Another round of the semi-annual link clearance.

• A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages
• If real life operated like MMORPGs.
• Not fooling anybody.
• Walt Mosspuppet has a blog!
• No, there is an elephant in the way.
• A hidden hole-in-the-wall restaurant in downtown Seattle.
• Teller (of Penn and Teller) co-authors a paper on the neuroscience of magic. Video.
• “Please, this is science. I’m trying to do science here. It’s very hard.” Zoologist Mike Dickison draws upon his PhD in large flightless birds to research and present Paedomorphic flightlessness and taxonomic affinities of an enormous Recent bird.
• Jay Pavlina, the developer of the video game Super Mario Bros. Crossover, plays his own game (Part 2). The language is NSFW, but that’s what makes it funny.
• More photos of cities at night, this time New York City and Las Vegas.
• Watch the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. They even recorded the rehearsals. Spoiler: It ended in a tie.
• When was the last time you said, “You’re welcome”?
• Sarcastic Gamer parodies the Microsoft Future Vision video. “Kind of like an iPhone, but with an extra piece that you can lose sometimes.” Bonus video: Drunk Gamers presents The Mac Gamer.
• My fascination with the phenomenon of hoarding continues with this interview with the authors of Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things.
• Foreign-language Microsoft marketing video: I don’t understand French, but it appears to me that the gist of the campaign is “use Windows Live Messenger and girls will pillow-fight in their underwear.” (Previous featured foreign-language Microsoft marketing video, for which I was completely unable to come up with a marketing message.)
• The NT Debugging blog would like me to direct your attention to two open positions for people who aren’t afraid of thinking on their feet and debugging complex problems. And not just any old complex problems, but often complex problems with high visibility. I would link to them more, but then I’d just link to pretty much everything they wrote…
• The Microsoft Incentives site aggregates the various discounts and purchase incentives being offered by Microsoft. It primarily targets organizational purchases, but there’s some consumer stuff buried in there.

And, as always, the obligatory plug for my column in TechNet Magazine:

• What Happened to the File Types Dialog? I found it interesting that Nick laments the loss of a dialog box that didn’t even work, not even at the time it was introduced in Windows 95!
• Evolution of the File Property Timestamp.
• A Look at the Evolution of Shut Down on the Start Menu.
• A Trip Down Memory Lane with EmulateHeap.
• The Third Rail of Keyboard Shortcuts.
• What happened to the Fast Items on my Start menu?

Starting in June 2010, TechNet Magazine publishes each issue in two stages, and my column appears in the second half of the month, so don’t freak out when you don’t see it when a new issue first comes out.