Watercolor Maps

The Stamen Design team has long been one of my favorites, and I think these embeddable watercolor maps are great:
http://maps.stamen.com/#watercolor/6/46.512/-83.221

Takeaways from Games, Learning, & Society 8.0

A couple weeks ago I headed to the Games, Learning, and Society conference held every year in Madison, Wisconsin.  Here are some of the things I took away from the conference and think others might be interested in:

• Kodu Game Lab: Build your own 3D games and learn how to think like a programmer using this tool (PC download or on Xbox 360).

• Studio K curriculum:  Use Kodu in your classroom or at an after-school program, using this curriculum, being developed at UW-Madison.

• ARIS games: Create your own location-based games for mobile platforms using this tool, developed by David Gagnon and others in Madison.

• Newton's playground:  Solve challenges that require creativity and the use of simple machines to move a ball around obstacles from point x to point y.  Being developed by Yoon Jeon Kim and others.

It was fun to be at the conference, surrounded by so many creative people.  I came away from it wanting to download Kodu and start building games or applications for ARIS.  After downloading Kodu (free) and tinkering for a while, I think it's a great visual programming environment and way for people to get started making games and thinking like a programmer.

Other highlights included being in sessions and hearing from James Paul Gee, talking with people working on YouSTEM projects in Illinois, hearing from Ben Shapiro about other games being developed in Madison including Progenitor X, and being inspired to come home after the conference and start making things.

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the elusive, un-Googleable podcast

Have you ever had moments of frustration when there was something you were trying to find and you just couldn't find it, even with the aid of Google?

I've been having one of those moments for the past week or so, but I'm thinking someone might be able to help.

I'm trying to find a podcast I listened to sometime in the last 6 months or so...  It was a story about a man who discovered his love of impersonating other people.  He introduced himself at a party once as a political figure (I think), posed as a doctor in a town, even met his wife while impersonating someone (soon revealing his cover, which made her like him even more).  He would get caught often, jailed for some time, then would be released and would go assume a different identity.

I remember one anecdote in particular where it was revealed that he had been impersonating a doctor, but when he was caught, the townspeople defended him because he had done such a great job curing them of all of his ailments.

It is so frustrating to not be able to find this (audio) podcast.  So far none of my keyword searches have yielded the results.

UPDATE 1: after a week of searching, I finally just found the episode while typing this post:  The Memory Palace -- episode on Ethan Weinberg:  http://transom.org/?p=16011

What amazes me is that it was only by typing out my description of the episode that I was able to finally find what I was looking for.  It's not that often that it's so difficult to find something online, but when it was just a memory of a story without any unique keywords, I couldn't find it.  But now that I've found it, I thought I'd still share.

UPDATE 2 (7/12/12):  It's happened again.  I'm trying to find a podcast I remember in which Robert Krulwich (of WNYC Radiolab) talks about how he was amazed by how a kid erupted into singing a Bach or Mozart piece after [scoring a goal in soccer]?