I recommend that people interested in this sort of thing read Alan Cooper's The Inmates Are Running the Asylum.
One of the best examples from that Alan Cooper book is alarm clocks.
That's also a perfect example of dysfunctional relationships between user design and the engineer. There are alarm clocks that project the time on the wall or ceiling, alarm clocks that (supposedly) lull me to sleep with white noise or "nature sounds," and alarm clocks that wake me with my favorite CD -- but every blinking last one of them has horrible user design, especially for the intended audience: sleepy, disoriented people who don't have their contacts in. It's pretty amazing to consider just how awkward the things are.
The guts of a better alarm clock: Bigger buttons that are clearly differentiated, even without my glasses on. Decent control over my snooze-ing -- limits on number of times, variable length, etc. would be nice. Readable displays that show different information -- ta dum! -- differently. ("Alarm" is not the same as "PM" and should not be an identical dot on the display.) And so on.
Everyone has one of these, but the business hasn't produced a really good alarm clock at the commodity level for Target to carry. Designers with swooshy plastic cases aren't going to fix the problem by themselves.
This is the logic of failure, artistic and financial.
Pixar plans on continuing to make quality movies. They didn't want to sacrifice half their revenues from those movies to Disney, which was handling distribution and providing its "brand." Pixar still gets its cut of revenues from past ones. They've built their own name enough -- witness the recognition level on slashdot -- that they think they can release movies and get the distribution they need independent of the Disney machine. They grew enough to go independent, is their idea.
Nobody stays on top forever in this business.
To wit: Disney's fallen hard, since Beauty and the Beast and Lion King, by making exactly the sorts of conservative, risk-averse decisions you're lauding here. They let Pixar take the risks.
That was a quote of a question and response from the interview article. Whose "logic" are you referring to? The poster, I guess, did come up with the qualifying "Great" on the post, but that's about it.
If you have an objection, I think it's to Arthur C. Clarke's response. Not that there's anything wrong with that...
FA-18 Hornet, which was a little later, supported this anyway. And yeah, it was way fun. I had a weird combination of monitors -- one color 20" and one Radius "tilt" screen that was B&W. The Radius would be set to landscape mode, and I'd "check six" for people on my tail. (I think it might have worked for Chuck Yeager's Air Combat, too -- that game had bad flight models, but all sorts of 'film' features and extras that were ahead of their time.)
Those old OS 7.something Macs supported "spanning" at the OS level, so if the game didn't want to fill the screen you didn't need any code to back this up. Colonization was much nicer with all the palettes off to one side and a sprawling, 20" map of the new world on the other screen.
(Mac users were the design people, is why this feature was always there. When we presented a brochure design or something, the display was one monitor or LCD, and our slide show controls, palettes and whatnot were on the other one.)
The two superpowers had their various deep benthic submersibles that they've used for stuff like tapping each other's deep-sea cables and pulling up each other's dead subs and so on. (You might want to Read "Blind Man's Bluff" for an okay popular history of that stuff.) Now that the cold war's over, there are private markets for the technology, and the navy's happy to lend its stuff to Robert Ballard to poke around the Meditteranean, looking for history.
Underwater archaeology's taking off as a result. We've had an amazing run of shipwreck-finding, haven't we? Heck, let alone shipe -- we get Black Sea villages that've been preserved in anaerobic environments since "THE flood." All sorts of sailing vessels. Nazi subs. It's a great time to be looking for ships down there. Go down off of the canaries, and you almost have too many ships to choose from.
(William Broad's "The Universe Below" is a decent run through the military history of this stuff, and concentrates more on the shipwrecks side than, say, Richard Ellis's "Deep Atlantic." Broad also considers the legal and ethical problems -- who does a shipwreck from 1500 belong to? Ellis is more about the biology, which is cool too.)
After all, if He wanted, to, God could have created the entire universe just a moment after you read this comment. So why couldn't he have created the Earth with skeletons of dinosaurs where they are?
Typically, theologians opposed to evolution have anticipated you in this idea, and come up with a rationale that makes it (to their minds) unacceptable. The essential point would be that God wouldn't tell fibs that way, by planting misleading evidence. That's the synopsis of the argument, anyway.
(Meanwhile most of the scientists I've ever met in the US, anyway, were practicing Christians. The basic point that evolution and religion aren't in opposition because they deal with different types of knowledge is just tooooo hard to get ahold of, isn't it? Scientific knowledge is falsifiable by definition, faith is not, and so on? Sound like something we've heard before?)
