Alternate Reality Gaming is very interesting in how generous it is to the audience.
Unlike traditional advertising, ARGs really do give you an entire game, often spanning 3 months or more, full of innovative ideas and usually stellar writing, for free in exchange for the chance to get you liking their product. This is a "good deal" for the audience in a market where advertising is severely devalued. I would rather be advertised to with something that entertaining and engaging (and interactive!) than with a 30 second TV spot that plays six times during one episode of my favorite television program.
In other words, to game makers considering putting ads into your work: You should be putting as much effort into the ads as if they were part of the game product, integrating them with the game world and making them appealing in themselves. I can think of two wonderful examples:
First Example: Advertising for Grim Fandango in The Curse of Monkey Island, which integrated the storyline of the game and its signature humor with the surprising appearance of a crossover character. This was a "good deal" - it gave the player something before the product was sold. And for one, it sold me a copy of Grim Fandango.
Second Example: The advertising on pennyarcade.com is often drawn and colored by the comic's artist, Gabe, who has a very distinct and rich art style. By putting his art in the sidebar, the ads seem more personal, and the audience gets a piece of art that they wouldn't have seen otherwise.
Many others have been cited, but there are plenty of ways to do advertising right. Basically, offer the audience something in exchange for their time - engagement, humor, aesthetic pleasure - and you will earn more eyes and less scorn.
Having studied Victorian literature - the good and the nasty - I can tell you that being literate in that time did NOT necessarily convey the ability to communicate effectively. In fact, some of the worst examples we still keep from those days are almost completely unparseable. Take this sentence written by Thomas Carlyle in his most infamous racist diatribe, The Nigger Question. (I use this example because Carlyle was famous for the height of his literacy, and because this is considered the sloppiest of his works.)
"Taking, as we hope we do, an extensive survey of social affairs, which we find all in a state of the frightfullest embroilment, and as it were, of inextricable final bankruptcy, just at present; and being desirous to adjust ourselves in that huge up-break, and unutterable welter of tumbling ruins, and to see well that our grand proposed Association of Associations, the Universal Abolition-of-Pain Association, which is meant to be the consummate golden flower and summary of modern philanthropisms all in one, do not issue as a universal "Sluggard-and-Scoundrel Protection Society"--we have judged that, before constituting ourselves, it would be proper to commune earnestly with one another and discourse together on the leading elements of our great Problem, which surely is one of the greatest."
Now, can anyone in the room tell me: What the hell is this guy saying? If I hadn't told you that this was a racist tract, would you have any idea what it was about? The prose of the 19th century is very similar to the way a 14 year old would write today: a jumble of half-connected thoughts strung together with memorized pleasantries. It is like a very stylized and carefully memorized dance. Is it more grammatically accurate than today's average prose? Yes. Does it communicate more accurately? More efficiently? With greater depth? I really don't think so.
(The same system that you praise was lambasted in its time for relying too heavily on memorization and arbitrary but standard rules. For a critical take on the Victorian school systems, take a peek at Dickens' Hard Times. A critique of a similar modern school system can also be found in Richard Feynman's book, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman.)
Alternate Reality Gaming is a slightly different kind of online gaming. You interact with characters in the story as though they were real. If you need more info, try the "What is an ARG?" and "How do I get started?" buttons at the top of the article. A good explanation is also available at Unfiction.
Needless to say, this is an article about such games that took place in the past year.
I'd also like to point out that, as a junior PM on the grassroots game Omnifam, this is the first time a project of mine has been mentioned on Slashdot. Woot!
...and more to do with how we teach. As children, most of us are taught to do without questioning, and are often punished for doing things out of order or improvising.
Anyone else remember a schoolroom "exercise" in which you would only win if you read last instruction in a long list before starting? Kids who "fail" to read the rules through are instructed to stand up and embarass themselves. I doubt the chimp has ever had that sort of experience, but I personally took this "test" at least 4 times in primary school.
Think back and consider how many times you've been given an F for not following procedures. Remember how many times you've gotten a right answer but used the "wrong" method of reaching it? We teach our kids to follow directions because allowing them to build their own thought processes is too messy. But at least now we have some inkling of what mental blockage we're putting on the children this way.
Not to mention...
1) Aslan knew he would be resurrected and planned for it. If Lucy and Susan hadn't followed him into the woods, people would think he had just been gone for a few hours.
2) Aslan "wins" by knowing the law better than the White Witch, and basically tricking her. I have never seen any interpretation of the Bible that claims Jesus outsmarted the Romans, or the Devil. Christ's divine nature was the cause of his resurrection.
3) In the Narnia story, Aslan could have chosen to sacrifice Lucy, Beaver, or anyone else on his side with the same result. The fact that he chose to sacrifice himself is a sign of personal responsibility, and a sign of the White Witch's greed. Whereas Christ embodied the only possible sacrifice to save all humanity.
I tend to look at C.S. Lewis as a highly educated Christian who felt comfortable playing with his own theology. We know that he believed a concrete historical Jesus distracted from the message of Christianity, because he rants about it profusely in The Screwtape Letters. Lewis seems to have believed that archetypes and metaphors led to a more direct relationship with God. And if we read the Narnia story as a way to distill the essence or archetype of Christ, we find that sacrifice is what Lewis believed was most central to the Christ story - the major discrepancies between Christ's story and Aslan's were probably created to refute the argument that Christ's divinity or his knowledge of his own death made his story less poignant.
Given this, I find it funny that Biblical literalists are rallying around this movie. Doesn't their faith clearly indicate this as heresy? Yet they seem to have some tolerance for it, if only because, as its own story, it is wonderful.
And yet the story didn't come across as evangelical to me...at least not as compared to a lot of other movies, like the fetid pile of dogma known as Bruce Almighty. (Heck, the movie equates God to narrative expectancy, which is a few dozens of stories higher on the intellectual ladder than most evangelical drivel.)
Check out this list of mammal genome sizes. It has no less than ten separate listings for canis familiaris, with their genome sizes ranging from 2.8 to 3.54 picograms (1 pg = about 1 billion base pairs, apparently). Notice that they all have 78 chromosomes, but the amount of genetic matter in those 78 chromosomes seems to vary pretty greatly. And these are all modern specimens which are genetically compatible. So there definitely is evidence that the amount of genetic material can vary - and variance is 50% of an argument for selection.
The other half would be a circumstance to disfavor certain variations. I can, of course, think of many off the top of my head - sperm/egg weights, signal to noise ratio in the genome, and the need to hold a given amount of information - and that's where the "proof" stops. I can't prove that any of those things were, in fact, the deciding factors in getting the mammal genome to the size it is today. But it does seem obscenely likely.
P.S. Considering the world's largest genome is that of a plant, fritillary assyrica, and it's an order of magnitude greater than the human genome, I would reconsider your use of the terms "lower" and "higher." They can be remarkably deceiving.
I'm not afraid of God. But I don't think God, after going to all the trouble to set the heavens in motion, create the all delicate, beautiful variations of life, and build the eyes and minds to view it, would find it good of us to praise him instead of exploring his work. That would be like going to a symphony to stare at the conductors ass.
I had a high school teacher tell me that the wax in a candle didn't burn. He said the entire candle evaporated, even though he couldn't explain why a candle burns much longer than a raw wick, or why my house wasn't full of re-condensed wax.
He also told me that there was no way water would expand when frozen, because all matter decreases in volume when it changes to a solid state. (Water expands because it forms a crystalline structure, but anyone who's ever tried to freeze a water bottle can tell you that it expands.) This guy was also an I.D. proponent, but I'm sure that had nothing to do with it.
I'd just like to point out that, in Latin, they use the word "day" - in the feminine, meaning a period of time, length unspecified. So it seems like both translations are in force there. Considering the Latin bible was made by the Catholics for the Catholics, it does seem to indicate that they follow the metaphoric day theory. Or at least they did back when they did the translation. In any case, the idea of an epic, ages-long creation seems to be much older than the modern scientific evidence supporting it. In the mainstream, no less.
Tales from the 8-bit era
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20 Years of NES
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Actually, the story is a little funnier than that. Tengen tried to reverse engineer the lockout chip, but they couldn't in time to make their deadline. So they called the USPTO and asked them to send a copy of the chip spec, claiming that they needed the information for an ongoing legal case. The Patent Office gladly passed over the specs, and Tengen started making copies. By the time Nintendo had sued the pants off Tengen, they'd figured out how to disable the lockout by sending a small power surge to knockout the chip inside the system.
Another funny story from the NES era is the tale of Wisdom Tree Games, the derivative company created by Color Dreams to sell unauthorized NES cartridges out in the open without fear of retribution from Nintendo. How? The company and the games were biblically themed, and the carts were sold in Christian bookstores. Nintendo didn't dare sue a company making bible games, for fear of massive PR backlash. So Wisdom Tree thrived in its technically-illegal niche. In fact, it's still around today and still printing carts for the gameboy color.
The 10NES chip certainly made for some interesting stories.
On the other end of the spectrum, I suppose I can offer a small anecdote from my time in college. My freshman year, a new student group showed up on campus. Their entire purpose was to, once a year, host the display of a colossal metal tower featuring 12-foot-high images of aborted fetuses. Surrounding the tower were maybe 50 people who would shout at the passing students, and surrounding them was a metal fence. This display was put up far away from the area usually reserved for student groups, in the middle of a major thoroughfare, right next to the largest dormitory hall in the state. The accompanying texts on the boards and signs surrounding the tower for about a block portrayed pro-choice students as Nazis. They also pointed to a web site.
Upon visiting this web site, you were greeted with the name of our school, and the site was done up in our school colors. It looked like a student-run organization. Except that there was no way that even the wealthiest student organization on campus could afford this display. It was put up with a crane every morning, and taken down every night. It had its own security guards. This thing cost some big bucks. Turns out, the web site and the display were provided by a corporation created to tour this thing around many college campuses every year. In fact, it turns out that many of the people out there "protecting" the tower weren't students; they were volunteers from outside the school working with this company. This is where the "bias" comes in.
At the time, the rules were strictly against companies advertising or providing ad materials for students on campus to put up. This was intended to keep big companies from flooding the campus with ads without sponsoring a service (for example, the Coke machines around campus) or an event. And also to keep student groups recruiting and debating at roughly the same financial level. This company had clearly sought to get around that rule by pretending that their ad was created by the students - it was obvious they knew what they were doing wasn't allowed. But the University didn't take the display down, didn't tell the yellers to quiet down, didn't do anything to divert students around it. They politely asked the student sponsors to cover the parts of the display that showed the name of the company's web site. Which they did, with huge yellow posters decrying University "censorship."
