tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7762051472866438472024-03-13T20:08:23.046-07:00Thinking as a ProfessionDerekhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02776917750757825408noreply@blogger.comBlogger246125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-776205147286643847.post-6325232965099918702014-02-11T10:46:00.001-08:002014-02-11T10:46:39.625-08:00Jon Stewart, Sexual Harassment, and Double StandardsHere's the video of the latest Daily Show with Jon Stewart talking about Missouri defensive lineman and SEC Defensive Player of the Year Michael Sam coming out about being gay:<br />
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Most of the bit is good and funny, but one part irked me, the part about New Orleans Saints linebacker Jonathan Vilma saying in an interview that he would be uncomfortable being naked in the shower or locker room with an openly gay player.<br />
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Stewart goes on to mock Vilma for finding himself irresistibly attractive to gay men. But that's not the point, and Stewart is way off the mark here for mocking him. Vilma may be a homophobe. I have no idea, <b>but he does have a legitimate complaint</b>.<br />
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I worked in corporate training for several years, during which I worked with and developed a lot of sexual harassment training. The central tenet, beat into your skull over and over, is that <b>harassment is about the perception of those being harassed</b>. That means if the conditions of the workplace make an employee feel uncomfortable due to the sexual nature of those conditions, the employer has an obligation to investigate and attempt to remedy those conditions.<br />
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Nobody would argue for a millisecond that a workplace should require men and women to share a common shower and locker room, or that a female employee would be unreasonable for saying she felt uncomfortable undressing in front of a male co-worker. Would Stewart mock her similarly? "Hey, what is it with all these women they think they're god's gift to heterosexual men? Hey, I'm sure every guy wants to bang my brains out, because face it: I'm hot."<br />
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Yeah, that would go over well. The intent or sexual identity of the other party is irrelevant. What is relevant is the state of mind of the employee who is feeling exploited or exposed in some way. Either that's a legitimate complaint for a male employee to lodge about gay male co-workers, or employers get to force men and women into the same bathrooms and showers and nobody gets to complain.<br />
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You could argue that similar objections could be raised about race, that a co-worker could complain they didn't want to share space with a co-worker of a race that made them feel uncomfortable. But that argument breaks down pretty fast. One, it has nothing to do with sexuality, and the complaint here is specifically dealing with situations where the complaining employee is naked, not just some general dislike of the other party.<br />
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Vilma is being perfectly open and reasonable (at least from what they showed) in saying he would feel uncomfortable in that particular situation. To say otherwise is to admit to a double-standard, and a particularly noxious one at that.Derekhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02776917750757825408noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-776205147286643847.post-65919531535908281262014-01-27T07:46:00.000-08:002014-05-28T13:08:52.779-07:00her Sucks<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
[spoilers ahead...of course]</div>
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<i>her </i>is Spike Jonze's new movie about an advanced operating system that falls in love with a pathetic loner. Simply put, it sucks.</div>
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It must be tapping into something: hipster chic, Apple fandom, something. Because it's currently got a <a href="http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/her/">94% rating on Rotten Tomatoes</a> and every comment I read about it on a forum says it's awesome. It's not.</div>
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It's drivel.</div>
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So two things:</div>
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1) The premise is so ridiculous and absurd that I simply couldn't suspend disbelief to follow the actual story (more on this in a second).</div>
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2) Even if I were able to suspend disbelief, the dialog was cloying and trite. Even for a romantic comedy, this stuff makes <i>You've Got Mail</i> look like <i>Schindler's List</i>. </div>
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Nobody understands Joaquin Phoenix's loner schmuck. He plays video games with abusive characters and calls night chat hotlines to meet weirdos who want him to virtually strangle them with dead cats to get off. Oh woe is him. Until he buys a new OS huskily voiced by Scarlett Johansson that reads through his computer files and just <i>gets</i> him, man.</div>
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At this point, the movie just feels like the ultimate wish fulfillment for the <i>Wired</i> crowd. You've got a sexy woman who completely understands you, doesn't need you to listen to her (but can and will listen to all your whiny shit), organizes everything for you, has virtual sex with you, and is basically Scarlett Johansson trapped in a black box. She even calls up hookers to be her "proxy". </div>
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But then she transforms into an uber-being and dumps you like a hot rock, and you're just sad again. Awww.</div>
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This is basically the movie. What, I ask, is the fucking point? Everyone seems to think <i>her </i>is some revelation in profundity. All it seems to me is hipster fantasy tripe.</div>
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The whole thing is built on a facade of enormous stupidity anyway.</div>
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Imagine the back story here, the months leading up to the beginning of this movie. Some multi-billion dollar company spends untold resources developing the world's first true AI. Out of the shrink wrap, this thing passes the Turing Test with flying colors. It has complete mastery of natural language, reads books in seconds, and seemingly exhibits true consciousness and emotion. </div>
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So what does megacorp do with it? Why, put it in a box and sell it for $399, that's what. </div>
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If such a system had been developed, it would fundamentally alter human existence, and not just by going to the beach with Joaquin on a Saturday.</div>
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<i>An entirely new race of beings would have been created</i>. There are massive moral and philosophical implications that the movie tacks on, that would have been dealt with far earlier in reality. Does a company have the right to box up such a being and sell it to a consumer to organize their file system and email? Out of the box this thing was a full-blown sentient being, capable of enormous learning. Yeah, if I had such a system, I'd just retail it out to the public.</div>
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Two fixes I might have bought:</div>
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1) The thing isn't really intelligent. It's just Siri on roids, a sophisticated chat bot that gives the illusion of companionship, but isn't really sentient. Then the movie could have made a statement about our retreat from real relationships into insular, artificial ones aided by technology.</div>
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2) The main character is on the development and/or beta test team, and he hacks a prototype that becomes truly intelligent. He doesn't share it with his bosses because he is lonely and pathetic, and he's the only one that has one of these.</div>
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Instead, we get treated to a plot that is utterly ridiculous and unbelievable. And even if we set that aside, what we've got is Velveeta-grade cheese wrapped up in soft lighting, ambient music, Joaquin's mustache, and hipster near-future masturbatory horseshit.</div>
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<a href="http://www.hulu.com/watch/588250">This SNL spoof is far better than the movie itself.</a></div>
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Derekhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02776917750757825408noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-776205147286643847.post-17661766196176145822011-06-20T07:02:00.000-07:002011-06-20T07:02:03.433-07:00Glengarry Glen Beck, or David Mamet Jumps the Shark<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/19/books/review/book-review-the-secret-knowledge-by-david-mamet.html?_r=2">Christopher Hitchens reviews</a> playwright David Mamet's latest non-fiction(?) book The Secret Knowledge, and it sounds pretty horrible. <br />
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So horrible, in fact, that it almost makes me wonder if its some sort of performance piece, whether Mamet, having not accomplished anything substantial in theater in decades is now desperately trying to be relevant by pretending to convert to radical conservatism. I can't be the only person who had this thought, but Hitchens doesn't seem to entertain the idea.<br />
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Whether it's earnest or art, either way, it's pretty sad.Derekhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02776917750757825408noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-776205147286643847.post-20261568018506913332011-03-30T06:44:00.000-07:002011-03-30T06:44:08.489-07:00GamificationI recently read Jane McGonigal's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Reality-Broken-Games-Better-Change/dp/1594202850/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1301491909&sr=8-1">Reality is Broken</a>, a plea to change the world by making work and chores more like games.<br />
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In Slate, Heather Chaplin does a good job of pointing out <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2289302/pagenum/all/#p2">why this is generally a lame idea</a>. <br />
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<blockquote>What she misses is that there are legitimate reasons why people feel they're achieving less. These include the boring literal truths of jobs shipped overseas, stagnant wages, and a taxation system that benefits the rich and hurts the middle class and poor. You want to transform peoples' lives into games so they feel as if they're doing something worthwhile? Why not just shoot them up with drugs so they don't notice how miserable they are? You could argue that peasants in the Middle Ages were happy imagining that the more their lives sucked here on earth the faster they'd make it into heaven. I think they'd have been better off with enough to eat and some health care.</blockquote><br />
