Interesting « Quotulatiousness

February 18, 2012

New medieval ruins, you say?

Filed under: Germany, History, Humour — Tags: GuildWars, Interesting, MMORPG, YouTube — Nicholas @ 13:19

In an article about Guild Wars 2 game play at the German website wartower.de, author 4thVariety briefly reminisces about fake medieval ruins:

This ruin will be smashed by Tequatl every time. I wonder, if players need to build it first, in some obtuse quest, sorry, event referencing Kevin Costner’s unforgettable, or rather unrepressable, classic Field of Dreams. Building a ruin makes no sense you say? I beg to differ. 135 years ago, the Bavarian king announced he was looking forward to visiting my home town the next year and take a tour of the medieval ruins. Problem was, there were no medieval ruins, but nobody wanted to tell that to the King and spoil the perfect visit he was looking forward to. Thus, in a fit of “because we can” and to further spite the neighboring cities, a medieval ruin was build in the middle of an English garden. The King had a happy visit and today’s fantasy nerds a spot to geek out once a year. This is the place where I learned that people in chainmail do not jump and dropping off a one meter ledge in armor with a broadsword in your hand is a scary dangerous thing. Thank god, neither cell-phone cameras nor Youtube were invented back then, else I would be an international near self-impalement meme today. On the bright side, nobody would then complain about not being able to jump in MMOs.

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December 30, 2011

Are creative people also more likely to be “creative” with the truth?

Filed under: Science — Tags: Ethics, Interesting, Psychology, Research — Nicholas @ 10:51

Melissa Leong on a recent study:

Francesca Gino’s new study, which links creativity to dishonesty, opens with a quote from 18th-century French philosopher and art critic Denis Diderot: “Evil always turns up in this world through some genius or other.”

Gino is not suggesting, as some artists at the time complained, that creative people are evil. But she is saying that, according to her research, creative people are more apt to cheat, lie and justify their evil. Gino, associate professor of business administration at Harvard University, spoke to the Post about her study, co-authored by Dan Ariely, a behavioural economist at Duke University. (Their findings were published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology last month.)

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December 29, 2011

Alternatives to ordinary houses: former missile silos

Filed under: History, Military, Randomness, USA — Tags: 1960s, BallisticMissiles, Housing, Interesting — Nicholas @ 11:16

A former US Air Force missile silo (with a house and other buildings on the land above) was put on the market earlier this month at a low-low price of only $750,000:

Boing Boing has come across a cozy little place that any future super-villain would be happy to call home on Sotheby’s International Realty website. Situated in the scenic Adirondack Mountains of New York, this silo and air park were operational for a short time in 1961. Hundreds of these Atlas F missile silos were built across the U.S. in the 1960’s in anticipation of attacks on the country.

As if the promise of moving into your very own missile silo isn’t tempting enough, Sotheby’s has recently dropped the price from $4.6 million USD to a mere $750,000. Not a bad deal if you’re looking to save money on your lair so you can splurge on that death ray you’ve always wanted.

In addition to the house perched atop the missile, you may also be interested in the adjoining air craft hanger, seven buildings spread out over neighbouring acres of land and an additional log cabin with runway access. To get the whole package, it’ll cost you $1.76 million USD.

The article also linked to this related video:

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September 30, 2011

Coming soon: the “sober-up” pill

Filed under: Health, Science — Tags: Booze, Interesting — Nicholas @ 09:09

Scientists at the University of Illinois may have cracked the secret to sobering up after a night on the town:

It’s your mutinous immune system that gives you that sozzled feeling after a boozy session, scientists claim in a paper published today in the British Journal of Pharmacology.

Conk out certain immuno receptors in your brain and you’ll be able to walk in a straight line, perform complex manual tasks and probably even stay awake on the night bus home after a heavy dose of alcoholic refreshment.

These receptors are a particular part of your immune system and scientists have been trying to figure out their connection to alcohol for years. When active TLR4s react with alcohol they release an inflammatory chemical called cytokine that seems to contribute to making us sleepy and poorly-coordinated.

It was a research team at the Department of Psychiatry, University of Illinois, that made the breakthrough. Their pill works for mice, at least.

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September 22, 2011

BT is worth negative £30bn

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Technology — Tags: Corporations, Interesting, Salvage — Nicholas @ 12:11

The British telecoms firm is actually worth much less than the scrap value of its copper wire network:

British Telecom is, as a telecoms company, worth minus £30bn. Yes, that’s a negative number there. And yet it is literally sitting on top of billions in assets.

[. . .]

Ten pairs of copper cabling weighs around 132kg per mile. Which by the miracle of multiplication can be seen to be about 10 million tonnes of copper. Which, at current LME prices of just over £5,000 a tonne, is £50bn.

BT’s current market capitalisation is just north of £20bn. So, as an operating telecoms company they’re worth £30bn less than the mountain of copper they’re sitting upon: that is, they’re worth less than the physical assets or they have, as a telecoms company not a mountain of scrap copper, a negative value.

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August 27, 2011

More photos from Japan’s abandoned “Battleship Island”

Filed under: Asia, History, Japan — Tags: Interesting, Photography — Nicholas @ 12:42

I blogged about this last year, including a few photos of the island’s skyline. This post at How to be a Retronaut includes lots of interior photos:

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August 1, 2011

Vocabulary test

Filed under: Randomness — Tags: Interesting, Language — Nicholas @ 12:22

Another one of those “test yourself” websites: Test Your Vocabulary. I did fine on most of the test, but a few of the words in the right column are ones I’ve never encountered:

H/T to James M. Bryant for the link.

Update: On the same list, John Lennard points out this possibly cautionary note: “It is interesting, but without knowing how they’re performing their calculations I’m kinda suspicious. [. . .] Shakespeare’s total recorded active vocabulary (all words used in all his printed works) is 29,066.”

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July 26, 2011

Oh, Amazon, you temptress

Filed under: Books, Media — Tags: Amazon, Interesting, LNeilSmith, SF — Nicholas @ 17:19

I just noticed that the latest L. Neil Smith novel is available, so I clicked the Amazon.com link to find out more about it. While vampire stuff is pretty far out of my normal fiction reading tastes, this one sounds interesting enough to add it to my list: Sweeter Than Wine. The review by Rex F. May captures my normal disdain for the genre rather well:

I don’t like vampire novels. I don’t even like vampire stories. Never did. They lack verisimilitude if vampires have to bite people frequently, and the people they bite turn into vampires, why aren’t we all vampires by now? And what’s the deal with sunlight? And the garlic and the wooden stake? That all sounds like superstition. So to me, vampires belong in the realm of fantasy, not in science fiction at all, and, for the most part, I don’t enjoy fantasy very much. Now, there are some exceptions I like Terry Pratchett’s Discworld vampires, because the story is humorous, like all his stuff. But most vampire stories are dead serious, with all kinds of gothic, fifteen-year-old-girl orientation Twilight is nothing new, just a continuation of the old pattern. Same old same old rape fantasies porn for teeny-boppers.

Since it makes little sense to order a single book from Amazon, due to shipping costs, I clicked the Recommendations list to see what else is new, interesting, or Amazon’s algorithms consider might be appealing to me. Of the fifteen offerings on the first page, twelve of them are by Steven Brust. As I recently started reading his Vlad Taltos series, that kinda makes sense, but 12/15ths?

Page two of the recommendations were also heavily weighted to match a recent purchase, but this time the recommendations included The Iliad, The Odessey, Plato’s Republic, and works by Saint Augustine, Aristophanes, Euripides, Aeschylus, and Epictetus. The seed book for that seems to have been Peloponnesian War by Thucidides.

Page three appears to be an attempt to patch between the first two pages — Xenophon and several SF books by David Weber, John Ringo, George R.R. Martin, David Drake, and Tom Kratman.

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July 18, 2011

Logic puzzle

Filed under: Randomness — Tags: Interesting — Nicholas @ 12:16

Tim Harford has been retweeting this little puzzle as part of a discussion with @paullewismoney:

Reminds me of an old riddle, Paul. Which weighs more, a pound of gold or a pound of feathers? You will know the answer…

Thanks all tweets re: @paullewismoney and whether a pound of gold weighs more than a pound of feathers. Most of you are wrong…

…but @adam_j666 @andrew_F_smith and @cleverwithmoney have it right. Congrats. And I’m sure @paullewismoney had it right.

(more…)

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June 23, 2011

This is amusing

Filed under: Cancon, Soccer — Tags: Interesting — Nicholas @ 11:21

There’s only one team in the world I favour over England, and they just saved themselves from elimination with this effort:

H/T to David Akin for the link.

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June 5, 2011

India as seen by “a cool Bangalorean”

Filed under: Humour, India — Tags: Criticism, Interesting — Nicholas @ 11:32

India as seen by a cool Bangalorean

H/T to Gerard Vanderleun who posted it on his Tumblr site.

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May 27, 2011

Happy 190th anniversary to the good old Grauniad

Filed under: Britain, History, Media — Tags: Interesting, Newspapers — Nicholas @ 12:08

It’s the 190th anniversary, so the folks at The Guardian have virtually turned the calendar back:

More information about the “experiment in the typesetting of the mechanical facsimile we operate at guardian.co.uk” here.

