This new Internet thing has really turned my fetish for delivery boxes into a real old-fashioned perversion. Every day, it becomes harder and harder to put up the flag, if you know what I mean.
Isn't it a bit silly to be arguing whether or not someone can be taken to court over stealing a neighbor's wi-fi?
If that isn't a frivolous lawsuit, I don't know what is.
It'd be much easier to charge the kid down the street $20 to set up your wifi for you, rather than bring someone to court, just because you didn't know how to set up a WPA pass-key.
I imagine most of these problems will be worked out in the coming years as wireless penetration grows and more routers come pre-equipped with automatic configuration settings.
The popularity of Barack Obama's first name is probably because of its other-ness. It's not a very common name, as opposed to John (Edward/McCain), or Ron (Paul), or whoever (AdMITTably "Mitt" (get it?) is an odd one too). Obama's whole name (don't forget "Hussein") is a subject of a lot of talk.
The popularity of Hillary Clinton's first name is a little simpler. Her campaign has actively encouraged use of her first name ("Hillary 2008"). This is certainly to differentiate her from her husband, but there are some other reasons too. There is an element of friendliness in using a first name, because using a person's first name seems much more personable (not to mention a way of expressing her femininity and differentiating herself from the traditionally male habit of identifying yourself by a family name).
Bush also engaged in a bit of this to differentiate him from his father, but probably not as much. Though honestly, I'm more familiar with the derogative uses: "W stands for Wrong" bumper stickers, etc. It's interesting to note that even though the two Bushes share a first name, this isn't so much of a problem these days (though it might have been more of a problem during his first election, I'm not sure). Finally, newspapers tend to identify public people by their last names, and since Bill Clinton has been far more active than Bush, Sr., it was probably just not as much of an issue for the papers to use "Bush."
The "magic memory number" is something like 7 +/- 2 digits. So how do you remember 11, how do you remember? How do idiot savants count cards or memorize a hundred digits of pi?
For the most part, it's called "chunking." You might remember the first three digits of a number as a single part, like an area code. Maybe through repetition or some kind of pattern, those numbers become a single encoded, sometimes even rhythmic, symbol.
The number you gave was "414354#####". That 414 is a palindrome, so maybe that gets chunked up. Maybe you see mathematical relationships between numbers. 4 + 1 + 4 = 9, and the last 5 + 4 = 9, and both of those sums of 9 are sandwiching a 3. It's nice that 3^2 is 9. Or maybe you flirt with the idea of 4-3=1, then 1+3=4. Then there's that 3 again. 4134. Or perhaps you start with 4, go down 2, up 2, up 1. Maybe you remember that your birthday party on 4/13/04 ended tragically because your 54-yr-old mother stepped on your dog, fell over, and broke her hip. I don't know.
There's a million little ways you can play number games, and most of them aren't readily understood at the conscious level. We develop feelings and associations for numbers (or words, or other symbols), and sometimes a pattern is more visible in our minds because we've seen and used it elsewhere before. Those of us with more experience simply have a larger "vocabulary" of chunks (see grandmaster chess-players), despite intelligence levels (for the most part).
Lacking the daily homogenizing input, I am kind of awkward in conversation with strangers or casual acquaintances. I don't know any of the little catch phrases from the sitcoms, or what any of the sports teams are doing. It would do my social life a lot of good if I watched TV, but I just can't hack it. If you find your social life suffering because you don't know current sitcom/sports trends, then I believe you have one of two options:
1. Read more books and news. Instead of "How 'bout those Yankees?", you can ask "How 'bout that Iraq?" Instead of "Did you see last night when...?", you can ask "Did you know that I want to make sweet love to a robot?"
2. If that doesn't work, keep nodding your head and saying "ah." Make new friends on the Internet ASAP.
Elitist? Yes, without a doubt. But really, people who read a lot (books, news, blogs, Slashdot, etc.) are on the whole a lot more interesting people to talk to. If you think that your social life is improved by chatting about sports scores and the last episode of Survivor, then by all means, immerse yourself in it.
But if you really want to impress people, you have to project an air of intelligence and good humor while at the same time remaining modest and inclusive.
If they're captivated by sitcoms, it's doubtful they are going to have much to contribute. Oh, your endless well of pessimism delights me.
It is perfectly reasonable to argue with facts, and once you've arrived at a conclusion, you should be be on the look-out for alternatives.
Take the fact that there are proportionally more black prisoners in this country than white prisoners.
Some people take the easy explanation and claim that black people just commit more crimes. They're genetically or culturally inferior in some way. That wraps it up.
