I've always liked to dream that our 3d universe is just the event horizon surface of a black hole in a 4d space. In this fantasy, the big bang is just our view of the supernova where the collapsing object's surface area and mass rapidly expanded. The rest of the 4d universe is inaccessible to us, just as the surface of a black hole in our universe has no way to "see" the rest of ours.
Alas, it feels like the collectible craze has finally struck the heart of D&D.
At the risk of sounding like I'm shaking my cane at those dratted kids (and maybe I am), this isn't a followup to the classic game, it's a repackaged version of the miniatures game. Look at the monsters... they're essentially a card. The actual description, background and mythology of the creatures are negligible. The mechanics themselves are designed to be bound to a board, not played out in the imagination.
On some level I guess I can't blame them. As a system linking MMORPGs, miniatures games and card games, it works. They look at the income of Magic the Gathering or WOW and say "why can't we get a piece of that?!" so they design a game that will allow them to leverage the different merchandise against each other. It's not a bad system if that's what you have in mind and I can see it being very successful in that Microsoft sort of way. I know a lot of people who wouldn't touch this system with a 10-foot pole if it didn't have the D & D name on it, but since it does, they probably won't want to play anything else.
What's really sad to me is how hard it is to dig up any information on what can or cannot be created and distributed by players. They seemed to be starting to get the hang of it with opening the d20 system but this feels like a step in the opposite direction. It's becoming about leveraging their games onto players, not about empowering players to create their own games and worlds. I want tools to create stories with, to build worlds with... as a gamer, I'm not a consumer of fantasy, I'm a creator of fantasy.
Re:Excuse me while I gouge my eyes out with a spoo
on
I Will Derive
·
· Score: 0, Redundant
Oh come now, at least it was better than the new Indiana Jones movie and that made the front page.
What I feel was IJ's original brilliance was that it was a mashup of genres from a particular era of cinema: it took a pulp detective movie, an swashbuckling adventure, a Casablanca-ish winds of war story and a biblical epic and put all the elements and styles together into a single story.
Rather than try to recreate the same story every time, the franchise should be aiming to create a movie each decade that mashes together all the genres that were most popular in the time period 50 years earlier.
"Tabloid" is not just a page size, it's a term of derision for a lack of journalistic integrity. I'm not sure it's quite the right word for that paper though. Though a pompous and shameless tool of right-wing propaganda seeking to manipulate rather than inform its readers, National Post was at least relatively free of sensationalism (at least it was a few years ago the last time I read a copy)
I think AV vendors would rather be in the business of selling a placebo than selling a cure.
What I fear personally is recombination, where malware writers start setting up protocols for automatically and randomly exchanging code/modules with other malware without need for human intervention. That's where I feel the next explosion could come from - both in the variety of malware and the speed at which new innovations propagate across various strains. The only thing holding it back would seem to be the profit motive of malware writers - it's hard to control something that's mutating in unpredictable ways.
On a chemical level, life is mostly a whole mass of chemical chain reactions that form closed loops of events that (directly or indirectly) spread into multiple copies like glider-replicators in a game of life. A right-handed compound and a left-handed compound won't interact the same way... so as the chain reaction "replicates", only one form gets passed on. That there would be a chirality bias is not surprising. On the contrary, I would say that it is the expected situation.
So... the model says streaks are probable. Reality says they're rare. So which is the more reasonable conclusion: that we're in a rare reality or that the model is not an accurate reflection of reality? Seems to me that the later is the better choice. Like seers of old, I don't care how interesting the theory and show of a model are, the only thing that matters is: "are the predictions accurate"
Given the value of data, at what point does diplomacy start to consider network intrusion to be an act of war. I mean, if they're going to treat physical and imaginary "property" to be equal under the law, then this sort of massive data intrusion becomes the equivalent of walking into a naval base and sailing away with a fully loaded aircraft carrier.
Role playing games are one of the truly great innovations of the 20th century and I would rank it up with the television in the impact it has had on a generation of geeks and the industries it has spawned. Though I never had the chance to talk to (or more importantly game with) him, I would like to hope someone will leave 3d6 behind for him in case he needs to roll up a character in the next campaign he joins.
I would rephrase this as "create a better-than-nature method of using solar power to convert CO2 + H20 into gasoline + O2."
The way I see it, the only problem with the carbon we burn is that we're taking it out of the ground instead of out of the air. Gasoline is a already a pretty good battery - it just happens to be one that for now we can find lying around in the ground.
