That’s right, my foul-mouthed podcast with John Welch and Darby Lines hit a milestone this week with our 200th episode. Special guest included author, programmer and speaker Dori Smith.

Topics include Shandroidfreude, more smartwatch unicorn chasing, and farewell (again) to Fake Steve Jobs.

MG Siegler:

I can’t help but get the feeling that the ramifications of Google killing off Reader are going to be far more wide-reaching than they may appear at first glance.

RSS is important to many sites and people in a variety of ways. MG looks at it from TechCrunch’s point of view and from his own site.

Definitely cool, but I wonder how they sound.

FedEx:

On March 25, 2013 the Toronto Zoo welcomes two giant pandas. This will be the first time since 1985 that pandas have visited the Toronto Zoo.They will spend five years in the Toronto Zoo before residing in the Calgary Zoo for an additional five years.

You really can ship anything via FedEx. And, unlike those of us forced to ride in coach on most airlines, the pandas will have In-flight catering that will include 220lbs of bamboo, 330lbs of bamboo shoots, 110lbs of apples and 33lbs of fresh water.

New York Times:

Last week, scientists sequenced the genome of cells taken without consent from a woman named Henrietta Lacks. She was a black tobacco farmer and mother of five, and though she died in 1951, her cells, code-named HeLa, live on. They were used to help develop our most important vaccines and cancer medications, in vitro fertilization, gene mapping, cloning. Now they may finally help create laws to protect her family’s privacy — and yours.

I read the original book, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” (Amazon referral) and it tells a fascinating story of medicine and ethics.

BBC Radio 4:

Every Friday we bring you a new drama from Radio 4 or Radio 3. This week begins Neil Gaiman’s classic, “Neverwhere”, voiced by X-Men’s James McAvoy, Game of Thrones’ Natalie Dormer and soon to be Star Trek bad guy and present BBC Sherlock Holmes, Benedict Cumberbatch.

The first episode is available for download from the iTunes Store and other episodes are streamed from the BBC’s web site.

Ben Brooks explains how he kicked Google to the curb.

It makes my stomach queazy just looking at these pics.

Feral Interactive says its Mac conversion of XCOM: Enemy Unknown – Elite Edition will be out on April 25, 2013. It’ll be available for download from the Mac App Store and other services including Feral’s own online store.

XCOM was originally developed by Firaxis Games and published for the PC by 2K Games; an iPad version is in the works too (though Feral isn’t involved in that one). It’s a turn-based tactical role=playing strategy game that’s a “reimagining” of the classic 90’s game X-COM: UFO Defense.

As the Elite Edition, this release includes the Slingshot and Elite Soldier Pack add-on content, as well as the Second Wave update.

“We wanted to have the capability to start doing some smaller, more experimental games,” said Pardo. “At Blizzard, each team has gotten bigger and bigger, and our dev cycles have gotten longer and longer, and the industry moves much faster than that. Even though we still are going to keep doing large games because that’s what we’re great at, we still wanted to build some new capability and experiment with some games that might turn into the next big thing.”

Hearthstone is a collectible card game that will appear on Mac and PC, and then on iPad, and it’ll be free to play, with additional content available either by earning it in-game or purchasing it. It’s the first brand-new property for Blizzard in quite some time, and quite a departure.

Blizzard’s chief creative officer Rob Pardo talks about the small team that’s working on the game, and how its development made Blizzard look very differently at creating a new property.

Want great press for your startup, app or company? EZPR specializes in getting great stories written about what you’re working on. Call 646-569-9027 or email Ed Zitron to get started.

‘In theory the local police station would contact me and ask for Cameron to come in to be interviewed.

‘I could make it difficult of course and refuse to bring him in and they would have to come and arrest him.

‘Really I just want to embarrass Apple as much as possible. Morally, I just don’t understand where Apple gets off charging for a child’s game.’

So the father reported the kid to the cops. This isn’t Apple’s problem, it’s the father’s problem. Deal with it and stop blaming other people.

If you only read one gaming statistic this week, let it be this one: In a pre-conference survey, GDC 2013′s organizers found that 58 percent of gaming professionals attending either last year’s conference or this one plan to release their next game on smartphones or tablets. That’s a tad greater than commitments to the Xbox 360, Microsoft’s next console, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Wii U and Wii, which combined garnered “next game” pledges from 56.5 percent of developers.

It will certainly be interesting to see how this week plays out.

First we’ll look at the relative popularity of different chords based on the frequency that they appear in the chord progressions of popular music. Then we’ll begin to look at the relationship that different chords have with one another. For example, if a chord is found in a song, what can we say about the probability for what the next chord will be that comes after it?

