The point is that insurance is only in principle a bad deal if you yourself can cover the costs of whatever may happen. If you can't, it's an investment, and in some cases an essential one.
No. That's how PEOPLE play, because it's a complex game and their opponents are imperfect (both in their playing abilities and their ability to conceal their intent), so it's a productive strategy for someone skilled. But it's not optimal (not least because someone with more skill can turn it against you).
The fact is, it's sometimes possible to mathematically analyse a game and find THE optimal strategy - one that will give the best return over time whatever happens, whatever the opponents do, and even if the opponents know exactly what that strategy is. That's what these guys say they've found. Such strategies not only routinely, by the way, include such things as "When you have (this) combination of cards, you should bluff 30% of the time" - such weighted, unpredictable decisions are absolutely crucial in stopping opponents working out a counter to the strategy. Such a robot not only WOULD bluff, but it would do so entirely randomly, and at just the frequency calculated to get the best results WHATEVER you choose to try to do to outsmart it. And the best you'd be able to figure out or know would be that, say, it bluffs on a certain type of weak hand 3 times in 10 - but that you have absolutely NO way of knowing whether or not it's currently doing that beyond that 3 in 10 probability. And in fact, your truly optimal response - the one likely to give you the best return over time - is almost certainly also going to be along the lines of, say, "raise x% of the time, fold y%".
Playing such a bot would conceivably be quite boring, because the bot itself almost certainly wouldn't be playing the people - because once you start to do that, you're opening yourself up to be outplayed by someone smarter than yourself, i.e. your strategy may well be very effective under some circumstances, but it's no longer optimal. And from your side of the table, you'd be getting no tells at all (so, whilst this is supposedly an optimal strategy for a robot, there may not actually be a human out there who could implement play it, even if they could get their head around it). You'd be getting nothing exploitable in the way of play style - because everything you might choose to do has already been implicitly figured into the calculation of "optimum" play, and any attempt to beat the optimal strategy typically results in you losing more.
One weakness in such analyses can be things like limits. How much money did everyone bring to the table, for instance? The caveat on this claim is "given enough hands" - in other words, the strategy merely guarantees that, ON AVERAGE, it won't lose more than it wins. That certainly can't stop it being wiped out in any particular game by a run of sensible but random decisions that nevertheless go against it and produce a sequence of losses.
An interesting observation. Scrabble, again, is way down the BGG list (#1045 today). I suspect, and entirely without evidence other than personal experience, that it's perhaps limited (beyond the "known it since forever" phenomenon that doubtless down-rates ALL "familiar" games**) by the need for a very specific set of word-related skills (a rich vocabulary, good spelling, a knack for anagrams and the lie) to stand any chance of doing well against a half-decent player. Without those - or if your regular opponent is just too good - you're not really likely to form the sort of "I enjoyed doing that, I want to do it again!" attachment that brings you back for more (or gets you to rate it highly, when you're considering what you think of it as a game).
For my money, it's still an excellent game - but it's also somewhat niche, and I haven't actually played it in years. In practice, with any particular group of players there's almost almost something else I'd rather play that is likely to be more "fun" on the day.
(**Even quite mediocre games can do quite well in the BGG ratings for a short while, if they're sufficiently novel. The real test is their staying power, as people become used to them and votes pile up.)
I'm sure it's easy to write off the fact that so many people dislike a game you're keen on as "snobbery", but in truth you have things backwards. There may be the occasional elitist idiot out there who is genuinely "smug" about their preferences - every hobby has them - but if so, they're few and far between. We often play downright "silly" games; we have nothing to be smug about. No, It's not a case of the hobby looking down on games played by "the masses"; it's "the masses" still buying lousy games like Monopoly simply because games are "for kids", Monopoly and Risk are pretty much all they know, and they're almost entirely unaware of how much other, far better stuff there is out there. "Want to play a game after Christmas lunch?" "Sure. How about that 'Settlers of Catan?' thing we bought and never played?" "We can't play that, we're all far too tired for something new, and Granny won't want to learn new rules. Get the Monopoly out, everyone already knows that." Well yes, everyone already knows that. And most of them kind of hate it, too, and remember the rows after last year's game - but they play anyway, to be sociable, and miss out yet again on trying one of the better games of recent years. And another long, boring Christmas afternoon wends its weary way to the almost inevitable arguments, rows, tears and recriminations.
And yes, I'll grant that it's quite possible that Monopoly and Risk suffer in the BGG ratings from the fact that everyone has known them for so long and isn't greatly keen to replay, ad nauseam, games from their childhood. But they're also unpopular because, by today's standards, they simply aren't very good games - and Monopoly, in particular, is downright lousy. (Hardly unexpected; the game was designed a century ago, and the last 40 years in particular have seen a LOT of experiment into what sort of mechanisms work in a game and what don't. I've seen it first hand; I was a big games player back in the 70s, and truth to tell many of the games I thought were excellent back when I started playing still play OK today, but ALSO look pretty lousy by today's standards.)
If Monopoly and Risk were launched today as fresh new commercial offerings, I can see Risk charting quite well initially, before dropping down the charts - but frankly it's hard to see Monopoly getting any traction at all, because there's simply not enough to it, too many things wrong with it, and FAR too many other games out there at any one time that are much, much more fun to play, if you only give them a try.
If you want an example of an older commercial stocks and shares game that knocks Monopoly into a cocked hat, get hold of a copy of Acquire (BGG #131) - published 1964, rules on one side of paper, and still a VERY good game.
'Stross also makes a more general proposition that's particularly interesting to me: "One of the failure modes of extrapolative SF is to assume that just because something is technologically feasible, it will happen.... Someone has to want it enough to pay for it—and it will be competing with other, possibly more attractive options.'
That's also notably one of the failure modes of the technology industry for the last few decades - assuming that, just because you CAN make something, people will automatically want it enough to pay for it in quantity (e.g. 3D TV, Google Glass). For my money, "wearable computing" is the latest probable example - lots of hype, little or no obvious market call.
Saw the final Hobbit film here in the UK a couple of days ago (in 2D) for the equivalent of $13. Some films I'd always choose to go see in the cinema first off, because I still feel the "big screen" experience is likely to serve them best. The rest I'll wait for and watch at home.
I have to say that, seen from the standpoint here in the UK of a non-US national, I've viewed the vast bulk of what comes out of the US studios as almost entirely formulaic dross for, literally, decades. And it's getting worse. If two releases a year actually tempt me to the theatre now, it's been a good year. The problem seems to me to be that US studio execs would mostly clearly rather die than take a risk that might cost the studio money (and them their jobs). Sadly, that's precisely where all the good stuff would have come from. So almost all we get now are (1) the same old hackneyed stories and genres, with (literally) formulaic structure and pacing (see http://entertainment-beta.slas... if you don't know what I'm talking about), and (2) "grab the money" sequels to (or rip-off copies of) anything that did even remotely well at the box office (here's a hint, guys - if, say, 1 movie in 10 was an unexpected hit, experience suggests to me that the likelihood that any sequel will even be half as good, is not much better than 1 in 10 as well - probably worse, actually, as clueless studio execs try desperately to get the production team to repeat whatever "magic" made it sufficiently different as to be successful, and destroy it completely in the process).
(Ok - technically, the Erismann experiment turned everything the "right" way up - because the image on the retina is normally inverted already. But you get, as it were, the picture.)
I've worn glasses for very short sight for, literally, as long as I can remember - I was certainly wearing them when i started school at about 5. I'm now 60, and my accommodation (the ability of a single eye to pull focus) dropped off a cliff a decade or more ago. I've been wearing varifocals (as "progressives" are mostly known here in the UK) ever since. So I've been through a modest number of pairs. With regard to using them for extended periods in front of screens: I stopped working about 3 years ago, but prior to that I was a full-time software tester and programmer, so like you I spent my entire working week on (multi-screen) computers. And even right now I'm sitting in front of a pair of decent-sized screens at home, typing this. It's never given me the remotest problem; work at a sensible, ergonomic distance from the screen, and set your workplace up similarly - which you should be doing anyway - and they're perfectly fine.
The blunt fact, though, is that varifocals feel weird at first, and take a while to get used to, because your brain has to learn - both where to move your head in order for you to use them without thinking about it, and what sort of image it's going to get from the rest of the lens. The first pair are bad enough; changing from one pair to another, when that day comes, is often even worse, because they're rarely set to the *quite* the same measurements as your old ones (in fact an aunt of mine managed with her first pair fine, then gave up on them when she came to change). I've had pairs that were sweet and easy to use the first time I put them on; I've had others (including, in fact, the pair I'm wearing) that seemed horrendous (and, yes, in the case of the current pair, with a sharp focal zone so small I'd be hard pressed to find, if I bothered to stop and think about it - but which my unconscious brain has no trouble finding). When you get a difficult pair you can either give in and chuck them away, or stick with it and wait for your brain to get used to them - which it will after a few days, and at which point, frankly, you'll pretty much cease to even notice. I can't, personally, really afford to go chucking glasses away on a whim, so I've stuck with them all - and, every time, after those initial few days my brain has learned (a) where the sweet spot is for every length I use them at, (b) when everything to be in crisp focus, and when the areas just off the sweet zone are fine, (c) where my head needs to move to to find those, and (d) what other weird stuff it's going to be getting at the same time. Everything just happens, and I no longer obsess over how "bad" they are, or what my head is doing; the glasses work fine, and that's all I need.
