So until or unless you can produce said evidence, you get to enjoy the status of "crackpot", pretty much right along the lines of astrologers, religionists, and crystal gazers.:-)
I remember reading a column by the physicist Paul Davies in which he showed that the multiverse model of the universe leads inevitably to the conclusion that we're just a computer simulation within a simulation within a simulation:
"For every original world, there will be a stupendous number of available virtual worlds -- some of which would even include machines simulating virtual worlds of their own, and so on ad infinitum."
Sure, but is there a way to nominate that site for having a completely broken DHTML interface with pointless animations? Also, if you are writing a page about other pages that suck, it should at least validate...
Really, that site sucked enough itself that I didn't even have to look at any of the sites it listed.
Since the AC who posted this comment was obviously unequal to the task of finding the article, I tracked it down:
The Tug of the Newfangled Slot Machines (May 9, 2004 By GARY RIVLIN)
That should be enough to get anyone interested in going the right direction. Don't expect to find a free copy on the New York Times's site, where articles are only available for free for a very limited time.
From the article:
At 8 p.m. on a warm midsummer's night, Baerlocher watched a woman dressed in green polyester pants and a yellow-and-white-striped short-sleeved top play a slot machine he designed called ''The Price Is Right.'' At first, the woman's body language was noncommittal: she stood half-turned from the game, as if no more than mildly curious about the outcome of her wager. ''Price'' is what slot pros call ''a cherry dribbler,'' a machine that dispenses lots of small payouts while it nibbles at your stash rather than biting off large chunks of it. ''You want to give the newbie lots of positive reinforcement -- to keep 'em playing,'' Baerlocher told me. As if on cue, the woman hit a couple of small jackpots and took a seat. ''Gotcha,'' Baerlocher said softly under his breath.
I read somewhere recently (I think it was The Black Swan by NNT) that whether or not you become a gambling addict depends largely on your first experience with it. First-time winners tend to be more likely to become addicts. A form of confirmation bias -- affirmation bias?
Luckily, my dad had no mercy on me playing poker as a 5 year-old.
I read a New York Times article on this subject a while back -- it was about professional slot machine designers. It referred to an insidious concept with the charming title, "cherry dribbling." Basically, it means figuring out the ratio of payouts to losses that defines the optimal rate to pick a slot-machine player's pocket. Pay out too much and obviously the slot-machine owner will lose. Pay out too little and people begin to feel like suckers and stop playing. Get it just right -- super happy profit!
I don't know how reasonable this is as an alternative (it won't work for most LAN/desktop situations), but this is what I use for logins to internet sites that aren't a high security concern for me:
I rolled this myself and it runw all client-side with javascript (both the cause and solution to all life's problems?). If you were concerned about the security of a third-party site (as you should be -- though this is safe) you could roll your own pretty easily and stick it on your own public site.
It's handy because I can just add a reminder to the profile page that most sites offer. And it makes my password for the site easily available where I have an internet connection. (Though it does require visiting the mushpup site and entering the info there and then pasting it back to site I want to log into.)
I can -- now that I got the author's name correct. It was actually written by Elizabeth Kolbert and titled "Pimps and Dragons." No longer on the New Yorker's site, but found a copy here:
As far as post-scarcity economies, isn't that Cory Doctorow's speciality? (Haven't read the novel in question -- nor remember it's name off-hand.) Another perspective, from the Sweepers Calendar:
As soon as the artificial problem of scarcity is finally eradicated, economics will immediately turn to the dangerous problem of superabundance. States will fall into turmoil as people riot for want of absolutely nothing. And the leisure class will be distinguished not by its conspicuous exhibition of affluence, but by a fashionable hint of the mildest deprivation.
You're right, but that doesn't mean we should cater to this insane desire for self-rating.
Except that by understanding this insane desire, the state, officials, sysops, ordinary citizens, etc. can exploit it to positive social ends -- a point perfectly illustrated by the "red hair dye" solution in the world of Ultima Mead writes about in her article. If that doesn't epitomize the insane desire for gratuituous markers of social status, well, then I guess we can always go get in line a week ahead of time for an iphone.
Of course, more than likely, it will be exploited to negative social ends. But in recognizing it, you can at least protect yourself, which is what I guess the GP's point was.
But you're right about self-appointed fairness monitors: as far as I can tell, "this social boost" is what serotonin is all about and there have been some interesting things written about the effect social positioning has on its release.
You need to stop grinding your teeth whenever someone has a better lot than you and start worrying about YOUR fortune... As long as parts of the game are work rather than play, I am going to choose alternative methods that let me bypass them. Me doing so, doesn't affect you in the slightest.
Unfortunately, generations of sociobiological selection and primate evolution make sure that it does affect me (or would, if I played any of these games.) Look up E.O. Wilson.