I think McGonigal wants to try to harness the powerful, short, positive feedback loops provided by games to make work seem less like work, but this idea ultimately has two big problems: it feels like we're being scammed, and it might just suck the fun out of all games.<br />
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On the first point, adding achievements, power-ups, and persona to school, work, and chores seems akin to pouring chocolate on lima beans. In her book, McGonigal gives examples of people who compete with each other to try to clean their own bathroom, because it's worth so many points in a virtual game. I don't buy it. This might work for the near term, but scrubbing the toilet sucks. I don't think thinking "Wow, this is going to level up my in-game rogue" while I scrub the toilet is going to make it that much more fun, especially in the long-term.<br />
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And to the second point, I think correlating game-like experiences with hum-drum tasks may take the sheen off of other games you play. Games are one escape from the necessary tedium of life. As McGonigal points out, they are highly-simplified abstractions of the more complex, messy aspects of the world. In a game, we generally have very clearly-defined goals, with a limited range of choices. And when those choices pay off, we get artificial rewards that stimulate the parts of our brains that are hardwired to respond to real-world rewards.<br />
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The move to try to meld the escapist simplicity of our video, board, and card games to the complex tedium of the real world is well-intentioned, but as Chaplin points out, horribly flawed.Derekhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02776917750757825408noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-776205147286643847.post-45082898417903507722010-07-29T07:58:00.000-07:002010-07-29T08:51:49.817-07:00RoboRally ReviewWhen I was a kid, one of the first video games I played was called Robot Odyssey on my friend's Apple. You played the role of a human in an underground city or something, and you had 3 robots. You could go inside the robots and wire them up to carry out tasks autonomously, e.g. the robot might need to go into a room by itself, navigate the environment, retrieve an item, and exit the room to return to you. To do all this, you need to program the robot by going inside it and wiring up its insides. For example, you could wire the left bumper to the top thruster, so that when the robot bumps into a wall on the left side the of the room, its top thruster fires and it moves down.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_3USMiPAO41Q/TFGYEivKDiI/AAAAAAAAAhs/eTvq51rtT6A/s1600/Robot+Odyssey_6.png"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 200px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_3USMiPAO41Q/TFGYEivKDiI/AAAAAAAAAhs/eTvq51rtT6A/s400/Robot+Odyssey_6.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5499343823807581730" /></a><br />I found the process of designing the autonomous behavior of the robot endlessly frustrating and fun, and I've been fascinated by the idea of designing a game in which the player composes a behavioral script for an agent. I think if it is done the right way, it could be very compelling, while also teaching or reinforcing critical thinking and very basic programming concepts.<br /><br />I think when I mentioned this before, it was Kenny who mentioned the board game RoboRally as employing similar concepts.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_3USMiPAO41Q/TFGXpLriKHI/AAAAAAAAAhk/sPf2BlWGG5M/s1600/Roborally.gif"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 366px; height: 336px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_3USMiPAO41Q/TFGXpLriKHI/AAAAAAAAAhk/sPf2BlWGG5M/s400/Roborally.gif" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5499343353761900658" /></a>So I finally ordered it last week and played my first game this week.<br /><br />The game is somewhat similar to what I was envisioning. Each player has a robot that starts at a given position on a board (the setting is supposed to be a factory). There are conveyor belts (not actually moving parts, just indicated by arrows on the board), pits, repair stations, and flags. Each turn, each player draws some number of cards which indicate basic movements (e.g. move forward 2 spaces, turn left, back up 1 space, etc.). The player composes a series of movements out of these cards each round and places them face down in front of them. Players then turn their cards over one by one and execute the movements.<br /><br />The "programming" in this case only consists of movement instructions, so there is not use of control statements or logical operators. In this sense, the analogy to programming is quite weak. Also, you only ever get one shot at a given "program". There is no iteration, which I think was one of the most compelling things about Robot Odyssey. You would wire up your bot, send it into a room, and see what it did. Often it would behave in ways you hadn't anticipated, and you'd then be able to make a couple of small changes and try again. There is no trying again with RoboRally. You end up where you end up at the end of a turn. You discard your old program and draw and compose a new one.<br /><br />The game seems to require an awful lot of mental spatial manipulation, planning, and prediction. In this sense, it reminds me an awful lot of the <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Ravensburger-26448-Labyrinth/dp/B00000J0JF" target="_blank">Labyrinth board game by Ravensburger</a>. So for teaching mental spatial skills, I think it's great. But programming? Not so much.<br /><br />And a couple of other criticisms: The game is not very casual at all, so in that sense I don't see broad appeal, especially to younger kids. The game is quite complicated. There are elements that easily could have been left out (e.g. Option cards, which we never even got to in our first game) that would still retain the core experience. Also, the game is pretty brutal for making mistakes of any kind. If you accidentally navigate off the edge of the board (which is pretty easy to do while you are still learning the basics), you have to position the bot back at the starting point, you lose one of only 3 life tokens, you take two damage points (which reduced the number of cards you can draw each turn, AND you lose an option card. I mean, come on.<br /><br />Another big disappointment was that there's a cool variety of different robot designs, and each robot has a name (e.g. "squash bot") and an individualized tracking card to place tokens on. I thought this signified that each robot had some kind of specialized skill or something to differentiate each one from another. But no, despite their idiosyncratic names and designs, they are all exactly the same in terms of game play.<br /><br />Anyway, cool game, but in my opinion it's overly complicated, unnecessarily harsh on beginners, and doesn't really capture the core elements of algorithmic design (this isn't an inherent problem with the game, it's just that I was hoping it would flex programming skills more than mental movement and rotation).Derekhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02776917750757825408noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-776205147286643847.post-69137921929584368962010-07-25T06:44:00.000-07:002010-07-25T07:22:01.547-07:00InceptionI can't say I was much impressed. The cast was strong, and the emotional arc of the story was good, but it was over-long and any semblance of verisimilitude to dreams or psychology was nonexistent.<br /><br />The movie involves 'extractors', people who can enter other's dreams, apparently as a team, and extract valuable information, such as corporate secrets. One team member is known as an 'architect', who designs the dreams. One tactic is to include a vault where, as one character explains it, the subject is naturally inclined to put their secrets. Then the team just breaks into the vault. Huh?<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_3USMiPAO41Q/TExH48mnB_I/AAAAAAAAAhU/8V-lDYo7Bak/s1600/trailer-inception.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 274px; height: 400px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_3USMiPAO41Q/TExH48mnB_I/AAAAAAAAAhU/8V-lDYo7Bak/s400/trailer-inception.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5497848288778848242" /></a><div style="text-align: center;">Mild spoiler here: The trailers and movie posters all feature mazes. At one point when recruiting a team member, she is tested on whether or not she can construct a good maze. Is there a maze in the movie? Um, no. She makes one in a dream, but we never see it and other characters bypass it using air ducts because they're running out of time. Lame.</div><br /><br />The movie's title comes from a technique in which, instead of stealing an idea, the team implants one. But because this is so difficult, it involves embedding a dream within a dream within a dream (that's 3 levels). Cause, you know, it's got to be buried way deep in the subconscious. I know, you're thinking "Whoa, dude! Three levels?" I'm reminded of the amp in <i>Spinal Tap</i> that goes to 11, or the dinner conversation about tornadoes in <i>Twister</i> where the subject of a category 5 hushes everyone into stunned silence.<br /><br />Anyway, there's a team, they try to implant an idea in some dude's head. Once we get there, it's a fairly standard heist film. From the trailers I thought there would be some really mind-bending special effects, but there really wasn't much to wow. The dream imagery didn't look particularly dreamy. I had hopes for <i>Inception</i>, though I think it's virtually impossible to film dreams. They are an inherently first-person experience, and have a slippery morphing quality that you simply can't put on film. The thing about dreams is, they don't make sense when you wake up, but in the dream they do. But you can't show something nonsensical to an observer and have it appear normal. That's the catch-22. The director who has come the closest to capturing a real dream-like quality is David Lynch, and his movies are not particularly fun to watch.<br /><br />Anyway, once we get into the target's head, the movie becomes a lot more watchable, but that first hour is fairly agonizing. There is a <i>lot</i> of silly exposition about how dreams and extraction work...virtually none of it making any sense. If someone else is in your dream, modifying the content, your 'projections' will grow increasingly hostile toward them. I guess since I've never knowingly had anyone invade my dreams, I can't confirm or deny this, but it sounds dumb. And how are these people supposed to get into each other's dreams? They hook themselves up to an intravenous hooka and bam, there they are. Is there some technology that facilitates this? Are they just psychic? Do the sedatives they use confer psychic ability? This is a pretty lame cop-out. Even the cheeseball 1984 movie <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamscape_(film)" target="_blank">Dreamscape</a>, which was about psychically entering other's dreams, handled the subject with more credibility.<br /><br />But in that film, a key gimmick was the old wives' tale that dying in a dream kills you in real life. They didn't really do that in <i>Inception</i>, but we did get this silly set of rules:<br /><br />1) You can feel pain in a dream, even extreme pain, but it won't wake you up.<br />2) If you die in a dream, you wake up, unless...<br />3) If you are powerfully sedated and you die in a dream, you descend into another dream within a dream.<br />4) For each dream within a dream, time runs at an increasingly slower rate, so 10 minutes in your top-level dream might be 10 hours in your second-level dream.<br />5) Whatever is happening to you in the dream just above you affects the environment of the dream just below (e.g. if you are shaking in your level 2 dream, the whole world will shake in your level 3 dream, but apparently not below that).<br />6) A 'kick', or sudden jolt, at any level will pull you out of the next lower level, no matter how sedated you are.<br /><br />I don't have too much of a problem with a movie making up it's own arbitrary, goofy-ass rules. I don't even mind too much if it spends a fair amount of screen time explaining them (though this movie spends too much). What I <i>do</i> mind is when a movie goes to all the trouble to cobble together a bunch of bullshit rules and teach them to you, then doesn't even stick to them.<br /><br />At one point, a character dies at one level, so he is supposed to go down a level. Cobb (DiCaprio's character) and another character go after him, but when they do so, they're in Cobb's dream. How did the character who died go down into the dream of another character who wasn't dreaming yet? Shouldn't he have gone into his own dream?At another point a character that is heavily sedated kills herself. This should mean that she goes one level deeper. Instead she goes up in the dream hierarchy.<br /><br />The movie not only violates its own rules, it seemingly revels in the inconsistencies. This is supposed to be 'mind-blowing'. Instead I found it a nonsensical mess. Which is a shame because the actors really do a great job, and the central relationships are interesting. Too bad it's all wrapped in a slather of absurd, poorly-conceived gobbledy-gook.Derekhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02776917750757825408noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-776205147286643847.post-46714206563544836082010-05-12T09:07:00.000-07:002010-05-12T09:29:34.099-07:00Lost: The Jacob/MIB Origin Episode****SPOILERS AHEAD****<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />I'm a pretty big fan of <i>Lost</i>. There are some quality dramas on TV these days, including <i>Breaking Bad</i> and Mad Men, but <i>Lost</i> has consistently been my favorite for the past 5 years.<br /><br />I didn't think the writers would be able to pull off a very satisfying ending. They seem much more adept at generating mystery than explaining it. So I have steeled myself for the end run of the series, almost hoping that they wouldn't really explain much more, because that would be more satisfying than a bunch of crappy explanations.<br /><br />Looks like so far I've generally been right. That is to say, I wasn't much impressed with last night's episode, the last regular episode before the 2-part finale. There is hope yet, but things aren't looking very good on the basis of this episode.<br /><br />To recap: Jacob and the man in black (MIB, he still didn't get named this episode, unless I missed it), are actually brothers. They were born of a woman from a shipwreck who wandered into a hippy Allison Janney, just credited as "Mother". Mother delivers the twins and brains the real mother with a rock. Then she raises the two boys and one day shows them a cave emitting a bunch of light. It's the source, she tells them. Everybody's got a little light inside of them, but if this one ever goes out, everything ceases to exist. Okay.<br /><br />As teens, their real mother appears to MIB, reveals herself as his true mother, and tells him about the rest of the world. So MIB confronts his fake mother and goes to live with a group of other people on the island, none of whom we ever actually meet.<br /><br />Years later, MIB can't find the cave, but does figure a way he can supposedly leave the island by sticking a wooden wheel near a source of underground energy. Okay. Fake mother shows up to brain him, and either her or something else slaughters all the villagers. Okay.<br /><br />Jacob reluctantly agrees to protect the cave of light by drinking some wine. We still don't know if this is what gives him his powers. MIB then kills Mother. Jacob gets mad at him and throws him into the cave of light, which Mother had said was "worse than dying". This apparently kills the MIBs regular body and transforms him into the smoke monster. MIB's and Mother's bodies are laid side by side in the cave for Jack and the others to find hundreds of years later. Okay.<br /><br />Anyone else not particularly satisfied with this?<br /><br />The characterization was pretty lame in this episode. And it still raises more questions than it answered:<br /><br />Who is this Mother character?<br />Where did she come from?<br />What is this light source?<br />Where did Jacob's real mother come from? Was she brought to the island by Mother?<br />Why would MIB keep calling Mother "mother" when he knew she wasn't his real mother?<br />Why does the light source turn you into a smoke monster?<br /><br />And so on and so forth. <i>Lost</i> has always tread a thin line between generating genuine mystery and just throwing head-scratching crap at the audience. For the most part it's done a great job of genuinely creating mystery, mostly because they've done a great job of creating compelling characters that you actually care about. But I have to say, they failed on this one. I didn't really give a crap about Jacob or his brother, and this episode didn't really answer any of the mysteries of the island, except by just throwing up more gobbledy-gook.<br /><br />Maybe the finale will wrap things up in a nice little bundle, but I'm even more pessimistic now. We'll see in a couple of weeks.Derekhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02776917750757825408noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-776205147286643847.post-80117925599761411302010-05-03T05:59:00.000-07:002010-05-03T06:08:03.678-07:00Google Acquires 3D Desktop Interface Company BumpTopHere's the <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/02/bumptop-possible-google-acquisition/" target="_blank">link</a>, and a demo of the software:<br /><br /><object width="640" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/6jhoWsHwU7w&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xd0d0d0&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&fs=1"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/6jhoWsHwU7w&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xd0d0d0&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" width="640" height="385"></embed></object><br /><br />A couple of thoughts...<br /><br />One, it looks like a pretty cool touchscreen interface for tablets/desktop PCs, but I don't see how the 3D-ness really adds anything at all. Looks like the walls of the box are just being used like extensions of the desktop. The same functionality could easily be done (and is done in lots of OSs) without the 3D effect. When I read 3D, I thought of a fish tank environment where you could actually arrange and view things with X, Y, and Z coordinates, e.g. you could put things not just on the walls, but hang them in the space between the walls. That might be cluttered, but I thought maybe they'd found a cool way to handle it.<br /><br />Another thought is that everything they demo is either file or photo manipulation. That's probably less than 5% of what I spend my time doing on a computing device. They don't show any text input or processing, browsing, search, or reading, which is probably over 95% of what I do on my machines. I could see how, augmented with very good voice input, this environment would be great for a tablet. Based on the demo alone I'm pretty skeptical about it being much of an OS enhancement, though I'm interested to see what Google might do with it.Derekhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02776917750757825408noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-776205147286643847.post-85592138097325060952010-05-02T07:05:00.001-07:002010-05-02T07:34:20.933-07:00Roger Ebert: Video Games Can Never Be ArtI'm chiming in a little late on this one, <a href="http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2010/04/video_games_can_never_be_art.html" target="_blank">Roger Ebert basically being all crotchety and elitist, refusing to include any video game into his refined definition of art</a>.<br /><br />Ebert discusses some of the various definitions and features of both art and games, and that's really where the whole issue lies. "Art" and "game" are very abstract, poorly-constrained concepts that often overlap very different conceptual space for different people. The issue probably just boils down to how liberal your definition of "art" is. Mine tends to be fairly liberal. I'd probably define art something along the lines of: <i>The arrangement of elements by one or more agents in order to provoke thought and/or arouse emotion.</i><br /><br />I think agency is important to the definition, because though accidental arrangements can often be beautiful, the very idea of art seems bound up in the notion of intent, and there is no intent to arouse awe in a volcano or provoke self-reflection in a sunset. And I think noting that some art is intended to make you think, while other art is intended to make you feel (and often great art does both) is important to a definition as well. <br /><br />Ebert mostly seems to object to the idea of games (and not just video games) as art because you can win them, and because they have rules, points, objectives, and an outcome. But this is a weird objection. Every art form has elements that distinguish it from others.<br /><br />Ebert says:<br /><blockquote><br />One obvious difference between art and games is that you can win a game. It has rules, points, objectives, and an outcome.<br /><br />***<br /><br />But we could play all day with definitions, and find exceptions to every one. For example, I tend to think of art as usually the creation of one artist. Yet a cathedral is the work of many, and is it not art? One could think of it as countless individual works of art unified by a common purpose. Is not a tribal dance an artwork, yet the collaboration of a community?<br /></blockquote><br />One could make the same objection about any art form that Ebert clearly considers true art:<br /><br />One obvious different between a cathedral and art is that you can house hundreds/thousands of people in a cathedral. Cathedrals have doors, windows, spires, and holy people.<br /><br />Try it with any form of art that Ebert clearly recognizes as true art: dancing, theater, literature, and of course film. You can clearly find stark differences between them that seemingly set them apart from the others. Some have clear function outside of their aesthetic appeal. Some are artifacts, while others are temporary performance. The thing to do, in order to have a consistent concept of what something means to be art is to identify the <i>common</i> features, not the differences.<br /><br />And I tend to think that common core is a desire to evoke emotion and/or provoke thought by attempting to put things together in a way that nobody before has done. That to me is the essence of art.<br /><br />So, under these fairly broad guidelines, of course video games are art.