Your tax dollars at work

• Distinguishing Bolts from Screws, a 21-page document (in PDF format) by the US Department of Homeland Security, March 2006. Covers important supplementary criteria such as Under-head Fillets, Bearing Surfaces, Head Angularity, Shank Straightness, and Thread Concentricity. Someone should write this up as a d20 supplement.

• Do You Know Oatmeal?, US Dep’t of Agriculture, just a single page photo.

• Index of Blank Forms, Dep’t of the Army Military Publications Pamphlet 310-2. Just a cover shot.

• Psychological Aspects of Equipment Design, US Air Force, 1949. Don’t let Gary Gygax see this!

• Sprocket Man, a PDF comic book about bicycle safety from the US Consumer Product Safety Commission. Check your handlebars and put your helmet on....

• A Winning Combination: Wild Horses & Prison Inmates, from the New Mexico Bureau of Land Management. I’m seeing a new line of romance books here.

• And from the Canadian government, we have Who Are the Zombie Masters, and What Do They Want?. Calm down, cadhla, it’s actually about health care politics.

(listed on Free Government Information, discovered via Kevin Huizenga)

Spore on DS and Wii!

I’ve been saying for a while now that I wouldn’t feel a need for an Intel Mac till Will Wright’s Spore came out next year, figuring that it would be a desktop computer game. Turns out I won’t need one even then: Versions of Spore will be coming out for the Nintendo DS (confirmed) and Wii (maybe), the first of which I’ve already got and the second I’m planning to buy.

And Wright’s supposedly been talking about having the DS work with the Wii over WiFi for Spore.