The world’s least efficient machine:
More information about this modern day wonder here.
April 28, 2011
April 23, 2011
A neat way to address software piracy
I still find it hard to believe that Cracked, of all the media entities from the pre-internet era, is worth visiting (and linking to). However, this is good stuff:
The [Arkham Asylum] developers included a little bit of extra code to detect when the game has been pirated, a common tactic used to track a company’s losses or simply mess with cheap people. The game is mostly unchanged when hacked, with one seemingly minor exception: Batman’s glider cape is hilariously unusable and has the aerodynamics of a piece of cardboard riddled with bullet holes.
It’s not that the cape is faulty, apparently; it’s simply that your version of Batman doesn’t know how to use it. Instead of gliding from one surface to another, Batman simply opens his wings over and over like a total ass-clown, causing him to lose altitude and fall down. It’s like you’re being forced to play with the pudgy Batman copycat from the beginning of The Dark Knight.
All the other gadgets still work, so you can always fight your way across the level on foot, right? Well, yeah, except that without the glider cape you’ll be completely stranded in a certain room — you know, the one filled with poisonous gas. That’s right, in the pirated version of Arkham Asylum, the always-prepared Dark Knight is such an useless idiot that he gets himself killed due to his shitty cape.
This trick gets misconstrued a lot as a simple game glitch, so you have people like this guy asking what’s wrong with his game at the official Eidos message board … only for the forum administrator to explain the situation and tell him: “It’s not a bug in the game’s code, it’s a bug in your moral code [punk].“
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April 7, 2011
Health clubs’ real goal is “helping us to lose weight around the middle of our wallets”
I’ve never really been able to get into the idea of joining a health club — the few times I’ve tried, the interest hasn’t gone beyond the “free trial” period. I find exercise for the sake of exercise to be not just boring but actively repellant. What little exercise I get, outside the minimal physical efforts required of a modern technical writer are on the badminton court once or twice a week, or doing SCA rapier fencing. Those are both interesting enough to keep me coming back (in spite of my admitted lack of expertise in either).
I’m not alone in this, as Daniel Duane helps to illustrate:
Not that I haven’t wasted time at the gym like everybody else, sweating dutifully three times a week, “working my core,” throwing in the odd after-work jog. A few years ago, newly neck-deep in what Anthony Quinn describes in Zorba the Greek as “Wife, children, house…the full catastrophe,” I signed a 10-page membership contract at a corporate-franchise gym, hired my first personal trainer, and became yet another sucker for all the half-baked, largely spurious non-advice cobbled together from doctors, newspapers, magazines, infomercials, websites, government health agencies, and, especially, from the organs of our wonderful $19 billion fitness industry, whose real knack lies in helping us to lose weight around the middle of our wallets. Not that all of these people are lying, but here’s what I’ve learned: Their goals are only marginally related to real fitness — goals like reducing the statistical incidence of heart disease across the entire American population, or keeping you moving through the gym so you won’t crowd the gear, or limiting the likelihood that you’ll get hurt and sue.
We’re not innocent. Too many of us drift into health clubs with only the vaguest of notions about why we’re actually there — notions like maybe losing a little weight, somehow looking like the young Brad Pitt in Fight Club, or just heeding a doctor’s orders. Vague goals beget vague methods; the unfocused mind is the vulnerable mind, deeply susceptible to bullshit. So we sign our sorry names on the elliptical-machine waiting list — starting with a little “cardio,” like somebody said you’re supposed to — and then spend our allotted 30 minutes in front of a TV mounted a regulation seven to 10 feet away, because lawyers have told gym owners that seven to 10 feet minimizes the likelihood that we’ll crane our necks, lose our balance, and face-plant on the apparatus. After that, if we’ve got any remaining willpower, we lie flat on the floor, contract a few stomach muscles with tragic optimism, and then we “work each body part” before hitting the shower.
Even in my minimal-exercise routine, I’ve often been told to start with some stretches. Uh, no, apparently I shouldn’t do that:
How many times have you been told to start with a little stretching? Yet multiple studies of pre-workout stretching demonstrate that it actually raises your likelihood of injury and lowers your subsequent performance. Turns out muscles that aren’t warmed up don’t really stretch anyway, and tugging on them just firms up their resistance to a wider range of motion. In fact, limbering up even has a slackening effect on your muscles, reducing their stability and the amount of power and strength they’ll generate.