Others are more willing to look at larger cultural effects at work, or maybe they try figure out what's going on in these guys' minds. Either way, I think we can find more reasonable explanations when we take more than a simple set of statistics into the grand equation.
So... he's saying that blatant stereotypes are okay, as long as they are not of black people? Am I missing something? Yes. He's saying that most of us recognize that the idea of the "Italian gangster" is built upon layers and layers of shared cultural fiction. We go see movies about the Mob because our culture likes some of the themes that dwell under the surface--living the independently wealthy life, creating passionate alliances and rivalries, doling out vigilante justice ("Hey, nobody backstabs Tony and gets away wit' it!"), and so on.
Most people recognize that the "Italian gangster" is mostly a fiction. We aren't afraid of getting hit by the Mob. Having a big, greasy-haired guy come up to our business demanding "protection money" is just laughable. Even old Bugs Bunny cartoons parodied the hell out of the Mob. It's become a sort of "cultural joke." Given that Italian-Americans are now pretty well-integrated in America (though it certainly wasn't the case at first), all the way to the upper echelons of business and government, even they aren't threatened by these silly caricatures. Most Italians I know love Mob flicks.
We see the stereotype for what it is, and the GTA series does a wonderful job at parodying and satirizing concepts like the "Italian gangster."
However, I do not believe that the majority of Americans are able to clearly differentiate reality and fiction when it comes to the portrayal of African-Americans. Our characterization of the African-American is so inextricably tied to ideas like crime, poverty, violence, saying naughty words, and so on, that we have a difficult time seeing parody when it's staring at us in the face.
The interviewee thinks that "San Andreas gets scary because it's basically what people think black people are." While whites might laugh off the "Italian ganster," many of us whites are positively terrified of black men. He fears that we won't get the jokes, since our prejudices tell us that the jokes are funny because "that's how black people act, lol!", rather than the jokes being funny because they're overblown stereotypes of how we white people think black people act. So essentially, many of the jokes are at the white audience's expense, when you think about it.
Take the scene where CJ and the gang narrowly survive a Ballaz drive-by and are forced to escape. While you're driving, two of the characters use their uzis to defend the car. The last character, Big Smoke, won't fight until he finishes his fast food meal, and he spends the entire time in the back seat, bitching about his food. The scene pits two black stereotypes against one another--random drive-bys and large consumption of fast food--and forces you to escape while listening to this inane, absurd argument about whether Big Smoke should eat or shoot. I about died from laughter. (Link here if you're curious) Why is this funny? To me, it's funny because I'm forced into thinking about this competition between two ridiculous cultural stereotypes, both of which are paraded around through some parts of our country as spoken-under-your-breath truths: Black people love killing each other. Black people also love fried chicken. The question the scene raises is, which do black people like more: killing or eating? The very idea of asking such a bigoted question is repulsive to most of us, yet we laugh despite ourselves.
I loved GTA: San Andreas. I am sad that the original interviewee never completed the game, because I thought it was certainly the strongest title in the series. I will admit that the preview trailers and first hour of the game discouraged me from playing, because I was worried that Rockstar was undercutting themselves by relying too much on modern-day blaxploitation to encourage new audiences. Maybe they were, in some ways, but overall I felt that San Andreas had the most interesting and likable characters of the series, by far.
You seem to have dismissed the entire art of literature in one fell swoop. I find it somewhat condescending to only appreciate a great writer such as Clarke (or anyone else) insofar as they act as cheerleaders for other professions or ideals.
That said, I do share your opinion in part, and I don't want to sound like I'm flaming. I do think that his stories, and the field of science-fiction in general, has not only inspired budding scientists and engineers, but also ordinary people to develop an interest in the role of science in our society, as well as its prominent role in humanity's future.
That is one way of appreciating Clarke's writings. It can also be appreciated for its historical significance, having been written in an era of unprecedented American optimism. Just a year after both the book and movie were written, the Americans landed on the moon, after all! The stories' popularity can also be seen as a reflection of our self-image, value systems, or even fears through the themes and issues it raises. And if the HAL 9000 isn't an expression of our fear of technology, then I don't know what is!
(as written on Wikipedia, because I'm too lazy to do any of my own analysis, one theme that the book examines is the way that "troubles... crop up when man builds machines, the inner workings of which he does not fully comprehend and therefore cannot fully control"--sounds like my mother trying to work her DVD player, but I digress)
Once again, I'm not trying to criticize your feelings, but I merely wish to nitpick and point out to others that it is possible to appreciate authors and the works they create in more ways than a pragmatic, utilitarian, "what have they done to improve our world" sense of appreciation. Literature is more than just a tool...
I used to believe that my single vote couldn't possibly make a difference. Yet every couple months, I still hauled my ass over to the voting booths to vote on local issues, local representation, and a national leader, purely out of an interest in current events, rather than out of a desire to change how things worked or to right a wrong.
Every year, I would vote for the local school district levy, and every year it would fail. Ever since I first entered high school, I recognized how poorly the local public schools were doing: the books were falling apart, teachers were being laid off, extracurricular activities were being canceled, less teachers for classes meant more useless study hall periods, etc. For over ten years, the levies consistently failed, so the school failed to receive funding to support many of its most basic services.
During my senior year, I remember my homeroom adviser telling the class how the levy failed by a margin of only ~20-30 votes (I think it was). Since we were all of voting age, she said that if a single classroom of students would have just got off their asses and voted for the levy, it would have succeeded. That's a real, quantifiable number of people who could have made a change in a sea of tens of thousands of other voters.
Then the unthinkable happened. Last year, the levy passed by a margin of three votes. It was incredible, but then they issued a recount. After the recount, it still managed to pass by a margin of only TWO votes.
Of course, there were only tens of thousands voting, rather than tens of millions. And yes, one vote didn't really matter--two did. I wasn't necessarily one of those two votes, nor possibly anyone in my family.
But that didn't stop my younger brother from marching into class the next day, staring at his history teacher from across the room, and boldly proclaiming, "You have MY family to thank for your pay-raise. We accept cash only."
I remember when this game was set to be released alongside the Wii (or a few months after, I don't remember). But it kept getting pushed back further and further, until its true release date became locked in a Shrödinger box of quantum indeterminacy. Then the Duke Nukem Forever trailer came out and its waveform began to stabilize.
Then they moved it to Dec 3rd 2007, my birthday, and it soon failed to live up to even that. Nobody ever remembers my birthday. Thanks Nintendo.
Eh, now I feel kind of silly for missing the bit about "one question per post." Sorry about that. If you want, dump the other questions and just look at the first one:
1. How have various VTT programs (like OpenRPG and MapTools), as well as commercial games with customizable content (such as Neverwinter Nights and its elaborate world-creation tools), influenced the development of the online D&D tools?
Speaking of open development and community publishing, I am curious about how the online tools will support enterprising dungeon-crafters. I have contributed some code to OpenRPG, and I am an avid fan of MapTools. Both programs are currently very popular among virtual table-top (VTT) gamers, partly for their continual development, but mostly for their generous communities of gamers looking to bring their games past simple IRC chat and random dice roll commands. Here are my questions for the 4th Ed guys/gals:
How have various VTT programs (like OpenRPG and MapTools), as well as commercial games with customizable content (such as Neverwinter Nights and its elaborate world-creation tools), influenced the development of the online D&D tools?
Will there be any way to bundle together an adventure/dungeon with the online D&D tools and sell it to others? Or will there be very restrictive use when it comes to distribution of created content?
Will there be virtual expansions included with/purchased alongside adventure books? For instance, if I buy Return to Castle Ravenloft, will there be an option to load up Count Strahd's fortress with the online D&D tools too?
As far as customization goes, how much will there be? So far, I believe characters, monsters, and tile maps can be saved and exported, but what about entire campaigns? DM aides and room descriptions? Where can we get new content? Must we buy all new content, or can we rely on the community to help us model and import locales, monsters, and player models? Will the program have any 3rd-party plugin support?
If community expansion is as elaborate as I hope it will be, will there be ways to distribute and rate this content for quality? Community forums to organize games, and directories to organize user content, and so forth? Would such a service be centralized, like Steam or X-Box Live, or would it be community-controlled, as witnessed through the literal thousands of fan-sites that painstakingly categorize maps/mods/models/etc. of various computer games?
I am really excited about D&D 4th edition, because many of the previews have left me optimistic about the direction of the game's design. However, I am somewhat skeptical of their online tools, and many have ridiculed the simplistic 3D graphics shown in the presentation as simply eye-candy with no substance behind the veil. I hope the online tools are powerful enough for the creative community; otherwise, I might be sticking with the open-source VTT alternatives.
I feel that it is arrogant to dismiss certain works being lost to time with a simple "so what?" If we care about preserving our history for future generations to study (if we didn't care, this wouldn't be an issue at all), then it's important to preserve all data, or as much data as possible.