Oh, yeah? Well, for my then-girlfriend's Mac Plus, I bought a thick paperback book in order to get the install disk(s?) for AOL tucked into the cover.
Yes, I paid for the privilege of getting an AOL floppy. With a big reference on how to use it. Thirty bucks, I believe.
(And it was money well-spent, until the four months' worth of service they charged me for after I quit the service about six months later. Lame bridges were burned.)
Lots of the other examples you offer were just dogs, examples of a studio cashing in with a lame "big episode." The first Transformers movie, though, is way above the standard of the TV shows.
"Transformers" shows up in animation festivals, still, and that puzzled me until I saw it with the kids. I mean, I'm a Citizen Kane sort of movie watcher (a favorite DVD, it's fantastic), and seeing Orson Welles in the credits made me wince for him, you know? How low could he go? But it's one of those totally unlikely good, entertaining movies.
Reminds me of Christopher Guest movies
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Lots of Christopher Guest's fans have the same reaction to each new movie when it comes out. "It's okay, but not up to the standard he's set," you know?
I never saw "Waiting for Guffman" in the theater, but enjoyed it a little when I first saw it on VHS. Was it as funny as Spinal Tap? Seemed like it wasn't on that level. Next time around, it really grew on me. "Best in Show" I made a point of seeing in the dark box, and it was -- eh, okay, I guessed. Then about a year later someone had the DVD -- and hey, that's really funny, you know? "A Mighty Wind" we all agreed wasn't quite up to par with the earlier movies that we now thought were classics... But it's amazing how often someone throws out a line from it now, for a beneath-the-radar movie.
I'd definitely connect Christopher Guest's humor to the Simpsons', somehow. Not sure what it is, but they're just satisfying in the same way. And they grow on you.
MASh did end with a movie-cum-episode
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The MASH series did end with a "movie-length finale" just like the parent said. The poster wasn't referring to Robert Altman's movie.
(Depending on your Google results, the MASH finale seems to have remained the highest-rated prime-time show ever.
I would more likely believe that brain size (in terms of computational circuits) would be more appropriate...
A similar argument could be made -- would be made, intuitively, I'd think -- that the more "complex" a critter is, the more complex its DNA would be. More combinations means more potential "circuits" would be the idea. Actually looking at the human genome, though, makes you scratch your head over that one. Though expected to be around 100,000 genes, the human genome turns out to be 30-40,000 genes instead -- right around the level of bacteria, for one comparison.
Personally I'm into your elephant link, and thinking about how their minds work. I love looking at the old skulls and thinking about what that kind of "people" must've been like with a braincase shaped like that. But I dunno, I was reading someplace about Clark's Nutcrackers possibly needing to trade brain size against memory (for where they store seeds), and thinking "How reductive is that?" Seems like the sort of size=power reasoning that would evaporate under scrutiny. Applied to areas of the brain, or to overall brain sizes, it just seems to belong to the world of phrenology.
(And you left out physeter brains -- sperm whales', which are the biggest out there, right?)
In the mid-90s I was tangentially involved with setting up a Web site for a major insurer on which they included personal information about Doctors. This site was completely controlled by the insurer, which was a staff model HMO -- so the Doctors on the site were full-time employees of the HMO, and basically they had to consent to the site. (It'd be different for a more loosely-defined network in a non-staff-model outfit, I'm sure.) The idea was to provide patients with some better way to choose a physician.
Anyway, some of the technophile doctors liked this idea a lot, and it had started with one of them. Lots of the rest of them resented the site as a marketing idea that was beneath them as professionals. When they were asked to provide a personal essay to describe their interests, for example, they sent a taciturn phrase or two at most. The HMO took a fair amount of heat from its doctors about the project.
The idea of patient feedback was floated, in talking about this site originally, but got totally panned by even the technophile docs. The idea of patients with a grudge was obviously on their minds -- and the potential positive of patients who were able to choose doctors based on, say, other patients' descriptions of how communicative they were, that was a complete non-starter. Even the positive votes definitely wanted to control the content on the site completely. At the highest levels of the HMO mother ship, they were just wanting to save on calls asking for a woman internist who spoke Spanish, and to get a little marketing capital too.
I had plenty of profs in college who were totally uninspired classroom speakers. Those people don't want to have students telling each other about them any more than the ordinary word-of-mouth can let that happen.
ABC has a "reporter"-cum-opinion-spouter named John Stossel, who appears on 20/20. The guy's an avowed right-wing shill -- says his job is to preach the virtues of the free market -- and they've given him a green light for hour-long specials and that sort of thing. (Meanwhile Mr. Stossel likes to complain that the media's overwhelming left-wing bias makes his life a burden. Seriously. He's making a very decent living telling us how hard it is to make a living as a conservative in the US media.)
