The real-time aspect of DOS is nice for psychologists. It's vastly easier to collect data on response times (i.e., how long it takes a person to press a key after seeing a stimulus) in DOS than it is in windows. With DOS, you only have to worry about the keyboard buffer, which, I believe, introduces error of less than 10 milliseconds. With windows (or linux), unless you pay for a pricey real-time package, the error is huge.
Interesting to note the distinction between the reported favorite races (listed here highest to lowest):
Wood Elf, Human, Dark Elf, High Elf
and the races that most people would rather be:
Wood Elf, High Elf, Human, Dark Elf
A similar distinction results from looking at the class data: Warrior is listed as the second-favorite class, but ranks a distant sixth in the list of classes people would like to be, were Norath real.
This implies that people would rather be a class or race that isn't their favorite.
In fact, this may raise questions about the validity of these questions as measures of underlying preferences, although I don't know to what standard they should be compared.
I've been worried about the imagination-corruption argument as well, and to that end have been reading the books one last time before I see the movie.
That said, in retrospect, I think there's not much to the imagination-corruption concern. For example, I saw the Rankin-Bass animated ``Hobbit" and ``Return of the King" a long time before I read the books. But when I actually read the books, I didn't tend to think of the wood elves as blue and lanky, nor Gollum as much bigger than Bilbo. (Gollum's size seems to change a lot in those versions, actually.) I didn't read Gandalf in the voice of John Huston, nor Gollum in the voice of Brother Theodore. While I remember the animated versions pretty well, they don't seem to have changed my actual experience when I read the books.
Is there any empirical evidence regarding the imagination-corruption hypothesis? How would one conduct such an experiment?
In Psychology, we talk a lot about time-to-contact. The idea is that if you're approaching some object, the ratio of the size of the image on your retina to the expansion-rate of the same image, gives you the amount of time until you smack into it. Apparantly people and animals are sensitive to this property. It was first suggested in a science fiction story, although I can't say if that story influenced the psychologists who developed the theory. I think the author of the story was Fred Hoyle, but I can't remember the name of the story.
Some of the psychology can be found in:
Lee, D.N. (1980). Visuo-Motor Coordination in Space-Time. In G.E. Stelmach & J. Requin (Eds.), Tutorials In Motor Behaviour.
I'm not sure how common a name ``Longbottom" is, but note that in Tolkien, Merry (or Pippin, maybe? I can't remember) gets very excited about a kind of tobacco called ``Longbottom Leaf." In H.P., of course, we have Neville Longbottom. Possibly just coincidence.
Warburton was also in "The Dish", along with Sam Neil. It's a pretty good movie about an Australian satellite dish broadcasting one of the Apollo missions. Rent it, and watch it after Tick.
Many computer games ship with editors that can be used to create levels, mods, etc. for the particular games. Do these editors count as applications? If so, you're buying both a content part and an application part when you buy a game.
Viewing Episode 1 at age 25 was a growth experience for me. Previously, I had thought that the Star Wars movies were the best movies ever made. Episode 1 was a good movie, but it really was a movie for children, not adults. This made me realize that Eps 4-6 were also movies for children. I'm really glad that Lucas waited as long as he did to release Episode 1, and I wonder if waiting as long as he did to release it wasn't a conscious decision on his part. ("People are worshiping these kids' movies I made; I'll wait until they're older to release the next bunch, and they'll see that they're really just kids' movies.")
In any event, after I saw Ep1, I was able to start expanding my taste in movies. I still enjoy movies for kids, but now I can appreciate movies for grown-ups, too.
The difference, I think, between Star Wars and Harry Potter, is that SW has stayed at the level of entertainment for 12-13 year olds, while HP started at that level, and is moving towards the level of 16-17 year olds. I quite enjoy the HP books, and they're only getting better with time.
That said, these previews don't hold much interest for me. I'll probably see the Ep2 when it comes out, but I really don't feel particularly hyped up about this. I also don't feel the need to buy an HP ticket just to see the Ep2 preview.
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The real-time aspect of DOS is nice for psychologists. It's vastly easier to collect data on response times (i.e., how long it takes a person to press a key after seeing a stimulus) in DOS than it is in windows. With DOS, you only have to worry about the keyboard buffer, which, I believe, introduces error of less than 10 milliseconds. With windows (or linux), unless you pay for a pricey real-time package, the error is huge.
Wood Elf, Human, Dark Elf, High Elf
and the races that most people would rather be:
Wood Elf, High Elf, Human, Dark Elf
A similar distinction results from looking at the class data: Warrior is listed as the second-favorite class, but ranks a distant sixth in the list of classes people would like to be, were Norath real.
This implies that people would rather be a class or race that isn't their favorite.
In fact, this may raise questions about the validity of these questions as measures of underlying preferences, although I don't know to what standard they should be compared.
That said, in retrospect, I think there's not much to the imagination-corruption concern. For example, I saw the Rankin-Bass animated ``Hobbit" and ``Return of the King" a long time before I read the books. But when I actually read the books, I didn't tend to think of the wood elves as blue and lanky, nor Gollum as much bigger than Bilbo. (Gollum's size seems to change a lot in those versions, actually.) I didn't read Gandalf in the voice of John Huston, nor Gollum in the voice of Brother Theodore. While I remember the animated versions pretty well, they don't seem to have changed my actual experience when I read the books.
Is there any empirical evidence regarding the imagination-corruption hypothesis? How would one conduct such an experiment?
Some of the psychology can be found in:
Lee, D.N. (1980). Visuo-Motor Coordination in Space-Time. In G.E. Stelmach & J. Requin (Eds.), Tutorials In Motor Behaviour.
I'm not sure how common a name ``Longbottom" is, but note that in Tolkien, Merry (or Pippin, maybe? I can't remember) gets very excited about a kind of tobacco called ``Longbottom Leaf." In H.P., of course, we have Neville Longbottom. Possibly just coincidence.
Warburton was also in "The Dish", along with Sam Neil. It's a pretty good movie about an Australian satellite dish broadcasting one of the Apollo missions. Rent it, and watch it after Tick.
Many computer games ship with editors that can be used to create levels, mods, etc. for the particular games. Do these editors count as applications? If so, you're buying both a content part and an application part when you buy a game.
In any event, after I saw Ep1, I was able to start expanding my taste in movies. I still enjoy movies for kids, but now I can appreciate movies for grown-ups, too.
The difference, I think, between Star Wars and Harry Potter, is that SW has stayed at the level of entertainment for 12-13 year olds, while HP started at that level, and is moving towards the level of 16-17 year olds. I quite enjoy the HP books, and they're only getting better with time.
That said, these previews don't hold much interest for me. I'll probably see the Ep2 when it comes out, but I really don't feel particularly hyped up about this. I also don't feel the need to buy an HP ticket just to see the Ep2 preview.