nook versus Amazon’s Kindle? The New York Times’ tech maven David Pogue opines: “Every one of the Nook’s vaunted distinctions comes fraught with buzz kill footnotes.”

UPDATE: Other reviewers pile on:

Here’s The Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg: “My recommendation on the Nook is to wait, even if you prefer its features to the Kindle’s. It’s not fully baked yet.”

Here’s the AP: “I’ve been trying Barnes & Noble Inc.’s $259 Nook for a few days, and I’m not eager to prolong the acquaintance.”

The “Incest Map” and Other Interesting Things

1. The Seattle Times brings us a hefty PDF (12MB) of the “Incest Map”, a diagram showing the relations between scores of Seattle bands.

2. It’s official: Dead Space 2! The original was one of my favorite games of 2008.

3. Also from The Seattle Times, the infuriating story of how the IRS spent tens of thousands of dollars to audit an impoverished single mother of two in order to squeeze her for $1,400 in (questionable) unpaid taxes:

4. The Federal Trade Commission has issued its annual report on Marketing Violent Entertainment to Children:

“The Commission finds that the video game industry has made great strides in restricting the marketing of violent M-rated games to children. Although there remains room for improvement – particularly in the area of Internet advertising – the video game industry outpaces the movie and music industries in the three key areas that the Commission has been studying for the past decade.” (Hat tip to Dubious Quality)

5. Finally, here’s today’s examination of the Amazon Top 100 sellers in video games. Yet again, New Super Mario Bros. Wii took the top spot. Wii titles accounted for 34 spots on the list, up from 30 for most of last week. Xbox 360 had 11 titles while the PlayStation 3 had just seven. Interestingly, of the Wii games, eight of them, or nearly one-quarter, were music or rhythm games.

As for the hardware, the Wii was still the top-seller, coming in at No. 2, while the low-end PS3 was No. 18. However, the Xbox 360 Elite bundle saw a big jump, to No. 30, while the Modern Warfare 2-themed ”Super Elite” system was No. 84. At No. 91 was the 250-gigabyte PS3.

Xbox 360 Returns to Amazon Top 100

Yesterday I was surprised to see that the Top 100 items on Amazon’s video-game store did not include any model of the Xbox 360 console. Today, Microsoft’s gaming machine makes not one, but two appearances. The top game is still New Super Mario Bros. Wii, with the Wii console holding it’s sales position at No. 2. The lower-end model of the PlayStation 3 moved up a few slots to No. 14, though the higher-end version with a 250GB hard-drive fell a few to No. 85. At No. 90 is the Xbox 360 Elite bundle, and the Modern Warfare 2 “Super Elite” bundle registers at No. 95. Wii games dominated the list with 30, followed by PS3 titles with 11 and then Xbox 360 with nine.

Lego Matrix, and Other Cool Things

1. Fascinating story from Reuters about the rise of high-speed stock trading, where success is measured in nanoseconds and profit is accumulated one-tenth of a penny at a time.

Lotus Capital Management LP of New York earlier this year realized that a competitor was beating it to a trade it had programed by exactly 3 microseconds, day after day. The loss meant Lotus was forfeiting about $1,000 in daily revenue on that particular trading strategy.

Lotus, a quantitative trading firm that uses high-frequency strategies, invested and tinkered, eventually shaving five microseconds from the router and two microseconds from the execution server.

 This is quite long and detailed for Reuters, which typically caps features at 800-1,000 words.

2. I’ve been checking the Top 100 best-selling video-game items on Amazon. This morning, the top game was New Super Mario Bros. for Wii, while the top console was the Wii, occupying the No. 2 slot. The PlayStation 3 appeared at No. 19 (120 GB model) and No. 72 (250 GB model). The Xbox 360 was not on the list. The list featured 30 Wii games, 15 PS3 games and 12 Xbox 360 games.

3. More on space travel from from Charles Stross and why the word “starship” is misleading.

Such an interstellar capability isn’t going to look much like a “ship”. It’s going to look more like a DVD balanced on a microwave beam, or a can of beans hanging below a light sail energized by lasers powered by huge orbiting solar power stations. There won’t be any biological agencies aboard: just AGIs (artificial general intellgences) or something equivalent ported out of a fleshbody’s cranium. No hands, only nanotech assemblers. And after a voyage of decades or centuries it’s going to have to stop — somehow braking at the other end — then spend more decades farming rocks, slush and sunlight to build ever-bigger physical structures until it can build the equipment with which to phone home.

If anything, it’s going to resemble a seed pod for a different kind of life, and on arrival it’s going to hatch and grow into a tree, or a forest, or a manufacturing-industrial complex. Finally, long after arrival, it might have sufficient resources to divert from homeostasis and growth to construct a biosphere, open communications with home, and prepare to download digitized colonists — if the whole uploading concept doesn’t prove to be chimerical, and if there’s something to be done with the serialized primate core-dumps at the other end.

 4. Here’s the scene from “The Matrix” where Neo dodges bullets on the rooftop. Only this one’s been done in Lego.

5. On an open thread on Kotaku, commenter Danarcho voices concerns about the tight collaboration between the military and the video-game industry. I take a more sanguine view.