Stossel will basically say anything to back up the story he wants to tell. He's not just fact-light, like this Evans article/opinion piece; he's willing to just plain make 'em up. He'll tell you Parkinson's Disease kills more people than AIDS, 'cause he wants less AIDS funding. He'll make up graduation rates for school systems out of thin air. And so on.
I'll say this, at least the BBC editors, or maybe even Evans, see fit to throw in an occasional qualification. ABC has known Stossel was abusing the truth for years and years, and they keep shuffling his producers and fact checkers off the job without disciplining their on-air "personality." The guy just goes on writing his facts to support the conclusion he's already reached.
...fooling your users...is much harder on the mac side, because the users get more prompting on the proper response to untrusted email attachments.
It's amazing how far a dialog box will go, eh?
If anything OS X generally has less clear, less consistent dialogs than the historical pre-X OS. This has always been one of the strengths of the Mac, though, from the point of view of any user you'd care to ask. Apple apparently has a much better-than-average set of English majors writing the dialogs. You can understand them. The UI standards are such that you mostly get clear options in the dialogs, too. The writers aren't working around to using "okay" for something much more complex.
So, at the OS level at least, you aren't getting the cryptic double-negative "Okay - Cancel" options that make you more vulnerable as a user.
And that's not just vulnerability to trojan horses or Word macros or whatever -- it's vulnerability to lost data because of the UI. (Easy example offhand: Save As from Excel into a.csv file. Try working with that csv. I deal with more users who screw up data that way...)
I'd laugh, but you know... I don't remember the line from the movie, so it isn't quite as funny.
Every time I see Jeff Van Gundy -- former Knicks coach, now with Houston -- I hear Simon Bar Sinister from Underdog ranting about collecting all the bodies of water in the world. (So Underdog was more memorable for me than Episode I. No surprises there.)
As a kid I had a "lazy" eye that didn't let me see in stereo for a while -- later than many kids have it.
Once I finally determined to actually wear my patch, I remember realizing that I could see depth so much better afterward. At this moment I'm not taking that for granted.
Are you seriously comparing the work of the US military in Iraq with the Tiananmen Square massacre?
I'm seriously comparing the perspective of soldiers with the perspective of independent journalists -- that being the point of your post, to which I was responding.
I chose that example specifically because it was extreme. Did you follow that at all? Again, tell me -- would the story you got from the "grunts on the ground" have been substantially different in Tiananmen? Wouldn't the Chinese foot soldier headed into Beijing have said he was following orders that were meant to protect his nation? The contrast between the governments and the situations is quite wide, you're right -- that being the point.
You've just suggested that soldiers know what the majority sentiment of Iraqis is. When the news is about Shiite leaders staging large-scale demonstrations in which they protest our election plans, I suppose we could ask a Master Sergeant what it all means... It just doesn't seem to me like that person's going to necessarily have the best grip on Shiite politics. I'd much rather rely on Iraqis for that information. (For one thing, Iraqis would take the more inflammatory sides of the Shiite clergy's rhetoric a little less to heart.)
Want a much simpler comparison that won't upset you nearly as much? How accurately do you think police officers understand public opinion? I've always thought cops' sense of people was off, because they're constantly dealing with the public in minor confrontational situations like traffic stops. Their sense of how people react to them is distorted, from the examples I see -- including the officer who lives next door, whom I like a lot. Comes with the job.
Now: you're a solider with a mechanized infantry division, and you've been thrown into a policing role, despite inadequate training for it, in an Arab Muslim country during the chaotic months after all-out war. How accurate do you think your perceptions are about people's attitudes? More or less accurate than my neighbor's read on public opinion in his home town?
(As far as the mainstream media goes, they basically "embedded" themselves so thoroughly during major combat that we got an overwhelming share of our information, in the U.S., from reporters who were being toted around like baggage with military units.)
If they knew as much pre-accident as they claim post-accident, not one was willing to stick his neck out and risk his job for those seven lives. Not one.
Look at that sentence. A corporate culture that suppresses important dissenting opinions at the cost of safety -- yes?
If it's necessary to risk your job to try to save the astronauts, and you're a NASA engineer, what does that say? Does it say to you that "accidents happen"? I'm not inclined to shrug it off as "shit happens," for my own sake.
Don't take me as being some sort of NASA-hating contrarian, here. I got my ten-year-olds a game called 'Moonshot' for Christmas, about the programs that led up to Apollo. If the organization lulls itself into a bureaucratic sleepwalk after something like Challenger, though, there are serious problems to fix.
Just out of passing curiosity, did you think the perspective of the Chinese military -- which, after all, was made up of those "grunts on the ground" you so value -- was the correct one with respect to the Tienanmen square massacre?
The role of journalists is to provide an independent perspective. The model you're pining for is one that Li Peng would have been very comfortable with back in 1989. The Chinese state-controlled media will have given you that version, in which responsible, capable soldiers went about performing a difficult job under difficult circumstances, motivated by their higher purpose and sense of moral duty to their nation.
And as far as reporters drinking martinis in a hotel, did you catch the news yesterday at all? Ever hear of Daniel Pearl?
Granted, eBay provides us with a somewhat wilder, woolier petri dish to observe this in, but shoddy writing affects one's credibility everywhere. Spelling matters, and grammar matters, and having some sense of your audience is handy too.
In the case of an auction site, the difference can be described in easily quantifiable terms. Botch the spelling of "earrings" and the value of your goods falls through the floor.
On one of our local talk shows a few weeks back, the politician who's been sponsoring death penalty legislation for five years now made his case. He said the word "heinous" maybe twenty times, mispronouncing it every last time. (It was "hee-nee-us" for him.) Coincidentally, he also seemed to have no rejoinder to any of the basic criticisms of the death penalty. When asked about crime rates, he didn't seem to know they were adjusted for population. When asked about racially biased sentencing, he said he thought we had a pretty good justice system, and had little more to offer. After five years, you'd think he'd have at least considered how to rebut the opposition. His sloppiness over the little things did mean something; it affected his credibility, and it indicated that he wasn't to be taken seriously, at least in my book.
"The most complicated machine ever built was not knocked out of the sky by a pound and a half of foam. This was murder by management."
So every fatal car accident caused by untimely mechanical failure is "murder by manufacturer"?
There's a decent-sized step from "In this case NASA didn't exercise the proper degree of caution, and its culture seems to have quashed the concerns of engineers who were worried about this happening" and "Every untimely mechanical failure resulting in death is murder."
Early Chrysler minivan hatch failures resulted in a number of unintended deaths due to failures in rear-end collisions. Not astonishing news, nor did it necessarily imply culpable behavior on Chrysler's part. However, when the company tried to suppress crash test reporting that showed how bad the problem was -- and particularly when an internal memo showed up that said they could improve the latches for 25 to 50 cents apiece, but that doing so would seem to concede that the earlier ones had a problem -- then you got a very bad picture of how the company's management had dealt with a safety hazard. Having a problem is one thing; compromising your attempt to fix the problem for reasons to do with bureaucratic self-protection, that's filth. (Scarier example: Bush administration opposing the investigation of 9/11 in every way it can.)
NASA's people did know this foam could be a problem, they'd kept track of the patterns of tile damage for that reason. During Columbia's last flight there were engineers on the ground who were incredulous: those above them were taking the position that the risk of foam damage wasn't worth doing anything about.
Yes, it was an unintended mechanical failure -- but management had something to do with how it went down. Management had to do with the lessons of Challenger not being learned. "Murder" isn't the word, okay, but "shit happens" doesn't keep it from happening again.
I find bosses to be some of the most compelling and interesting parts of a number of games, unique parts of every game, whereas everything else kind of repeats... Most everything else is just lame running around and beating up so so, no challenge enemies.
You make my point, from where I'm sitting.
If the imagination of our game designers is limited to "Filler... filler... filler.... Now let's make a really hard boss by giving him extra special armor and lots of hit points," that's the problem. Making the "bosses" harder and harder to compensate for a total lack of imagination is just sad.
Also, note to designers, creating games that require higher and higher hardware threshholds to get a decent frame rate is just plain inflation, and doesn't add much to my experience.
One of the ways to measure a pop movie is to think of the memorable lines from it. Dialog doesn't have to be all that great to stick in your head. ("This was no boating accident!" isn't great literature.)
Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back had the same ham-fisted Lucas dialog, but they were fun and you remember a lot of little lines from them. Heck, I can still hear the exact intonation of Luke's lines as he reacts to Ben Kenobi being cut down. "These aren't the droids we're looking for" and a bunch of other quotes have stuck with me forever. "Empire..." I recall a little less from, though I've probably seen it more. Some of the drippingly sarcastic "Your worship" stuff, and lots of Threepio's banter with R2D2, but not tons of it.
