Virtual Ecomonies

This article in the New York Times Magazine is an interesting look into "gold farming" where players of the game World of Warcraft gather gold and other valuables in the game which are then bought by other players too impatient to earn it themselves, creating real value for virtual goods. As a result people are playing video games for a living in China. An entire industry has grown up around playing online games to harvest gold. This article discusses how this affects the gaming community at large and also describes a variety of tactics that have been employed to make a living playing video games. Interesting reading. Enjoy!

The Life of the Chinese Gold Farmer

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Here's an interesting article from Scientific American: "Can Climate Intervention Turn Down the Heat?" Some researchers from Carnegie Mellon created a climate model of Earth and observed the affects of global warming in over time. They then introduced climate intervention techniques such as satellites supporting mirrors or particles dispersed in the sky to reflect the sun's rays.
They made the assumption that whatever intervention technique was chosen the affect would be uniform across the globe. That seems like an unrealistic assumption, but without that assumption it would've been pretty hard to model, so I can understand why they did it. Anyway, read the article for their interesting results.