Then they sued the school. Claiming that they were sort-of-censored because of the beliefs they were espousing, and not because they were doing it with a 12-foot-tall industrial ad display. They said that the school rules were inherently biased and didn't allow for truly free speech. And the funny thing is, they won. Somehow, just as their student group managed to construct a steel tower on student funds, they "just" managed to rally up enough legal clout to take on the state's biggest university. And it was no small coincidence that the new free speech code allowed big companies to start advertising on our huge, consumer-rich campus. It stank of money, especially when the next year they unveiled an only-8-foot-high version of the tower, designed to merely take up the majority of the space in the student groups' usual meeting area.
So basically, when I see a conservative group whine about only being given their own space where no one was allowed to post opposing views, about only being allowed to display a huge ad that could be seen from one end of the campus to the other, about only being able to harass other students from behind the safety of a metal fence, and about being given a slap on the wrist when they should have been kicked off the campus, I tend to think that all this whinging about "liberal bias" is just selfishness talking. Granted, they did make some students cry. I suppose the uni could be pissed about the counseling time.
2. Pretty much limited to locations he could beg borrow or steal. Not a bad thing with the script, but the script was written around the locations he could get - rather than writing the script the way he wanted to, and then just getting the locations that were in it.
That's interesting, because one of the things I find so attractive about Clerks was that it had a definite sense of place. Even though the script was all over the field conceptually, it was sort of glued to the physical location, and that gave it a sort of personality that many films lack.
Similarly, the fact that Firefly was cancelled after the third (?) episode, gave the last half of the series a very elegaic feel. (For example, the funeral in "The Message" really felt like a funeral for the show itself.)
I guess my point is, sometimes it's better creatively to put all your energy into a project with big restrictions. It can definitely add to the final product. (Heck, some of my own best work has been done on a short deadline with tiny resources. When you're restricted, you find ways to turn those problems to your advantage.)
Also, do you really need 24p for an indie film? Seems like that'd be the kind of thing you would want to upgrade to when you're working with someone else's money.
I am SO sick of professors who use Blackboard/WebCT as a way to get around ordering textbooks or reading packets. I've had professors scan in hundreds of pages from a book, put them on a web in PDF form (two pages to a screen, so you had to read sideways), and expect us to print them out and bring them to class as though they were textbooks. This was done in the name of "saving us money," but really it was just a cop-out for professors who were too lazy to plan their courses ahead of time, or didn't want to get caught in the act of mass copyright infringement. Most of the students spent far more on printer ink than they would have at the copy shop or the bookstore, not to mention the wonderful feeling you get when your ink runs out in the middle of printing your term paper.
If anyone reading this is teaching a class next semester and is even remotely thinking about digitizing their textbook, DON'T DO IT. It only stretches the students' time and resources thinner, and wastes reams of paper - info packets printed at home are lucky to survive an entire semester without getting water damaged, torn apart, or lost in a pile of identical papers from other classes. A good rule of thumb is, if it's more than ten pages, put it in the reading packet. If you absolutely have to put something big online, make sure the PDF is readable on the screen, and don't expect the students to lug stacks of printer paper to class with them. The Blackboard/WebCT isn't there to make the students do your work for you.
Oh, come on. The original game had ten levels and five side-quests. Don't tell me you didn't think it needed a sequel.
Personally, I think the new one is a lot of fun. Not a whole lot of innovation going on there, aside from the sumo wrestler and that *@&$*! fire Katamari level. But I'm happy to get my hands on more ways to roll that thing. That's not to say that the original wasn't perfect in its protean half-indie state - it was delicious. But when you can buy both for the price of a single game, more levels are still worth it.
The only thing that really bugged me was the load times. The original Katamari was one of the miniscule set of PS2 games that didn't have long load times. Now I have to wait for loading in the middle of the freakin' level? How disturbing.
And just for clarity, Guild Wars is highly fragmented, but you can jump freely from server to server, and the chat protocol is universal. You won't see everyone in your game world when you walk into a town - just everyone in your "district" (whether these are individual servers or merely instances run on the same server) - but you can change districts to meet up with your friends.
If you and your friend play in different localities (there are three server "worlds" for Korea, Europe, and North America), you can meet up on the international server. Guilds are also universal. Currently my guild is about half American, half European. In short, you can't see everyone in Guild Wars all the time, but you have access to everyone. Also, it appears that the servers expand and contract districts depending on demand - so if a large crowd show up in, say, Ascalon, the servers stop serving districts in less-popular cities and spawn instances of Ascalon instead. In theory, this prevents the players from crashing the server by congregating in one spot. Pretty nifty setup if you ask me.
We had a New Year's party where someone noticed our DK bongos and decided we should all play. One of the guys at the party was a drummer, and so he thought that he would totally own at the game...but then we got to the bit with the controller. It didn't respond the way he expected a real drum to respond, and then he had to CLAP? What kind of shit was this? He lost one round to a girl who was experienced at the game and sulked in the corner the rest of the night, mumbling about how he hated the game. It was badly made because he couldn't win without trying. Saaad...
Game controllers are precision instruments, man. Even the obvious ones.
I am a woman. I disagree. Games like Rumble Roses and Dead or Alive Beach Volleyball make me feel pretty shitty. The kind of "appreciation" you're expressing makes me feel pretty shitty, because for most men that appreciation comes before all others. It's demeaning to those of us who actually work to do something of value and meaning with our lives, to have our accomplishments swept aside by that natural titty lust. And somehow you expect a woman to like it simply because you're complimenting her body. What you don't understand is that most of the time what we want is appreciation for what we have done, not for the incidental shape of our tits. (And for those guys who say, "Gee, I wish people treated me like a sex object, hur hur hur!" - No, you don't. Trust me.)