By the time we get to Return of the Jedi, though, I recall nothing to speak of. And for the last/first two movies, all, I can come up with is "Mee-sa." Seriously. And maybe, if I reach, "Around the survivors a perimeter create," but that I'm remembering because it was so stoo-pid. (The entire plot point, not just the line.)
Anyway, does anyone remember any lines from Episodes I or II? For good reasons? Try it out.
One of my huge peeves with games is the whole "boss" thing. JK II has a couple of "Bosses" that are just plain meant to be "Oh, you got killed again, please reload" stopping points. Galak Fyyar's armored outfit is just dorky, and takes away from the Star Wars atmosphere of the rest of the game. Might as well have been Doctor Robotnik.
My two bits is that it seems like this design concept is way long in the tooth by now. I have two ten-year-olds who don't play games until they've done their homework and practiced Piano and orchestra -- meaning we don't get too much electronic time. But dang it if they can't immediately recognize "bosses" when they make their entrance. It's trite, it doesn't really add to the fun as much as it does the player's frustration, and usually those sequences are where the "difficulty" settings we're talking about get frustrating.
I say game designers lack imagination. It's not that they're better at chording buttons, (though they vastly overestimate how fun we think that is). They need to think about pacing in more imaginative ways than "this level has a boss at the end."
I understand they are grasping to get the American public "excited" once more about space exploration...
You have your choice of news sources. Seems like space.com and NASA are doing a decent job explaining these releases in context. They do indicate that this is a confirmation of what we thought, right? Are you just wanting them to wait until they translate the pulses with Hitler's opening ceremonies speech, or what?
I understand they are grasping to get the American public "excited" once more about space exploration, but still. Water does not excite me.
Funny how all the scientists seem to be looking for water, though, isn't it? Gosh, you'd think it was one of the necessary conditions for life as we know (or at least expect) it.
Which it is. Which is why it would be big news to definitively determine whether Mars's surface features have to do with flowing water. Oops, did we lose you already?...
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One of the best examples from that Alan Cooper book is alarm clocks.
That's also a perfect example of dysfunctional relationships between user design and the engineer. There are alarm clocks that project the time on the wall or ceiling, alarm clocks that (supposedly) lull me to sleep with white noise or "nature sounds," and alarm clocks that wake me with my favorite CD -- but every blinking last one of them has horrible user design, especially for the intended audience: sleepy, disoriented people who don't have their contacts in. It's pretty amazing to consider just how awkward the things are.
The guts of a better alarm clock: Bigger buttons that are clearly differentiated, even without my glasses on. Decent control over my snooze-ing -- limits on number of times, variable length, etc. would be nice. Readable displays that show different information -- ta dum! -- differently. ("Alarm" is not the same as "PM" and should not be an identical dot on the display.) And so on.
Everyone has one of these, but the business hasn't produced a really good alarm clock at the commodity level for Target to carry. Designers with swooshy plastic cases aren't going to fix the problem by themselves.
Pixar plans on continuing to make quality movies. They didn't want to sacrifice half their revenues from those movies to Disney, which was handling distribution and providing its "brand." Pixar still gets its cut of revenues from past ones. They've built their own name enough -- witness the recognition level on slashdot -- that they think they can release movies and get the distribution they need independent of the Disney machine. They grew enough to go independent, is their idea.
Nobody stays on top forever in this business.
To wit: Disney's fallen hard, since Beauty and the Beast and Lion King, by making exactly the sorts of conservative, risk-averse decisions you're lauding here. They let Pixar take the risks.
If you have an objection, I think it's to Arthur C. Clarke's response. Not that there's anything wrong with that...
Those old OS 7.something Macs supported "spanning" at the OS level, so if the game didn't want to fill the screen you didn't need any code to back this up. Colonization was much nicer with all the palettes off to one side and a sprawling, 20" map of the new world on the other screen.
(Mac users were the design people, is why this feature was always there. When we presented a brochure design or something, the display was one monitor or LCD, and our slide show controls, palettes and whatnot were on the other one.)
The two superpowers had their various deep benthic submersibles that they've used for stuff like tapping each other's deep-sea cables and pulling up each other's dead subs and so on. (You might want to Read "Blind Man's Bluff" for an okay popular history of that stuff.) Now that the cold war's over, there are private markets for the technology, and the navy's happy to lend its stuff to Robert Ballard to poke around the Meditteranean, looking for history.
Underwater archaeology's taking off as a result. We've had an amazing run of shipwreck-finding, haven't we? Heck, let alone shipe -- we get Black Sea villages that've been preserved in anaerobic environments since "THE flood." All sorts of sailing vessels. Nazi subs. It's a great time to be looking for ships down there. Go down off of the canaries, and you almost have too many ships to choose from.
(William Broad's "The Universe Below" is a decent run through the military history of this stuff, and concentrates more on the shipwrecks side than, say, Richard Ellis's "Deep Atlantic." Broad also considers the legal and ethical problems -- who does a shipwreck from 1500 belong to? Ellis is more about the biology, which is cool too.)
Typically, theologians opposed to evolution have anticipated you in this idea, and come up with a rationale that makes it (to their minds) unacceptable. The essential point would be that God wouldn't tell fibs that way, by planting misleading evidence. That's the synopsis of the argument, anyway.
(Meanwhile most of the scientists I've ever met in the US, anyway, were practicing Christians. The basic point that evolution and religion aren't in opposition because they deal with different types of knowledge is just tooooo hard to get ahold of, isn't it? Scientific knowledge is falsifiable by definition, faith is not, and so on? Sound like something we've heard before?)
Yes, I paid for the privilege of getting an AOL floppy. With a big reference on how to use it. Thirty bucks, I believe.
(And it was money well-spent, until the four months' worth of service they charged me for after I quit the service about six months later. Lame bridges were burned.)
"Transformers" shows up in animation festivals, still, and that puzzled me until I saw it with the kids. I mean, I'm a Citizen Kane sort of movie watcher (a favorite DVD, it's fantastic), and seeing Orson Welles in the credits made me wince for him, you know? How low could he go? But it's one of those totally unlikely good, entertaining movies.
I never saw "Waiting for Guffman" in the theater, but enjoyed it a little when I first saw it on VHS. Was it as funny as Spinal Tap? Seemed like it wasn't on that level. Next time around, it really grew on me. "Best in Show" I made a point of seeing in the dark box, and it was -- eh, okay, I guessed. Then about a year later someone had the DVD -- and hey, that's really funny, you know? "A Mighty Wind" we all agreed wasn't quite up to par with the earlier movies that we now thought were classics... But it's amazing how often someone throws out a line from it now, for a beneath-the-radar movie.
I'd definitely connect Christopher Guest's humor to the Simpsons', somehow. Not sure what it is, but they're just satisfying in the same way. And they grow on you.
(Depending on your Google results, the MASH finale seems to have remained the highest-rated prime-time show ever.
I would more likely believe that brain size (in terms of computational circuits) would be more appropriate...
A similar argument could be made -- would be made, intuitively, I'd think -- that the more "complex" a critter is, the more complex its DNA would be. More combinations means more potential "circuits" would be the idea. Actually looking at the human genome, though, makes you scratch your head over that one. Though expected to be around 100,000 genes, the human genome turns out to be 30-40,000 genes instead -- right around the level of bacteria, for one comparison.
Personally I'm into your elephant link, and thinking about how their minds work. I love looking at the old skulls and thinking about what that kind of "people" must've been like with a braincase shaped like that. But I dunno, I was reading someplace about Clark's Nutcrackers possibly needing to trade brain size against memory (for where they store seeds), and thinking "How reductive is that?" Seems like the sort of size=power reasoning that would evaporate under scrutiny. Applied to areas of the brain, or to overall brain sizes, it just seems to belong to the world of phrenology.
(And you left out physeter brains -- sperm whales', which are the biggest out there, right?)
Anyway, some of the technophile doctors liked this idea a lot, and it had started with one of them. Lots of the rest of them resented the site as a marketing idea that was beneath them as professionals. When they were asked to provide a personal essay to describe their interests, for example, they sent a taciturn phrase or two at most. The HMO took a fair amount of heat from its doctors about the project.
The idea of patient feedback was floated, in talking about this site originally, but got totally panned by even the technophile docs. The idea of patients with a grudge was obviously on their minds -- and the potential positive of patients who were able to choose doctors based on, say, other patients' descriptions of how communicative they were, that was a complete non-starter. Even the positive votes definitely wanted to control the content on the site completely. At the highest levels of the HMO mother ship, they were just wanting to save on calls asking for a woman internist who spoke Spanish, and to get a little marketing capital too.
I had plenty of profs in college who were totally uninspired classroom speakers. Those people don't want to have students telling each other about them any more than the ordinary word-of-mouth can let that happen.
Stossel will basically say anything to back up the story he wants to tell. He's not just fact-light, like this Evans article/opinion piece; he's willing to just plain make 'em up. He'll tell you Parkinson's Disease kills more people than AIDS, 'cause he wants less AIDS funding. He'll make up graduation rates for school systems out of thin air. And so on.
I'll say this, at least the BBC editors, or maybe even Evans, see fit to throw in an occasional qualification. ABC has known Stossel was abusing the truth for years and years, and they keep shuffling his producers and fact checkers off the job without disciplining their on-air "personality." The guy just goes on writing his facts to support the conclusion he's already reached.
It's amazing how far a dialog box will go, eh?
If anything OS X generally has less clear, less consistent dialogs than the historical pre-X OS. This has always been one of the strengths of the Mac, though, from the point of view of any user you'd care to ask. Apple apparently has a much better-than-average set of English majors writing the dialogs. You can understand them. The UI standards are such that you mostly get clear options in the dialogs, too. The writers aren't working around to using "okay" for something much more complex.
So, at the OS level at least, you aren't getting the cryptic double-negative "Okay - Cancel" options that make you more vulnerable as a user.
And that's not just vulnerability to trojan horses or Word macros or whatever -- it's vulnerability to lost data because of the UI. (Easy example offhand: Save As from Excel into a .csv file. Try working with that csv. I deal with more users who screw up data that way...)
Every time I see Jeff Van Gundy -- former Knicks coach, now with Houston -- I hear Simon Bar Sinister from Underdog ranting about collecting all the bodies of water in the world. (So Underdog was more memorable for me than Episode I. No surprises there.)
As a kid I had a "lazy" eye that didn't let me see in stereo for a while -- later than many kids have it.
Once I finally determined to actually wear my patch, I remember realizing that I could see depth so much better afterward. At this moment I'm not taking that for granted.
I'm seriously comparing the perspective of soldiers with the perspective of independent journalists -- that being the point of your post, to which I was responding.
I chose that example specifically because it was extreme. Did you follow that at all? Again, tell me -- would the story you got from the "grunts on the ground" have been substantially different in Tiananmen? Wouldn't the Chinese foot soldier headed into Beijing have said he was following orders that were meant to protect his nation? The contrast between the governments and the situations is quite wide, you're right -- that being the point.
You've just suggested that soldiers know what the majority sentiment of Iraqis is. When the news is about Shiite leaders staging large-scale demonstrations in which they protest our election plans, I suppose we could ask a Master Sergeant what it all means... It just doesn't seem to me like that person's going to necessarily have the best grip on Shiite politics. I'd much rather rely on Iraqis for that information. (For one thing, Iraqis would take the more inflammatory sides of the Shiite clergy's rhetoric a little less to heart.)
Want a much simpler comparison that won't upset you nearly as much? How accurately do you think police officers understand public opinion? I've always thought cops' sense of people was off, because they're constantly dealing with the public in minor confrontational situations like traffic stops. Their sense of how people react to them is distorted, from the examples I see -- including the officer who lives next door, whom I like a lot. Comes with the job.
Now: you're a solider with a mechanized infantry division, and you've been thrown into a policing role, despite inadequate training for it, in an Arab Muslim country during the chaotic months after all-out war. How accurate do you think your perceptions are about people's attitudes? More or less accurate than my neighbor's read on public opinion in his home town?
(As far as the mainstream media goes, they basically "embedded" themselves so thoroughly during major combat that we got an overwhelming share of our information, in the U.S., from reporters who were being toted around like baggage with military units.)
Look at that sentence. A corporate culture that suppresses important dissenting opinions at the cost of safety -- yes?
If it's necessary to risk your job to try to save the astronauts, and you're a NASA engineer, what does that say? Does it say to you that "accidents happen"? I'm not inclined to shrug it off as "shit happens," for my own sake.
Don't take me as being some sort of NASA-hating contrarian, here. I got my ten-year-olds a game called 'Moonshot' for Christmas, about the programs that led up to Apollo. If the organization lulls itself into a bureaucratic sleepwalk after something like Challenger, though, there are serious problems to fix.
The role of journalists is to provide an independent perspective. The model you're pining for is one that Li Peng would have been very comfortable with back in 1989. The Chinese state-controlled media will have given you that version, in which responsible, capable soldiers went about performing a difficult job under difficult circumstances, motivated by their higher purpose and sense of moral duty to their nation.
And as far as reporters drinking martinis in a hotel, did you catch the news yesterday at all? Ever hear of Daniel Pearl?
(How about George Orwell?)
In the case of an auction site, the difference can be described in easily quantifiable terms. Botch the spelling of "earrings" and the value of your goods falls through the floor.
On one of our local talk shows a few weeks back, the politician who's been sponsoring death penalty legislation for five years now made his case. He said the word "heinous" maybe twenty times, mispronouncing it every last time. (It was "hee-nee-us" for him.) Coincidentally, he also seemed to have no rejoinder to any of the basic criticisms of the death penalty. When asked about crime rates, he didn't seem to know they were adjusted for population. When asked about racially biased sentencing, he said he thought we had a pretty good justice system, and had little more to offer. After five years, you'd think he'd have at least considered how to rebut the opposition. His sloppiness over the little things did mean something; it affected his credibility, and it indicated that he wasn't to be taken seriously, at least in my book.
So every fatal car accident caused by untimely mechanical failure is "murder by manufacturer"?
There's a decent-sized step from "In this case NASA didn't exercise the proper degree of caution, and its culture seems to have quashed the concerns of engineers who were worried about this happening" and "Every untimely mechanical failure resulting in death is murder."
Early Chrysler minivan hatch failures resulted in a number of unintended deaths due to failures in rear-end collisions. Not astonishing news, nor did it necessarily imply culpable behavior on Chrysler's part. However, when the company tried to suppress crash test reporting that showed how bad the problem was -- and particularly when an internal memo showed up that said they could improve the latches for 25 to 50 cents apiece, but that doing so would seem to concede that the earlier ones had a problem -- then you got a very bad picture of how the company's management had dealt with a safety hazard. Having a problem is one thing; compromising your attempt to fix the problem for reasons to do with bureaucratic self-protection, that's filth. (Scarier example: Bush administration opposing the investigation of 9/11 in every way it can.)
NASA's people did know this foam could be a problem, they'd kept track of the patterns of tile damage for that reason. During Columbia's last flight there were engineers on the ground who were incredulous: those above them were taking the position that the risk of foam damage wasn't worth doing anything about.
Yes, it was an unintended mechanical failure -- but management had something to do with how it went down. Management had to do with the lessons of Challenger not being learned. "Murder" isn't the word, okay, but "shit happens" doesn't keep it from happening again.
You make my point, from where I'm sitting.
If the imagination of our game designers is limited to "Filler... filler... filler.... Now let's make a really hard boss by giving him extra special armor and lots of hit points," that's the problem. Making the "bosses" harder and harder to compensate for a total lack of imagination is just sad.
Also, note to designers, creating games that require higher and higher hardware threshholds to get a decent frame rate is just plain inflation, and doesn't add much to my experience.
Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back had the same ham-fisted Lucas dialog, but they were fun and you remember a lot of little lines from them. Heck, I can still hear the exact intonation of Luke's lines as he reacts to Ben Kenobi being cut down. "These aren't the droids we're looking for" and a bunch of other quotes have stuck with me forever. "Empire..." I recall a little less from, though I've probably seen it more. Some of the drippingly sarcastic "Your worship" stuff, and lots of Threepio's banter with R2D2, but not tons of it.
By the time we get to Return of the Jedi, though, I recall nothing to speak of. And for the last/first two movies, all, I can come up with is "Mee-sa." Seriously. And maybe, if I reach, "Around the survivors a perimeter create," but that I'm remembering because it was so stoo-pid. (The entire plot point, not just the line.)
Anyway, does anyone remember any lines from Episodes I or II? For good reasons? Try it out.
My two bits is that it seems like this design concept is way long in the tooth by now. I have two ten-year-olds who don't play games until they've done their homework and practiced Piano and orchestra -- meaning we don't get too much electronic time. But dang it if they can't immediately recognize "bosses" when they make their entrance. It's trite, it doesn't really add to the fun as much as it does the player's frustration, and usually those sequences are where the "difficulty" settings we're talking about get frustrating.
I say game designers lack imagination. It's not that they're better at chording buttons, (though they vastly overestimate how fun we think that is). They need to think about pacing in more imaginative ways than "this level has a boss at the end."
You have your choice of news sources. Seems like space.com and NASA are doing a decent job explaining these releases in context. They do indicate that this is a confirmation of what we thought, right? Are you just wanting them to wait until they translate the pulses with Hitler's opening ceremonies speech, or what?
I understand they are grasping to get the American public "excited" once more about space exploration, but still. Water does not excite me.
Funny how all the scientists seem to be looking for water, though, isn't it? Gosh, you'd think it was one of the necessary conditions for life as we know (or at least expect) it.
Which it is. Which is why it would be big news to definitively determine whether Mars's surface features have to do with flowing water. Oops, did we lose you already?...