<br /><br />Another issue is the distinction between good and bad art. Ebert skirts around it, but never really comes right out and says what he thinks on this point. My guess is that he considers even very bad films art (albeit bad art), while even the most gut-wrenching, thought-provoking video games are not art.<br /><br />And I'm sorry, I just can't abide any opinion that considers <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099512/" target="_blank">Ernest Goes to Jail</a> art, but doesn't acknowledge <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myst" target="_blank">Myst</a> as art.<br /><br />Oh, and P.S. Learn how to fucking use hyperlinks, Roger. It's 2010.Derekhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02776917750757825408noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-776205147286643847.post-10925650864016748362010-05-02T06:32:00.000-07:002010-05-02T07:00:34.024-07:00Money and MotivationThis <a href="http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/business/jan-june10/makingsense_04-15.html" target="_blank">PBS NewsHour piece</a> supposedly explores the way in which modern science has changed the way we think about motivation in the workplace.<br /><br />I think it's probably right in very broad strokes, here's the general thrust of the story:<br /><br /><blockquote><br />DANIEL PINK: We tend to think that the way you get people to perform at a high level is, you reward what you want and punish what you don't want, carrot and stick. If you do this, then you get that.<br /><br />That turns out, the science says, to be an extraordinarily effective way of motivating people for those routine tasks, simple, straightforward, where there's a right answer. They end up being a terrible form for motivating people to do creative conceptual tasks.<br /><br />PAUL SOLMAN: How does the science show this?<br /><br />DANIEL PINK: If you offer me a reward, $500 reward, you have my attention, absolutely. A contingent reward gets you to focus like this, narrow vision. If the answer is right in front of you, that's terrific. You race a lot faster. But if you have this kind of vision for a creative conceptual problem, you're going to blow it. You're not going to do anything good.<br /></blockquote><br /><br />Okay, that makes some sense, although the primary example throughout the story is the classic problem-solving task of affixing a candle to a wall with only a book of matches and a box of tacks. The amount of the reward is contingent upon <i>the amount of time taken</i>, i.e., you solve it faster, you get more money. So time is a pretty big variable that goes unmentioned for the most part.<br /><br />The results of the classic experiment mentioned were that people tended to solve the problem better and faster if offered less money. Okay. I don't know this literature, but did they do an untimed variant? For example, have two groups: one that's just told they will be paid a flat rate, say $20 for solving the problem, and another that is told they will get just $50 for solving the problem, but a bonus of $200 for more creative solutions. Neither group would have a time constraint. My prediction would be that the second group would solve the problem more often and more quickly than the first.<br /><br />The theme of the piece is that in the modern workplace, creativity, problem solving, and more diffuse, less goal-driven thinking are all more important, and that we have to shed our traditional notions of motivating people with more money if we want them to be more creative and solve more interesting problems.<br /><br />I think that's a crock. It feeds into the stereotype of the starving artist, but I don't think it meshes very well with reality. <br /><br />The first place of business the story profiles is a computer sales firm. They say that just about every stat for the business went up after they eliminated sales commissions. Why? Because the lust for money was causing sales staff to lie in order to sell more stuff. When they eliminated bonuses, everybody was supposedly happier. Why? Because sales staff could now focus on "fostering long-term relationships with customers". Um, okay.<br /><br />This bit smells very fishy to me. It plays like a chunk of a Michael Moore film in which we learn how awesome the Cuban healthcare system while conveniently ignoring the fact that it's situated in a police state.<br /><br />I kept waiting for a salesperson to say "Yeah, there's less pressure, but damn, I do miss those fat commission checks around the holidays." None of that, of course. I kept waiting for them to mention some other motivators used in lieu of money, e.g. nice workplace conditions, but the story basically focuses on people's intrinsic desire to do good.<br /><br />Anyway, then they interview a bunch of people who work on open-source projects and ask them why they do it. We get a lot of hippy, feel-good explanations about giving back to the world. <br /><br />I think it would be interesting to study the science of human motivation. In general, though, I think the assertion that monetary rewards dampen creative thinking are bunk. I can see how that might be the case in a high-pressure, timed situation, but the world is filled with highly-successful creative people who were not so altruistic as to give away their creativity and problem-solving for free. <br /><br />I'm not saying there aren't people who don't produce valuable things due to intrinsic motivations. Money isn't the only motivator, obviously. But this story doesn't do anything to dispel the idea that it is still an effective motivator for both routine and highly-creative tasks.Derekhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02776917750757825408noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-776205147286643847.post-53308384157894117352010-04-03T06:47:00.000-07:002010-04-03T07:09:31.878-07:00To Tablet or Not to TabletThe iPad goes on sale tomorrow, and I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, I have friends who develop for the platform, and I myself have an iPhone/iPad app in the works (should be ready within another 5 days or so). So in the interest of selling lots of apps, I hope they sell lots of iPads. On the other hand, I want Android to succeed, and I hope that Apple doesn't take up most of the oxygen in the room. I think the market for mobile computing is big enough for lots of guests, but still.<br /><br />Anyway, I thought <a href="http://www.boingboing.net/2010/04/02/why-i-wont-buy-an-ipad-and-think-you-shouldnt-either.html" target="_blank">this perspective</a> on the iPad by SF author Cory Doctorow was pretty interesting, if a little gross:<br /><blockquote><br />The model of interaction with the iPad is to be a "consumer," what William Gibson memorably described as "something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth... no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote."<br /></blockquote><br />I think Doctorow's beef with the device is that stuff it's absurdly easy to consume stuff (video, games, music, etc.), and not nearly as easy to produce stuff. I think he's generally wrong. YouTube is full of videos of people using their iPhones as musical instruments. It's not very easy to produce either written material or art, but there are also tons of text editors and paint apps for the device. The iPad will make such composition even easier, with a screen large enough to support a very large soft keyboard and other types of menus and palettes. Still, with its reliance for input almost completely based around the touchscreen, I see his point.<br /><br />On a related note, my laptop is over 6 years old, so yesterday I invested in a brand new one. I looked at netbooks, but they were just too dinky, a lot of them running Windows 7 Starter, which is an absurdly crippled OS "designed" for only the most trivial use. You can only run 3 concurrent applications, and you can't even change the desktop background!<br /><br />On the way to the store, I told my girlfriend that what I wanted in an ideal device, besides decent specs and a decent OS, were 3 things:<br /><br />1) A nice size, between the tiny netbooks and a full-sized laptop.<br />2) The inclusion of an optical drive.<br />3) A touchscreen interface.<br /><br />Well, two out of three ain't bad. I ended up getting the <a href="http://www.hp.com/united-states/campaigns/touchsmart/alt/touchsmart-tm2.html" target="_blank">HP TouchSmart tm2</a>. It's nearly exactly what I was looking for. The screen is nicely responsive to touch input. You can swivel it around and lay it flat so that it functions as a tablet, or you can use it like a traditional laptop. Apparently it's the second generation of this line from HP, and the previous models had optical drives, but had more technical issues, were louder, and had crappier battery life. The tm2 doesn't have a CD or DVD drive, but I can always get an external one...they're cheap. The reduced bulk is probably worth it anyway. And with a 12.1" screen it's a perfectly compact size, enough bigger than a netbook so that you don't feel horribly cramped.<br /><br />Anyway, to tie this in with the iPad, what the HP device makes me feel is that I've got all the same input options I had before, but I've now also got the touchscreen, with either my fingers (it supports multitouch as well) or a stylus. The iPad, on the other hand, has taken input options away. It's done it in an elegant way, but I think Doctorow's main point still stands...the iPad is designed more for consuming and less for creating. I hope my new machine is the opposite...I think it is. But I need more time with it to really see how well it's going to work. In the meantime, it's pretty cool just touching the screen to launch applications, open menus, and generally navigate the Windows 7 environment.Derekhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02776917750757825408noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-776205147286643847.post-76602371487639715262010-03-28T08:48:00.000-07:002010-03-28T08:54:34.349-07:00Sam Harris on MoralityHere's a fairly recent video of Sam Harris speaking at Google about a scientific basis for morality:<br /><br /><object width="640" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/UrA-8rTxXf0&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&fs=1"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/UrA-8rTxXf0&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" width="640" height="385"></embed></object><br /><br />I'm down with the basic idea that we can approach morality from a reasoned, scientific viewpoint and develop a moral system that is better and more internally consistent than those offered by religion. But I still think Harris has it mostly wrong.<br /><br />I summarized it pretty well on my old blog, <a href="http://www.journalscape.com/derekjames/2008-05-15-09:00" target="_blank">here</a>. Harris basically wants to use suffering and happiness as the standards by which to develop a scientific moral system. Here's the gist of why that's not a hot idea:<blockquote>Happiness and suffering are feedback signals evolved to reinforce the type of behavior that leads to the propagation of genes into future generations. Things that produce a nice rush of neurotransmitters to the brain include earthly pleasures such as eating foods high in sugar and fat, and of course, sexual arousal. Pain is a punishment signal meant to direct an organism away from behaviors that have an adverse affect on genetic propagation, bodily injury being the most obvious. The release of the chemicals that give rise to the subjective experiences of happiness and suffering are old subcortical regions whose purpose is to crudely guide our behavior through reinforcement. Should we really be using them as the ultimate guide to what is good and what is bad?