If your body, which is something you have simply by virtue of existing, is the sole reason that people pay attention to you, what worth are your mind, soul, personality, opinions - in essence, the things that make up your sense of self? There's not much value in being "appreciated" like this all the time. Now think about how you would feel if you were ignored for a CGI image of a better body than yours - and probably "better" because you chose to spend your days, say, coding or writing instead of primping and dieting?
Again, this may not reflect how you feel or act, and I don't mean to say that this kind of portrayal is Eeevil in the moral sense. All I'm saying is that you might want to know what goes through my head when I, an actual woman, see a game like this, and why it makes me feel degraded.
I can feel a wave of moronic, misogynistic replies coming because of this post. I'm sorry, guys. If you don't want to understand things like this, it's not our fault that women seem mysterious to you.
You're complaining about the ergonomics of the Cube controller? The only controller to put the A,B and X buttons on the same axis as the arc of your thumb movement? The only controller to make the buttons different shapes so you could FEEL your way around the controller instead of having to "hunt and peck" for the right buttons? The only controller with analog shoulder buttons, which, by the way, exhibit the kind of resistance you were talking about - it actually feels like you're pulling a trigger when you push the button down. And while we're on the subject of those shoulder buttons, notice how they're dropped down to be exactly where your index fingers naturally land when you grip the controller? On a dual shock the L&R buttons are on stilts above the controller that force you to extend your fingers, and that hurts. (When you strain your index finger, it affects muscles all the way up your arm too.)
When I hold the GC controller, it's designed so that I only need to press together with my palms to hold it firmly, leaving the rest of my hand free to move. Try doing that with a dual shock - doesn't work, your hand only contacts at one point so the whole thing feels unbalanced. The Cube controller can also rest prefectly balanced on my middle fingers - again, the dual shock can't. The drops for the L&R 2 buttons get in the way of me curling my fingers up to meet the bottom of the controller; It will balance if I straighten my fingers, but that requires me to let go of the controls. The only option is to grip the dual shock tightly with your fingers already extended across the controls. The Cube controller actually allows you to relax your grip without feeling out of control. (I would compare with an Xbox controller, but I don't have one.) I've seen a lot of people say, "My hands are too big for the cube", and I'll give em that...but bad ergonomics, or unplanned ergonomics?? Surely you jest, sir. The ergonomics on the Cube controller are a work of art.
Re:Why the fuck is there a review of Nintendogs on
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Review: Nintendogs
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· Score: 1
Well, it was the number one selling game in Japan for over a week when it came out there. Its U.S. release, couple with Advance Wars DS, spurred a huge spike in new DS buys. Brick and mortar stores are having trouble keeping it in stock. I guess people wanted to know if the game was really worth all the buzz?
Oddly enough, I haven't found any ways to really abuse your Nintendogs.
You can refuse to feed them for a week, but they ignore it. You can bop them on the head with things, but they fetch them and bring em right back to you. You can let them eat trash in the streets, but it doesn't make them yarf. I've heard vague rumors that your puppies will run away if you mistreat them enough, but I haven't seen it happen. (And even if they do, they just come back after x amount of time anyway.) It seems like Nintendo has gone out of their way to make it uninteresting to abuse the little beasts.
Let's not overlook Microsoft Vista--Kitchen Edition. People are putting computers in the kitchen, aren't they? Well then there should be a rugged kitchen edition with a file system specifically suited to storing recipes and videos of Jacques Pepin cooking his way.
At Frys, they sell a refrigerator with a computer built in to bring up recipes, check your email, etc. I believe you can also use it to keep track of your groceries. It runs Windows XP.
I think you missed the point of the pocket constitution. It isn't a religious thingy at all. People buy them because either a) they think it's neato, or b) it represents a contract with the government that they want to hold the government to. The former is far more popular, and a miniscule number of people actually carry a pocket constitution around anywhere, unless they just bought it from the Lincoln Memorial gift shop.
I actually did take a close look at the Constitution recently. It's a pretty neat document. I was looking up gender referrers and was surprised to find how spare the gender references were. How exact the language was - for example, did you know that the Constitution as drafted does not define citizenship? At the time it was designed so that the states could define who was a citizen independently. The Constitution was written to apply to any group of states - something any programmer interested in modularization can appreciate. The idea of extending the constitution through Amendments, too, is pretty interesting. Or, for example, the Ninth Amendment that states that there are other inherent rights not listed in the Constitution which are equally inviolate as those in, say, the first amendment? I'm not saying that the Constitution is a godly thing...that's something for the strict constructionists...I'm just saying, it's pretty spiffy. It's no pulp novel.
And the first thing to say in protest is, "My rights are granted by God or by birth." I don't think the GP was implying that all of our rights are eternally safe. He was saying that they are eternally defensible. Especially when the central law of the land, the Constitution, says that his rights are inherent.
Perhaps the Constitution and its Bill of Rights were meant to allow regular people with little knowledge of the law to trump the semantic knowledge of the lawyers when their rights were trampled. I'm not saying that this is a panacea, but knowing your "God-given" rights is a huge step forward from not knowing...or from having them be "permitted rights" instead of inherent ones.
Wow, that's interesting. How is RNAi related to the natural processes for "turning on" and "turning off" genes? Do our cells naturally produce a "low line" amount of every protein? (Since you said that there's no way to completely turn off a gene with RNAi, I assume that the cell's regular RNA mechanisms have a similar effect.) Would an RNA "regulation malfunction" explain some biological oddities that just can't be explained with genetics? (For example, I have a friend with one attached and one free earlobe, which is supposed to be genetically impossible.)
Slashdot Mirror
Alternate Reality Gaming is very interesting in how generous it is to the audience.
Unlike traditional advertising, ARGs really do give you an entire game, often spanning 3 months or more, full of innovative ideas and usually stellar writing, for free in exchange for the chance to get you liking their product. This is a "good deal" for the audience in a market where advertising is severely devalued. I would rather be advertised to with something that entertaining and engaging (and interactive!) than with a 30 second TV spot that plays six times during one episode of my favorite television program.
In other words, to game makers considering putting ads into your work: You should be putting as much effort into the ads as if they were part of the game product, integrating them with the game world and making them appealing in themselves. I can think of two wonderful examples:
First Example: Advertising for Grim Fandango in The Curse of Monkey Island, which integrated the storyline of the game and its signature humor with the surprising appearance of a crossover character. This was a "good deal" - it gave the player something before the product was sold. And for one, it sold me a copy of Grim Fandango.
Second Example: The advertising on pennyarcade.com is often drawn and colored by the comic's artist, Gabe, who has a very distinct and rich art style. By putting his art in the sidebar, the ads seem more personal, and the audience gets a piece of art that they wouldn't have seen otherwise.
Many others have been cited, but there are plenty of ways to do advertising right. Basically, offer the audience something in exchange for their time - engagement, humor, aesthetic pleasure - and you will earn more eyes and less scorn.
Having studied Victorian literature - the good and the nasty - I can tell you that being literate in that time did NOT necessarily convey the ability to communicate effectively. In fact, some of the worst examples we still keep from those days are almost completely unparseable. Take this sentence written by Thomas Carlyle in his most infamous racist diatribe, The Nigger Question. (I use this example because Carlyle was famous for the height of his literacy, and because this is considered the sloppiest of his works.)
"Taking, as we hope we do, an extensive survey of social affairs, which we find all in a state of the frightfullest embroilment, and as it were, of inextricable final bankruptcy, just at present; and being desirous to adjust ourselves in that huge up-break, and unutterable welter of tumbling ruins, and to see well that our grand proposed Association of Associations, the Universal Abolition-of-Pain Association, which is meant to be the consummate golden flower and summary of modern philanthropisms all in one, do not issue as a universal "Sluggard-and-Scoundrel Protection Society"--we have judged that, before constituting ourselves, it would be proper to commune earnestly with one another and discourse together on the leading elements of our great Problem, which surely is one of the greatest."
Now, can anyone in the room tell me: What the hell is this guy saying? If I hadn't told you that this was a racist tract, would you have any idea what it was about? The prose of the 19th century is very similar to the way a 14 year old would write today: a jumble of half-connected thoughts strung together with memorized pleasantries. It is like a very stylized and carefully memorized dance. Is it more grammatically accurate than today's average prose? Yes. Does it communicate more accurately? More efficiently? With greater depth? I really don't think so.
(The same system that you praise was lambasted in its time for relying too heavily on memorization and arbitrary but standard rules. For a critical take on the Victorian school systems, take a peek at Dickens' Hard Times. A critique of a similar modern school system can also be found in Richard Feynman's book, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman.)
Alternate Reality Gaming is a slightly different kind of online gaming. You interact with characters in the story as though they were real. If you need more info, try the "What is an ARG?" and "How do I get started?" buttons at the top of the article. A good explanation is also available at Unfiction.
Needless to say, this is an article about such games that took place in the past year.
I'd also like to point out that, as a junior PM on the grassroots game Omnifam, this is the first time a project of mine has been mentioned on Slashdot. Woot!
-You can call me Toe
...and more to do with how we teach. As children, most of us are taught to do without questioning, and are often punished for doing things out of order or improvising.
Anyone else remember a schoolroom "exercise" in which you would only win if you read last instruction in a long list before starting? Kids who "fail" to read the rules through are instructed to stand up and embarass themselves. I doubt the chimp has ever had that sort of experience, but I personally took this "test" at least 4 times in primary school.
Think back and consider how many times you've been given an F for not following procedures. Remember how many times you've gotten a right answer but used the "wrong" method of reaching it? We teach our kids to follow directions because allowing them to build their own thought processes is too messy. But at least now we have some inkling of what mental blockage we're putting on the children this way.
Not to mention...
1) Aslan knew he would be resurrected and planned for it. If Lucy and Susan hadn't followed him into the woods, people would think he had just been gone for a few hours.
2) Aslan "wins" by knowing the law better than the White Witch, and basically tricking her. I have never seen any interpretation of the Bible that claims Jesus outsmarted the Romans, or the Devil. Christ's divine nature was the cause of his resurrection.
3) In the Narnia story, Aslan could have chosen to sacrifice Lucy, Beaver, or anyone else on his side with the same result. The fact that he chose to sacrifice himself is a sign of personal responsibility, and a sign of the White Witch's greed. Whereas Christ embodied the only possible sacrifice to save all humanity.
I tend to look at C.S. Lewis as a highly educated Christian who felt comfortable playing with his own theology. We know that he believed a concrete historical Jesus distracted from the message of Christianity, because he rants about it profusely in The Screwtape Letters. Lewis seems to have believed that archetypes and metaphors led to a more direct relationship with God. And if we read the Narnia story as a way to distill the essence or archetype of Christ, we find that sacrifice is what Lewis believed was most central to the Christ story - the major discrepancies between Christ's story and Aslan's were probably created to refute the argument that Christ's divinity or his knowledge of his own death made his story less poignant.
Given this, I find it funny that Biblical literalists are rallying around this movie. Doesn't their faith clearly indicate this as heresy? Yet they seem to have some tolerance for it, if only because, as its own story, it is wonderful.
And yet the story didn't come across as evangelical to me...at least not as compared to a lot of other movies, like the fetid pile of dogma known as Bruce Almighty. (Heck, the movie equates God to narrative expectancy, which is a few dozens of stories higher on the intellectual ladder than most evangelical drivel.)
I highly suggest everyone stop by the site, at least to get every track by the Kings Harmony Orchestra. They rock.
Check out this list of mammal genome sizes. It has no less than ten separate listings for canis familiaris, with their genome sizes ranging from 2.8 to 3.54 picograms (1 pg = about 1 billion base pairs, apparently). Notice that they all have 78 chromosomes, but the amount of genetic matter in those 78 chromosomes seems to vary pretty greatly. And these are all modern specimens which are genetically compatible. So there definitely is evidence that the amount of genetic material can vary - and variance is 50% of an argument for selection.
The other half would be a circumstance to disfavor certain variations. I can, of course, think of many off the top of my head - sperm/egg weights, signal to noise ratio in the genome, and the need to hold a given amount of information - and that's where the "proof" stops. I can't prove that any of those things were, in fact, the deciding factors in getting the mammal genome to the size it is today. But it does seem obscenely likely.
P.S. Considering the world's largest genome is that of a plant, fritillary assyrica, and it's an order of magnitude greater than the human genome, I would reconsider your use of the terms "lower" and "higher." They can be remarkably deceiving.
I'm not afraid of God. But I don't think God, after going to all the trouble to set the heavens in motion, create the all delicate, beautiful variations of life, and build the eyes and minds to view it, would find it good of us to praise him instead of exploring his work. That would be like going to a symphony to stare at the conductors ass.
I had a high school teacher tell me that the wax in a candle didn't burn. He said the entire candle evaporated, even though he couldn't explain why a candle burns much longer than a raw wick, or why my house wasn't full of re-condensed wax.
He also told me that there was no way water would expand when frozen, because all matter decreases in volume when it changes to a solid state. (Water expands because it forms a crystalline structure, but anyone who's ever tried to freeze a water bottle can tell you that it expands.) This guy was also an I.D. proponent, but I'm sure that had nothing to do with it.
I'd just like to point out that, in Latin, they use the word "day" - in the feminine, meaning a period of time, length unspecified. So it seems like both translations are in force there. Considering the Latin bible was made by the Catholics for the Catholics, it does seem to indicate that they follow the metaphoric day theory. Or at least they did back when they did the translation. In any case, the idea of an epic, ages-long creation seems to be much older than the modern scientific evidence supporting it. In the mainstream, no less.
Actually, the story is a little funnier than that. Tengen tried to reverse engineer the lockout chip, but they couldn't in time to make their deadline. So they called the USPTO and asked them to send a copy of the chip spec, claiming that they needed the information for an ongoing legal case. The Patent Office gladly passed over the specs, and Tengen started making copies. By the time Nintendo had sued the pants off Tengen, they'd figured out how to disable the lockout by sending a small power surge to knockout the chip inside the system.
Another funny story from the NES era is the tale of Wisdom Tree Games, the derivative company created by Color Dreams to sell unauthorized NES cartridges out in the open without fear of retribution from Nintendo. How? The company and the games were biblically themed, and the carts were sold in Christian bookstores. Nintendo didn't dare sue a company making bible games, for fear of massive PR backlash. So Wisdom Tree thrived in its technically-illegal niche. In fact, it's still around today and still printing carts for the gameboy color.
The 10NES chip certainly made for some interesting stories.
On the other end of the spectrum, I suppose I can offer a small anecdote from my time in college. My freshman year, a new student group showed up on campus. Their entire purpose was to, once a year, host the display of a colossal metal tower featuring 12-foot-high images of aborted fetuses. Surrounding the tower were maybe 50 people who would shout at the passing students, and surrounding them was a metal fence. This display was put up far away from the area usually reserved for student groups, in the middle of a major thoroughfare, right next to the largest dormitory hall in the state. The accompanying texts on the boards and signs surrounding the tower for about a block portrayed pro-choice students as Nazis. They also pointed to a web site.
Upon visiting this web site, you were greeted with the name of our school, and the site was done up in our school colors. It looked like a student-run organization. Except that there was no way that even the wealthiest student organization on campus could afford this display. It was put up with a crane every morning, and taken down every night. It had its own security guards. This thing cost some big bucks. Turns out, the web site and the display were provided by a corporation created to tour this thing around many college campuses every year. In fact, it turns out that many of the people out there "protecting" the tower weren't students; they were volunteers from outside the school working with this company. This is where the "bias" comes in.
At the time, the rules were strictly against companies advertising or providing ad materials for students on campus to put up. This was intended to keep big companies from flooding the campus with ads without sponsoring a service (for example, the Coke machines around campus) or an event. And also to keep student groups recruiting and debating at roughly the same financial level. This company had clearly sought to get around that rule by pretending that their ad was created by the students - it was obvious they knew what they were doing wasn't allowed. But the University didn't take the display down, didn't tell the yellers to quiet down, didn't do anything to divert students around it. They politely asked the student sponsors to cover the parts of the display that showed the name of the company's web site. Which they did, with huge yellow posters decrying University "censorship."
Then they sued the school. Claiming that they were sort-of-censored because of the beliefs they were espousing, and not because they were doing it with a 12-foot-tall industrial ad display. They said that the school rules were inherently biased and didn't allow for truly free speech. And the funny thing is, they won. Somehow, just as their student group managed to construct a steel tower on student funds, they "just" managed to rally up enough legal clout to take on the state's biggest university. And it was no small coincidence that the new free speech code allowed big companies to start advertising on our huge, consumer-rich campus. It stank of money, especially when the next year they unveiled an only-8-foot-high version of the tower, designed to merely take up the majority of the space in the student groups' usual meeting area.
So basically, when I see a conservative group whine about only being given their own space where no one was allowed to post opposing views, about only being allowed to display a huge ad that could be seen from one end of the campus to the other, about only being able to harass other students from behind the safety of a metal fence, and about being given a slap on the wrist when they should have been kicked off the campus, I tend to think that all this whinging about "liberal bias" is just selfishness talking. Granted, they did make some students cry. I suppose the uni could be pissed about the counseling time.
2. Pretty much limited to locations he could beg borrow or steal. Not a bad thing with the script, but the script was written around the locations he could get - rather than writing the script the way he wanted to, and then just getting the locations that were in it.
That's interesting, because one of the things I find so attractive about Clerks was that it had a definite sense of place. Even though the script was all over the field conceptually, it was sort of glued to the physical location, and that gave it a sort of personality that many films lack.
Similarly, the fact that Firefly was cancelled after the third (?) episode, gave the last half of the series a very elegaic feel. (For example, the funeral in "The Message" really felt like a funeral for the show itself.)
I guess my point is, sometimes it's better creatively to put all your energy into a project with big restrictions. It can definitely add to the final product. (Heck, some of my own best work has been done on a short deadline with tiny resources. When you're restricted, you find ways to turn those problems to your advantage.)
Also, do you really need 24p for an indie film? Seems like that'd be the kind of thing you would want to upgrade to when you're working with someone else's money.
This is a wide tangent, but...
I am SO sick of professors who use Blackboard/WebCT as a way to get around ordering textbooks or reading packets. I've had professors scan in hundreds of pages from a book, put them on a web in PDF form (two pages to a screen, so you had to read sideways), and expect us to print them out and bring them to class as though they were textbooks. This was done in the name of "saving us money," but really it was just a cop-out for professors who were too lazy to plan their courses ahead of time, or didn't want to get caught in the act of mass copyright infringement. Most of the students spent far more on printer ink than they would have at the copy shop or the bookstore, not to mention the wonderful feeling you get when your ink runs out in the middle of printing your term paper.
If anyone reading this is teaching a class next semester and is even remotely thinking about digitizing their textbook, DON'T DO IT. It only stretches the students' time and resources thinner, and wastes reams of paper - info packets printed at home are lucky to survive an entire semester without getting water damaged, torn apart, or lost in a pile of identical papers from other classes. A good rule of thumb is, if it's more than ten pages, put it in the reading packet. If you absolutely have to put something big online, make sure the PDF is readable on the screen, and don't expect the students to lug stacks of printer paper to class with them. The Blackboard/WebCT isn't there to make the students do your work for you.
Oh, come on. The original game had ten levels and five side-quests. Don't tell me you didn't think it needed a sequel.
Personally, I think the new one is a lot of fun. Not a whole lot of innovation going on there, aside from the sumo wrestler and that *@&$*! fire Katamari level. But I'm happy to get my hands on more ways to roll that thing. That's not to say that the original wasn't perfect in its protean half-indie state - it was delicious. But when you can buy both for the price of a single game, more levels are still worth it.
The only thing that really bugged me was the load times. The original Katamari was one of the miniscule set of PS2 games that didn't have long load times. Now I have to wait for loading in the middle of the freakin' level? How disturbing.
And just for clarity, Guild Wars is highly fragmented, but you can jump freely from server to server, and the chat protocol is universal. You won't see everyone in your game world when you walk into a town - just everyone in your "district" (whether these are individual servers or merely instances run on the same server) - but you can change districts to meet up with your friends.
If you and your friend play in different localities (there are three server "worlds" for Korea, Europe, and North America), you can meet up on the international server. Guilds are also universal. Currently my guild is about half American, half European. In short, you can't see everyone in Guild Wars all the time, but you have access to everyone. Also, it appears that the servers expand and contract districts depending on demand - so if a large crowd show up in, say, Ascalon, the servers stop serving districts in less-popular cities and spawn instances of Ascalon instead. In theory, this prevents the players from crashing the server by congregating in one spot. Pretty nifty setup if you ask me.
Hehehe...funny story....
We had a New Year's party where someone noticed our DK bongos and decided we should all play. One of the guys at the party was a drummer, and so he thought that he would totally own at the game...but then we got to the bit with the controller. It didn't respond the way he expected a real drum to respond, and then he had to CLAP? What kind of shit was this? He lost one round to a girl who was experienced at the game and sulked in the corner the rest of the night, mumbling about how he hated the game. It was badly made because he couldn't win without trying. Saaad...
Game controllers are precision instruments, man. Even the obvious ones.
Let me see how delicately I can put this...
I am a woman. I disagree. Games like Rumble Roses and Dead or Alive Beach Volleyball make me feel pretty shitty. The kind of "appreciation" you're expressing makes me feel pretty shitty, because for most men that appreciation comes before all others. It's demeaning to those of us who actually work to do something of value and meaning with our lives, to have our accomplishments swept aside by that natural titty lust. And somehow you expect a woman to like it simply because you're complimenting her body. What you don't understand is that most of the time what we want is appreciation for what we have done, not for the incidental shape of our tits. (And for those guys who say, "Gee, I wish people treated me like a sex object, hur hur hur!" - No, you don't. Trust me.)
If your body, which is something you have simply by virtue of existing, is the sole reason that people pay attention to you, what worth are your mind, soul, personality, opinions - in essence, the things that make up your sense of self? There's not much value in being "appreciated" like this all the time. Now think about how you would feel if you were ignored for a CGI image of a better body than yours - and probably "better" because you chose to spend your days, say, coding or writing instead of primping and dieting?
Again, this may not reflect how you feel or act, and I don't mean to say that this kind of portrayal is Eeevil in the moral sense. All I'm saying is that you might want to know what goes through my head when I, an actual woman, see a game like this, and why it makes me feel degraded.
I can feel a wave of moronic, misogynistic replies coming because of this post. I'm sorry, guys. If you don't want to understand things like this, it's not our fault that women seem mysterious to you.
You're complaining about the ergonomics of the Cube controller? The only controller to put the A,B and X buttons on the same axis as the arc of your thumb movement? The only controller to make the buttons different shapes so you could FEEL your way around the controller instead of having to "hunt and peck" for the right buttons? The only controller with analog shoulder buttons, which, by the way, exhibit the kind of resistance you were talking about - it actually feels like you're pulling a trigger when you push the button down. And while we're on the subject of those shoulder buttons, notice how they're dropped down to be exactly where your index fingers naturally land when you grip the controller? On a dual shock the L&R buttons are on stilts above the controller that force you to extend your fingers, and that hurts. (When you strain your index finger, it affects muscles all the way up your arm too.)
When I hold the GC controller, it's designed so that I only need to press together with my palms to hold it firmly, leaving the rest of my hand free to move. Try doing that with a dual shock - doesn't work, your hand only contacts at one point so the whole thing feels unbalanced. The Cube controller can also rest prefectly balanced on my middle fingers - again, the dual shock can't. The drops for the L&R 2 buttons get in the way of me curling my fingers up to meet the bottom of the controller; It will balance if I straighten my fingers, but that requires me to let go of the controls. The only option is to grip the dual shock tightly with your fingers already extended across the controls. The Cube controller actually allows you to relax your grip without feeling out of control. (I would compare with an Xbox controller, but I don't have one.) I've seen a lot of people say, "My hands are too big for the cube", and I'll give em that...but bad ergonomics, or unplanned ergonomics?? Surely you jest, sir. The ergonomics on the Cube controller are a work of art.
Well, it was the number one selling game in Japan for over a week when it came out there. Its U.S. release, couple with Advance Wars DS, spurred a huge spike in new DS buys. Brick and mortar stores are having trouble keeping it in stock. I guess people wanted to know if the game was really worth all the buzz?
Oddly enough, I haven't found any ways to really abuse your Nintendogs.
You can refuse to feed them for a week, but they ignore it. You can bop them on the head with things, but they fetch them and bring em right back to you. You can let them eat trash in the streets, but it doesn't make them yarf. I've heard vague rumors that your puppies will run away if you mistreat them enough, but I haven't seen it happen. (And even if they do, they just come back after x amount of time anyway.) It seems like Nintendo has gone out of their way to make it uninteresting to abuse the little beasts.
Let's not overlook Microsoft Vista--Kitchen Edition. People are putting computers in the kitchen, aren't they? Well then there should be a rugged kitchen edition with a file system specifically suited to storing recipes and videos of Jacques Pepin cooking his way.
At Frys, they sell a refrigerator with a computer built in to bring up recipes, check your email, etc. I believe you can also use it to keep track of your groceries. It runs Windows XP.
I think you missed the point of the pocket constitution. It isn't a religious thingy at all. People buy them because either a) they think it's neato, or b) it represents a contract with the government that they want to hold the government to. The former is far more popular, and a miniscule number of people actually carry a pocket constitution around anywhere, unless they just bought it from the Lincoln Memorial gift shop.
I actually did take a close look at the Constitution recently. It's a pretty neat document. I was looking up gender referrers and was surprised to find how spare the gender references were. How exact the language was - for example, did you know that the Constitution as drafted does not define citizenship? At the time it was designed so that the states could define who was a citizen independently. The Constitution was written to apply to any group of states - something any programmer interested in modularization can appreciate. The idea of extending the constitution through Amendments, too, is pretty interesting. Or, for example, the Ninth Amendment that states that there are other inherent rights not listed in the Constitution which are equally inviolate as those in, say, the first amendment? I'm not saying that the Constitution is a godly thing...that's something for the strict constructionists...I'm just saying, it's pretty spiffy. It's no pulp novel.
And the first thing to say in protest is, "My rights are granted by God or by birth." I don't think the GP was implying that all of our rights are eternally safe. He was saying that they are eternally defensible. Especially when the central law of the land, the Constitution, says that his rights are inherent.
Perhaps the Constitution and its Bill of Rights were meant to allow regular people with little knowledge of the law to trump the semantic knowledge of the lawyers when their rights were trampled. I'm not saying that this is a panacea, but knowing your "God-given" rights is a huge step forward from not knowing...or from having them be "permitted rights" instead of inherent ones.
Wow, that's interesting. How is RNAi related to the natural processes for "turning on" and "turning off" genes? Do our cells naturally produce a "low line" amount of every protein? (Since you said that there's no way to completely turn off a gene with RNAi, I assume that the cell's regular RNA mechanisms have a similar effect.) Would an RNA "regulation malfunction" explain some biological oddities that just can't be explained with genetics? (For example, I have a friend with one attached and one free earlobe, which is supposed to be genetically impossible.)
IANAB, just curious and incoherent.