If we want an accurate picture of a person's life, then we don't ask for their resume. If we want an accurate picture of a civilization, then we don't just look at their self-appointed "greatest works." The study of history used to be simply about studying the reigns of presidents and kings, military battles, etc. However, nowadays we like to understand prevailing attitudes and opinions: the role of women in domestic life, what tools a hunter used, or what language a shopkeeper used in early newspaper advertisements. No one thought to preserve this kind of information, but anthropologists and historians are able to dig it up and analyze it through various means.
Basically, if we want to present an accurate picture of our world for future generations to understand and learn from, then selectively choosing what to preserve and what to ignore will only hamper the search for the truth. True, it would take a herculean effort to preserve EVERYTHING indefinitely... but, shit, we have consumer-grade terrabyte drives these days. Those can hold a lot of B-Movies.
(sorry for repost, but paragraphs weren't formated right)
You are committing a fallacy that many people hold about natural selection: it is not an anthropic force. Evolution has no goals, nor ambitions, nor plans. It does not "try" or "determine" or "have good reasons," but rather, its output is the result of statistical probabilities and circumstantial events.
What would survive in today's world may not have survived a hundred million years ago, or vice-versa. For instance, despite an elephant's powerful build, I doubt it could take on some of the more ferocious, carnivorous dinosaurs. Perhaps certain dinosaurs could out-compete some of today's mammalian wildlife, but due to a number of historical events (meteors, ice ages, low sperm counts, or whatever), such a competition has never come about.
Same goes for humans. Hunter-gatherer traits may have been useful at one time, but nowadays we might treat the ferocious hunter as an over-aggressive antisocialite. Having the ability to amass huge quantities of facts and figures may have been useful years ago, but with the Internet, a few simple search terms can sometimes function just as well, leaving individuals with other parts of their brain developed at a head-start. (How much your genes influence your cognitive abilities is another argument, but suffice to say, something in your DNA probably helps you out with it, or dogs could do it too).
I've gone off on a tangent, but here's my main point: to argue that nature has a "plan" for "better humans" (not precisely what the parent was arguing, but the seeds of the argument were there) is a scientifically invalid assumption. Nature, if it was to be personified, is cruel, wasteful, and myopic. Just because a couple is infertile does not mean that their offspring would somehow sully the human gene-pool. If our technology (our 'environment') can overcome some kind of genetic weakness, like the couple's infertility, so be it. It is not a problem our species has to face any longer. On a similar note, if a creature in the desert develops a genetic mutation that renders it helpless in the presence of coconut milk, then good for it. Coconuts are not a problem it would ever has to face in its environment, so it can prosper like any of its kin. Both situations are the same. Both are 'natural' (which is really a word that means very little, if you think about it).
Finally, assuming one knows what nature thinks (or what God thinks, or what the FSM thinks) is dangerous, to say the least. I could go into how Hitler believed he was acting to purify the species and all that (among other things), but suffice to say, trying to clean up the gene-pool is simply not a method that leads to rational, ethically-sound actions.
You are committing a fallacy that many people hold about natural selection: it is not an anthropic force. Evolution has no goals, nor ambitions, nor plans. It does not "try" or "determine" or "have good reasons," but rather, its output is the result of statistical probabilities and circumstantial events.
What would survive in today's world may not have survived a hundred million years ago, or vice-versa. For instance, despite an elephant's powerful build, I doubt it could take on some of the more ferocious, carnivorous dinosaurs. Perhaps certain dinosaurs could out-compete some of today's mammalian wildlife, but due to a number of historical events (meteors, ice ages, low sperm counts, or whatever), such a competition has never come about.
Same goes for humans. Hunter-gatherer traits may have been useful at one time, but nowadays we might treat the ferocious hunter as an over-aggressive antisocialite. Having the ability to amass huge quantities of facts and figures may have been useful years ago, but with the Internet, a few simple search terms can sometimes function just as well, leaving individuals with other parts of their brain developed at a head-start. (How much your genes influence your cognitive abilities is another argument, but suffice to say, something in your DNA probably helps you out with it, or dogs could do it too).
I've gone off on a tangent, but here's my main point: to argue that nature has a "plan" for "better humans" (not precisely what the parent was arguing, but the seeds of the argument were there) is a scientifically invalid assumption. Nature, if it was to be personified, is cruel, wasteful, and myopic. Just because a couple is infertile does not mean that their offspring would somehow sully the human gene-pool. If our technology (our 'environment') can overcome some kind of genetic weakness, like the couple's infertility, so be it. It is not a problem our species has to face any longer. On a similar note, if a creature in the desert develops a genetic mutation that renders it helpless in the presence of coconut milk, then good for it. Coconuts are not a problem it would ever has to face in its environment, so it can prosper like any of its kin. Both situations are the same. Both are 'natural' (which is really a word that means very little, if you think about it).