It affects me for the same reason that the fate of Paris Hilton affects me: an adaptive intellectual curiosity about my relative social standing within the community (and the implications that holds for the perpetuation of my genes) hijacked by the forces of modern culture and amplified by modern technology.
Indeed, if it didn't affect me or anyone else, there'd be no market for MMORPGs in the first place. We'd all just stay at home all day complacently tending our rock gardens. Or, in my case, playing Sim City.
Years ago I read a very amusing article by Rebecca Mead in The New Yorker about the first online version of Ultima. It, and everything I've heard about these worlds since then -- up to and including SL, WOW, and now Eve Online -- seem to confirm her thesis: online worlds don't insulate us from the pettiness and absurdity of real life or the foibles and frailities of human nature -- they bring them into even sharper relief.
If they're depending on the ad revenue to support this thing, either they'd better get in touch with adultfriendfinder.com or I don't expect this will be around all that long.
Hey, I just thought it was cool to have another option for hosting all the lolcat images I like to plaster my blog and myspace profile with. But apparently it's not like that and doesn't support remote hosting! WTF?
Only because I have so few opportunities to quote Milton on/. and the parent comment brought him to mind:
I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather; that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary. That virtue therefore which is but a youngling in the contemplation of evil, and knows not the utmost that vice promises to her followers, and rejects it, is but a blank virtue, not a pure; her whiteness is but an excremental whiteness.
John Milton, Areopagitica: A speech for the liberty of unlicensed printing to the parliament of England
Of course, he recommends Spenser, not child porn, for the contemplation of evil.
Or if you'd rather have a break from reading, listen to his NPR radio interview (and the NASA's chiefs response, if you want to end up even more pissed off than Easterbrook.)
Easterbrook is more concerned with the crappy Motel 6 we're committed to building on the moon. But members of the Society for the Preservation of Legislative Language Protecting Missions to Mars just see that as a halfway house to Mars anyway.
I'm on Easterbrook's side here. Leave Mars for Duck Dodgers in the 24th-and-a-half century and get to the real science.
Recently read The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who would likely dismiss the model and the numbers it generates as a complete fraud. Retroactive predictions seem like a pretty obvious oxymoron. More interesting in his book was the attention he paid to retroactive assessments of future predictions -- the kind of thing I long wondered why hadn't been given more attention.
Don't have the book or his references in front of me. But interesting to note -- and not wholly unexpected -- that most economic and market analysts making predictions are no better than a chicken pecking at bell curve. They have wonderful confabulations to explain away their past failures when confronted with them. And they rarely suffer penalties for their lack of prescience -- unless perhaps they applied it as a personal investment strategy.
Actually, I thought it was a brilliant ending. But I thought for sure Tony was going to pick Layla from the jukebox and we were going to roll out with the coda. That Journey song was a bit tongue-in-cheek.
I've been looking for a *AMP-driven CMS to invest some time in. A few months ago, after a bit of investigation, I settled on Joomla but agree with the parent's complaint about intuitiveness. Haven't fallen in love with it.
I'll have to check out PostNuke and Community Server. But I noticed on its Wikipedia page that it's.NET-driven:
I'm focused right now on PHP/MySQL packages. What do others like and why? (Do "community server" and "content management system" mean the same thing?)
I'd like something that is easy and intuitive. And something especially that makes it easy to change the look and feel -- both with a stylesheet and by altering html, if necessary.
"Of all the ways of making the weaker argument seem the stronger, merely stating that the weaker argument is an alternative to the stronger is one of the more subtle. Saying that further research into the matter is required is subtler still."
Slashdot Mirror
So until or unless you can produce said evidence, you get to enjoy the status of "crackpot", pretty much right along the lines of astrologers, religionists, and crystal gazers. :-)
Or Discovery Institute Fellow.
I remember reading a column by the physicist Paul Davies in which he showed that the multiverse model of the universe leads inevitably to the conclusion that we're just a computer simulation within a simulation within a simulation:
"For every original world, there will be a stupendous number of available virtual worlds -- some of which would even include machines simulating virtual worlds of their own, and so on ad infinitum."
- A Brief History of the Multiverse
That said, maybe we just need the cheap bastard who's running our little MMPORM(ultiverse) to ante up for the expansion pack.
Sure, but is there a way to nominate that site for having a completely broken DHTML interface with pointless animations? Also, if you are writing a page about other pages that suck, it should at least validate...
Really, that site sucked enough itself that I didn't even have to look at any of the sites it listed.
Since the AC who posted this comment was obviously unequal to the task of finding the article, I tracked it down:
The Tug of the Newfangled Slot Machines (May 9, 2004 By GARY RIVLIN)
That should be enough to get anyone interested in going the right direction. Don't expect to find a free copy on the New York Times's site, where articles are only available for free for a very limited time.