It's a bit humbling to think that even in this day and age, it's still possible for a plane to disappear in the middle of one of the most advanced countries on the planet and the combined resources of governments and enthusiastic hobbiests cannot find any trace of it.
The conclusion this line of thinking seems to lead to is that the presence of terrorism is evidence that a society still allows freedom of thought (or rather that the absence of terrorism/crime/general-antisocial-behavior is a warning sign that a society has already crossed the line into being controlled). Then again, the definition of crime and terrorism can always be tweaked to justify the required level of controls.
The sad irony of the Internet is that although it provides freedom of communication with the world, it also allows freedom to invisibly monitor all communication between networks.
This is interesting given the timing of the Microsoft bid and the state of the wireless auction. Could Microsoft have waited until they believed Google had committed its resources to a spectrum bid before making a move to take Yahoo?
An employee is selling their time to an employer, not their life, not their soul.
(I'd grant an exception for celebrities who are explicitly selling their face, name and reputation for use by the employer, but I think that's a silly business anyway)
What amazes me about "identity" (financial, blog or otherwise) in the Internet age is how similar it is starting to feel to the concept of identity in fantasy fiction (such as the Earthsea books) where people have disposable day-to-day common names, but also truenames that hold the real power of identity, shared only with the most trusted of companions.
It's a nice presentation, but it seems to me that the logical (if not immediately obvious from length) breakdown is to do the first movie about dealing with Smaug (from Bilbo's point of view) and then use the second movie to examine all the factions arguing over the treasure, leading up to the Battle of the Five Armies (giving a chance to work in all the side-stories such as the Necromancer/White Council/etc). I don't think the Hobbit can be done in the Jackson style in a single (2-3 hour) film and I don't think there is really any other place earlier to cut it and actually end the first movie other than just stopping after a fight and saying "too be continued next year" (which worked in Fellowship, but is now getting annoyingly common in films - Matrix 2&3, Pirates 2&3, Golden Compass, etc).
Although it's an interesting idea, I suspect it will turn out that there is a much more familiar reason for the start and end of the Cambrian Explosion: a new scripting language followed by code bloat.
Personally I tend to lean to the idea what the Cambrian explosion rose from was a new mutation that allowed body segmentation/specialization to be effectively encoded, leading to specialization to exploit a multitude of ecological niches and a huge variety of possible paths in the evolution of predator/prey races. Lots of innovation, lots of ideas good and bad that eventually died out in the market. But eventually, enough specialization had accumulated in the surviving lines in the number and function of body segments that it became difficult to find workable novel mutations. For example a human can't change our number of limbs or the alignment of one of those limbs without causing a whole mess of debilitating side effects, whereas in the early evolution of body segments, you could do a lot more rotating and elongating of segments without destroying the existing functions. So instead of adding new limbs or new types of gills, we rotate one digit off of one limb off one body segment and marvel in the wonder of having evolved an opposable thumb.
But if your idea is correct, as we sequence the DNA a number of critters from different phylum that grew out of the Cambrian era, if retroviruses did enable any gene swapping, it should be possible to test for the presence of genes that seem out of place relative to the rest of a family tree (it boggles my mind to think of the amount of insight about evolutionary history, chemistry and medicine we're going to be able to mine from DNA over the next generation - politely assuming scientific thought can maintain a niche in our culture and isn't driven to extinction by religious memes).
I think you misunderstand me. I'm not saying that people are carbon copies of each other at birth or that it is impossible to make statistical predictions of future success. But rather, is who you are in the eyes of the society a question of your genes and ancestry or is it the person how you become? In another era, the color of a person's skin would have been considered as insurmountable disability and every measurable statistic of social success at the time would have agreed.
One of the most eloquent solutions the world has ever seen to all the ethical and legal complications of inheritance is the famous passage from the American Declaration of Independence. They simply declared equality as an axiom. It was intended as rejection of hereditary social caste systems within the dominant race and gender of the time, but it's really all a question of genetics.
(now the question of insurance is muddier because it's one thing for the law to be blind to genetics, but it's another thing for the law to meddle in the calculations of a private company, but I'll leave that to a different debate... I just wanted to try to clarify where my original comment was coming from)
Slashdot Mirror
So in other words Saddam Hussein was the ideal leader to have in Iraq?
I've always liked to dream that our 3d universe is just the event horizon surface of a black hole in a 4d space. In this fantasy, the big bang is just our view of the supernova where the collapsing object's surface area and mass rapidly expanded. The rest of the 4d universe is inaccessible to us, just as the surface of a black hole in our universe has no way to "see" the rest of ours.
Alas, it feels like the collectible craze has finally struck the heart of D&D.
At the risk of sounding like I'm shaking my cane at those dratted kids (and maybe I am), this isn't a followup to the classic game, it's a repackaged version of the miniatures game. Look at the monsters ... they're essentially a card. The actual description, background and mythology of the creatures are negligible. The mechanics themselves are designed to be bound to a board, not played out in the imagination.
On some level I guess I can't blame them. As a system linking MMORPGs, miniatures games and card games, it works. They look at the income of Magic the Gathering or WOW and say "why can't we get a piece of that?!" so they design a game that will allow them to leverage the different merchandise against each other. It's not a bad system if that's what you have in mind and I can see it being very successful in that Microsoft sort of way. I know a lot of people who wouldn't touch this system with a 10-foot pole if it didn't have the D & D name on it, but since it does, they probably won't want to play anything else.
What's really sad to me is how hard it is to dig up any information on what can or cannot be created and distributed by players. They seemed to be starting to get the hang of it with opening the d20 system but this feels like a step in the opposite direction. It's becoming about leveraging their games onto players, not about empowering players to create their own games and worlds. I want tools to create stories with, to build worlds with ... as a gamer, I'm not a consumer of fantasy, I'm a creator of fantasy.
Oh come now, at least it was better than the new Indiana Jones movie and that made the front page.
Rule of thumb: when science hits the non-science news before the science news, it's not news.
What I feel was IJ's original brilliance was that it was a mashup of genres from a particular era of cinema: it took a pulp detective movie, an swashbuckling adventure, a Casablanca-ish winds of war story and a biblical epic and put all the elements and styles together into a single story.
Rather than try to recreate the same story every time, the franchise should be aiming to create a movie each decade that mashes together all the genres that were most popular in the time period 50 years earlier.
"Tabloid" is not just a page size, it's a term of derision for a lack of journalistic integrity. I'm not sure it's quite the right word for that paper though. Though a pompous and shameless tool of right-wing propaganda seeking to manipulate rather than inform its readers, National Post was at least relatively free of sensationalism (at least it was a few years ago the last time I read a copy)
I think AV vendors would rather be in the business of selling a placebo than selling a cure.
What I fear personally is recombination, where malware writers start setting up protocols for automatically and randomly exchanging code/modules with other malware without need for human intervention. That's where I feel the next explosion could come from - both in the variety of malware and the speed at which new innovations propagate across various strains. The only thing holding it back would seem to be the profit motive of malware writers - it's hard to control something that's mutating in unpredictable ways.
seriously ... BS detector is flashing red on this whole article.
But it does raise the point that apocalypse cults are best kept away from space tech.
On a chemical level, life is mostly a whole mass of chemical chain reactions that form closed loops of events that (directly or indirectly) spread into multiple copies like glider-replicators in a game of life. A right-handed compound and a left-handed compound won't interact the same way ... so as the chain reaction "replicates", only one form gets passed on. That there would be a chirality bias is not surprising. On the contrary, I would say that it is the expected situation.
So ... the model says streaks are probable. Reality says they're rare. So which is the more reasonable conclusion: that we're in a rare reality or that the model is not an accurate reflection of reality? Seems to me that the later is the better choice. Like seers of old, I don't care how interesting the theory and show of a model are, the only thing that matters is: "are the predictions accurate"
Given the value of data, at what point does diplomacy start to consider network intrusion to be an act of war. I mean, if they're going to treat physical and imaginary "property" to be equal under the law, then this sort of massive data intrusion becomes the equivalent of walking into a naval base and sailing away with a fully loaded aircraft carrier.
Role playing games are one of the truly great innovations of the 20th century and I would rank it up with the television in the impact it has had on a generation of geeks and the industries it has spawned. Though I never had the chance to talk to (or more importantly game with) him, I would like to hope someone will leave 3d6 behind for him in case he needs to roll up a character in the next campaign he joins.
I would rephrase this as "create a better-than-nature method of using solar power to convert CO2 + H20 into gasoline + O2."
The way I see it, the only problem with the carbon we burn is that we're taking it out of the ground instead of out of the air. Gasoline is a already a pretty good battery - it just happens to be one that for now we can find lying around in the ground.
It's a bit humbling to think that even in this day and age, it's still possible for a plane to disappear in the middle of one of the most advanced countries on the planet and the combined resources of governments and enthusiastic hobbiests cannot find any trace of it.
The conclusion this line of thinking seems to lead to is that the presence of terrorism is evidence that a society still allows freedom of thought (or rather that the absence of terrorism/crime/general-antisocial-behavior is a warning sign that a society has already crossed the line into being controlled). Then again, the definition of crime and terrorism can always be tweaked to justify the required level of controls.
The sad irony of the Internet is that although it provides freedom of communication with the world, it also allows freedom to invisibly monitor all communication between networks.
*sighs as my thought-database entry is flagged*
This is interesting given the timing of the Microsoft bid and the state of the wireless auction. Could Microsoft have waited until they believed Google had committed its resources to a spectrum bid before making a move to take Yahoo?
An employee is selling their time to an employer, not their life, not their soul.
(I'd grant an exception for celebrities who are explicitly selling their face, name and reputation for use by the employer, but I think that's a silly business anyway)
What amazes me about "identity" (financial, blog or otherwise) in the Internet age is how similar it is starting to feel to the concept of identity in fantasy fiction (such as the Earthsea books) where people have disposable day-to-day common names, but also truenames that hold the real power of identity, shared only with the most trusted of companions.
"Such a shame that we occupy such a small blink in the process, and can't witness cosmic events on any larger a level."
Patience grasshopper.
Wait...fur?! Oh blast, what have you mortals gone and evolved yourselves into now?
Kudos to the first group to penetrate the series' offices and make off with their tapes.
It's a nice presentation, but it seems to me that the logical (if not immediately obvious from length) breakdown is to do the first movie about dealing with Smaug (from Bilbo's point of view) and then use the second movie to examine all the factions arguing over the treasure, leading up to the Battle of the Five Armies (giving a chance to work in all the side-stories such as the Necromancer/White Council/etc). I don't think the Hobbit can be done in the Jackson style in a single (2-3 hour) film and I don't think there is really any other place earlier to cut it and actually end the first movie other than just stopping after a fight and saying "too be continued next year" (which worked in Fellowship, but is now getting annoyingly common in films - Matrix 2&3, Pirates 2&3, Golden Compass, etc).
"Don't worry, our Chinese contractors assure us there are no NSA backdoors"
Although it's an interesting idea, I suspect it will turn out that there is a much more familiar reason for the start and end of the Cambrian Explosion: a new scripting language followed by code bloat.
Personally I tend to lean to the idea what the Cambrian explosion rose from was a new mutation that allowed body segmentation/specialization to be effectively encoded, leading to specialization to exploit a multitude of ecological niches and a huge variety of possible paths in the evolution of predator/prey races. Lots of innovation, lots of ideas good and bad that eventually died out in the market. But eventually, enough specialization had accumulated in the surviving lines in the number and function of body segments that it became difficult to find workable novel mutations. For example a human can't change our number of limbs or the alignment of one of those limbs without causing a whole mess of debilitating side effects, whereas in the early evolution of body segments, you could do a lot more rotating and elongating of segments without destroying the existing functions. So instead of adding new limbs or new types of gills, we rotate one digit off of one limb off one body segment and marvel in the wonder of having evolved an opposable thumb.
But if your idea is correct, as we sequence the DNA a number of critters from different phylum that grew out of the Cambrian era, if retroviruses did enable any gene swapping, it should be possible to test for the presence of genes that seem out of place relative to the rest of a family tree (it boggles my mind to think of the amount of insight about evolutionary history, chemistry and medicine we're going to be able to mine from DNA over the next generation - politely assuming scientific thought can maintain a niche in our culture and isn't driven to extinction by religious memes).
I think you misunderstand me. I'm not saying that people are carbon copies of each other at birth or that it is impossible to make statistical predictions of future success. But rather, is who you are in the eyes of the society a question of your genes and ancestry or is it the person how you become? In another era, the color of a person's skin would have been considered as insurmountable disability and every measurable statistic of social success at the time would have agreed.
One of the most eloquent solutions the world has ever seen to all the ethical and legal complications of inheritance is the famous passage from the American Declaration of Independence. They simply declared equality as an axiom. It was intended as rejection of hereditary social caste systems within the dominant race and gender of the time, but it's really all a question of genetics.
(now the question of insurance is muddier because it's one thing for the law to be blind to genetics, but it's another thing for the law to meddle in the calculations of a private company, but I'll leave that to a different debate ... I just wanted to try to clarify where my original comment was coming from)