The brain is amazingly adaptable. Related to this - there's a well-known experiment, repeated many, many times, because it's so reliable and for the impression it makes on new students - in which the subject had prisms fitted to his eyes that inverted everything he saw. At first he could barely walk; yet after about 10 days his brain got so used to the input that he basically stopped even seeing things as being "upside down", and was able to get on with just about anything he could do before. Removing the prisms took a similar, but shorter, period of readjustment. (Google, say, "image inversion experiment" or "Erismann and Kohler" if you're sufficiently interested). Varifocals are like that. Stick with them, and let your brain learn.
I've nothing against Chess, Go, Shogi or any other "classic" game; but frankly they're a completely different beast to the modern, commercial board game, and I'd play them under completely different circumstances. Attempting to bring them to this sort of discussion is apples and oranges.
My preferred games have always been first and foremost a social activity; I want to enjoy the game, but I also want to enjoy socialising with friends while we're playing. My criteria for "good" games are dictated by that. So - likely playing well with a reasonable number of people (ideally 5+, if only because that's the size of group I tend to end up with). Deep enough and skill-based enough to reward good play (if I win, I want to be able to take at least a little pleasure in having played well) but not so deep or devoid of luck that a less-experienced player doesn't stand a chance of doing at least moderately well (I want everyone to enjoy themselves and want to play again). Short enough so that, even when someone has a truly awful game (it happens!), that needn't be their sole experience of the session. Not so demanding that everyone is sitting in silence thinking through their next move, or so complex that the dread "analysis paralysis" sets in - I value "fun" highly (if everyone is howling with laughter all the time I can forgive just about anything; whereas there's nothing less fun for just about anyone than sitting around in silence for 15 minutes just waiting for your turn to come around again). NO player elimination (and incredibly bad design decision unless the game is VERY short, and even then it's not something I like - people want to play, not sit around watching others play and getting bored). Enough player-player interaction that trailing players can influence the progress of people doing better than themselves, and leading players can "play the man" as well as just making their own moves; not so much that good play gets totally swamped in a popularity contest of "let's all get HIM"). At least vaguely "trackable"; not so arcane that no-one really has the foggiest who is doing well until the scores are added up afterwards. And inclusive; keeping everyone busy (so, sufficiently non-random that players can be thinking about their next turn while others are taking theirs, or with mechanisms that mean everyone is involved all of the time).
None of the above are hard-and-fast; I can think of excellent games that, played with the right people, break most of them, and I would enjoy (many of the most highly-rated 100 games on Boardgamegeek break one or two of them, in fact, and aren't in my own collection for precisely that reason, despite the fact that I recognise that they're often very good). But I can also think of otherwise-excellent games that I dislike intensely because they break one or more of those; so as rules of thumb, they work well for me.
Games I own that keep coming back out of the cupboards (sometimes despite their ages)? Settlers of Catan. Metro. Ticket to Ride. Roborally. 1830. Puerto Rico. Alhambra. Railway Rivals. Acquire. Win, Place & Show. Tikal. Medici. Fair Means or Foul. Primordial Soup. Bohnanza. Pitchcar. Woolly Bully. Streetcar. Not a comprehensive list - just ones that come to mind. I've several I've acquired more recently that show promise, but it's too early to tell how well they'll stand the test of time.
Your comments are interesting, and your points may have some validity when all the players are hard-core afficionados of the game - the world would be a poorer place if we were all identical. But frankly all I can do is point to Boardgamegeek - as definitive source as is currently out there for anything informational on games in general - where the vanilla game comes in at the abysmally low position of 10463rd as rated by the site's members. And even the highest version of Monopoly that can conceivably rated as the "vanilla" game, the "Indiana Jones" set (which is very likely to have been bought by a disproportionate number of "lovers" of the game) can only manage position 6811. And, yes, those low numbers will undoubtedly be skewed by the fact that a very large number of people know the game, and have rated it, compared to most other games on the list - but the simple fact is undeniable: gamers, as a community, detest it.
I'd love to agree with this, but I can't. Power Grid is a great game, and I'll happily play it any day - but IMO despite its excellent "last shall be first" play mechanisms, it's just too hard for a trailing player to influence what happens enough to catch up. And it's NOT a casual gamer's game, because familiarity with the game is too big an advantage for new players to stand much of a chance.
Not the first time I've heard this suggested. But then, given how long the dinosaurs survived, it seems intuitively that it must have taken something highly improbable - a "perfect storm" of disasters - to disrupt ecosystems enough to shift them worldwide.
(And before anyone starts flaming me - I don't want adds any more than the next man, and use ABP myself to block them.)
OK - there's a lot of predictable slagging off here of the advertisers (with which I broadly and mostly agree). But let's not, in the process, ignore the fact that EYEO aren't exactly behaving in a spotless manner either. Summed up, their position now seems to be "Pay us, and subject to a few conditions we'll stop our add-on blocking your ads".
Well - firstly, for my part, I don't want to see even the ads that EYEO deems "acceptable". I don't want ads, full stop, and will either be near the head of the queue to blacklist anything that ABP starts letting through, or will be looking for another add-on.