From the article:
At 8 p.m. on a warm midsummer's night, Baerlocher watched a
woman dressed in green polyester pants and a
yellow-and-white-striped short-sleeved top play a slot
machine he designed called ''The Price Is Right.'' At
first, the woman's body language was noncommittal: she
stood half-turned from the game, as if no more than mildly
curious about the outcome of her wager. ''Price'' is what
slot pros call ''a cherry dribbler,'' a machine that
dispenses lots of small payouts while it nibbles at your
stash rather than biting off large chunks of it. ''You want
to give the newbie lots of positive reinforcement -- to
keep 'em playing,'' Baerlocher told me. As if on cue, the
woman hit a couple of small jackpots and took a seat.
''Gotcha,'' Baerlocher said softly under his breath.
I read somewhere recently (I think it was The Black Swan by NNT) that whether or not you become a gambling addict depends largely on your first experience with it. First-time winners tend to be more likely to become addicts. A form of confirmation bias -- affirmation bias?
Luckily, my dad had no mercy on me playing poker as a 5 year-old.
I read a New York Times article on this subject a while back -- it was about professional slot machine designers. It referred to an insidious concept with the charming title, "cherry dribbling." Basically, it means figuring out the ratio of payouts to losses that defines the optimal rate to pick a slot-machine player's pocket. Pay out too much and obviously the slot-machine owner will lose. Pay out too little and people begin to feel like suckers and stop playing. Get it just right -- super happy profit!
Add a lot of bells and whistles to amuse people while they're getting fleeced and it's almost like they're enjoying it. (But most importantly, make sure that when they put a $1 in you credit them only $1.)
I'd have to look up the article to find what the ratio was, but the margin was surprisingly slim.
I don't know how reasonable this is as an alternative (it won't work for most LAN/desktop situations), but this is what I use for logins to internet sites that aren't a high security concern for me:
http://mushpup.org/
I rolled this myself and it runw all client-side with javascript (both the cause and solution to all life's problems?). If you were concerned about the security of a third-party site (as you should be -- though this is safe) you could roll your own pretty easily and stick it on your own public site.
It's handy because I can just add a reminder to the profile page that most sites offer. And it makes my password for the site easily available where I have an internet connection. (Though it does require visiting the mushpup site and entering the info there and then pasting it back to site I want to log into.)
My slashdot password: m{this.domain/this.user}
It's the only kind of adult entertainment fully endorsed by my church and my local clown guild.
If [Web] 1.0 is full page refreshes for content, Web 2.0 is, "How do I minimize page views and deliver content more seamlessly?"'
Never seen this definition of Web 2.0 before.
Does this mean we can start putting online articles all back on a single page again now?
Well, maybe some good will come of this after all.
Also consider the effects of false memory:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Loftus
This guy had obviously heard enough of the conspiracy theories that facts could have easily got jumbled.
And then there's always senility.
Can you link to this UO thing you mention?
I can -- now that I got the author's name correct. It was actually written by Elizabeth Kolbert and titled "Pimps and Dragons." No longer on the New Yorker's site, but found a copy here:
Pimps and Dragons
This article from Wired is also interesting:
The Unreal Estate Boom
As far as post-scarcity economies, isn't that Cory Doctorow's speciality? (Haven't read the novel in question -- nor remember it's name off-hand.) Another perspective, from the Sweepers Calendar:
As soon as the artificial problem of scarcity is finally eradicated, economics will immediately turn to the dangerous problem of superabundance. States will fall into turmoil as people riot for want of absolutely nothing. And the leisure class will be distinguished not by its conspicuous exhibition of affluence, but by a fashionable hint of the mildest deprivation.
You're right, but that doesn't mean we should cater to this insane desire for self-rating.
Except that by understanding this insane desire, the state, officials, sysops, ordinary citizens, etc. can exploit it to positive social ends -- a point perfectly illustrated by the "red hair dye" solution in the world of Ultima Mead writes about in her article. If that doesn't epitomize the insane desire for gratuituous markers of social status, well, then I guess we can always go get in line a week ahead of time for an iphone.
Of course, more than likely, it will be exploited to negative social ends. But in recognizing it, you can at least protect yourself, which is what I guess the GP's point was.
But you're right about self-appointed fairness monitors: as far as I can tell, "this social boost" is what serotonin is all about and there have been some interesting things written about the effect social positioning has on its release.
You need to stop grinding your teeth whenever someone has a better lot than you and start worrying about YOUR fortune... As long as parts of the game are work rather than play, I am going to choose alternative methods that let me bypass them. Me doing so, doesn't affect you in the slightest.
Unfortunately, generations of sociobiological selection and primate evolution make sure that it does affect me (or would, if I played any of these games.) Look up E.O. Wilson.
