The Wisdom of Buddha

This video seems timely considering all the turmoil of late.

"When words are both true and kind, they can change our world." -Buddha

Family Guy Censored for Bad Taste

I found this YouTube video of a censored "Family Guy" joke. It was intended as joke targeted at the Simpsons. There is a back and forth going on, supposedly all in good fun. In the video, Marge gets raped and in the end the whole Simpson family is murdered. Some people might find this type of thing funny. Personally, I think it's extremely distasteful and insensitive to victims of rape and murder. It is just going a little too far.

Hey, I'm not rich!

I don't know how all these organizations got my phone number, but I usually get anywhere from 3-5 calls per week asking me to donate. With all the calls I get, you'd think that I have amassed some huge fortune like Warren Buffett or Bill Gates. Well, I haven't. By most standards, I'm somewhere between poor and middle-class. Mainly because of student loans (around $40,000), I have a negative net worth. So please, stop asking for money!

What's Killing the Video-Game Business?

I found this interesting article on Slate By N. Evan Van Zelfden.

Like pretty much every industry these days, video-game publishing is in some financial trouble. Electronic Arts, the world's largest game publisher, best known for Madden and the Sims, lost $641 million in 2008's fourth quarter. Activision-Blizzard, owners of the cash cows World of Warcraft and Call of Duty, reported losses of $72 million in the fourth quarter of 2008. (They lost $194 million the quarter before that.) THQ, the third-largest publisher in the United States, and known for lucrative licenses ranging from the Ultimate Fighting Championship to Pixar, had $192 million in losses over the holidays and is laying off 24 percent of its work force.

In my opinion, they need to revise their business model. Their biggest problem is that their costs exceeds their revenue. They should employ smaller teams on products that sell and cut-out the middleman. There's no need for draconian DRM schemes that hurt sales.

LINK

DEUTERIUM MICROBOMB ROCKET PROPULSION

Abstract

Large scale manned space flight within the solar system is still confronted with the solution of two problems: 1. A propulsion system to transport large payloads with short transit times between different planetary orbits. 2. A cost effective lifting of large payloads into earth orbit. For the solution of the first problem a deuterium fusion bomb propulsion system is proposed where a thermonuclear detonation wave is ignited in a small cylindrical assembly of deuterium with a gigavolt-multimegampere proton beam, drawn from the magnetically insulated spacecraft acting in the ultrahigh vacuum of space as a gigavolt capacitor. For the solution of the second problem, the ignition is done by argon ion lasers driven by high explosives, with the lasers destroyed in the fusion explosion and becoming part of the exhaust.

Link

Interesting...

Global Warming Is Irreversible, Study Says

Climate change is essentially irreversible, according to a sobering new scientific study.

As carbon dioxide emissions continue to rise, the world will experience more and more long-term environmental disruption. The damage will persist even when, and if, emissions are brought under control, says study author Susan Solomon, who is among the world's top climate scientists.

Read or Listen to the rest at NPR.org
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=99888903

Crysis CryEngine2 Level Editor Demo

The Onion: Bush Tours America

Bush Tours America To Survey Damage Caused By His Disastrous Presidency

Life As We Know It Nearly Created in Lab

Life As We Know It Nearly Created in Lab is an interesting article about some scientist that created molecules that self-replicate and even evolve and compete to win or lose. This only proves is that life can be designed.

The big mystery of life is how it began. It's pretty evident that life has evolved from the simple to the complex through natural selection, but how did it start?

If life occurs randomly then complex life is likely to be extremely rare. I'd like to think that early life was designed with the ability to evolve as a built in mechanism to increase its chances for survival.

Neutron Star

This is a pretty cool rendering a neutron star that was left over from a supernova explosion.

Galaxy Song

Why am I still single?

Quiz by Onlinedating.org
Quiz brought to you by Online Dating

A New Economic Engine: Energy in the 21st Century

Barack in Richmond, VA

Happy Halloween

Thinking of voting for John McCain?

I normally shy away from posting about politics because it tends to be a distraction from making real contributions to science and technology. Sometimes you have to...




This should be seen by every American who is thinking of voting for John McCain. Pass it on.

Good programming doesn't mean great software

I recently found some of the best C game programming from the previous decade; the source for the game Angband. The code has seen quite a lot of revision and it does what it does well. However, the game is basically a huge waste of time. If there was ever a game to identify with hard-core, hack-n-slash, geeky role-playing, this is it.

Chief faults:
1)Interface design -Too Cryptic, requiring knowledge of macros to work well. 2)Game play -Extremely tedious and permanent character death is part of it's culture. 3)Story -Uh, you make a character and you go around killing stuff. That's about it. 4)Scope -One town and huge frigging dungeon to crawl. 5)Frustrating -Character Death occurs too frequently and load/save is considered cheating by it's community.

Moral of the story, good programming does not make a good game.

Spore released with Draconian DRM

It would appear the much hyped game Spore has hit a snag; namely it's draconian DRM. The out-cry over this has turned into a hate bomb on Amazon of over 500 1-star reviews, mostly criticizing the DRM but also the dumbed-down game play.

First of all, the game incorporates a draconian DRM system that requires you to activate over the internet, and limits you to a grand total of 3 activations. If you reach that limit, then you'll have to call EA in order to add one extra activation.

"Creating" your creatures is pointless (cosmetic only, because everything is based on stats), and brings you about the same excitement as dressing up a plastic doll.

I seem to recall Will Wright giving a presentation where he said that how you designed your creature would determine it's survival. Apparently it's been dumb-down so much that the creature design is mostly cosmetic; depending on the run-of-the-mill stats and dice rolls of the average RPG. The space phase supposedly pales in comparison to Sins of the Solar Empire that boast 500,000+ sales, in part, thanks to no DRM.

Maybe EA will learn a powerful lesson from this. Who knows?

I know that until they get rid of the DRM, I won't be bothering with Spore or any other EA game.

How to improve the MOO2 AI

Master of Orion II multiplayer is typically the place to find challenging games. What about times when you just can't find an opponent or don't have that much time? The single player AI just doesn't work for practice games in single-player mode. Here's what I did to help make the AI a bit more challenging.

After starting MOO2:
1) Click Multiplayer->Hotseat->New Game
2) Do the game setup as if you where playing multiplayer
3) Keep adding custom human opponents with good race picks.
4) Start the game and play the first turn for the AI then save it.
5) Click Multiplayer->Network->Load Game then load the AI saved game.
6) Click start game after 1 person as joined.
7) Click yes to confirm start with AI opponents.

Another way to do this would be to save your first turn from a multiplayer game then load that with AI opponents. The idea is that with stronger race picks the AI will have less of a disadvantage. On Impossible, with good race picks, the AI plays about as good as the average new player. They still make lots of mistakes but it's better than just using their default race picks.

The main flaw with the MOO2 AI is that it has MOO1 mentality associated with one habitable planet per system. Instead of building colony bases it tries to expand to get the most systems possible. Since colony bases are cheaper than colony ships, this is inefficient. It also errors when building ships; tending to use lots of bombs and few weapon mods. That doesn't work for well ship-to-ship combat. Another problem is that it values a systems position over it's actual worth. It'll populate and defend a poor planet that is near a rival rather than colonize a back-water rich planet.