But secondly, the idea of trying to EYEO trying to monetarise ABP on the basis of "We have a headlock on part of your revenue stream, but we'll let go if you pay us" is extremely questionable - whether I like what the advertisers want to send me or not, that approach strikes me as a cynical business tactic verging on the unethical, and (whilst it's always dangerous to try to second-guess the courts) I wouldn't be in the least bit surprised to see them make a degree of headway on their challenge. Blocking everything across the board? Probably legally fine - it's the users' choice whether or not to use the add-on, and I strongly doubt that advertisers have any right to require people to let their ads be seen. Blocking everything but sufficiently "nonintrusive" ads, again across the board? Probably fine again, on the same basis. Telling people that you'll only let their stuff through if they pay you, though? Morally broken, and dodgy legal ground; I can see how a court might quite easily judge that to be extortion.
"Nub". "Nub of the whole thing." First rule of the internet - 3 seconds after posting something that might be viewed as vaguely pompous or preachy, you WILL spot at least one glaring and embarrassing typo.
"It is hailed as the first hard evidence of altruism for the young field of behavioral economics."
Altruism is one of those things that, according to how strongly you define it - weakly, merely something with no obvious reward, or strongly, as something that has genuinely no benefit - either MUST, or CANNOT (as a general trait), exist.
The bottom line is that man has evolved as a social species. In that word "social" is the numb of the whole thing, because it describes a type of behaviour in which individuals sometimes behave in ways that forego immediate personal benefit for the benefit of their social grouping (and what is that but altruism, in its weaker definition?). And it's also clear that such social behaviour doesn't have to take place at the reasoned, "if I do this then..." level; social behaviour is found in very many animal species, most of whom are certainly not capable of thinking through the future consequences of the choices facing them. They simply behave in the way they've evolved to behave - which includes the weak "altruistic" behaviour that benefits the group as a whole.
Altruism in its stronger definition, by contrast, has to be behaviour that not only doesn't benefit the individual but doesn't benefit the larger social grouping either (because benefits to the group are likely to benefit to the individual too, if only indirectly - an obvious example would be a sterile bee stinging, and dying, to defend the hive that is its own, indirect genetic future). Such acts may occur from time to time in individuals, but the tendency to perform them is unlikely to hang around, let alone spread, as general behaviour within the group, because (by definition) it has no benefit to either the group or the individual - they serve no purpose. Other, more profitable modes of behaviour will win out instead.
The sort of behaviour in the experiment described is social behaviour. If it's suggested that it's also evidence of altruism if the weaker type - well, well done for finding an example, but no big deal. It had to be there to find.
Mammoths? 4.5 thousand years ago. Dinosaurs? Upwards of 66 MILLION+. Compared to the dinosaurs, any dead mammoths we may find have barely stopped breathing. But what the heck, who cares if it makes for a good headline?
IBM's problems are not about products; they're about the way it's run. The only thing that could help IBM right now would be a complete change of senior management, and a seismic shift from the "share price at all costs" attitude that has dragged it down from one of the best companies in the world to the dysfunctional mess it is today.
" FBI has arrested the online persona "Defcon," identified as Blake Benthall".
No. The FBI has arrested Blake Benthall, alleged to be the online persona, "Defcon". It's for the court system to decide whether it agrees with that allegation.
Because there's no such thing as a well-designed experiment for this sort of thing. You don't design experiments to test a machine; you design them to test the underlying science, and to attempt to (in)validate hypotheses. If he doesn't explain exactly the mechanism by which he purports to achieve his results, so that others can independently attempt to reproduce it and isolate the underlying science, there's nothing to test that couldn't in principle be a con achieved by some obscure means that hasn't taken into account.
Also from FTFA: "ExtremeTech now reports". Frankly, that's on a par with, "In tests, nine out of ten dog-owners reported..." And about as reliable.
Until and unless he explains precisely how his mechanism works, and allows independent scientists to attempt replicate his results, no-one with an ounce of sense is going to take him seriously. A "magic box" that supposedly does something that goes against current scientific understanding isn't going to get him anywhere - there are far too many ways that sort of thing can be a con. And "protecting his secrets" isn't a valid argument - if his box actually works, the underlying science isn't patentable anyway.
They are, simply, in a class of their own. I'm typing on one right now; I have another on my wife's machine; I have a couple of spares tucked away in a cupboard. Every machine I've built for about the last 15 years has used the same keyboards. 'Nuff said.
Um. You mean "Tilting against windmills". It was Don Quixote who was doing the tilting, not the windmills.
(To "tilt", in this context, is an archaic verb meaning to joust with a lance. Knights on horseback, and all that.)
"Tilting AT windmills". Darn it. First rule of internet pedantry - any pedantic post will inevitably contain at least one howling error that isn't spotted until the post has been irretrievably committed....
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The point is that insurance is only in principle a bad deal if you yourself can cover the costs of whatever may happen. If you can't, it's an investment, and in some cases an essential one.