On the economic incentives of health club owners:
Commercial health clubs need about 10 times as many members as their facilities can handle, so designing them for athletes, or even aspiring athletes, makes no sense. Fitness fanatics work out too much, making every potential new member think, Nah, this place looks too crowded for me. The winning marketing strategy, according to Recreation Management Magazine, a health club–industry trade rag, focuses strictly on luring in the “out-of-shape public,” meaning all of those people whose doctors have told them, “About 20 minutes three times a week,” who won’t come often if ever, and who definitely won’t join unless everything looks easy, available, and safe. The entire gym, from soup to nuts, has been designed around getting suckers to sign up, and then getting them mildly, vaguely exercised every once in a long while, and then getting them out the door.
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February 25, 2011
Friday fun link: BoxCar2D
Watch the Darwinian struggle of car evolution: http://www.boxcar2d.com/.
The program learns to build a car using a genetic algorithm. It starts with a population of 20 randomly generated shapes with wheels and runs each one to see how far it goes. The cars that go the furthest reproduce to produce offspring for the next generation. The offspring combine the traits of the parents to hopefully produce better cars. Now with the button at the bottom left u can choose to input cars and different terrains. This lets people post their results and even design a car by hand.
It uses a physics library called box2D to simulate the effects of gravity, friction, collisions, motor torque, and spring tension for the car. This lets the car be a wide range of shapes and sizes, while still making the simulation realistic. This is based on the AS3 box2D flash port of the library. Watch the demo of some of its capabilities.
My inspiration for this project comes from qubit.devisland.net/ga. My implementation uses the physics library to make the car a real object instead of two point masses. There are also many extra variables because of the complicated car and axles and the color cleary illustrates the evolution.
H/T to DarkWaterMuse for the link.
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February 14, 2011
Ingenious ways to re-use your Altoids tin
By way of Gerard Vanderleun’s Tumblr blog, a collection of neat ways to get further use out of your used Altoids tins:
Altoids have been freshening bad breath since the turn of the 19th century. But while they are touted as “Curiously Strong Mints,” perhaps the real curiosity is not the allure of the mints themselves, but the popularity of turning the tin in which they’re packaged into all sorts of truly handy, and just plain fun, creations.
The draw of the transformed Altoids tin, like the draw one feels towards, say, a secret book safe, is hard to put your finger on. Part of it is the satisfying challenge of fitting as much as possible into a small space. Part of it is the delight of being able to carry something cool in your pocket. Of course much of the appeal can be found in the enjoyment of tinkering and working on a diy project. There is also the satisfaction that comes from reusing an ordinary object for something else entirely. Grandpa’s old motto of “use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without” still resonates.
Any way you slice it, beholding the creative uses for an Altoids tin simply brings a smile to your face. So we searched high and low and put together this list of 22 manly ways to reuse an Altoids tin. You can make some of these things for yourself, or use the list for cheap and unique gift ideas.
A mini electronics lab
A self-storing router plane (blogged in 2009 here)
Altoids wilderness survival kit (from Field and Stream magazine)
January 6, 2011
Even Time Lords could get confused by this matchup
I can’t improve on The Register‘s take:
Doctor Who the 10th, David Tennant, is planning to get hitched to his fictional daughter Georgia Moffett, who also happens to be the real daughter of his fictional fifth incarnation.
Moffet is the real-life fruit of former Time Lord Peter Davison’s loins, and played Who offspring Jenny in 2008’s The Doctor’s Daughter. Davison and his future son-in-law Tennant appeared together in 2007’s Children in Need Doctor Who special Time Crash, well after Ms Moffet really existed, but before she was spawned as her soon-to-be husband’s television child.
Paradoxically, this means that Davison and Tennant came together as both individuals and the same person, while one was the father of the future daughter of the other.
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December 29, 2010
October 1, 2010
Freakonomics trailer
Since reading the book(s), I often find myself in discussions using the term “incentives” (especially in the sense of perverse incentives: those which produce the opposite of the desired effect). I think there’s much value in this approach to problem solving, and I’m looking forward to seeing the movie.
Update: I guess I’ve gotten out of the habit of seeing movies at all. Freakonomics is in the theatres now, but I seem to have uninstalled the movie theatre information app on my iPhone . . . it figures: it doesn’t appear to be playing anywhere near here.