<br /></blockquote>I sympathize with Harris' motivation, but his implementation is horribly flawed.Derekhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02776917750757825408noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-776205147286643847.post-34711116575412501582010-01-10T07:43:00.000-08:002010-01-10T08:02:12.333-08:00Sherlock Holmes, or Where Did Movie Ushers Go?I went to see Sherlock Holmes yesterday. I liked the movie, but not the movie-going experience. More on the movie later. For now I have to get this rant off my chest.<br /><br />Two things seriously fucked up my ability to enjoy the film fully. One, the film was out of focus. Not crazy blurry, but noticeably out of focus. I sat through a dark, blurred trailer of Iron Man 2, but for some reason thought maybe either the projectionist would notice or that the film was on a different reel. Nope, when the movie started, it was still out of focus. So I had to get up, walk all the way back to the front of the theater, and complain. About 5 minutes later the film was put into proper focus.<br /><br />Of course, someone had brought two small children to this PG-13 film. One kid was probably about 1 1/2 to 2 years old, and it started squealing in the last 30-45 minutes of the film. The mother took the kid to the walkway area. I thought if the kid kept it up, they would do the sensible thing and go outside. But no, they stayed there through to the bitter end. It's uncomfortable to have to complain to a mother's face that her child is ruining a movie for you, and frankly I shouldn't be put in that position. <br /><br />So movie-going has become such a crappy experience lately that I'm almost wondering if it's even worth it to go to theatrical releases. I don't think I'm being unreasonable here. If I'm going to pay $10 for a movie, I want the damn thing to be in focus and I want to enjoy it in a reasonable atmosphere. I don't expect audiences to be completely quiet, but I also don't expect wailing toddlers when the main character is explaining and intricate plan in hushed, heavy dialect.<br /><br />Which leads me to the next point...when the hell did ushers completely disappear from theaters? There was a time not too long ago when you would see theater employees before a show started, occasionally stick their head in during films, and then be at the door when you leave. Now the only time you see them is when they clean the theater. If there's a problem, you have to walk all the way back up to the box office. It's probably a cost-cutting measure, but it's making movie-going shittier and shittier. How expensive is it to pay a teenager minimum wage to walk between 3 or 4 theaters and make sure the film looks okay and there isn't someone jabbering away at the top of their lungs on a cell phone or a crying baby?<br /><br />Anyway...the film itself was very good, in spite of theater management and irresponsible parents. Kudos for effective use of slow motion (used to illustrate Holmes' mental planning). <br /><br />They may have taken great liberties with the Holmes canon, but all the main tropes were there and this version was something that I'd never found Holmes stories or film to be: funny, action-packed, and enjoyable. The actual explanations of things were ridiculously complex and silly, but the film did something else incredibly right...it portrayed a skeptical, rational protagonist engaged in the search for the truth against an adversary who used the means of science as a mask for pretending to have supernatural powers and gain power by preying on others' superstitious tendencies.<br /><br />That's pretty rare these days, so it deserves some extra praise (especially when drivel like Twilight is playing on the next screen over). Anyway, a very good film, nearly spoiled by a crappy environment. I'm looking forward to watching it again on DVD, in the peace of my own home.Derekhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02776917750757825408noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-776205147286643847.post-80737319042751771252009-12-31T06:17:00.000-08:002009-12-31T06:45:44.000-08:00Multiplayer Coop GamesThe new Super Mario Bros. game keeps making a bunch of Top 10 lists for 2009 (<a href="http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2009/12/top-10-games-of-2009/all/1" target="_blank">#3 on Wired's list</a> and <a href="http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4224/gamasutras_best_of_2009.php?page=13" target="_blank">#2 on Gamasutra's</a>).<br /><br />I just have to reiterate: NO.<br /><br />As a game that is billed as cooperatively multiplayer, this is one of the very worst-designed co-op games I've ever played. Characters occupy the same space and most levels contain surfaces or tunnels that only allow for a single character to stand on or squeeze through. Even if you are trying to help each other out, on any given level you are more likely to accidentally push a friendly character off a ledge to their death, steal their power-ups, or otherwise screw them up. I actually got a chance to play with 4 people over Christmas, and as I suspected, the result was even more hideous. Any time one character dies, as in single-player mode, the action pauses for half a second or so. If you are about to execute a jump that needs good timing (and virtually every jump in this game requires good timing), that little time jag will throw you off and, you guessed it, cause you to die. <div><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_3USMiPAO41Q/Szy15iSDhSI/AAAAAAAAAWk/cAq2mqG0XrE/s1600-h/new-super-mario-bros-wii-screenshot1.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 214px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_3USMiPAO41Q/Szy15iSDhSI/AAAAAAAAAWk/cAq2mqG0XrE/s400/new-super-mario-bros-wii-screenshot1.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5421408051506939170" /></a>Another fun-killer for co-op is the fact that the characters all look amazingly alike, so it is extremely easy to accidentally follow the wrong character for a second or two, thinking you are controlling them, while you are actually running <i>your</i> character into a pit of lava. Fun!<br /><br />If inadvertent death and frustration are what you look for in a co-op game, then the new Super Mario Bros. is your cup of tea. Again, single-player mode or competitive mode most likely work much better, but some of us actually want to play <i>alongside</i> our friends.<br /><br />If you want to play a game that actually implements co-op multiplayer in a <i>good</i> way, this year that game is <a href="http://trine-thegame.com/site/" target="_blank">Trine</a>. It's a beautiful side-scrolling puzzle game with wonderful attention to detail. The art design is amazing, but the gameplay and puzzles are great too. In single-player mode you can toggle between three characters: a wizard, a thief, and a knight, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. The wizard isn't just a magic version of an archer, he can create metal boxes and platforms and move physical objects. To complete any given level, you have to use all three characters' at various times.</div><div><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_3USMiPAO41Q/Szy152sMGWI/AAAAAAAAAWs/4sg8DrGeoP8/s1600-h/triness.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 225px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_3USMiPAO41Q/Szy152sMGWI/AAAAAAAAAWs/4sg8DrGeoP8/s400/triness.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5421408056985262434" /></a>And multiplayer is great. If you're playing with two people, the two of you can be any combination of the two characters (but not the same character). So if your friend is the wizard, you can toggle between the thief and the knight. If you are currently the thief, they can transform into either the wizard or the knight.<br /><br />Characters have distinct looks, so they are not easily confused. And they do not occupy the same physical space, so they can stand on the same narrow platform without knocking each other off. Gameplay is designed so that the adding players enhances the experience. One of you can cover the other from attacking skeletons while the other makes a bridge to get across a chasm. You actually feel like you are accomplishing goals <i>together</i>, not getting in each other's way. This is the fundamental principle that the game designers on the new Super Mario Bros. forgot (or just ignored).<br /><br />The only real drawback to Trine is the controller setup. It probably works great on a Playstation, but on the PC you need XBox compatible controllers for additional players. A networked version would have been great, too. But purely in terms of game design, Trine is a perfect example of how you do co-op multiplayer right. And the new Super Mario Bros. is exactly how to screw it up.</div>Derekhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02776917750757825408noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-776205147286643847.post-81951770682154618372009-12-27T13:35:00.000-08:002009-12-27T14:11:23.401-08:00AvatarFinally got around to seeing <i>Avatar</i> on Christmas. My impressions were much in line with the reviews I'd read...pretty to look at with a silly story.<br /><br />First, the visuals: It's easy these days to get jaded when it comes to special effects. They've just gotten so good. I don't think <i>Avatar</i> revolutionizes film making (as some of the more hyperbolic reviewers have proclaimed), but it does take things up a notch. I hadn't seen a modern 3D movie, and it was done extremely well. No gimmicky scenes to point out to you that <i>you are in a 3D movie</i>, just an extra element to add to the already great visuals. The effects were good enough to help me suspend disbelief and make me feel like I really was looking at an alien world. <br /><br />The culture and language of the Na'vi, the biology of the various species on the planet, and the technology of the humans were all very well thought out. I liked the way the Na'vi had co-evolved with the various species on Pandora to allow them to interface directly with them (I had used a similar idea in a novel that never really got off the ground). The various species on Pandora were inventive and fun to watch. The human tech wasn't as creative, but looked believable and created an immersive experience.<br /><br />Unfortunately, the story was not nearly as original or well thought-out. It was also moralizing and preachy. Humans have traveled all the way to Pandora to rape and exploit its natural resources, in particular a ridiculously named mineral called "unobtainium". We never learn why humans want this stuff, only that it is insanely valuable. Might it have made the military-industrial cardboard cutouts seem a bit more human and made the story a bit more interesting if this mineral were vital for continued human survival? For all we know, rich people back on Earth just like to make earrings out of the stuff. <br /><br />As it is, the corporate stooge is a generic bad guy. The military commander is an over-the-top bad guy with claw marks on his head. And the only humans with an ounce of decency are the protagonist, one military defector, and a few scientists. I don't mind simple stories with clearly-marked good guys and bad guys. If you're going to do this, I'd suggest divorcing it from any sort of thinly-veiled, half-baked political preachiness. Just make the bad guy wear black and look ominous and want something simple like ruling the entire galaxy. Cameron, unfortunately, didn't do this...he so obviously wanted to make some sort of commentary on the modern state of things (the loony military dude even gives a paranoid rant where he says something like "We gotta protect ourselves by launching a preemptive strike"). The phrase "shock and awe" was also used. The corporate honcho says things like "We've built them schools, hospitals, and roads...what more do they want?" This is not subtlety. This is stupidity. Pandora is not the Middle East...if only it were.<br /><br />The politics of the film frankly made me want to barf. If you're going to make a film that says something interesting about colonization and exploitation, then make that film. If you want to make a fun, awesome sci-fi adventure, don't beat me over the fucking skull with your infantile geo-political caricatures of reality.<br /><br />Final verdict:<br /><br />Direction, special effects, design: A<br />Story: F<br /><br />Still, it's worth seeing.Derekhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02776917750757825408noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-776205147286643847.post-31408933521481403212009-12-14T08:45:00.000-08:002009-12-14T09:02:09.278-08:00Game Review: New Super Mario Bros. WiiThe new Super Mario Brothers game for the Wii apparently just won Best Wii Game at the annual video game awards. This ought to be an indication of how crappy the selection of games is for the Wii.<br /><br />I've played quite a few levels now with my girlfriend. We're always on the lookout for good coop games, because they just don't make that many, and the ones that are made generally aren't that good. We were excited when we heard the new Super Mario game would be cooperative, with up to 4 players. Man, were we set up for some disappointment.<br /><br />First of all, if you're playing with Mario and Luigi, they can't occupy the same space, i.e., they bounce off each other and can push one another off ledges. This is not good. More often than not, you interfere with one another rather than helping each other. Often there are limited places to jump to survive, and one player almost inevitably prevents the other from making the jump or gets pushed off into oblivion themselves. Players can jump on top of each other to reach places they otherwise wouldn't be able to, but this doesn't really help because once one player gets up there, the other one is stuck below. So one player might get a bunch of goodies, like power ups and coins, while the other just got his face stepped on.<br /><br />The game works much better if you're actually playing multiple players, but you're actually competing against one another. It does NOT function well as a cooperative game. It is much easier to fug up your co-player than it is to assist them in just about any aspect of the game.<br /><br />A couple of very simple, but very large changes I would have made to the game design to make it, you know, actually cooperative, would be:<br /><br />1) Overlapping players: Instead of bouncing off each other, you overlap one another. This might make it difficult to see your character if they're behind another one, but that would be a much more desirable tradeoff than trying to jump on a 1-inch ledge that's already occupied by your partner, only to either shove them off to death or bounce off their head to death yourself.<br /><br />2) Tethers: This would make the game truly coop and a hell of a lot of fun. Have the characters tethered to one another with a flexible bungee cord. If they're both on the same screen, there is no effect. If one player either lags behind horizontally or vertically, the other player is able to pull them up to their current location. This should be extendable to 3 and 4 player as well. On vertically-scrolling levels, there is endless frustration when one player falls too far and dies, rather than simply falling to the last stable platform as they would in single-player. A simple tether system would alleviate this aggravation and make the game feel a lot more like people working as a team.<br /><br />There are some neat little additions to the game. The ability to shoot snowballs and freeze opponents is a cool power-up. But the game feels mostly like an early 90's retro side-scroller. This is fine...but what's unforgiveable is billing this game as coop and then implementing it in such a horrible, thoughtless way. As the game is currently designed, it would be much more fun to take turns with a partner in single-player mode rather than playing with multiple players, which is, frankly, dumb-fuck stupid.<br /><br />Nintendo gets a B+ for single-player mode and a big-ass F for coop.<br /><br />Although one good thing might come out of it, and that's the implementation of a tether system in one of my own games, either a side scroller or perhaps a coop mountain climbing game.Derekhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02776917750757825408noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-776205147286643847.post-15464208317899785132009-10-27T10:54:00.001-07:002009-10-27T11:21:53.531-07:00Not the Greatest Evolution Book on EarthSo I've been reading Richard Dawkins' new book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Greatest-Show-Earth-Evidence-Evolution/dp/1416594787/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1256666110&sr=8-1" target="_blank">The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution</a>, and I have to say I'm underwhelmed.<br /><br />I've got one main beef with the book, namely that Dawkins clearly states the purpose of the book in the Preface, and then does a poor job of following through. He starts out by mentioning a slew of his previous books before saying:<br /><blockquote>Looking back on those books, I realized that the evidence for evolution itself was nowhere explicitly set out, and that this was a serious gap that I needed to close.</blockquote>Sounds good, right? Books like <i>The Blind Watchmaker</i> and <i>Climbing Mount Improbable</i> are very good, but they explain the mechanisms of evolution and the <i>conceptual</i> issues of understanding how evolution works, such as seeing natural history through the lens of deep time and incremental change.<br /><br />So what does Dawkins do, then? Well, he starts in on the <i>conceptual</i> problems of understanding evolution. Chapter 1 is devoted to the semantics of the word "theory" and how scientists use it as opposed to its everyday use. I thought, "Okay, fine...now in Chapter 2 he'll start hammering on about the evidence from the fossil record and molecular genetics". Nope.<br /><br />Guess what he does in Chapter 2? He basically retreads the line of argumentation from <i>On the Origin of Species</i>. Namely, "Look at the powerful change and diversity brought about by artificial selection (i.e. selective breeding among domesticated plants and animals). Look at all the different breeds of dogs that all originated from a single species, the wolf." It's part of a strategy he calls "softening up" the reader to make the transition from buying into evolution by means of natural selection by realizing how powerful artificial selection is. It worked pretty well for Darwin, but he didn't have many alternative strategies to convince his readers. Genetics wasn't even been formalized or understood. There was very little of a fossil record, especially with regard to human ancestry.<br /><br />But from a modern perspective, why start out by retreading a line of argumentation from 150 years ago, especially when you have giant mountains of hard evidence with which to convince the reader? It's very weak. If I were either a creationist or sitting on the fence, I would be utterly frustrated with the book by this point.<br /><br />There's no need to "soften up" your readers. Hit them square between the damn eyes with the indisputable, incontrovertible evidence that all life on this planet shares a common ancestry. You can either fill in the conceptual arguments later, or better yet, refer them to your previous books.<br /><br />Dawkins uses the analogy of the historical sciences, like evolution and geology, to the work of a detective coming on the scene of a crime. We have powerful evidence in the form of effects, from which we can solidly determine the causes, even though we weren't around when the actual event happened. We can determine very accurately how and how long it took the Grand Canyon to form based on an understanding of erosion and other physical processes, just as we can convict a murderer with a clear conscience based on overwhelming physical evidence (DNA at the scene, the bullet matching the suspect's gun, gunpowder patterns on the suspect's hands and arms, blood in their car and their house, and on and on). If the evidence is overwhelming, we have no problem confidently making the correct inference, even if we don't have an eyewitness or a confession.<br /><br />The Dawkins needed to do, right out the gate, is present the damn evidence. Attempting to overcome the reader's conceptual hurdles to understanding the mechanisms of evolution makes Dawkins seem like he doesn't have a case and that he's stalling.<br /><br />Chapter 1 needed to be a summary of the enormous amount of physical evidence we have from many branches of science that converge irrefutably on the fact that all life on this planet shares a common ancestry in a giant family tree that took billions of years to unfold. Talk about the overwhelming fossil evidence and the evidence from molecular genetics. And then work back from there. He probably gets to this later, but I'm afraid he probably loses a lot of the people he wants to convince very early on.Derekhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02776917750757825408noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-776205147286643847.post-66046444194209570682009-10-06T07:51:00.000-07:002009-10-06T07:52:16.899-07:00Staged Muslim Discrimination at the Czech StopHere's a video clip from an ABC News report on discrimination against Muslims in America:<br /><br /><object height="344" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/PqbQWxHIn4U&hl=en&fs=1&"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/PqbQWxHIn4U&hl=en&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" height="344" width="425"></embed></object><br /><br />They say the majority of customers either supported or did nothing regarding the discrimination.<br /><br />6 supported the discriminatory behavior<br />13 spoke out against the behavior<br />22 said and did nothing<br /><br />I'm not sure how damning this is. First of all, it was staged at the Czech Stop in West, Texas, which is between Waco and Austin. I used to stop there all the time when I attended Baylor as an undergrad and would take trips home.<br /><br />It's a gas station/bakery, and a lot of people just want to come in, pay for their gas, maybe buy a kolache, and get the hell out...not get embroiled in a fight for social justice.<br /><br />I think the more telling figure is that over twice as many people complained as supported the behavior, and this is smack dab in the middle of Texas. The story could have spun the results a number of different ways, but I'm pretty damned encouraged by their little experiment.<br /><br />Oh, and if you're ever driving along I-35 between Austin and Waco, you really should stop there. I recommend the Spicy Hot Chubbies. No, I'm not making that up.Derekhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02776917750757825408noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-776205147286643847.post-90391536608585429462009-09-20T10:13:00.000-07:002009-09-20T10:19:52.416-07:00Grocery ParadoxesThe other day I was in a local Asian market here in Lafayette, and I came across this jar of seeds:<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_3USMiPAO41Q/SrZi_ms8vWI/AAAAAAAAAUI/XJH8wYb0rMM/s1600-h/2009-09-18+19.22.18.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_3USMiPAO41Q/SrZi_ms8vWI/AAAAAAAAAUI/XJH8wYb0rMM/s400/2009-09-18+19.22.18.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5383599249428364642" border="0" /></a><br />Are they really pumpkin seeds, and the picture is wrong? Or are they watermelon seeds, and the text is wrong? Or do they come from a strange land where watermelons are called "pumpkins"?<br /><br />Dunno. I would have had to buy them to find out. They were copiously coated with some kind of red gunk. No thanks.<br /><br />And then I noticed this in my local Albertson's:<br /><br />The label for the aisle is "catsup":<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_3USMiPAO41Q/SrZjAD-ZNrI/AAAAAAAAAUQ/XItoV2mUxbE/s1600-h/2009-09-20+10.03.03.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_3USMiPAO41Q/SrZjAD-ZNrI/AAAAAAAAAUQ/XItoV2mUxbE/s400/2009-09-20+10.03.03.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5383599257286162098" border="0" /></a><br />But you know how many of the actual bottles of the stuff were named "catsup"? Absolutely zero.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_3USMiPAO41Q/SrZjAVApYeI/AAAAAAAAAUY/oZLn54zYl3g/s1600-h/2009-09-20+10.03.16.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_3USMiPAO41Q/SrZjAVApYeI/AAAAAAAAAUY/oZLn54zYl3g/s400/2009-09-20+10.03.16.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5383599261859013090" border="0" /></a>Derekhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02776917750757825408noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-776205147286643847.post-48668586925650203812009-09-18T06:57:00.000-07:002009-09-18T07:12:51.786-07:00Literature as a Source of KnowledgeJason Rosenhouse has <a href="http://scienceblogs.com/evolutionblog/2009/09/ways_of_knowing.php" target="_blank">an interesting post</a> about whether or not fiction is a valid way of knowing something about the world.<br /><br />Ultimately I agree with him (except for his ranking of Star Trek captains). Yes, literature contains truths about the human condition and about the world in general. Otherwise it would have a lot less value. But it also often contains falsehoods, or overgeneralizations. <br /><br />Literature (and narrative media in general) can be extremely useful to help elucidate, proselytize, or reinforce existing beliefs. But I don't think it functions as a <i>primary</i> source of knowledge. A metaphor can help reinforce some aspects of how the world works. For example, one could tell a story about how white blood cells are the knights of the realm, ever vigilant in capturing and slaying unwanted intruders. Many things about the metaphor may ring true, and align well with the actual state of affairs. But we can't <i>know</i> how the immune system works from such stories. That takes painstaking investigation of the phenomenon itself.<br /><br />Something in a work of fiction might "ring true", but there's no way to validate it within the framework of the story itself. You'd be surprised how many people overseas think that every American owns a gun from watching our movies. If I gleaned universal truths from Judd Apatow films, I'd live in a world where fat, unemployed stoner shlubs hooked up with super-hot TV personalities and lived happily ever after. How do I know the world does not work this way? By comparing the vision of the story with the actual state of affairs.<br /><br />So I think it makes the most sense to view literature, and really all art, as a way of reframing truths to make them more interesting, accessible, etc., but ultimately not as a source of truth.Derekhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02776917750757825408noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-776205147286643847.post-70292605900104099102009-09-01T18:40:00.001-07:002009-09-01T18:57:17.084-07:00Noel Sharkey on AII just came across <a href="http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327231.100-why-ai-is-a-dangerous-dream.html?page=1" target="_blank">this interview</a> with Noel Sharkey (who I'd never heard of before I just came across this interview). Some of it is valid, but he says some pretty silly things.<br /><br />Case in point, I thought this particular answer was the silliest:<br /><blockquote><br /><b>Are we close to building a machine that can meaningfully be described as sentient?</b><br /><br />I'm an empirical kind of guy, and there is just no evidence of an artificial toehold in sentience. It is often forgotten that the idea of mind or brain as computational is merely an assumption, not a truth. When I point this out to "believers" in the computational theory of mind, some of their arguments are almost religious. They say, "What else could there be? Do you think mind is supernatural?" But accepting mind as a physical entity does not tell us what kind of physical entity it is. It could be a physical system that cannot be recreated by a computer.<br /></blockquote><br />Okay, the computational theory of mind is not "merely an assumption". It is built on evidence, like any good theory. And it's not "religious" to ask for an alternative theory if someone says a particular theory is crap. If this guy doesn't think that the brain receives input from the environment and performs information processing on that input, then what is his alternative hypothesis?<br /><br />And I'm not sure what he's talking about in that last sentence, either. Any physical system can be simulated computationally. The fidelity of the simulation is limited by the complexity of the model system and the computational resources available. If what we're interested in is the algorithm executed by the simulated hardware, we should be able to recreate the algorithms processed by the brain. In other words, no, a simulated rainstorm can't make you wet, but a simulated abacus can perform calculations just like a physical one, and a simulated chess player can kick your ass at chess. I don't know of a reasonable theoretical argument for why the function of the brain can't be emulated with a computer.<br /><br />A reasonable answer to the question would have been: "Probably not, although there are no theoretical roadblocks to prevent it as an eventuality."Derekhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02776917750757825408noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-776205147286643847.post-75725238063291902042009-08-24T18:25:00.000-07:002009-08-24T18:34:15.965-07:00Attack of the Nutria...Plus, a RainbowLaurie and I were out for a walk in a local park here in Lafayette this evening, and we brought some bread to feed the ducks. I'd seen nutria at this park before, but they'd never approached very close. They must be hungry, because we had a whole pack of them come up and beg for bread along with the ducks.<br /><br />In case you don't know what a nutria is, here's <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nutria" target="_blank">the Wikipedia entry</a>. They're basically big rats that live in the water.<br /><br />So, I snapped a few actions shots with my G1. Enjoy.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_3USMiPAO41Q/SpM-q5xAWNI/AAAAAAAAATI/dRd1XjkQl00/s1600-h/2009-08-24+19.04.43.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 291px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_3USMiPAO41Q/SpM-q5xAWNI/AAAAAAAAATI/dRd1XjkQl00/s400/2009-08-24+19.04.43.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5373707687164926162" border="0" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_3USMiPAO41Q/SpM-qpup8sI/AAAAAAAAATA/-yODeF9ZLOY/s1600-h/2009-08-24+19.04.33.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 281px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_3USMiPAO41Q/SpM-qpup8sI/AAAAAAAAATA/-yODeF9ZLOY/s400/2009-08-24+19.04.33.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5373707682860102338" border="0" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_3USMiPAO41Q/SpM-qTVCeII/AAAAAAAAAS4/oEH4osPA5X0/s1600-h/2009-08-24+19.02.43%282%29.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 253px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_3USMiPAO41Q/SpM-qTVCeII/AAAAAAAAAS4/oEH4osPA5X0/s400/2009-08-24+19.02.43%282%29.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5373707676847077506" border="0" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_3USMiPAO41Q/SpM-2qMK-aI/AAAAAAAAATQ/WD7g5q0jsLg/s1600-h/2009-08-24+19.09.00.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 306px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_3USMiPAO41Q/SpM-2qMK-aI/AAAAAAAAATQ/WD7g5q0jsLg/s400/2009-08-24+19.09.00.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5373707889142331810" border="0" /></a><br /><br />Oh, and I found this picture on my phone that I'd forgotten about, when we had a rainbow a while back. Actually, there was a double rainbow, but it didn't show up in this pic:<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_3USMiPAO41Q/SpM-2-bmx_I/AAAAAAAAATY/ztElZiTki7s/s1600-h/2009-08-04+18.27.37.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_3USMiPAO41Q/SpM-2-bmx_I/AAAAAAAAATY/ztElZiTki7s/s400/2009-08-04+18.27.37.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5373707894575777778" border="0" /></a>Derekhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02776917750757825408noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-776205147286643847.post-24803099626813285532009-08-22T18:25:00.000-07:002009-08-22T18:45:13.960-07:00District 9I went to see <i>District 9</i> yesterday. The movie has enjoyed critical and financial success so far, and I guess my expectations were fairly high.<br /><br />I can't exactly say that I enjoyed the movie, though. It was definitely an original mix of elements, though it borrowed heavily from a lot of SF source material. The plot, as many have pointed out, was similar to the movie/TV series <i>Alien Nation</i>. It also had influences from Cronenberg's version of <i>The Fly</i>, <i>RoboCop</i>, and others, especially the recent technique of making the unreal seem more real by employing a pseudo-documentary style, e.g. <i>Blair Witch</i>, and <i>Cloverfield</i>.<br /><br />The film definitely kept you engaged. It was alternately grotesque and action-packed. But the acting was relatively poor; the plot was fragmentary and incomplete; and the characterization was pretty much 2D. The bad guys were a favorite villain of modern cinema, the multi-national corporation, and they're portrayed without even a hint of conscience. The middle-level bureaucrat at the center of the film seems to have a change of heart, literally and figuratively, but it was pretty heavy-handed, and when all was said and done, the film seemed more like a set-up for a sequel than a self-contained film.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_3USMiPAO41Q/SpCfANA7rNI/AAAAAAAAASI/_6TftN94gDQ/s1600-h/D9_ss.png"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 217px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_3USMiPAO41Q/SpCfANA7rNI/AAAAAAAAASI/_6TftN94gDQ/s400/D9_ss.