No. That's how PEOPLE play, because it's a complex game and their opponents are imperfect (both in their playing abilities and their ability to conceal their intent), so it's a productive strategy for someone skilled. But it's not optimal (not least because someone with more skill can turn it against you).
The fact is, it's sometimes possible to mathematically analyse a game and find THE optimal strategy - one that will give the best return over time whatever happens, whatever the opponents do, and even if the opponents know exactly what that strategy is. That's what these guys say they've found. Such strategies not only routinely, by the way, include such things as "When you have (this) combination of cards, you should bluff 30% of the time" - such weighted, unpredictable decisions are absolutely crucial in stopping opponents working out a counter to the strategy. Such a robot not only WOULD bluff, but it would do so entirely randomly, and at just the frequency calculated to get the best results WHATEVER you choose to try to do to outsmart it. And the best you'd be able to figure out or know would be that, say, it bluffs on a certain type of weak hand 3 times in 10 - but that you have absolutely NO way of knowing whether or not it's currently doing that beyond that 3 in 10 probability. And in fact, your truly optimal response - the one likely to give you the best return over time - is almost certainly also going to be along the lines of, say, "raise x% of the time, fold y%".
Playing such a bot would conceivably be quite boring, because the bot itself almost certainly wouldn't be playing the people - because once you start to do that, you're opening yourself up to be outplayed by someone smarter than yourself, i.e. your strategy may well be very effective under some circumstances, but it's no longer optimal. And from your side of the table, you'd be getting no tells at all (so, whilst this is supposedly an optimal strategy for a robot, there may not actually be a human out there who could implement play it, even if they could get their head around it). You'd be getting nothing exploitable in the way of play style - because everything you might choose to do has already been implicitly figured into the calculation of "optimum" play, and any attempt to beat the optimal strategy typically results in you losing more.
One weakness in such analyses can be things like limits. How much money did everyone bring to the table, for instance? The caveat on this claim is "given enough hands" - in other words, the strategy merely guarantees that, ON AVERAGE, it won't lose more than it wins. That certainly can't stop it being wiped out in any particular game by a run of sensible but random decisions that nevertheless go against it and produce a sequence of losses.
"and the like". Ah well.
An interesting observation. Scrabble, again, is way down the BGG list (#1045 today). I suspect, and entirely without evidence other than personal experience, that it's perhaps limited (beyond the "known it since forever" phenomenon that doubtless down-rates ALL "familiar" games**) by the need for a very specific set of word-related skills (a rich vocabulary, good spelling, a knack for anagrams and the lie) to stand any chance of doing well against a half-decent player. Without those - or if your regular opponent is just too good - you're not really likely to form the sort of "I enjoyed doing that, I want to do it again!" attachment that brings you back for more (or gets you to rate it highly, when you're considering what you think of it as a game).
For my money, it's still an excellent game - but it's also somewhat niche, and I haven't actually played it in years. In practice, with any particular group of players there's almost almost something else I'd rather play that is likely to be more "fun" on the day.
(**Even quite mediocre games can do quite well in the BGG ratings for a short while, if they're sufficiently novel. The real test is their staying power, as people become used to them and votes pile up.)
I'm sure it's easy to write off the fact that so many people dislike a game you're keen on as "snobbery", but in truth you have things backwards. There may be the occasional elitist idiot out there who is genuinely "smug" about their preferences - every hobby has them - but if so, they're few and far between. We often play downright "silly" games; we have nothing to be smug about. No, It's not a case of the hobby looking down on games played by "the masses"; it's "the masses" still buying lousy games like Monopoly simply because games are "for kids", Monopoly and Risk are pretty much all they know, and they're almost entirely unaware of how much other, far better stuff there is out there. "Want to play a game after Christmas lunch?" "Sure. How about that 'Settlers of Catan?' thing we bought and never played?" "We can't play that, we're all far too tired for something new, and Granny won't want to learn new rules. Get the Monopoly out, everyone already knows that." Well yes, everyone already knows that. And most of them kind of hate it, too, and remember the rows after last year's game - but they play anyway, to be sociable, and miss out yet again on trying one of the better games of recent years. And another long, boring Christmas afternoon wends its weary way to the almost inevitable arguments, rows, tears and recriminations.
And yes, I'll grant that it's quite possible that Monopoly and Risk suffer in the BGG ratings from the fact that everyone has known them for so long and isn't greatly keen to replay, ad nauseam, games from their childhood. But they're also unpopular because, by today's standards, they simply aren't very good games - and Monopoly, in particular, is downright lousy. (Hardly unexpected; the game was designed a century ago, and the last 40 years in particular have seen a LOT of experiment into what sort of mechanisms work in a game and what don't. I've seen it first hand; I was a big games player back in the 70s, and truth to tell many of the games I thought were excellent back when I started playing still play OK today, but ALSO look pretty lousy by today's standards.)
If Monopoly and Risk were launched today as fresh new commercial offerings, I can see Risk charting quite well initially, before dropping down the charts - but frankly it's hard to see Monopoly getting any traction at all, because there's simply not enough to it, too many things wrong with it, and FAR too many other games out there at any one time that are much, much more fun to play, if you only give them a try.
If you want an example of an older commercial stocks and shares game that knocks Monopoly into a cocked hat, get hold of a copy of Acquire (BGG #131) - published 1964, rules on one side of paper, and still a VERY good game.
'Stross also makes a more general proposition that's particularly interesting to me: "One of the failure modes of extrapolative SF is to assume that just because something is technologically feasible, it will happen. ... Someone has to want it enough to pay for it—and it will be competing with other, possibly more attractive options.'
That's also notably one of the failure modes of the technology industry for the last few decades - assuming that, just because you CAN make something, people will automatically want it enough to pay for it in quantity (e.g. 3D TV, Google Glass). For my money, "wearable computing" is the latest probable example - lots of hype, little or no obvious market call.
Saw the final Hobbit film here in the UK a couple of days ago (in 2D) for the equivalent of $13. Some films I'd always choose to go see in the cinema first off, because I still feel the "big screen" experience is likely to serve them best. The rest I'll wait for and watch at home.
I have to say that, seen from the standpoint here in the UK of a non-US national, I've viewed the vast bulk of what comes out of the US studios as almost entirely formulaic dross for, literally, decades. And it's getting worse. If two releases a year actually tempt me to the theatre now, it's been a good year. The problem seems to me to be that US studio execs would mostly clearly rather die than take a risk that might cost the studio money (and them their jobs). Sadly, that's precisely where all the good stuff would have come from. So almost all we get now are (1) the same old hackneyed stories and genres, with (literally) formulaic structure and pacing (see http://entertainment-beta.slas... if you don't know what I'm talking about), and (2) "grab the money" sequels to (or rip-off copies of) anything that did even remotely well at the box office (here's a hint, guys - if, say, 1 movie in 10 was an unexpected hit, experience suggests to me that the likelihood that any sequel will even be half as good, is not much better than 1 in 10 as well - probably worse, actually, as clueless studio execs try desperately to get the production team to repeat whatever "magic" made it sufficiently different as to be successful, and destroy it completely in the process).
(Ok - technically, the Erismann experiment turned everything the "right" way up - because the image on the retina is normally inverted already. But you get, as it were, the picture.)
They're fine. Stick with it.
I've worn glasses for very short sight for, literally, as long as I can remember - I was certainly wearing them when i started school at about 5. I'm now 60, and my accommodation (the ability of a single eye to pull focus) dropped off a cliff a decade or more ago. I've been wearing varifocals (as "progressives" are mostly known here in the UK) ever since. So I've been through a modest number of pairs. With regard to using them for extended periods in front of screens: I stopped working about 3 years ago, but prior to that I was a full-time software tester and programmer, so like you I spent my entire working week on (multi-screen) computers. And even right now I'm sitting in front of a pair of decent-sized screens at home, typing this. It's never given me the remotest problem; work at a sensible, ergonomic distance from the screen, and set your workplace up similarly - which you should be doing anyway - and they're perfectly fine.
The blunt fact, though, is that varifocals feel weird at first, and take a while to get used to, because your brain has to learn - both where to move your head in order for you to use them without thinking about it, and what sort of image it's going to get from the rest of the lens. The first pair are bad enough; changing from one pair to another, when that day comes, is often even worse, because they're rarely set to the *quite* the same measurements as your old ones (in fact an aunt of mine managed with her first pair fine, then gave up on them when she came to change). I've had pairs that were sweet and easy to use the first time I put them on; I've had others (including, in fact, the pair I'm wearing) that seemed horrendous (and, yes, in the case of the current pair, with a sharp focal zone so small I'd be hard pressed to find, if I bothered to stop and think about it - but which my unconscious brain has no trouble finding). When you get a difficult pair you can either give in and chuck them away, or stick with it and wait for your brain to get used to them - which it will after a few days, and at which point, frankly, you'll pretty much cease to even notice. I can't, personally, really afford to go chucking glasses away on a whim, so I've stuck with them all - and, every time, after those initial few days my brain has learned (a) where the sweet spot is for every length I use them at, (b) when everything to be in crisp focus, and when the areas just off the sweet zone are fine, (c) where my head needs to move to to find those, and (d) what other weird stuff it's going to be getting at the same time. Everything just happens, and I no longer obsess over how "bad" they are, or what my head is doing; the glasses work fine, and that's all I need.
The brain is amazingly adaptable. Related to this - there's a well-known experiment, repeated many, many times, because it's so reliable and for the impression it makes on new students - in which the subject had prisms fitted to his eyes that inverted everything he saw. At first he could barely walk; yet after about 10 days his brain got so used to the input that he basically stopped even seeing things as being "upside down", and was able to get on with just about anything he could do before. Removing the prisms took a similar, but shorter, period of readjustment. (Google, say, "image inversion experiment" or "Erismann and Kohler" if you're sufficiently interested). Varifocals are like that. Stick with them, and let your brain learn.