Finally, assuming one knows what nature thinks (or what God thinks, or what the FSM thinks) is dangerous, to say the least. I could go into how Hitler believed he was acting to purify the species and all that (among other things), but suffice to say, trying to clean up the gene-pool is simply not a method that leads to rational, ethically-sound actions.
Slashdot Mirror
Mailboxes. I find mailboxes sexually attractive.
This new Internet thing has really turned my fetish for delivery boxes into a real old-fashioned perversion. Every day, it becomes harder and harder to put up the flag, if you know what I mean.
I don't think you know what I mean. Nobody does.
Well, except my Facebook friends.
So you're NIFOC?
IWSN.
Don't worry, I'm KPC.
So what's everyone elseu waiting for? GYPO!
Hey, I bought BC for $10 at Microcenter!
And I also made my girlfriend buy the base game for me! How often does THAT happen?
But I also spent about $150 on subscriptions, so yeah, point taken.
Also: 25 bucks for a character transfer? I think that's the most expensive copy & paste job in history.
Isn't it a bit silly to be arguing whether or not someone can be taken to court over stealing a neighbor's wi-fi?
If that isn't a frivolous lawsuit, I don't know what is.
It'd be much easier to charge the kid down the street $20 to set up your wifi for you, rather than bring someone to court, just because you didn't know how to set up a WPA pass-key.
I imagine most of these problems will be worked out in the coming years as wireless penetration grows and more routers come pre-equipped with automatic configuration settings.
$100? Try Amazon. I'm getting it there for $57, free shipping.
The popularity of Barack Obama's first name is probably because of its other-ness. It's not a very common name, as opposed to John (Edward/McCain), or Ron (Paul), or whoever (AdMITTably "Mitt" (get it?) is an odd one too). Obama's whole name (don't forget "Hussein") is a subject of a lot of talk.
The popularity of Hillary Clinton's first name is a little simpler. Her campaign has actively encouraged use of her first name ("Hillary 2008"). This is certainly to differentiate her from her husband, but there are some other reasons too. There is an element of friendliness in using a first name, because using a person's first name seems much more personable (not to mention a way of expressing her femininity and differentiating herself from the traditionally male habit of identifying yourself by a family name).
Bush also engaged in a bit of this to differentiate him from his father, but probably not as much. Though honestly, I'm more familiar with the derogative uses: "W stands for Wrong" bumper stickers, etc. It's interesting to note that even though the two Bushes share a first name, this isn't so much of a problem these days (though it might have been more of a problem during his first election, I'm not sure). Finally, newspapers tend to identify public people by their last names, and since Bill Clinton has been far more active than Bush, Sr., it was probably just not as much of an issue for the papers to use "Bush."
Video games linked to lousy statistical methodologies.
When questioned about sketchy practices, senior researchers at Penn State replied, "Wtf noob get your own research grant lol"
The "magic memory number" is something like 7 +/- 2 digits. So how do you remember 11, how do you remember? How do idiot savants count cards or memorize a hundred digits of pi?
For the most part, it's called "chunking." You might remember the first three digits of a number as a single part, like an area code. Maybe through repetition or some kind of pattern, those numbers become a single encoded, sometimes even rhythmic, symbol.
The number you gave was "414354#####". That 414 is a palindrome, so maybe that gets chunked up. Maybe you see mathematical relationships between numbers. 4 + 1 + 4 = 9, and the last 5 + 4 = 9, and both of those sums of 9 are sandwiching a 3. It's nice that 3^2 is 9. Or maybe you flirt with the idea of 4-3=1, then 1+3=4. Then there's that 3 again. 4134. Or perhaps you start with 4, go down 2, up 2, up 1. Maybe you remember that your birthday party on 4/13/04 ended tragically because your 54-yr-old mother stepped on your dog, fell over, and broke her hip. I don't know.
There's a million little ways you can play number games, and most of them aren't readily understood at the conscious level. We develop feelings and associations for numbers (or words, or other symbols), and sometimes a pattern is more visible in our minds because we've seen and used it elsewhere before. Those of us with more experience simply have a larger "vocabulary" of chunks (see grandmaster chess-players), despite intelligence levels (for the most part).
Hey, I thought open-source was supposed to be free!
I call shenanigans!
Guess it's time to go back to my cheaper boot-legged graphics card.