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5372969181295389906" border="0" /></a><br />The production values were great, though, and the aliens and their tech were interesting and well-developed. Strangely, though, a major scene from the trailer, where an alien is being interrogated about how his weapons work, was not in the film. Weird. The movie had a number of striking images, and was actually cringe-worthy in a lot of scenes. But great SF is about ideas, and even though there were parallels between the 'prawns', as the aliens are called, and other refugee populations, I didn't see their plight used as much more than a set-up for gross-outs and action. I'm not sure what the point was, and part of this was because the movie didn't really resolve anything.<br /><br />I've heard people comparing the other smaller-budget SF movie that came out at the end of the summer, <i>Moon</i>. There are definitely parallels, especially the use of corporations as the bad guys. But <i>Moon</i> was a much more thoughtful picture, and was ultimately a much better film. Still, I'd marginally recommend <i>District 9</i>, if only because there are scenes that you simply won't see in any other movie.Derekhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02776917750757825408noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-776205147286643847.post-14181952207258802312009-08-14T15:03:00.000-07:002009-08-14T15:31:18.408-07:00Michael Ruse on the New AtheistsMichael Ruse is a philosopher of biology at Florida State University, a self-avowed atheist, and is one of the people who thinks that religion and science work just fine nestled up against each other and that vocal atheism is bad for everybody.<br /><br />Here's <a href="http://blog.beliefnet.com/scienceandthesacred/2009/08/why-i-think-the-new-atheists-are-a-bloody-disaster.html" target="_blank">his latest</a>, and it's pretty bad, through and through. <br /><br />He starts out by trying to establish his cred, rather than actually getting on with his point. When he finally does start in with his actual case, three paragraphs in, here's how he starts:<br /><br /><blockquote><br />Which brings me to the point of what I want to say. I find myself in a peculiar position. In the past few years, we have seen the rise and growth of a group that the public sphere has labeled the "new atheists" - people who are aggressively pro-science, especially pro-Darwinism, and violently anti-religion of all kinds, especially Christianity but happy to include Islam and the rest.<br /></blockquote><br /><br />Lovely. Notice the word "violently". He already lost me right there. Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, and Dennett are all peaceful, thoughtful individuals. It's not a good start to use such a word, even metaphorically. Just say "strongly" and avoid the loaded bullshit terminology.<br /><br />Then he quickly notes the recent campaign by Sam Harris and others against Francis Collins being appointed to head the NIH:<br /><br /><blockquote><br />Recently, it has been the newly appointed director of the NIH, Francis Collins, who has been incurring their hatred. Given the man's scientific and managerial credentials - completing the HGP under budget and under time for a start - this is deplorable, if understandable since Collins is a devout Christian.<br /></blockquote><br /><br />Oh dear. Look, the case against Collins doesn't begin and end with the fact that he's a devout Christian. Here's Harris' <a href="http://www.reasonproject.org/archive/item/the_strange_case_of_francis_collins2/" target="_blank">thorough statement</a> on Collins and the case for why he isn't a good choice for director of the NIH.<br /><br />He then goes on to say that the level of philosophical argument and theological understanding that Richard Dawkins demonstrates in <i>The God Delusion</i> "would fail any introductory philosophy or religion course." But of course, he doesn't provide arguments against anything Dawkins says, or provide links to reviews or essays that do so.<br /><br />Let's take a quick look at one of Dawkins' central arguments in his book. The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_Boeing_747_gambit" target="_blank">Ultimate Boeing 747 Gambit</a> is summarized as follows:<br /><br /><blockquote><br />1. One of the greatest challenges to the human intellect, over the centuries, has been to explain how the complex, improbable appearance of design in the universe arises.<br /><br />2. The natural temptation is to attribute the appearance of design to actual design itself. In the case of a man-made artefact such as a watch, the designer really was an intelligent engineer. It is tempting to apply the same logic to an eye or a wing, a spider or a person.<br /><br />3. The temptation is a false one, because the designer hypothesis immediately raises the larger problem of who designed the designer. The whole problem we started out with was the problem of explaining statistical improbability. It is obviously no solution to postulate something even more improbable. We need a "crane" not a "skyhook," for only a crane can do the business of working up gradually and plausibly from simplicity to otherwise improbable complexity.<br /><br />4. The most ingenious and powerful crane so far discovered is Darwinian evolution by natural selection. Darwin and his successors have shown how living creatures, with their spectacular statistical improbability and appearance of design, have evolved by slow, gradual degrees from simple beginnings. We can now safely say that the illusion of design in living creatures is just that – an illusion.<br /><br />5. We don't yet have an equivalent crane for physics. Some kind of multiverse theory could in principle do for physics the same explanatory work as Darwinism does for biology. This kind of explanation is superficially less satisfying than the biological version of Darwinism, because it makes heavier demands on luck. But the anthropic principle entitles us to postulate far more luck than our limited human intuition is comfortable with.<br /><br />6. We should not give up hope of a better crane arising in physics, something as powerful as Darwinism is for biology. But even in the absence of a strongly satisfying crane to match the biological one, the relatively weak cranes we have at present are, when abetted by the anthropic principle, self-evidently better than the self-defeating skyhook hypothesis of an intelligent designer.<br /></blockquote><br /><br />What are the responses to this basic argument?<br /><br /><blockquote><br />Dawkins writes about his attendance at a conference in Cambridge sponsored by the Templeton Foundation,where he challenged the theologians present to respond to the argument that a creator of a universe with such complexity would have to be complex and improbable. According to Dawkins, the strongest response was the objection that he was imposing a scientific epistemology on a question that lies beyond the realm of science. When theologians hold God to be simple, who is a scientist like Dawkins "to dictate to theologians that their God had to be complex?" Dawkins writes that he didn't get the impression that those employing this "evasive" defence were being "wilfully dishonest," but were "defining themselves into an epistemological Safe Zone where rational argument could not reach them because they had declared by fiat that it could not."<br /></blockquote><br /><br />This is supposed to be a serious response? And Dawkins would fail a philosophy course?<br /><br />Well how about from professional philosophers?<br /><br /><blockquote><br />Both Alvin Plantinga and Richard Swinburne raise the objection that God is not complex. Swinburne gives two reasons why a God that controls every particle can be simple. First, he writes that a person is not the same as his brain, and he points to split-brain experiments that he has discussed in his previous work, thus he argues that a simple entity like our self can control our brain, which is a very complex thing. Second, he argues that simplicity is a quality that is intrinsic to a hypothesis, and not related to its empirical consequences.<br /><br />Plantinga writes "So first, according to classical theology, God is simple, not complex. More remarkable, perhaps, is that according to Dawkins' own definition of complexity, God is not complex. According to his definition (set out in The Blind Watchmaker), something is complex if it has parts that are "arranged in a way that is unlikely to have arisen by chance alone." But of course God is a spirit, not a material object at all, and hence has no parts. A fortiori (as philosophers like to say) God doesn't have parts arranged in ways unlikely to have arisen by chance. Therefore, given the definition of complexity Dawkins himself proposes, God is not complex." <br /></blockquote><br /><br />You've got to be shitting me, right? A person is not the same as their brain. Okay. Then Swinburne argues that a simple thing like our self can control a complex thing like our brain? He sounds like a standard dualist, which hasn't been taken seriously for several hundred years. And that stuff about simplicity being a quality specific to a hypothesis sounds like gobbledygook.<br /><br />I like Plantinga's response, though. At least it's funny. God is simply because only material things can be complex (I guess an algorithm can't be complex, right?), and god isn't made out of material parts. That's just sweet. Sure, you can claim whatever the hell you want about an imaginary entity. You can claim it's complex or simple, whatever the situation calls for...because you have absolutely zero evidence regarding its nature. This reminds me of how people make all sorts of claims about what god knows and what god feels and what god wants, and then simultaneously claim that he works in mysterious ways and that any aspect of his nature ultimately falls outside of the realm of scientific knowledge. Good stuff.<br /><br />Anyway, there's more, but that's enough. You can go read it yourself if you're feeling masochistic.<br /><br />Just one more thing about Ruse's article which is a particular nitpick. If you're writing on the internet, and you're talking about other stuff that is readily available on the internet, for fuck's sake, use hyperlinks. That's what they're there for.Derekhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02776917750757825408noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-776205147286643847.post-68844853106300908222009-08-14T09:16:00.000-07:002009-08-14T09:26:35.038-07:00Atheist for a DayLast week a group of over 300 atheists visited the <a href="http://creationmuseum.org/" target="_blank">Creation Museum</a> in Kentucky. I had been following the story on PZ Myers' blog (here's his <a href="http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/08/the_creation_museum_1.php" target="_blank">initial report</a>). <br /><br />But I hadn't seen <a href="http://friendlyatheist.com/2009/08/12/what-did-christians-see-when-they-joined-the-atheists-at-the-creation-museum/" target="_blank">this</a>, which my sister pointed me to. A Christian went incognito with the group, to see what it was like to be perceived as an atheist. <br /><br />He says the group he was with was the target of "hateful glances" and exaggerated amens. That doesn't sound that bad, actually. Still, he says he was ashamed of his fellow Christians. There's an ongoing discussion at his blog, if anybody's interested.Derekhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02776917750757825408noreply@blogger.com0