I've nothing against Chess, Go, Shogi or any other "classic" game; but frankly they're a completely different beast to the modern, commercial board game, and I'd play them under completely different circumstances. Attempting to bring them to this sort of discussion is apples and oranges.
Brain dump.
My preferred games have always been first and foremost a social activity; I want to enjoy the game, but I also want to enjoy socialising with friends while we're playing. My criteria for "good" games are dictated by that. So - likely playing well with a reasonable number of people (ideally 5+, if only because that's the size of group I tend to end up with). Deep enough and skill-based enough to reward good play (if I win, I want to be able to take at least a little pleasure in having played well) but not so deep or devoid of luck that a less-experienced player doesn't stand a chance of doing at least moderately well (I want everyone to enjoy themselves and want to play again). Short enough so that, even when someone has a truly awful game (it happens!), that needn't be their sole experience of the session. Not so demanding that everyone is sitting in silence thinking through their next move, or so complex that the dread "analysis paralysis" sets in - I value "fun" highly (if everyone is howling with laughter all the time I can forgive just about anything; whereas there's nothing less fun for just about anyone than sitting around in silence for 15 minutes just waiting for your turn to come around again). NO player elimination (and incredibly bad design decision unless the game is VERY short, and even then it's not something I like - people want to play, not sit around watching others play and getting bored). Enough player-player interaction that trailing players can influence the progress of people doing better than themselves, and leading players can "play the man" as well as just making their own moves; not so much that good play gets totally swamped in a popularity contest of "let's all get HIM"). At least vaguely "trackable"; not so arcane that no-one really has the foggiest who is doing well until the scores are added up afterwards. And inclusive; keeping everyone busy (so, sufficiently non-random that players can be thinking about their next turn while others are taking theirs, or with mechanisms that mean everyone is involved all of the time).
None of the above are hard-and-fast; I can think of excellent games that, played with the right people, break most of them, and I would enjoy (many of the most highly-rated 100 games on Boardgamegeek break one or two of them, in fact, and aren't in my own collection for precisely that reason, despite the fact that I recognise that they're often very good). But I can also think of otherwise-excellent games that I dislike intensely because they break one or more of those; so as rules of thumb, they work well for me.
Games I own that keep coming back out of the cupboards (sometimes despite their ages)? Settlers of Catan. Metro. Ticket to Ride. Roborally. 1830. Puerto Rico. Alhambra. Railway Rivals. Acquire. Win, Place & Show. Tikal. Medici. Fair Means or Foul. Primordial Soup. Bohnanza. Pitchcar. Woolly Bully. Streetcar. Not a comprehensive list - just ones that come to mind. I've several I've acquired more recently that show promise, but it's too early to tell how well they'll stand the test of time.
Your comments are interesting, and your points may have some validity when all the players are hard-core afficionados of the game - the world would be a poorer place if we were all identical. But frankly all I can do is point to Boardgamegeek - as definitive source as is currently out there for anything informational on games in general - where the vanilla game comes in at the abysmally low position of 10463rd as rated by the site's members. And even the highest version of Monopoly that can conceivably rated as the "vanilla" game, the "Indiana Jones" set (which is very likely to have been bought by a disproportionate number of "lovers" of the game) can only manage position 6811. And, yes, those low numbers will undoubtedly be skewed by the fact that a very large number of people know the game, and have rated it, compared to most other games on the list - but the simple fact is undeniable: gamers, as a community, detest it.
I'd love to agree with this, but I can't. Power Grid is a great game, and I'll happily play it any day - but IMO despite its excellent "last shall be first" play mechanisms, it's just too hard for a trailing player to influence what happens enough to catch up. And it's NOT a casual gamer's game, because familiarity with the game is too big an advantage for new players to stand much of a chance.
Not the first time I've heard this suggested. But then, given how long the dinosaurs survived, it seems intuitively that it must have taken something highly improbable - a "perfect storm" of disasters - to disrupt ecosystems enough to shift them worldwide.
(And before anyone starts flaming me - I don't want adds any more than the next man, and use ABP myself to block them.)
OK - there's a lot of predictable slagging off here of the advertisers (with which I broadly and mostly agree). But let's not, in the process, ignore the fact that EYEO aren't exactly behaving in a spotless manner either. Summed up, their position now seems to be "Pay us, and subject to a few conditions we'll stop our add-on blocking your ads".
Well - firstly, for my part, I don't want to see even the ads that EYEO deems "acceptable". I don't want ads, full stop, and will either be near the head of the queue to blacklist anything that ABP starts letting through, or will be looking for another add-on.
But secondly, the idea of trying to EYEO trying to monetarise ABP on the basis of "We have a headlock on part of your revenue stream, but we'll let go if you pay us" is extremely questionable - whether I like what the advertisers want to send me or not, that approach strikes me as a cynical business tactic verging on the unethical, and (whilst it's always dangerous to try to second-guess the courts) I wouldn't be in the least bit surprised to see them make a degree of headway on their challenge. Blocking everything across the board? Probably legally fine - it's the users' choice whether or not to use the add-on, and I strongly doubt that advertisers have any right to require people to let their ads be seen. Blocking everything but sufficiently "nonintrusive" ads, again across the board? Probably fine again, on the same basis. Telling people that you'll only let their stuff through if they pay you, though? Morally broken, and dodgy legal ground; I can see how a court might quite easily judge that to be extortion.
"Nub". "Nub of the whole thing." First rule of the internet - 3 seconds after posting something that might be viewed as vaguely pompous or preachy, you WILL spot at least one glaring and embarrassing typo.
"It is hailed as the first hard evidence of altruism for the young field of behavioral economics."
Altruism is one of those things that, according to how strongly you define it - weakly, merely something with no obvious reward, or strongly, as something that has genuinely no benefit - either MUST, or CANNOT (as a general trait), exist.
The bottom line is that man has evolved as a social species. In that word "social" is the numb of the whole thing, because it describes a type of behaviour in which individuals sometimes behave in ways that forego immediate personal benefit for the benefit of their social grouping (and what is that but altruism, in its weaker definition?). And it's also clear that such social behaviour doesn't have to take place at the reasoned, "if I do this then..." level; social behaviour is found in very many animal species, most of whom are certainly not capable of thinking through the future consequences of the choices facing them. They simply behave in the way they've evolved to behave - which includes the weak "altruistic" behaviour that benefits the group as a whole.
Altruism in its stronger definition, by contrast, has to be behaviour that not only doesn't benefit the individual but doesn't benefit the larger social grouping either (because benefits to the group are likely to benefit to the individual too, if only indirectly - an obvious example would be a sterile bee stinging, and dying, to defend the hive that is its own, indirect genetic future). Such acts may occur from time to time in individuals, but the tendency to perform them is unlikely to hang around, let alone spread, as general behaviour within the group, because (by definition) it has no benefit to either the group or the individual - they serve no purpose. Other, more profitable modes of behaviour will win out instead.
The sort of behaviour in the experiment described is social behaviour. If it's suggested that it's also evidence of altruism if the weaker type - well, well done for finding an example, but no big deal. It had to be there to find.
Mammoths? 4.5 thousand years ago. Dinosaurs? Upwards of 66 MILLION+. Compared to the dinosaurs, any dead mammoths we may find have barely stopped breathing. But what the heck, who cares if it makes for a good headline?
IBM's problems are not about products; they're about the way it's run. The only thing that could help IBM right now would be a complete change of senior management, and a seismic shift from the "share price at all costs" attitude that has dragged it down from one of the best companies in the world to the dysfunctional mess it is today.
" FBI has arrested the online persona "Defcon," identified as Blake Benthall".
No. The FBI has arrested Blake Benthall, alleged to be the online persona, "Defcon". It's for the court system to decide whether it agrees with that allegation.
Because there's no such thing as a well-designed experiment for this sort of thing. You don't design experiments to test a machine; you design them to test the underlying science, and to attempt to (in)validate hypotheses. If he doesn't explain exactly the mechanism by which he purports to achieve his results, so that others can independently attempt to reproduce it and isolate the underlying science, there's nothing to test that couldn't in principle be a con achieved by some obscure means that hasn't taken into account.
Also from FTFA: "ExtremeTech now reports". Frankly, that's on a par with, "In tests, nine out of ten dog-owners reported..." And about as reliable.
Until and unless he explains precisely how his mechanism works, and allows independent scientists to attempt replicate his results, no-one with an ounce of sense is going to take him seriously. A "magic box" that supposedly does something that goes against current scientific understanding isn't going to get him anywhere - there are far too many ways that sort of thing can be a con. And "protecting his secrets" isn't a valid argument - if his box actually works, the underlying science isn't patentable anyway.
They are, simply, in a class of their own. I'm typing on one right now; I have another on my wife's machine; I have a couple of spares tucked away in a cupboard. Every machine I've built for about the last 15 years has used the same keyboards. 'Nuff said.
Um. You mean "Tilting against windmills". It was Don Quixote who was doing the tilting, not the windmills.
(To "tilt", in this context, is an archaic verb meaning to joust with a lance. Knights on horseback, and all that.)
"Tilting AT windmills". Darn it. First rule of internet pedantry - any pedantic post will inevitably contain at least one howling error that isn't spotted until the post has been irretrievably committed....
Um. You mean "Tilting against windmills". It was Don Quixote who was doing the tilting, not the windmills.
(To "tilt", in this context, is an archaic verb meaning to joust with a lance. Knights on horseback, and all that.)