1. Read more books and news. Instead of "How 'bout those Yankees?", you can ask "How 'bout that Iraq?" Instead of "Did you see last night when...?", you can ask "Did you know that I want to make sweet love to a robot?"
2. If that doesn't work, keep nodding your head and saying "ah." Make new friends on the Internet ASAP.
Elitist? Yes, without a doubt. But really, people who read a lot (books, news, blogs, Slashdot, etc.) are on the whole a lot more interesting people to talk to. If you think that your social life is improved by chatting about sports scores and the last episode of Survivor, then by all means, immerse yourself in it.
But if you really want to impress people, you have to project an air of intelligence and good humor while at the same time remaining modest and inclusive. If they're captivated by sitcoms, it's doubtful they are going to have much to contribute. Oh, your endless well of pessimism delights me.
It is perfectly reasonable to argue with facts, and once you've arrived at a conclusion, you should be be on the look-out for alternatives.
Take the fact that there are proportionally more black prisoners in this country than white prisoners.
Some people take the easy explanation and claim that black people just commit more crimes. They're genetically or culturally inferior in some way. That wraps it up.
Others are more willing to look at larger cultural effects at work, or maybe they try figure out what's going on in these guys' minds. Either way, I think we can find more reasonable explanations when we take more than a simple set of statistics into the grand equation.
Most people recognize that the "Italian gangster" is mostly a fiction. We aren't afraid of getting hit by the Mob. Having a big, greasy-haired guy come up to our business demanding "protection money" is just laughable. Even old Bugs Bunny cartoons parodied the hell out of the Mob. It's become a sort of "cultural joke." Given that Italian-Americans are now pretty well-integrated in America (though it certainly wasn't the case at first), all the way to the upper echelons of business and government, even they aren't threatened by these silly caricatures. Most Italians I know love Mob flicks.
We see the stereotype for what it is, and the GTA series does a wonderful job at parodying and satirizing concepts like the "Italian gangster."
However, I do not believe that the majority of Americans are able to clearly differentiate reality and fiction when it comes to the portrayal of African-Americans. Our characterization of the African-American is so inextricably tied to ideas like crime, poverty, violence, saying naughty words, and so on, that we have a difficult time seeing parody when it's staring at us in the face.
The interviewee thinks that "San Andreas gets scary because it's basically what people think black people are." While whites might laugh off the "Italian ganster," many of us whites are positively terrified of black men. He fears that we won't get the jokes, since our prejudices tell us that the jokes are funny because "that's how black people act, lol!", rather than the jokes being funny because they're overblown stereotypes of how we white people think black people act. So essentially, many of the jokes are at the white audience's expense, when you think about it.
Take the scene where CJ and the gang narrowly survive a Ballaz drive-by and are forced to escape. While you're driving, two of the characters use their uzis to defend the car. The last character, Big Smoke, won't fight until he finishes his fast food meal, and he spends the entire time in the back seat, bitching about his food. The scene pits two black stereotypes against one another--random drive-bys and large consumption of fast food--and forces you to escape while listening to this inane, absurd argument about whether Big Smoke should eat or shoot. I about died from laughter. (Link here if you're curious) Why is this funny? To me, it's funny because I'm forced into thinking about this competition between two ridiculous cultural stereotypes, both of which are paraded around through some parts of our country as spoken-under-your-breath truths: Black people love killing each other. Black people also love fried chicken. The question the scene raises is, which do black people like more: killing or eating? The very idea of asking such a bigoted question is repulsive to most of us, yet we laugh despite ourselves.
I loved GTA: San Andreas. I am sad that the original interviewee never completed the game, because I thought it was certainly the strongest title in the series. I will admit that the preview trailers and first hour of the game discouraged me from playing, because I was worried that Rockstar was undercutting themselves by relying too much on modern-day blaxploitation to encourage new audiences. Maybe they were, in some ways, but overall I felt that San Andreas had the most interesting and likable characters of the series, by far.
You seem to have dismissed the entire art of literature in one fell swoop. I find it somewhat condescending to only appreciate a great writer such as Clarke (or anyone else) insofar as they act as cheerleaders for other professions or ideals.
That said, I do share your opinion in part, and I don't want to sound like I'm flaming. I do think that his stories, and the field of science-fiction in general, has not only inspired budding scientists and engineers, but also ordinary people to develop an interest in the role of science in our society, as well as its prominent role in humanity's future.
That is one way of appreciating Clarke's writings. It can also be appreciated for its historical significance, having been written in an era of unprecedented American optimism. Just a year after both the book and movie were written, the Americans landed on the moon, after all! The stories' popularity can also be seen as a reflection of our self-image, value systems, or even fears through the themes and issues it raises. And if the HAL 9000 isn't an expression of our fear of technology, then I don't know what is!
(as written on Wikipedia, because I'm too lazy to do any of my own analysis, one theme that the book examines is the way that "troubles... crop up when man builds machines, the inner workings of which he does not fully comprehend and therefore cannot fully control"--sounds like my mother trying to work her DVD player, but I digress)
Once again, I'm not trying to criticize your feelings, but I merely wish to nitpick and point out to others that it is possible to appreciate authors and the works they create in more ways than a pragmatic, utilitarian, "what have they done to improve our world" sense of appreciation. Literature is more than just a tool...
I used to believe that my single vote couldn't possibly make a difference. Yet every couple months, I still hauled my ass over to the voting booths to vote on local issues, local representation, and a national leader, purely out of an interest in current events, rather than out of a desire to change how things worked or to right a wrong.
Every year, I would vote for the local school district levy, and every year it would fail. Ever since I first entered high school, I recognized how poorly the local public schools were doing: the books were falling apart, teachers were being laid off, extracurricular activities were being canceled, less teachers for classes meant more useless study hall periods, etc. For over ten years, the levies consistently failed, so the school failed to receive funding to support many of its most basic services.
During my senior year, I remember my homeroom adviser telling the class how the levy failed by a margin of only ~20-30 votes (I think it was). Since we were all of voting age, she said that if a single classroom of students would have just got off their asses and voted for the levy, it would have succeeded. That's a real, quantifiable number of people who could have made a change in a sea of tens of thousands of other voters.
Then the unthinkable happened. Last year, the levy passed by a margin of three votes. It was incredible, but then they issued a recount. After the recount, it still managed to pass by a margin of only TWO votes.
Of course, there were only tens of thousands voting, rather than tens of millions. And yes, one vote didn't really matter--two did. I wasn't necessarily one of those two votes, nor possibly anyone in my family.
But that didn't stop my younger brother from marching into class the next day, staring at his history teacher from across the room, and boldly proclaiming, "You have MY family to thank for your pay-raise. We accept cash only."
I remember when this game was set to be released alongside the Wii (or a few months after, I don't remember). But it kept getting pushed back further and further, until its true release date became locked in a Shrödinger box of quantum indeterminacy. Then the Duke Nukem Forever trailer came out and its waveform began to stabilize.
Then they moved it to Dec 3rd 2007, my birthday, and it soon failed to live up to even that. Nobody ever remembers my birthday. Thanks Nintendo.
Eh, now I feel kind of silly for missing the bit about "one question per post." Sorry about that. If you want, dump the other questions and just look at the first one:
1. How have various VTT programs (like OpenRPG and MapTools), as well as commercial games with customizable content (such as Neverwinter Nights and its elaborate world-creation tools), influenced the development of the online D&D tools?
Speaking of open development and community publishing, I am curious about how the online tools will support enterprising dungeon-crafters. I have contributed some code to OpenRPG, and I am an avid fan of MapTools. Both programs are currently very popular among virtual table-top (VTT) gamers, partly for their continual development, but mostly for their generous communities of gamers looking to bring their games past simple IRC chat and random dice roll commands. Here are my questions for the 4th Ed guys/gals:
I am really excited about D&D 4th edition, because many of the previews have left me optimistic about the direction of the game's design. However, I am somewhat skeptical of their online tools, and many have ridiculed the simplistic 3D graphics shown in the presentation as simply eye-candy with no substance behind the veil. I hope the online tools are powerful enough for the creative community; otherwise, I might be sticking with the open-source VTT alternatives.
I feel that it is arrogant to dismiss certain works being lost to time with a simple "so what?" If we care about preserving our history for future generations to study (if we didn't care, this wouldn't be an issue at all), then it's important to preserve all data, or as much data as possible.
If we want an accurate picture of a person's life, then we don't ask for their resume. If we want an accurate picture of a civilization, then we don't just look at their self-appointed "greatest works." The study of history used to be simply about studying the reigns of presidents and kings, military battles, etc. However, nowadays we like to understand prevailing attitudes and opinions: the role of women in domestic life, what tools a hunter used, or what language a shopkeeper used in early newspaper advertisements. No one thought to preserve this kind of information, but anthropologists and historians are able to dig it up and analyze it through various means.
