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Sunday, December 31, 2006
Developing Games in Google Earth
 After Julian Bleecker showed a Battleship prototype in Google Earth, I had been speculating on game ideas that would be compelling and technically feasible in Google Earth. At Intel, they were thinking the same thing, for they made Mars Sucks. Read how they did it. /entertainment - permalink - comments Article on the intersection of happiness and economics, which points out that happiness correlates to relative social standing within a community rather than to absolute wealth. Read the article. /politics - permalink - comments
You'll smell it when you believe it The perception of an odor does not always match the odor. The context under which the odor is presented influences the scent. This suggests that the perception of a scent is mediated, which supports a philosophical position that human conscious experience is mediated from the physical environment. Read the article. Scientists may be taking small steps toward supplying experimental data that confirms mystical beliefs. By recognizing that human conscious experience is mediated, one may also recognize that optimal use of human consciousness should not only account for the physical environment of the human, but also on the mental architecture and idioms of the human mind. While believing in the physical existence of fairy creatures is superstitious, believing in the mental existence of subconscious intelligent processes that might be interfaced in a manner suggestive of fairy creatures to the naive subject may be another tool for intelligent operation of the brain, by the brain. /science - permalink - comments
Reading tough grammar exercises the brain In an article by David Rose, unconventional alterations to grammar excite the brain. Read the article. I wonder how this brain activity compares to say playing a game of go, in which future moves are predicted and analyzed, or playing a first-person shooter and anticipating sudden events. /science - permalink - comments
Bigger is not necessarily better Healy and Rowe's article on comparative brain sizes of different species undermines the general correlation of brain size to intelligence and also points out the insufficient metric for intelligence between different species, including the conventional notion of complex behavior. Indeed, how can intelligence be compared between different species with different evolutionary strategies, among which intelligence is only a component of some strategies? Read the article. /science - permalink - comments
What's good for the body is good for the brain Christen Brownlee's article at Science News provides evidence that voluntary cardiovascular exercise improves the health of the nervous system, including within the brain. Read part one. Part two of this article discusses how eating cucumin (found in tumeric) and omega-fatty acids (found in fish and a few plants) also improves the health of the brain, providing similar benefits as exercise. By contrast a high fat, high sugar diet, and high calorie diet enables damage to the brain. Additionally, calorie restriction was also claimed to lengthen the healthy life of the brain as well as the body. I've heard that calorie restriction lengthens the life of experimental rats plenty of times before, but what was especially interesting in this article was an explanation of why the brain is healthier for longer when fed less than desired. Light stress of slight hunger stimulates the brain into greater activity. Perhaps the brain is considering alternate strategies (or architectural methods) to find sufficient food. Read part two. In some yoga and magick regimens, ejaculation-restriction is advocated to improve the spiritual health and creativity, which I believe ought to correlate to neural health and intelligence. Perhaps, like the light stress of mild hunger stimulating healthy brain activity, the light stress of mild carnal desire stimulates neural activation, learning, growth, and eploration. /science - permalink - comments Saturday, December 30, 2006
Virtual Memory: Blurring Interface and Object An interactive object in a virtual environment produces a more vivid memory, which contributes to greater recall about the object, but it also confuses the elements of the interface and illusory features that were not part of the object. Perhaps the user was recalling the interface of the virtual environment and misapplied this memory to the object being manipulated. Read a bit more in the article by Nancy Gardner. /entertainment - permalink - comments
Self-deception in personal and public affairs In a discussion between Robert Trivers and Noam Chomsky, self-deception at the personal level and goverment level is compared with a similar model of selective information. The discussion touches a lot of interesting bases, if not going into any deeply. Read the article. /politics - permalink - comments Saturday, December 09, 2006I happened to be reading about a program that would reinvigorate interest in computer science, as according to studies, it is in decline! If you've been around engineering academia for the last couple of years then you've probably heard of the woeful drop in computer science majors, such as the study at UCLA. Below is an image from the report.
 The total incoming freshmen in computer science drops dramatically during the years 1984 and 2001 (ominously enumerated years if ever there were). The usual, kneejerk reaction is to bemoan the loss of popularity. But reinterpret the same data as a correlation to the two of the greatest electronic media gluts: the videogame glut of 1983 and the Dot-Com bubble-burst of 2001. Look again at the graph above, but not at the troughs, instead at the peaks. It is the peaks which are the anomolies. They are abnormally high and are much less stable than their surrounding gradual climbing troughs. And their ramp coincides with the public perception's craze of their age: Videogames became pop culture starting with Space Invaders and Galaxian at the end of the 70s and Pac-Man in 1981. That is where the influx of freshmen computer scientists begins to surge. And 1994 saw the birth of the world wide web, which is when the second rise begins. By this hypothesis, these dramatic dropoffs are nothing other than sanity checks, returns to the reality in which physical space still exists, and everything virtual must still produce a tangible benefit. /science - permalink - comments
Make them frustrated, make them sad, but never angry Mahewswaran and Chen analyzed that a consumer saddened by a nation's actions does not affect purchasing, whereas a consumer angered by a nation's actions does correlate to sanctions against products associated with that nation. