So you don't believe that the HadSST2 data set is reliable? It is, after all, primarily the work of one Dr. Phil Jones. That he could make sense of 150 years worth of very diverse raw measurement data seems to me utterly implausible.
I'm no HadSST2 expert, but googling for it and checking the first result (http://badc.nerc.ac.uk/data/hadsst2/), I find a paper about HadSST2, published in Journal of Climate, and written by 8 different researchers. The paper also lists six pages of references of other peoples' work that they've used in theirs. Phil Jones is not an author of that paper, and I checked Jones's list of publications (http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/pubs/byauthor/jones_pd.htm) which doesn't mention HadSST2. I'm left wondering where you got your information from. (To add, the HadSST2 paper does refer to papers authored or co-authored by P.D.Jones as well as dozens of other people.)
"Just use the end result, the HadSST2 data set." In other words, trust me?
You have that same problem with the raw data as well. You'll just have to trust the people and devices taking the original measurements. Or time-travel 150 years back yourself to make the measurements. There you go. You need to trust someone, because you're not omnipotent yourself. In the end, all the scientific papers are out there for you to read, if you want to check other peoples' work before trusting it. Please do so if you want. Jones's list of publications could be a fine starting point.
Let's see, we're supposed to spend literally trillions of dollars to fix global warming, yet we can't see the raw data the hysteria is based on?
The raw data would not be of any use to you. You could not make any sense of it, nor is it stored anywhere as a whole. You would want the thoroughly checked, fixed and quality controlled collection of data, and that, incidentally, is available. It's also the basis for climate models, not some raw data penciled in a notebook.
You can download and view source code at http://www.ccsm.ucar.edu/models/atm-cam/, for example. I doubt that's useful for you either. But seriously, try to search for stuff and read for yourself first. There's a lot of documentation online, really.
Seems to me, if climate change science were based on solid and irrefutable scientific evidence, then there would be no need to use verbal trickery to influence opinion. If you're so sure of yourself, then why the propaganda?
Unfortunately, that's very far from truth. Most citizens and politicians are completely unable to do the science themselves, or even understand every significant part of the reasoning. So for the commoner, it boils down to believing or not believing the panel of scientists, and that is unfortunately a game of propaganda.
Do note that even if climate change is based on solid and irrefutable scientific evidence, only scientists can tell if some evidence is solid or irrefutable. Besides, it seems to me only scientists know well enough to not even demand absolute irrefutability - in reality, that is rather hard to find, isn't it!
This is the first time I've seriously begun to question whether or not the global warming studies are in fact legitimate. If they won't allow free access to the data, so others can verify results or run it through alternative (or more refined) climate models, then the very obvious question becomes "why?"
One thing that comes to mind: McIntyre seems to have been asking for raw data. Now raw measurement data, especially if it's combined from a variety of sources, might be pencilled in notebooks, photographs of meter readings, or automatically saved files in several weird formats. That aside, measurements can also come from different devices that act in different ways, and to allow comparison, several corrections may be done and erroneous data points may be removed. HadSST2 seems to be a result of such work, to produce a data set that is consistent over a period of 150 years.
To suggest that any one scientist could make sense of 150 years worth of very diverse raw measurement data seems to me utterly implausible. If this data could be given to someone, he'd be unlikely to arrive at the right results - rather, failing to know the difference between different kinds of equipment would more than likely cause him to be mislead, not even mentioning the endless possibilities for cherry-picking.
Just use the end result, the HadSST2 data set. That's what climate scientists use anyway, not raw data.
Now Bond trips over something so it breaks and you see it's only a cardboard prop. That'd break all the immersion and remind you it's all just illusion.
I'd like to add something to this point. For me, it's not so much about graphics looking realistic as it is about a game looking *dynamic*. The greatest shortcoming of most games is that the world isn't dynamic. If I see a photorealistic fancy flag waving (or not waving) exactly the same way from day to day, hour to hour - then I remember it's just a game. I'm in a picture, even if it's an animated 3-d photorealistic one.
Then again, it does breaks immersion to see something utterly unrealistic. I had such a moment playing Star Wars: Galaxies, when I realized I could see stars through moons! From that moment, I wasn't seeing a moon, I was seeing a translucent texture in the sky..
A dynamic world works wonders for me. Even in a game like Dwarf Fortress, which uses textmode graphics. Every single thing in the game can be cut, including everything from mountains to cats, and a dwarf becomes a dead dwarf when he dies (or maybe parts of a dwarf, depending on what killed it). I find no problem at all getting immersed to the game and caring for my dear ascii characters.
You have a point. Maybe thinking in new terms could be "sold" to the public as an exercise for the brains?:). Switching to euros took me a couple of weeks, and a basic grasp of a foreign currency comes in five minutes. Maybe it has something to do with speaking many languages as well?
I can't picture a kilometer (or a mile) either, but that's because I never see things that are that long at one view! A kilometer is something I can walk in maybe 10 minutes, or drive in one;). It's also 10 000 kilometers from north pole to the equator. A centimeter is much easier: if something is 35 cm, I mostly think of 35% of a meter, not 35 times some very short length.
Something I use very often is the fact that one liter of water is 1 kg, and also 10 cm squared.
Sure, sometimes someone has to get a calculator to figure out how many inches are in 200 feet (but hopefully not most people) before they figure out how many 1.65 inch pieces they can cut that 200 feet into, but the other guy is going to need a calculator (or some scratch paper, whatever) to figure out how many 4.191 cm pieces they can get from 60 meters anyway.
What? Where does math education suck so much? It takes me ten seconds and no calculator to say the answer is slightly less than 1500.
Some more thought into it: it's about 5% less, so around 1425 (the exact answer, from a calculator, is 1431).
That, and I've never seen a calculator that would do unit conversions for me. Do you actually have a calculator that you can put inches and feet into, and that converts automatically?
We have proven the existence of a molten outer core inside the Earth, and the proof doesn't depend on the magnetic field, but rather, seismology. Sound and vibration can travel in any substance as a pressure wave - material compressing and decompressing (P-waves). In solids, vibration can also be orthogonal to the direction of propagation (S-waves). Think of vibration in a string, or in a tuning fork. It is known empirically that S-waves travel through the Earth only to certain depth. Because they can't propagate deeper than that, the material must be unsuitable for S-waves, which means liquid.
Now, if there's a liquid, a gravitational field, and a temperature difference, convective flow must be present too. In addition, this liquid outer core is circulating around the Earth's axis. So the "geodynamo" still seems like the best explanation to me (I recommend Fowler's The Solid Earth if anyone's actually interested in the science and reasoning behind all this).
the long-term changes (the secular variation) in the Earth's main magnetic field are possibly induced by our oceans' circulation.
This here is what the article actually states. I'm not surprised that oceanic currents can correlate with the details of the magnetic field, as the field is known to be the result of several phenomena. Actually this finding can turn out to be supporting the geodynamo idea, as one problem with the geodynamo is why the magnetic field is such a mess;). Maybe core currents generate most of the magnetic field and oceans add variation to it.
But in computer games, it's impossible to have an equal match. It's humans versus machines. One side has an advantage of being able to perform a billion calculations per second, and the other has the massively parallel human brain.
Any parity here is an illusion, and it's that illusion that we seek to improve and maintain via the introduction of intelligent mistakes and artificial stupidity.
Even with no more information that a human would have, a computer will always win in anything that concerns evaluating probabilities, optimizing variables, predicting trajectories or things, et cetera. Do you actually want a math contest between you and a multiprocessing overclocked calculator on steroids? No, you don't. Imagine an FPS with an AI that had zero reaction time, perfect vision and perfect accuracy, even with "no extra information"..
The article was about people wanting to play against calculators that pretend to be humanlike. And I quite heartily agree. At least I want to play against a tough challenge that is fallible and quirky just like humans are.
Only intelligent animals keep other animals in cages.
Herding Aphids: How 'Farmer' Ants Keep Control Of Their Food:
ants have been known to bite the wings off the aphids in order to stop them from getting away and depriving the ants of one of their staple foods: the sugar-rich sticky honeydew which is excreted by aphids when they eat plants.
Consider saving a grid of numerical data in a text file, say, a map of air temperatures or some other meteorological data. Only that you don't have data in all points. What do you do? Write -99 instead, because it can never be that cold, right? (unfortunately some people do that). What's worse, ad-hoc data formats are usually not well defined, commented or anything.
After thinking about this real hard once, I decided to write "NULL". Because everyone knows what it represents, because there's no possible way anyone could think that's a valid number, and because C++ I/O turned out to support it with no special pain or code to write;).
How about sparse matrices in memory? Right, if they are sparse enough you should be doing something else anyway. What if you only have one third of values missing in random locations?
Essentially, I think that sometimes the NULL "certificate" is the best solution. Even in real languages there's the concepts of "empty" and "nothing", and that's for a reason - sometimes it's easier to say "my hand is empty" than to say "my hand contains zero items".
I can't defend thier choice but from reading the blogs at the time of 4.0 it was quite clear...
And if you go buy a new pencil, will you first read what the pencilmakers wrote about it in their blogs? Didn't think so. A lot of people don't do that for software either. And frankly, if it takes more than two seconds to determine if some program version is worth installing, I'm not going to bother. Getting old, I guess.
As for the other arguments.. Well, I can understand, but can't accept;).
himanchal.org or nepalwireless.net for information about volunteering in Nepali countryside. I've been there myself three times. It's really an experience in every possible way, and you can really make a difference.
..after a couple deaths you have to restart the ENTIRE GAME, not the level, the entire game. And its a fixed rate scroller so there's no 'going faster'.
Oh. Ouch. Well, that just sucks on a level I didn't think possible in more modern than maybe NES games..
It's not that games shouldn't at all "punish" you for failure (there's Lucasarts graphic adventures for that), but rather that games shouldn't punish you with time sinks -- which was the article's point.
I agree with that. I disagree with the notion that having to do one level again would necessarily be a time sink. In a nonlinear game you could go do something else, get different weapons, a few more levels or whatever, and then come back to the boss. Or just do the level differently to conserve HP or ammo for the boss.
What turns me away from MMOs is that they punish you with time sinks especially when you did nothing wrong. Leveling, grinding, making "bring me X bodyparts of animal Y" quests is all a huge time sink..
most modern computer games: You're supposed to re-play LOADS of times, with comparatively short games each time, rather than one very long play-through.
I've played games where I couldn't figure out the boss, but had completely mastered the 6 minute level to reach him... WASTING 6 minutes between each attempt to try a different attack pattern on the boss is just annoying.
Maybe you should learn to do those 6 minutes quicker? I've seen a friend of mine complete the first map of Duke Nukem 3d in 18 seconds.
Well, that, and most of the time when I first reach the boss, I already have lost hit points. So I need to do the level again without losing HP that I need against the boss.
More seriously though, I like save option in linear games, and I like open-ended games even better. Ones in which I don't need to repeat the same 6 minutes after dying, but can do something different instead.
Well, of course it is good to have many kinds of games for many kinds of audiences. What he's talking about is probably true about linear, scripted games like Prince of Persia, but not universal. And not to my liking either.
A far better option is to actually have open-ended gameplay and serious punishments. Mount & Blade is a true gem for a game, even when one single defeat can mean your pack of 80 knights gets completely slaughtered and driven away, you lose most of your money and some important pieces of gear, and it takes you ten hours of playing to regain everything you've lost.
In URW (a roguelike in a northern setting), you can die. The whole story can be about slowly dying away from cold and hunger. Most of my first ten games I started in the winter were, and the others were about a bear or a lynx killing me before hunger and coldness could.
In yet another game, Dwarf Fortress, one bad move can ruin your kingdom of 200 dwarves under the mountain. Maybe the dragon attacks and fries most of your folks. Maybe you found a magma chamber by digging into it from underneath.
So why do I enjoy these kinds of setbacks? Because these games tell a story. Stories sometimes have unhappy endings, and many other times stories are about surviving setbacks. Lost all of your knights while attacking Swadia? Maybe it's time to join Swadia, hire some horse archers and go loot villages for a while! Had Smaug fry your dwarves and conquer your mountainhome? Time to go hire a thief and try something sneaky!;)
It's about immersion. True, basketball isn't about immersion, but some games are.
The different death rates for climbers and sherpas at least suggests that a lot of climbers don't get it right.
My own risk management, simplified, is as follows: rope up at any occasion when there's a significant chance of a significant fall. Stop and/or turn around whenever not feeling healthy.
A lot of climbers don't get it right. Some think it's okay to leave their tent unroped and die from accidental slipping. Some think it's okay to continue even when they experience the first signs of mountain sickness. Some think it's okay to abseil without stopper knots and die when they run out of rope.
More generally, some think it's okay to be scared - I disagree. Whenever I'm scared, there's a safety issue I'm not focusing on enough and my instincts are telling me about it. If I'm scared about whether a rope will hold me to the rock, I'll make sure it will, or if I can't, find another route.
My explanation is that people get overly anxious about climbing Everest. They've paid a lot, the monsoon is coming, they might not get another chance. And they're focused on the summit, not the climbing. Climbing is great fun even without summiting. Many a time I hear stories about people really pushing themselves to get to the summit, and once they're there, they feel miserable and their only thought is getting a few pics and going back.
I think it's a failed climb if I feel like that at the summit. Or anyone else climbing with me.
That, and for many, Everest is probably the only really high peak they ever attempt. So they might think it's not essential getting it absolutely right, if only they get to the summit and down.
At least what many climbers do is spend a lot of time learning about other climbers' accidents and sharing their own accident stories and concerns. Very many rather detailed stories can be found online:).
That's just not how you manage OSS projects. If somebody wants to do something cool with Wine (make it work with 64-bit code), they'll mostly do that or nothing. You can't force anyone to do dull stuff without paying them. Which is one reason why open source software is "bleeding edge" in both the good and the painful way. But hey, it's OSS.
A climber intentionally risks many other things, like falling into a crevasse on a glacier, getting caught in a storm on a mountain, etc. I climb, and for me it's very satisfying to manage these risks by making good decisions and surviving in good health from something that is serious business. It's an adventure, and even when it's not a large step for the mankind, it's a kind of personal exploration. Doesn't matter so much if other people charted the glaciers and summits before me, I'm still learning very much about the planet we live on.
The risk management is not unlike driving a car. While driving fast there's a significant risk of death which we manage. People drive cars even when many die while doing just that. Of course it's much more satisfying to do something a bit less mundane in tremendous surroundings. I don't know why, but after my first trip to Himalayas I've had this calling.. It's not something that existed before that, though.
You probably shouldn't equate climbing with the Everest so much. People who go to Everest are the types who want to climb the highest mountains - as if that was the superior achievement. And Everest is relatively easy too, it's only challenging because of the height. Most climbers are happier on lower hills. Most climbers never risk hypoxia. And some climbers still climb mountains that have never been climbed by anyone.
Climbing today might not advance the humanity as a whole very much, but advances still happen. At least the equipment used in climbing and professions who use ropes has developed a great deal during the last decades. It's actually so fast that during my three years of climbing, I'm already seeing technological advances. Also, thanks to the climbers, there's a lot of science done on which knots are the best in saving lives, and which others occasionally fail. This might not get you excited, but it does that to me;).
Yea, that's what it means, and it's really telling. The base camp height is already serious business. People have died of altitude sickness in heights of 3000 meters and up.
Well, some would probably have died of other illnesses, accidents etc. And of injury they suffered higher up, but then got down before dying.
Slashdot Mirror
So you don't believe that the HadSST2 data set is reliable? It is, after all, primarily the work of one Dr. Phil Jones. That he could make sense of 150 years worth of very diverse raw measurement data seems to me utterly implausible.