Basically, if we want to present an accurate picture of our world for future generations to understand and learn from, then selectively choosing what to preserve and what to ignore will only hamper the search for the truth. True, it would take a herculean effort to preserve EVERYTHING indefinitely... but, shit, we have consumer-grade terrabyte drives these days. Those can hold a lot of B-Movies.Here's to hoping for a brighter future... for our children.
(sorry for repost, but paragraphs weren't formated right)
You are committing a fallacy that many people hold about natural selection: it is not an anthropic force. Evolution has no goals, nor ambitions, nor plans. It does not "try" or "determine" or "have good reasons," but rather, its output is the result of statistical probabilities and circumstantial events.
What would survive in today's world may not have survived a hundred million years ago, or vice-versa. For instance, despite an elephant's powerful build, I doubt it could take on some of the more ferocious, carnivorous dinosaurs. Perhaps certain dinosaurs could out-compete some of today's mammalian wildlife, but due to a number of historical events (meteors, ice ages, low sperm counts, or whatever), such a competition has never come about.
Same goes for humans. Hunter-gatherer traits may have been useful at one time, but nowadays we might treat the ferocious hunter as an over-aggressive antisocialite. Having the ability to amass huge quantities of facts and figures may have been useful years ago, but with the Internet, a few simple search terms can sometimes function just as well, leaving individuals with other parts of their brain developed at a head-start. (How much your genes influence your cognitive abilities is another argument, but suffice to say, something in your DNA probably helps you out with it, or dogs could do it too).
I've gone off on a tangent, but here's my main point: to argue that nature has a "plan" for "better humans" (not precisely what the parent was arguing, but the seeds of the argument were there) is a scientifically invalid assumption. Nature, if it was to be personified, is cruel, wasteful, and myopic. Just because a couple is infertile does not mean that their offspring would somehow sully the human gene-pool. If our technology (our 'environment') can overcome some kind of genetic weakness, like the couple's infertility, so be it. It is not a problem our species has to face any longer. On a similar note, if a creature in the desert develops a genetic mutation that renders it helpless in the presence of coconut milk, then good for it. Coconuts are not a problem it would ever has to face in its environment, so it can prosper like any of its kin. Both situations are the same. Both are 'natural' (which is really a word that means very little, if you think about it).
Finally, assuming one knows what nature thinks (or what God thinks, or what the FSM thinks) is dangerous, to say the least. I could go into how Hitler believed he was acting to purify the species and all that (among other things), but suffice to say, trying to clean up the gene-pool is simply not a method that leads to rational, ethically-sound actions.
You are committing a fallacy that many people hold about natural selection: it is not an anthropic force. Evolution has no goals, nor ambitions, nor plans. It does not "try" or "determine" or "have good reasons," but rather, its output is the result of statistical probabilities and circumstantial events. What would survive in today's world may not have survived a hundred million years ago, or vice-versa. For instance, despite an elephant's powerful build, I doubt it could take on some of the more ferocious, carnivorous dinosaurs. Perhaps certain dinosaurs could out-compete some of today's mammalian wildlife, but due to a number of historical events (meteors, ice ages, low sperm counts, or whatever), such a competition has never come about. Same goes for humans. Hunter-gatherer traits may have been useful at one time, but nowadays we might treat the ferocious hunter as an over-aggressive antisocialite. Having the ability to amass huge quantities of facts and figures may have been useful years ago, but with the Internet, a few simple search terms can sometimes function just as well, leaving individuals with other parts of their brain developed at a head-start. (How much your genes influence your cognitive abilities is another argument, but suffice to say, something in your DNA probably helps you out with it, or dogs could do it too). I've gone off on a tangent, but here's my main point: to argue that nature has a "plan" for "better humans" (not precisely what the parent was arguing, but the seeds of the argument were there) is a scientifically invalid assumption. Nature, if it was to be personified, is cruel, wasteful, and myopic. Just because a couple is infertile does not mean that their offspring would somehow sully the human gene-pool. If our technology (our 'environment') can overcome some kind of genetic weakness, like the couple's infertility, so be it. It is not a problem our species has to face any longer. On a similar note, if a creature in the desert develops a genetic mutation that renders it helpless in the presence of coconut milk, then good for it. Coconuts are not a problem it would ever has to face in its environment, so it can prosper like any of its kin. Both situations are the same. Both are 'natural' (which is really a word that means very little, if you think about it). Finally, assuming one knows what nature thinks (or what God thinks, or what the FSM thinks) is dangerous, to say the least. I could go into how Hitler believed he was acting to purify the species and all that (among other things), but suffice to say, trying to clean up the gene-pool is simply not a method that leads to rational, ethically-sound actions.