This is a three part series and is very interesting. I can’t imagine what must have gone into analyzing so many songs.

This was fascinating. Simon Thomas did a nice job with this article.

It’s great to see how businesses are using the iPad to make things better for its customers. I can’t see many iPads sticking around a restaurant in North America though.

What we can say, however, is that the sentiment and stock action related to Apple offer a perfect study in how conjecture and misunderstanding can trump actual knowledge when it comes to evaluating a company. When the company is as much the focus of worldwide attention and as uncommunicative about its own plans as Apple, the effect is even sharper.

Michael Hiltzick scores a bullseye here as he dissects the conflation of “myth-making” with actual news reporting on Apple and some fundamental misunderstandings of Apple’s clientele compared to Samsung’s and Google’s.

Horace Dediu is getting set to publish a report on iTunes and how the business is doing. He put together an excerpt on his site.

New York Times:

Even as data moves to computers and the cloud, staplers continue to help people keep it together. On the computer, we can file copies in folders and send messages to mailboxes. We can cut, copy and paste text and files. But which computer activity is similar to stapling? Sure, there’s the paper-clip icon that attaches documents to e-mail. But nothing, really, comes close to the satisfying ka-chunk of a stapler: it’s a sound that means work is getting done.

More than you ever thought you could know about the lowly but oddly treasured office stapler.

Wired:

Do you like Android? You should, it’s amazing. iOS? Wow, what a great platform, no wonder it started a revolution. Windows Phone? Seriously, it’s got a remarkable and beautiful interface. BlackBerry? There are plenty of great reasons people love it. And no matter which platform you adore, it’s shockingly possible to both have a preference and respect that other people may prefer an entirely different device. I know. Totally weird. But true.

Nobody cares what kind of smartphone you believe in. It’s not a religion. It’s not your local sports team even. Stop being a soldier. You are not a soldier. You are just wrong. Shut up.

The “Smartphone Wars” reminds us “old timers” of the Mac vs PC wars. And it’s just as pointless.

Poynter:

“Let Me Tweet That For You” is pretty simple — you type in a Twitter username and a message, and it generates a realistic-looking image of a tweet from that person. It even adds fake retweet and favorite counts to lend some more credibility.

That should be a bit scary for journalists and anyone else concerned about potential hoaxes. Of course, it would be pretty easy to debunk one of these fake tweets if you just visit the person’s actual Twitter profile to see if the tweet really exists.

But what if it’s passed off as screenshot evidence of an allegedly deleted tweet?

Poynter says it raises concerns for journalists but it should raise flags for all of us who use Twitter and social media. Such as this fake Tweet:

USA Today:

Two giant rocket engines that launched U.S. astronauts to the moon four decades ago have been recovered from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean off Cape Canaveral by an expedition paid for by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

The F-1 engines, which powered the first-stage Saturn V boosters that fell back to Earth after their fuel was depleted, were found at a depth of 14,000 feet, Bezos’ expedition announced Wednesday.

Remarkable use of private funds to do public good.

Jake Savin:

Software should empower you, not distract you. It’s a tool, and like any good tool it should feel like a part of you. Once you know how to use it, the software itself should fade into your subconscious.

Jake makes some good points.

I observed design students who were acting mindlessly, simply doing their assignments as presented. No creativity, no imagination, no questioning. That’s not what design thinking is about. As a result, I have changed my mind: Design Thinking really is special. Alas, it isn’t embraced by all designers, but where it exists, it is powerful.

The two-year-old startup has developed ways for mobile apps to detect a phone user’s location in a building using Wi-Fi signals. It has been offering the technology to application developers for indoor mapping and new types of retail and social networking apps. The company has a handful of employees, and its co-founders include former Google software engineering intern Joseph Huang.

Timothy Pereira does a nice job of cutting through a lot of the Wall Street garbage that we’ve been getting lately.

The only changes players should expect in the iOS game is fewer maps; a result of file size limitations on the iPad, and a revised user interface that makes sense on the iPad. Even with the reduction of map numbers, Solomon says there will still be more maps than what a player would experience in a single playthrough of the game’s PC and console versions.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown is a turn-based tactical role playing strategy game developed by Firaxis. It’s based on and inspired by the 1990’s classic UFO: Enemy Unknown (also called XCOM: UFO Defense). A Mac version is in the works, as well (coming from Feral Interactive this spring).

Charles Arthur takes a look at 39 shuttered Google products.

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