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May 14, 2011

QotD: The Liberal Party as Canada’s “Skull-and-Bones Society”

Filed under: Cancon, Politics, Quotations — Tags: ConspiracyTheories, Criticism, Interesting, Leadership, LiberalParty, Toronto — Nicholas @ 00:19

John Manley strikes me as a shining example of one of the great tragedies of the Liberal Party of Canada: a fine public servant blessed with good sense, but subsumed by the weird rituals of that odd cult. Over the years I’ve been shocked at how many really smart, well-meaning ex-Liberals I’ve met who left the party, and public service, because their skills and talent go thrown under the bus at some point by those hidden party puppet-masters we hear so much about, but so rarely show themselves (I assume they’re in some underground fortress in Rosedale) because it was what the party required.

Not being a Central Canadian lawyer, I don’t think I can ever understand the sort of strange grip the Liberal party in its prime once seemed to have on people, but it certainly appeared like it was, for a very long time, some kind of skull-and-bones society, promising Canada’s ambitious, young, bright men and women a route to power, but requiring their allegiance till death. I consider sharp, well-meaning guys like Manley, or former Indian Affairs minister Bob Nault, victims of a game they were obliged to play in order to achieve what they wanted. Until the Liberal party’s recent conversion into a yawning, smoldering crater, if you wanted to make an impact in Canada, especially through government, you’d be best to sell your soul to the Trudeausmen — which, ironically, often meant submitting principle, and logic, to the greater good of the party. I can see why Manley had to go along with the ritual, and retain his silence about the peculiar and problematic universe of mini-lobby groups that had grown like weeds within the party itself. Perhaps, like a befuddled Moonie, he couldn’t even see the problems until he broke free of the party’s hold. But then again, it’s also hard to sound credible complaining about structural problems in your party when it keeps winning election after election after election.

Kevin Libin, “Where was John Manley when the Liberals needed him?”, National Post, 2011-05-13

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May 6, 2011

“Reasoning is a non-violent weapon given to us by evolution to help us get our way”

Filed under: Science — Tags: ConfirmationBias, ConspiracyTheories, Interesting, Psychology — Nicholas @ 09:59

Remember that old saw about it being impossible to reason someone out of an opinion they were never reasoned into? Ian Leslie looks at a new paper about the function of reasoning:

This is a widespread habit, of course, and one we might notice in ourselves in other contexts. Whether it’s relationships or politics or the workplace, we have a tendency to start off with we want and then reason backwards towards it; to cloak our true motivations or prejudices in the guise of reason. It’s been shown again and again in studies that we have a very strong ‘confirmation bias’; once we have an idea about the world we like (Obama is un-American, my girlfriend is cheating on me, the world is or isn’t getting warmer) we pick up on evidence we think supports our hypothesis and ruthlessly disregard evidence that undermines it, even without realising we’re doing so.

[. . .]

We tend to think of reason as an abstract, truth-seeking method that gets contaminated by our desires and motivations. But the paper argues it’s the other way around — that reasoning is a non-violent weapon given to us by evolution to help us get our way. Its capacity to help us get to the truth about things is a by-product, albeit a hugely important one. In many ways, reasoning does as much to screw us up as it does to help us. The paper’s authors, Dan Sperber and Hugo Mercier, put it like this:

The evidence reviewed here shows not only that reasoning falls quite short of reliably delivering rational beliefs and rational decisions. It may even be, in a variety of cases, detrimental to rationality. Reasoning can lead to poor outcomes, not because humans are bad at it, but because they systematically strive for arguments that justify their beliefs or their actions. This explains the confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, and reason-based choice, among other things.

H/T to Tim Harford for the link.

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April 28, 2011

Want a secure home? Even want it zombie-proof? Here you go

Filed under: Randomness — Tags: Housing, Interesting, Security, Zombies — Nicholas @ 12:12

The first house to be certified as Zombie-proof:

“The most essential item for our clients was acquiring the feeling of maximum security,” begins the designers’ website in the summary of the structure. Who wouldn’t feel safe in a concrete rectangle that folds in upon itself to become completely sealed? Even the windows are covered with a slab of concrete when the structure is on nap time.

The house, with its movable walls, has only one entrance, which is located on the second floor after crossing a drawbridge. Seems like the perfect opportunity to use a flamethrower and defend the life of your family, while stylishly nesting in a piece of architectural elitism.

Lots of pictures at the original post. Here’s your drawbridge: