Web Monitor
15:17 UK time, Wednesday, 18 November 2009
A celebration of the riches of the web.
Web Monitor is taking some leave this week but for the die-hard fans, it didn't want to deprive you entirely. So, today in Web Monitor: the vegan activist, where the pinball machine went and the Star Trek cruise.
• Sarah Palin's been out promoting her book and her critics have been close to her tail. has collected her favourites. The singer, DJ and vegan Sarah Palin's reasoning behind eating meat. He says Palin's assertion (if God had not intended for us to eat animals, how come he made them out of meat?) leads him on a strange logical trail:
"The problem, of course, being that other things are also made out of meat. Like, well, people. And doggies and kitties. And cute little human babies. So if we follow your logic, Mrs Palin, you are actually suggesting that god intended for us to eat humans and dogs and cats and human babies, as these things are all technically made out of meat."
• Where did pinball machines go? Well, , the Professor of Economics at Northwestern University, has enough time on his hands to work it all out:
Pinball skill is transferrable. If you can pass, stall, nudge, and aim on one machine you can do it on any machine. This is both a blessing and a curse for pinball developers. The blessing is that pinball players were a captive market. The curse was that to keep the pinball players interested the games had to get more and more intricate and challenging.... Eventually, to keep the pinballers playing, the games became so advanced that entry-level players faced an impossible barrier. High-schoolers in 1986 were either dropouts or professionals in 1992 and without inflow of new players that year essentially marked the end of pinball."
• Travel writer the world of the Star Trek cruise. Not knowing much about Star Trek and having never been on a cruise, he is struck by a similarity when he hears about the programme's Talosians. They are described to him as observers who use people's own ideals and expectations to create seductive illusions that have no basis in reality:
"When I first hear this it sounds like a nifty little critique of consumer travel writing - but in coming days I will discover that it just as readily applies to the baffling idiosyncrasies of the leisure-cruise industry."
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