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January 29, 2010
Even more evidence to support Agent Smith
Remember the point in The Matrix where Agent Smith explains that he’s decided that humans are actually viruses (“Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You’re a plague and we are the cure“). Here’s even more to support his point of view:
When, in 2001, the human genome was sequenced for the first time, we were confronted by several surprises. One was the sheer lack of genes: where we had anticipated perhaps 100,000 there were actually as few as 20,000. A bigger surprise came from analysis of the genetic sequences, which revealed that these genes made up a mere 1.5 per cent of the genome. This is dwarfed by DNA deriving from viruses, which amounts to roughly 9 per cent.
On top of that, huge chunks of the genome are made up of mysterious virus-like entities called retrotransposons, pieces of selfish DNA that appear to serve no function other than to make copies of themselves. These account for no less than 34 per cent of our genome.
All in all, the virus-like components of the human genome amount to almost half of our DNA. This would once have been dismissed as mere “junk DNA”, but we now know that some of it plays a critical role in our biology. As to the origins and function of the rest, we simply do not know.
January 8, 2010
Agent Smith was right after all
Remember that little scene in The Matrix where Agent Smith is sharing some of his philosophy with a captured Morpheus?
I’d like to share a revelation that I’ve had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you’re not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You’re a plague and we are the cure.
Well, he was close: we’re apparently part-virus:
People may not be quite the humans they think they are. Or so suggests new research showing that the human genome is part bornavirus.
Bornaviruses, a type of RNA virus that causes disease in horses and sheep, can insert their genetic material into human DNA and first did so at least 40 million years ago, the study shows. The findings, published January 7 in Nature, provide the first evidence that RNA viruses other than retroviruses (such as HIV) can stably integrate genes into host DNA. The new work may help reveal more about the evolution of RNA viruses as well as their mammalian hosts.
“Our whole notion of ourselves as a species is slightly misconceived,” says Robert Gifford, a paleovirologist at the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center, affiliated with Rockefeller University in New York City. Human DNA includes genetic contributions from bacteria and other organisms, and humans have even come to rely on some of these genes for basic functions like fighting infections.
In the new study, Japanese researchers found copies of the bornavirus N (for nucleoprotein) gene inserted in at least four separate locations in the human genome. Searches of other mammalian genomes also showed that the gene has hitched rides in a wide variety of species for millions of years.
October 31, 2009
Twitter evolution
When I first heard of Twitter, I didn’t get it. The benefits were not clear, and the drawbacks — following everyone else’s dinner menus, lunch dates, appointments, and daily routine — seemed like a minor purgatory for me.
At the last company I was working for as a full-time employee, it was mandated that managers join Twitter and (at a minimum) follow the other managers/team leads. After a few weeks, I branched out from the mandate and started following other, non-work related, Twitterers. It’s been a great source of potential blogging material, providing me with useful and interesting links. 140 characters doesn’t seem so limiting, now that I’ve discovered how useful even that short a string can be.
What Wired characterizes as “mob rule” is actually a very useful service. I now wonder how I managed to find blogworthy material without it.
Last August, the people who putatively run Twitter — the small crew that three years ago launched the world’s fastest-growing communications medium — announced a relatively minor change in the way the site functions. The tweak would have a small effect on retweeting, the convention by which Twitter users repost someone else’s informative or amusing message to their own Twitter followers. Retweets start with RT, for “retweet,” and usually cite the first author by user ID. And, importantly, retweeters often add a word or two of commentary about the repeated content.
But there was a problem: Twitter itself didn’t invent retweeting; it was created by Twitter users. In a blog post explaining the changes to retweets, the company’s second-in-command, Biz Stone, called them “a great example of Twitter teaching us what it wants to be.” The good news, he said, was that Twitter was building retweets right into the site’s architecture. The bad news was that Project Retweet didn’t make any provision for the commentary that users might like to add.
It didn’t take long for Twitter users to respond: How dare Twitter mess with . . . Twitter. A self-described “social, search, and viral marketing scientist” named Dan Zarrella posted a passionate cri de coeur, writing that Twitter was about to “completely eviscerate most of the value out of retweets.” That night, Zarrella created a Twitter hashtag — another grassroots Twitter convention, which lets users group their conversations — called #saveretweets. A few tweeters liked the plan, but the general consensus was summed up by one user skilled in Twitter’s uncompromising brevity: “Very bad plan we hates it.”
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October 28, 2009
Updated “powers of ten” visual aid
Use the slider at the bottom to dive down, down, down.
H/T to Felicia Day for the link.
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