Spore's players will get to experience firsthand how choices made on a local scale -- a single creature's decision to, say, adopt an omnivorous lifestyle -- can end up having global repercussions.
No they won't. Spore is...um...for want of a better word, fiction. The dynamics of the game have been tweaked to behave this way. There's no 'firsthand' experience of 'global repercussions'. If a bunch of major polluting companies decided to release an ecological game in which the effects of any decision were always purely local could we expect Fox News to report how players could experience, firsthand, the robustness of nature against human interference?
Now if spore was built as an accurate simulation based on parameters measured out in nature, maybe one could argue that we were experiencing 'firsthand'. Otherwise this is just nonsense.
Since when does anything about gaming have anything to do with need. The question is whether or not gamers want HDTV. And you only have to look at the history of increasing PC graphics resolutions to get the answer to that.
After all, the series started with tens of billions of rather meaningless deaths.
They weren't meaningless to the Cylons. The Cylons had been enslaved by humans and as long as humans existed they ran the risk that they would, at some point, attempt to hunt them down and enslave or destroy them again. Given the contempt held by humans for Cylons, despite the fact that the Cylons were clearly intelligent and feeling enough to protest about their oppression, the Cylons were entirely justified in their fears. No, rather than being meaningless, every death was considered by Cylons to be one step closer to freedom.
Maybe you're also unaware that in the rest of the world we don't eat wichetty grubs, we have no idea how to wrestle with crocodiles and we don't drink Fosters.
A little while back I asked an Australian friend of mine about the 'Crocodile Hunter'. He told me that he was unheard of in Australia and he was just some Australian stereotype promulgated by American TV. But when Irwin died I read comments like that of the Australian Prime Minister saying that he represented the real Australia. So now I assume that all Australian stereotypes are accurate:-)
Is the Sharon on the BSG a bad guy? What about the 'war hero' Sharon and #6? What about the preacher that Roslin thoughtlessly tossed out of the airlock? And anyway, who was it that started this war in the first place by enslaving the Cylons? Give up your obvious bias towards humans and look at the bigger picture:-)
What is the nature of political power? Can there be a legitimate government without an army to back it up? What properties should something possess before we grant it rights? Can something non-human be treated as a moral agent? Which of our rights should we give up in extreme situations? Do the ends justify the means?
Like Star Trek before it, Battlestar grapples with these issues. Unlike Star Trek, it doesn't lecture you. It doesn't present you with easy answers. It doesn't tell you the answer that will make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Instead it brings up these issues within the context of a damn fine drama with all of the complex and messy interdependencies that we find in real life. The characters are complex and inconsistent and develop as they face these challenges. There are no clearly defined goodies and baddies. Even the Cylons have convoluted motivations. The characters (apart from Baltar) rarely fit simple pigeon-hole categories and we definitely don't have to endure annoying individuals who preach to us from a pedestal of high moral ground (though you may think one or two are a little self-righteous if you only watch a single episode).
Oh...one last thing...like Firefly it doesn't have people wearing silly masks pretending to be aliens.
Do you really think so? Try going out to see a movie, then you'll see what the word 'crap' really means. The TV studios are currently producing the best drama and entertainment that they ever have. I gave up watching TV for about 8 years. Then about two years ago I got hooked on series like The Sopranos, Firefly and Battlestar Galactica on DVD. Now I have a 50" TV in the living room...
So you're claiming that working out the amount of paint required to paint a wall whose height varies is such a bizarre and abstract concept that potential math canidates won't understand it?
You can't do anything with a PhD in math... except more math
You're trying to set up a barrier between mathematics and the other subjects. I use mathematics every day in my working life. I develop graphics software for movie visual effects. Using mathematics I'm able to write code to solve problems in geometry, physics, optics, image processing and even areas like plant growth and crowd simulation. I have previously used my mathematics knowledge in game development and drug development (in computational chemistry). I'm also a pretty normal guy. Not completely, but I probably am for a/. user.
I've no idea why you're speaking the BS that you are, but it's really not helpful. In particular, you're perpetuating the fear that mathematics has no continuity with ordinary experience. This causes people to have mathophobia which in turn causes people to freeze up when doing mathematics to the point where they can't solve problems in a mathematical context that are identical to problems that they can solve in everyday life. You are one of the causes of that problem and it's very sad.
When a dog runs along a beach and then jumps into the water to retrieve a ball thrown diagonally into a lake, it instinctively solves a problem that humans need calculus to solve.
This is such BS it's incredible that it could have appeared in print. You might as well say that a falling stone knows calculus because at any moment it knows how fast to go to keep moving on a parabola.
Don't try to use the rules you learned with numbers
This is the worst advice ever.
Most of the time when you're doing EE you'll be working with equations in which the variables represent numbers. It's important to bear in mind, that every stage, that these aren't just meaningless symbols. An unknown variable, x, satisfies all the properties that all numbers do. For example xy=yx because 2*3=3*2 and 5*7=7*5, and (-1)*22=22*(-1) and so on. Sure, you can forget about this, and just use the rules of algebra to manipulate these symbols. But as long as you do this you'll have no insight and you'll be like a brute force chess playing machine that has to search out all possible sequences of moves. Keep in mind that these symbols are actually numbers, and all that's happening is that you're doing arithmetic, then you can let your intuition about numbers guide you, even if your equation doesn't even contain any numbers.
eventually, you will have that "Aha!" moment where you really do finally understand what a definite integral is
It's much easier to understand the concept of a definite integral than to memorize and use the rules for manipulating them. Properly explained, the idea is incredibly simple. And once you get the idea, many of the properties will be plainly obvious.
It just won't connect back for a really long time...
Your teachers must have been awful. And despite the fact that I have a PhD in math, you must have had way more stamina than me to learn all of this stuff without connecting it back to arithmetic until much later.
I find it hard to believe that we are the only intellegent life in the entire Universe
I think you're missing an important point in logic. To not believe that X is true does not imply that you believe X is false. It might mean you don't know whether or not X is true. I can quite happily not believe that X is true at the same time as not believing that X is false. Allowing inability to believe something to lead you to believe the converse is the way of madness.
So to put this into practice: I, like you, find it hard to believe that we are the only intellegent life in the entire Universe. But that doesn't mean I believe that we are not the only intelligent life in the universe.
On the other hand, I do think intelligent life is at best fairly rare simply due to the Fermi 'paradox'.
I like to imagine ethereal pink fairies made of non-interacting shadow matter at the end of my yard. But no matter how hard I imagine, it has no bearing on reality.
We've discovered life at the bottom of the ocean, deep in the antarctic, and even in water so hot that we previously expected to kill life by causing the cells to explode.
So because earth lifeforms can survive at high temperatures, the existence of life on other planets is "most supportable theory given the current data". And I suppose that because someone has a Britney Spears CD that can srvive at a temperature of 110F, all planets with a temperature of 110F must be covered in Britney Spears CDs.
Did I miss some big event? Like some Fields medalist announcing that logical deduction is flawed and that henceforth we should all just make stuff up?
Your logic is a little flawed. Britney Spears appeared on earth after 4.6 billion years of evolution around a star with a lifetime of 9.2 billion years. Therefore, by your logic, 50% of rocky worlds have, or have had, Britney Spears evolve on them.
Please describe, in a repeatable, objectively testable way, how to tell the difference between living and dead matter at the quantum level.
You don't even have a clue what "quantum level" means. You might as well ask me how to tell the difference between apples and oranges at the "astrophysical level" for all the sense you're making. Throwing together random technobabble does not meaning make.
Slashdot Mirror
Now if spore was built as an accurate simulation based on parameters measured out in nature, maybe one could argue that we were experiencing 'firsthand'. Otherwise this is just nonsense.
Since when does anything about gaming have anything to do with need. The question is whether or not gamers want HDTV. And you only have to look at the history of increasing PC graphics resolutions to get the answer to that.
Progress!
And this.
The story to read is this one.
A little while back I asked an Australian friend of mine about the 'Crocodile Hunter'. He told me that he was unheard of in Australia and he was just some Australian stereotype promulgated by American TV. But when Irwin died I read comments like that of the Australian Prime Minister saying that he represented the real Australia. So now I assume that all Australian stereotypes are accurate :-)
Like Star Trek before it, Battlestar grapples with these issues. Unlike Star Trek, it doesn't lecture you. It doesn't present you with easy answers. It doesn't tell you the answer that will make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Instead it brings up these issues within the context of a damn fine drama with all of the complex and messy interdependencies that we find in real life. The characters are complex and inconsistent and develop as they face these challenges. There are no clearly defined goodies and baddies. Even the Cylons have convoluted motivations. The characters (apart from Baltar) rarely fit simple pigeon-hole categories and we definitely don't have to endure annoying individuals who preach to us from a pedestal of high moral ground (though you may think one or two are a little self-righteous if you only watch a single episode).
Oh...one last thing...like Firefly it doesn't have people wearing silly masks pretending to be aliens.
So you're claiming that working out the amount of paint required to paint a wall whose height varies is such a bizarre and abstract concept that potential math canidates won't understand it?
I've no idea why you're speaking the BS that you are, but it's really not helpful. In particular, you're perpetuating the fear that mathematics has no continuity with ordinary experience. This causes people to have mathophobia which in turn causes people to freeze up when doing mathematics to the point where they can't solve problems in a mathematical context that are identical to problems that they can solve in everyday life. You are one of the causes of that problem and it's very sad.
Most of the time when you're doing EE you'll be working with equations in which the variables represent numbers. It's important to bear in mind, that every stage, that these aren't just meaningless symbols. An unknown variable, x, satisfies all the properties that all numbers do. For example xy=yx because 2*3=3*2 and 5*7=7*5, and (-1)*22=22*(-1) and so on. Sure, you can forget about this, and just use the rules of algebra to manipulate these symbols. But as long as you do this you'll have no insight and you'll be like a brute force chess playing machine that has to search out all possible sequences of moves. Keep in mind that these symbols are actually numbers, and all that's happening is that you're doing arithmetic, then you can let your intuition about numbers guide you, even if your equation doesn't even contain any numbers.
It's much easier to understand the concept of a definite integral than to memorize and use the rules for manipulating them. Properly explained, the idea is incredibly simple. And once you get the idea, many of the properties will be plainly obvious. Your teachers must have been awful. And despite the fact that I have a PhD in math, you must have had way more stamina than me to learn all of this stuff without connecting it back to arithmetic until much later.Like this. Not only would we be able to see earthlike planets - we'd be able to use spectrography to determine the composition of their atmospheres.
So to put this into practice: I, like you, find it hard to believe that we are the only intellegent life in the entire Universe. But that doesn't mean I believe that we are not the only intelligent life in the universe.
On the other hand, I do think intelligent life is at best fairly rare simply due to the Fermi 'paradox'.
I like to imagine ethereal pink fairies made of non-interacting shadow matter at the end of my yard. But no matter how hard I imagine, it has no bearing on reality.
Did I miss some big event? Like some Fields medalist announcing that logical deduction is flawed and that henceforth we should all just make stuff up?
Your logic is a little flawed. Britney Spears appeared on earth after 4.6 billion years of evolution around a star with a lifetime of 9.2 billion years. Therefore, by your logic, 50% of rocky worlds have, or have had, Britney Spears evolve on them.
Purely Functional Datastructures by Okasaki.
How do you deduce, using common sense, that one in a thousand planets that harbor life have 'significant life'? (Whatever that is.)
How do you deduce, using common sense, that a few in a thousand planets with 'significant life' have 'intelligent' life?
Oh, right. You just made up some random stuff and then claimed it was suggested by common sense.