Quotulatiousness

May 10, 2013

This week in Guild Wars 2

Filed under: Gaming — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:17

My weekly Guild Wars 2 community round-up at GuildMag is now online. The next chapter of the living story, Secret of Southsun, will be going live next week and there’s much anticipation for what will be included, plus the usual assortment of blog posts, videos, podcasts, and fan fiction from around the GW2 community.

Colby Cosh on “gendercide”

Filed under: Cancon, Health, Law, Liberty, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:53

Despite the federal government’s efforts to keep this debate from happening, we apparently are going to be having a big national debate about abortion. (For those following from outside the borders of Former Soviet Canuckistan, Canada doesn’t actually have any abortion law on the books at the moment, and Stephen Harper’s government of “bitter-clinging, right-wing, Bible-thumping, fundamentalist Christian” Conservatives is desperate not to have to bring one in.) Colby Cosh explains why the efforts by some back-bench MPs to use “gendercide” as a way to force the government’s hand won’t work:

Here, then, is my contribution to the big conversation.

(1) “Gendercide” is incoherent religious militancy in cheap drag. (Editors certainly shouldn’t be taking sides by putting it in headlines as if it were an actual thing.)

(2) However you feel about personal eugenics, which is an accurate name for “mothers choosing babies that are likely to be better in some respect they deem relevant”, the Era Of It is arriving now and will not be wished away.

(3) Sex-selective abortion perpetrated for reasons of religious superstition is, upon all evidence, a marginal phenomenon in this country, probably a fading one, and quite likely to be an inherently self-correcting one. It makes a shabby excuse for blowing up the political truce our country clings to when it comes to the topic of abortion. (It seems remotely possible that Stephen Harper has perceived this and concurs with it.)

(4) In particular, no statute is likely to be effective against sex selection by mothers. We had one, you know, and it actually made a hypothetical exception for parents at risk of X-linked gene disease. A Liberal government devoted to “reproductive choice” criminalized sex-selective embryo implantation by means of the Assisted Human Reproduction Act; a Supreme Court found that law offensive to the Constitution; and a Conservative government closed the agency that was supposed to enforce it because it had accomplished the sum total of jack squat ever.

(5) People who wish to police sex-selective abortion had better figure out what exactly kinds they don’t like. And why. And what other reasons for a woman to have an abortion don’t cut their brand of mustard. And whether they really want their wives, girlfriends, daughters or nieces to end up as a future Case 6 running afoul of the law.

(6) Fellow-travellers of Mark Warawa who think he makes an awesome test case for parliamentary purity should consider looking for one that, pardon the metaphor, doesn’t have quite so many oopsies in its DNA.

Is wine tasting bullshit?

Filed under: Business, Media, Wine — Tags: — Nicholas @ 09:41

There are lots of bullshit artists in the wine trade … and a lot of what is written about wine is definitely bullshit:

A real wine review

The human palate is arguably the weakest of the five traditional senses. This begs an important question regarding wine tasting: is it bullshit, or is it complete and utter bullshit?

There are no two ways about it: the bullshit is strong with wine. Wine tasting. Wine rating. Wine reviews. Wine descriptions. They’re all related. And they’re all egregious offenders, from a bullshit standpoint.

[. . .]

In 1996, research published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology concluded that wine experts cannot reliably identify more than three or four of a wine’s flavor components. Most wine critics routinely report tasting six or more. The wine review excerpted in the top image for this post, for example (which is a real review, by the way – somebody actually wrote those words about a bottle of wine, in earnest) lists the following components in the wine’s “principle flavor” profile: “red roses, lavender, geranium, dried hibiscus flowers, cranberry raisins, currant jelly, mango with skins [Ed. note: jesus wine-swilling christ – mango with skins?], red plums, cobbler, cinnamon, star anise, blackberry bramble, whole black peppercorn,” and more than a dozen other flavors that I refuse to continue listing lest my head implode.

Fun fact: MIT behavioral economist Coco Krume recently conducted a meta-analysis of the classifiers used in wine reviews, and found that reviewers tend to use “cheap” and “expensive” words differently. Cheap descriptors are used much more frequently, expensive ones more sparingly. Krume even demonstrated that it’s possible to guess the price range of a wine based on the words used in its review.

Even with all the evidence that the wine world is replete with marketing bullshit, there’s still great wine experiences to have, and you don’t need to wear an ascot and fake a snobby accent to enjoy it. As I wrote last year:

There are good wines and bad wines. There are good wines and better wines. But my experience has always been that there’s a point of diminishing returns beyond which you’re paying more money for no appreciable improvement in the quality of the wine. In other words, beyond that point, you’re paying for the prestige of the label or the mystique of the brand not for anything intrinsic to the liquid in the glass. [. . .] If you’re buying wine to have with a nice dinner, find your point of diminishing returns and don’t go beyond it: you’ll save yourself a lot of money over time and still enjoy your wine. If, on the other hand, you’re buying wine specifically to impress then go as expensive as you like.

Early signs of “rejuvenation therapy”?

Filed under: Health, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:41

An interesting report from the Harvard Gazette on some research into a possibility of reducing some of the effects of aging, specifically aging of the heart:

Two Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI) researchers — a stem cell biologist and a practicing cardiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital — have identified a protein in the blood of mice and humans that may prove to be the first effective treatment for the form of age-related heart failure that affects millions of Americans.

When the protein, called GDF-11, was injected into old mice, which develop thickened heart walls in a manner similar to aging humans, the hearts were reduced in size and thickness, resembling the healthy hearts of younger mice.

Even more important than the implications for the treatment of diastolic heart failure, the finding by Richard T. Lee, a Harvard Medical School professor at the hospital, and Amy Wagers, a professor in Harvard’s Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology, ultimately may rewrite our understanding of aging.

Research of this type may be very important as the baby boomer generation enters retirement age … not necessarily to extend total lifespan, but to increase the chances for healthy activity longer into our existing lifespan. Few of us would want to live to 100 if the last 20 years are pain-wracked, immobile, and inactive … but being able to live that long and managing to keep doing the things we like to do for most of that time? That’d be much more appealing to many of us.

Nine years of blogging

Filed under: Administrivia, Media — Tags: — Nicholas @ 00:01

Nine years is a very long lifespan for a blog. The vast majority of blogs don’t even make it to a first anniversary before the blogger loses interest and stops updating it. As I have no other particular claims to distinction, I’ll hang my hat on longevity. If I were to do it over again, I’d probably have come up with a different name for the blog, but for a spur-of-the-moment joke, it’s held up well enough. I guess.

One thing I don’t regret is not specializing in a particular area. I’m not an economist, or a military historian, or a political theorist, but I have interests in those areas that crop up relatively frequently here on the blog. I don’t generally post personal items, as there are lots of other venues (like Facebook) which are better suited to that sort of thing … and I live a fairly boring life, so exotic trips and exciting adventures are things I read about rather than experience directly. I especially don’t post about (past) employers or (current) clients in a way that they could be identified: that’s the sort of thing that tends to have only negative repercussions.

I did a retrospective round-up of the first year for the 2010 anniversary, the “best of 2005″ for 2011, and posts from 2006 last year. To stay on that path requires a look at what I posted in 2007 (and may still have some relevance or interest):

January, 2007

February, 2007

March, 2007 (a very busy month, resulting in very low blog output)

  • Our dystopian future?. “Brad Warbiany takes a moment to glance into his crystal ball and finds . . . shite”
  • “Good job, buddy!”. An extended comment from a regular reader becomes a full blog post.
  • Very disturbing development. “These guys are not exemplars of “warriors”. They’re parties to conspiracy and murder. That is not what soldiers do. The distinction may be a bit subtle for those raised on anti-war protests and anti-military propaganda, however. “

April, 2007

  • Toronto to export garbage at retail level. The social and political side of garbage collection.
  • The diet dilemma. The inevitable result of two trends: more sedentary adult life and cheaper food.
  • Why have an army at all?. A letter to the Toronto Star suggests that Canada has no actual need for any armed forces at all.
  • Everybody’s talking about it . . .. Some conversations just repeat on a regular basis. This discussion of how a criminal got his hands on the weapons he used in his crime could be copy-pasted into any month of the last decade.
  • Somehow, I’m not convinced. A long-standing problem with using US college students as guinea pigs for sociological experiments is that they’re not truly representative even of Americans, never mind non-westerners. Your results will be biased due to the sample you’re using.
  • Potential outages. Jon switched ISPs at the end of April. It took several days to get the blog up and running at the new ISP. An abortive effort was made to update to the then-current version of MovableType, but eventually he had to admit it wasn’t working properly and revert back to the older install.

May, 2007 (a death in the family meant another month of irregular updates)

June, 2007

July, 2007 re-employment took its toll on blogging output

August, 2007

September, 2007

October, 2007 (the job was consuming all my waking hours this month, so blog posts were very light indeed)

  • There’s no place like Florida. There’s just something … special … about Florida.
  • Voting day in Ontario. The election John Tory had to work really hard to lose. But he somehow managed the trick.
  • Micro microeconomics. I explain “Russon’s Law of Economics” as applied to the Ontario economy just before the entire North American economy hit the skids. In hindsight, this was a flashing red light about the near-term performance across all retail sectors.
  • The anti-age-effects movement. Rather than working toward mere longevity, put efforts into reducing or even eliminating the worst aspects of old age.

November, 2007 (deadline pressures at work kept blogging light)

December, 2007

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