Items of Interest

Book Review: Gaeilge: A Radical Revolution - Caoimhín De Barra

This week I finished reading Gaeilge: A Radical Revolution by Caoimhín De Barra. The book does an excellent job at describing the many facets of the relationship between Ireland and the Irish language, from ancient history to modern day. De Barra debunks all of the automated responses most of us Irish have inherited about Gaeilge, such as "It's the way it is taught" and "You'd be better off learning Mandarin".

The Mysterious Uncrackable Video Game

On their quest to unearth lost video game coding secrets, researchers John Aycock and Tara Copplestone of the Universities of Calgary and York stumbled accross a piece of code from the 1982 Atari 2600 game Entombed which they could not reverse engineer. The video game archaeologists contacted employees involved in developing the game, and they too recalled not being able to decipher the logic behind a particular data table which was used to generative valid maze structures within the game.

How A Drunkard Was Cured

Duchas.ie is a project that digitises the National Folklore Collection of Ireland. While browsing the site for my home town of Glounthaune in Cork, I came across some fantastic stories and tales from 1938 captured in the Schools collection. One particular story was about a drunk man who used to return home from the pub on his donkey and cart once a week. On one particular occassion, the man fell asleep mid-trip and the donkey brought him back to his house. Some local boys found him and decided to play a prank on the man.

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