I'm no HadSST2 expert, but googling for it and checking the first result (http://badc.nerc.ac.uk/data/hadsst2/), I find a paper about HadSST2, published in Journal of Climate, and written by 8 different researchers. The paper also lists six pages of references of other peoples' work that they've used in theirs. Phil Jones is not an author of that paper, and I checked Jones's list of publications (http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/pubs/byauthor/jones_pd.htm) which doesn't mention HadSST2. I'm left wondering where you got your information from. (To add, the HadSST2 paper does refer to papers authored or co-authored by P.D.Jones as well as dozens of other people.)
"Just use the end result, the HadSST2 data set." In other words, trust me?
You have that same problem with the raw data as well. You'll just have to trust the people and devices taking the original measurements. Or time-travel 150 years back yourself to make the measurements. There you go. You need to trust someone, because you're not omnipotent yourself. In the end, all the scientific papers are out there for you to read, if you want to check other peoples' work before trusting it. Please do so if you want. Jones's list of publications could be a fine starting point.
Let's see, we're supposed to spend literally trillions of dollars to fix global warming, yet we can't see the raw data the hysteria is based on?
The raw data would not be of any use to you. You could not make any sense of it, nor is it stored anywhere as a whole. You would want the thoroughly checked, fixed and quality controlled collection of data, and that, incidentally, is available. It's also the basis for climate models, not some raw data penciled in a notebook.
You can download and view source code at http://www.ccsm.ucar.edu/models/atm-cam/, for example. I doubt that's useful for you either. But seriously, try to search for stuff and read for yourself first. There's a lot of documentation online, really.
Seems to me, if climate change science were based on solid and irrefutable scientific evidence, then there would be no need to use verbal trickery to influence opinion. If you're so sure of yourself, then why the propaganda?
Unfortunately, that's very far from truth. Most citizens and politicians are completely unable to do the science themselves, or even understand every significant part of the reasoning. So for the commoner, it boils down to believing or not believing the panel of scientists, and that is unfortunately a game of propaganda.
Do note that even if climate change is based on solid and irrefutable scientific evidence, only scientists can tell if some evidence is solid or irrefutable. Besides, it seems to me only scientists know well enough to not even demand absolute irrefutability - in reality, that is rather hard to find, isn't it!
This is the first time I've seriously begun to question whether or not the global warming studies are in fact legitimate. If they won't allow free access to the data, so others can verify results or run it through alternative (or more refined) climate models, then the very obvious question becomes "why?"
One thing that comes to mind: McIntyre seems to have been asking for raw data. Now raw measurement data, especially if it's combined from a variety of sources, might be pencilled in notebooks, photographs of meter readings, or automatically saved files in several weird formats. That aside, measurements can also come from different devices that act in different ways, and to allow comparison, several corrections may be done and erroneous data points may be removed. HadSST2 seems to be a result of such work, to produce a data set that is consistent over a period of 150 years.
To suggest that any one scientist could make sense of 150 years worth of very diverse raw measurement data seems to me utterly implausible. If this data could be given to someone, he'd be unlikely to arrive at the right results - rather, failing to know the difference between different kinds of equipment would more than likely cause him to be mislead, not even mentioning the endless possibilities for cherry-picking.
Just use the end result, the HadSST2 data set. That's what climate scientists use anyway, not raw data.
Now Bond trips over something so it breaks and you see it's only a cardboard prop. That'd break all the immersion and remind you it's all just illusion.
I'd like to add something to this point. For me, it's not so much about graphics looking realistic as it is about a game looking *dynamic*. The greatest shortcoming of most games is that the world isn't dynamic. If I see a photorealistic fancy flag waving (or not waving) exactly the same way from day to day, hour to hour - then I remember it's just a game. I'm in a picture, even if it's an animated 3-d photorealistic one.
Then again, it does breaks immersion to see something utterly unrealistic. I had such a moment playing Star Wars: Galaxies, when I realized I could see stars through moons! From that moment, I wasn't seeing a moon, I was seeing a translucent texture in the sky..
A dynamic world works wonders for me. Even in a game like Dwarf Fortress, which uses textmode graphics. Every single thing in the game can be cut, including everything from mountains to cats, and a dwarf becomes a dead dwarf when he dies (or maybe parts of a dwarf, depending on what killed it). I find no problem at all getting immersed to the game and caring for my dear ascii characters.
You have a point. Maybe thinking in new terms could be "sold" to the public as an exercise for the brains? :). Switching to euros took me a couple of weeks, and a basic grasp of a foreign currency comes in five minutes. Maybe it has something to do with speaking many languages as well?
I can't picture a kilometer (or a mile) either, but that's because I never see things that are that long at one view! A kilometer is something I can walk in maybe 10 minutes, or drive in one ;). It's also 10 000 kilometers from north pole to the equator. A centimeter is much easier: if something is 35 cm, I mostly think of 35% of a meter, not 35 times some very short length.
Something I use very often is the fact that one liter of water is 1 kg, and also 10 cm squared.
Sure, sometimes someone has to get a calculator to figure out how many inches are in 200 feet (but hopefully not most people) before they figure out how many 1.65 inch pieces they can cut that 200 feet into, but the other guy is going to need a calculator (or some scratch paper, whatever) to figure out how many 4.191 cm pieces they can get from 60 meters anyway.
What? Where does math education suck so much? It takes me ten seconds and no calculator to say the answer is slightly less than 1500.
Some more thought into it: it's about 5% less, so around 1425 (the exact answer, from a calculator, is 1431).
That, and I've never seen a calculator that would do unit conversions for me. Do you actually have a calculator that you can put inches and feet into, and that converts automatically?
We have proven the existence of a molten outer core inside the Earth, and the proof doesn't depend on the magnetic field, but rather, seismology. Sound and vibration can travel in any substance as a pressure wave - material compressing and decompressing (P-waves). In solids, vibration can also be orthogonal to the direction of propagation (S-waves). Think of vibration in a string, or in a tuning fork. It is known empirically that S-waves travel through the Earth only to certain depth. Because they can't propagate deeper than that, the material must be unsuitable for S-waves, which means liquid.
Now, if there's a liquid, a gravitational field, and a temperature difference, convective flow must be present too. In addition, this liquid outer core is circulating around the Earth's axis. So the "geodynamo" still seems like the best explanation to me (I recommend Fowler's The Solid Earth if anyone's actually interested in the science and reasoning behind all this).
the long-term changes (the secular variation) in the Earth's main magnetic field are possibly induced by our oceans' circulation.
This here is what the article actually states. I'm not surprised that oceanic currents can correlate with the details of the magnetic field, as the field is known to be the result of several phenomena. Actually this finding can turn out to be supporting the geodynamo idea, as one problem with the geodynamo is why the magnetic field is such a mess ;). Maybe core currents generate most of the magnetic field and oceans add variation to it.
I'm sure machines can be forced by people. Material wealth comes from machines these days after all.
As the actual article stated,
But in computer games, it's impossible to have an equal match. It's humans versus machines. One side has an advantage of being able to perform a billion calculations per second, and the other has the massively parallel human brain.
Any parity here is an illusion, and it's that illusion that we seek to improve and maintain via the introduction of intelligent mistakes and artificial stupidity.
Even with no more information that a human would have, a computer will always win in anything that concerns evaluating probabilities, optimizing variables, predicting trajectories or things, et cetera. Do you actually want a math contest between you and a multiprocessing overclocked calculator on steroids? No, you don't. Imagine an FPS with an AI that had zero reaction time, perfect vision and perfect accuracy, even with "no extra information"..
The article was about people wanting to play against calculators that pretend to be humanlike. And I quite heartily agree. At least I want to play against a tough challenge that is fallible and quirky just like humans are.
Only intelligent animals keep other animals in cages.
Herding Aphids: How 'Farmer' Ants Keep Control Of Their Food: ants have been known to bite the wings off the aphids in order to stop them from getting away and depriving the ants of one of their staple foods: the sugar-rich sticky honeydew which is excreted by aphids when they eat plants.
Let the kids be fucking kids
I definitely agree. Kids shouldn't be fucking adults!
in that program of mine, writing an array of floating-point numbers.
Consider saving a grid of numerical data in a text file, say, a map of air temperatures or some other meteorological data. Only that you don't have data in all points. What do you do? Write -99 instead, because it can never be that cold, right? (unfortunately some people do that). What's worse, ad-hoc data formats are usually not well defined, commented or anything.
After thinking about this real hard once, I decided to write "NULL". Because everyone knows what it represents, because there's no possible way anyone could think that's a valid number, and because C++ I/O turned out to support it with no special pain or code to write ;).
How about sparse matrices in memory? Right, if they are sparse enough you should be doing something else anyway. What if you only have one third of values missing in random locations?
Essentially, I think that sometimes the NULL "certificate" is the best solution. Even in real languages there's the concepts of "empty" and "nothing", and that's for a reason - sometimes it's easier to say "my hand is empty" than to say "my hand contains zero items".
What about 4.0alpha, 4.1beta and 4.2? Or 4.-2, 4.-1 and 4.0?
Or, rather, 4alpha1, 4alpha124 and 4.0? Or 3.9, 3.99 and 4.0? :)
I can't defend thier choice but from reading the blogs at the time of 4.0 it was quite clear...
And if you go buy a new pencil, will you first read what the pencilmakers wrote about it in their blogs? Didn't think so. A lot of people don't do that for software either. And frankly, if it takes more than two seconds to determine if some program version is worth installing, I'm not going to bother. Getting old, I guess.
As for the other arguments.. Well, I can understand, but can't accept ;).
himanchal.org or nepalwireless.net for information about volunteering in Nepali countryside. I've been there myself three times. It's really an experience in every possible way, and you can really make a difference.
..after a couple deaths you have to restart the ENTIRE GAME, not the level, the entire game. And its a fixed rate scroller so there's no 'going faster'.
Oh. Ouch. Well, that just sucks on a level I didn't think possible in more modern than maybe NES games..
It's not that games shouldn't at all "punish" you for failure (there's Lucasarts graphic adventures for that), but rather that games shouldn't punish you with time sinks -- which was the article's point.
I agree with that. I disagree with the notion that having to do one level again would necessarily be a time sink. In a nonlinear game you could go do something else, get different weapons, a few more levels or whatever, and then come back to the boss. Or just do the level differently to conserve HP or ammo for the boss.
What turns me away from MMOs is that they punish you with time sinks especially when you did nothing wrong. Leveling, grinding, making "bring me X bodyparts of animal Y" quests is all a huge time sink..
most modern computer games: You're supposed to re-play LOADS of times, with comparatively short games each time, rather than one very long play-through.
You play different modern games than I do! ;)
I've played games where I couldn't figure out the boss, but had completely mastered the 6 minute level to reach him... WASTING 6 minutes between each attempt to try a different attack pattern on the boss is just annoying.
Maybe you should learn to do those 6 minutes quicker? I've seen a friend of mine complete the first map of Duke Nukem 3d in 18 seconds.
Well, that, and most of the time when I first reach the boss, I already have lost hit points. So I need to do the level again without losing HP that I need against the boss.
More seriously though, I like save option in linear games, and I like open-ended games even better. Ones in which I don't need to repeat the same 6 minutes after dying, but can do something different instead.
Well, of course it is good to have many kinds of games for many kinds of audiences. What he's talking about is probably true about linear, scripted games like Prince of Persia, but not universal. And not to my liking either.
A far better option is to actually have open-ended gameplay and serious punishments. Mount & Blade is a true gem for a game, even when one single defeat can mean your pack of 80 knights gets completely slaughtered and driven away, you lose most of your money and some important pieces of gear, and it takes you ten hours of playing to regain everything you've lost.
In URW (a roguelike in a northern setting), you can die. The whole story can be about slowly dying away from cold and hunger. Most of my first ten games I started in the winter were, and the others were about a bear or a lynx killing me before hunger and coldness could.
In yet another game, Dwarf Fortress, one bad move can ruin your kingdom of 200 dwarves under the mountain. Maybe the dragon attacks and fries most of your folks. Maybe you found a magma chamber by digging into it from underneath.
So why do I enjoy these kinds of setbacks? Because these games tell a story. Stories sometimes have unhappy endings, and many other times stories are about surviving setbacks. Lost all of your knights while attacking Swadia? Maybe it's time to join Swadia, hire some horse archers and go loot villages for a while! Had Smaug fry your dwarves and conquer your mountainhome? Time to go hire a thief and try something sneaky! ;)
It's about immersion. True, basketball isn't about immersion, but some games are.
How manageable is the risk on Everest?
The different death rates for climbers and sherpas at least suggests that a lot of climbers don't get it right.
My own risk management, simplified, is as follows: rope up at any occasion when there's a significant chance of a significant fall. Stop and/or turn around whenever not feeling healthy.
A lot of climbers don't get it right. Some think it's okay to leave their tent unroped and die from accidental slipping. Some think it's okay to continue even when they experience the first signs of mountain sickness. Some think it's okay to abseil without stopper knots and die when they run out of rope.
More generally, some think it's okay to be scared - I disagree. Whenever I'm scared, there's a safety issue I'm not focusing on enough and my instincts are telling me about it. If I'm scared about whether a rope will hold me to the rock, I'll make sure it will, or if I can't, find another route.
My explanation is that people get overly anxious about climbing Everest. They've paid a lot, the monsoon is coming, they might not get another chance. And they're focused on the summit, not the climbing. Climbing is great fun even without summiting. Many a time I hear stories about people really pushing themselves to get to the summit, and once they're there, they feel miserable and their only thought is getting a few pics and going back.
I think it's a failed climb if I feel like that at the summit. Or anyone else climbing with me.
That, and for many, Everest is probably the only really high peak they ever attempt. So they might think it's not essential getting it absolutely right, if only they get to the summit and down.
At least what many climbers do is spend a lot of time learning about other climbers' accidents and sharing their own accident stories and concerns. Very many rather detailed stories can be found online :).
That's just not how you manage OSS projects. If somebody wants to do something cool with Wine (make it work with 64-bit code), they'll mostly do that or nothing. You can't force anyone to do dull stuff without paying them. Which is one reason why open source software is "bleeding edge" in both the good and the painful way. But hey, it's OSS.
A climber intentionally risks many other things, like falling into a crevasse on a glacier, getting caught in a storm on a mountain, etc. I climb, and for me it's very satisfying to manage these risks by making good decisions and surviving in good health from something that is serious business. It's an adventure, and even when it's not a large step for the mankind, it's a kind of personal exploration. Doesn't matter so much if other people charted the glaciers and summits before me, I'm still learning very much about the planet we live on.
The risk management is not unlike driving a car. While driving fast there's a significant risk of death which we manage. People drive cars even when many die while doing just that. Of course it's much more satisfying to do something a bit less mundane in tremendous surroundings. I don't know why, but after my first trip to Himalayas I've had this calling.. It's not something that existed before that, though.
You probably shouldn't equate climbing with the Everest so much. People who go to Everest are the types who want to climb the highest mountains - as if that was the superior achievement. And Everest is relatively easy too, it's only challenging because of the height. Most climbers are happier on lower hills. Most climbers never risk hypoxia. And some climbers still climb mountains that have never been climbed by anyone.
Climbing today might not advance the humanity as a whole very much, but advances still happen. At least the equipment used in climbing and professions who use ropes has developed a great deal during the last decades. It's actually so fast that during my three years of climbing, I'm already seeing technological advances. Also, thanks to the climbers, there's a lot of science done on which knots are the best in saving lives, and which others occasionally fail. This might not get you excited, but it does that to me ;).
Yea, that's what it means, and it's really telling. The base camp height is already serious business. People have died of altitude sickness in heights of 3000 meters and up.
Well, some would probably have died of other illnesses, accidents etc. And of injury they suffered higher up, but then got down before dying.