It affects me for the same reason that the fate of Paris Hilton affects me: an adaptive intellectual curiosity about my relative social standing within the community (and the implications that holds for the perpetuation of my genes) hijacked by the forces of modern culture and amplified by modern technology.
Indeed, if it didn't affect me or anyone else, there'd be no market for MMORPGs in the first place. We'd all just stay at home all day complacently tending our rock gardens. Or, in my case, playing Sim City.
Years ago I read a very amusing article by Rebecca Mead in The New Yorker about the first online version of Ultima. It, and everything I've heard about these worlds since then -- up to and including SL, WOW, and now Eve Online -- seem to confirm her thesis: online worlds don't insulate us from the pettiness and absurdity of real life or the foibles and frailities of human nature -- they bring them into even sharper relief.
Please add "Lulu Blooker Prize" to the list.
I just noticed they host Google ads on the image pages. Pretty sure this is a violation of Adsense's terms of service:
http://bayimg.com/aAAegaabC (nsfw -- or home, for that matter)
If they're depending on the ad revenue to support this thing, either they'd better get in touch with adultfriendfinder.com or I don't expect this will be around all that long.
Hey, I just thought it was cool to have another option for hosting all the lolcat images I like to plaster my blog and myspace profile with. But apparently it's not like that and doesn't support remote hosting! WTF?
Only because I have so few opportunities to quote Milton on /. and the parent comment brought him to mind:
I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather; that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary. That virtue therefore which is but a youngling in the contemplation of evil, and knows not the utmost that vice promises to her followers, and rejects it, is but a blank virtue, not a pure; her whiteness is but an excremental whiteness.
John Milton, Areopagitica: A speech for the liberty of unlicensed printing to the parliament of England
Of course, he recommends Spenser, not child porn, for the contemplation of evil.
Tragically, by the time we're done there, Iraq will probably end up being better training for the Mars landscape than Mars itself.
Manned space flight is an entertainment issue, and as such gets the public attention and money.
A point trenchantly made on the Simpsons -- what? 15 years ago? -- when Homer went into space. In rod we trust.
The failings of NASA are curmudgeonly summarized by Gregg Easterbrook in this Wired article:
How NASA Screwed Up (And Four Ways to Fix It)
Or if you'd rather have a break from reading, listen to his NPR radio interview (and the NASA's chiefs response, if you want to end up even more pissed off than Easterbrook.)
Easterbrook is more concerned with the crappy Motel 6 we're committed to building on the moon. But members of the Society for the Preservation of Legislative Language Protecting Missions to Mars just see that as a halfway house to Mars anyway.
I'm on Easterbrook's side here. Leave Mars for Duck Dodgers in the 24th-and-a-half century and get to the real science.
Reminds me of something from the Myspace 95 Thesis:
"Information wants to be free, but then so does misinformation. Protect your identity by freely applying a layer of misinformation."
Good advice.
Recently read The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who would likely dismiss the model and the numbers it generates as a complete fraud. Retroactive predictions seem like a pretty obvious oxymoron. More interesting in his book was the attention he paid to retroactive assessments of future predictions -- the kind of thing I long wondered why hadn't been given more attention.
Don't have the book or his references in front of me. But interesting to note -- and not wholly unexpected -- that most economic and market analysts making predictions are no better than a chicken pecking at bell curve. They have wonderful confabulations to explain away their past failures when confronted with them. And they rarely suffer penalties for their lack of prescience -- unless perhaps they applied it as a personal investment strategy.
Ah ha! Now I get it.
Actually, I thought it was a brilliant ending. But I thought for sure Tony was going to pick Layla from the jukebox and we were going to roll out with the coda. That Journey song was a bit tongue-in-cheek.
I've been looking for a *AMP-driven CMS to invest some time in. A few months ago, after a bit of investigation, I settled on Joomla but agree with the parent's complaint about intuitiveness. Haven't fallen in love with it.
.NET-driven:
I'll have to check out PostNuke and Community Server. But I noticed on its Wikipedia page that it's
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Server
I'm focused right now on PHP/MySQL packages. What do others like and why? (Do "community server" and "content management system" mean the same thing?)
I'd like something that is easy and intuitive. And something especially that makes it easy to change the look and feel -- both with a stylesheet and by altering html, if necessary.
Thanks,
Tom
"Of all the ways of making the weaker argument seem the stronger, merely stating that the weaker argument is an alternative to the stronger is one of the more subtle. Saying that further research into the matter is required is subtler still."
-- Sweepers Calendar [http://www.sweeperscalendar.com/variorum/1405/]
To quote Sideshow Bob (sort of):
Just the thought of all those raw, surging ads makes me wonder why the hell I should even care.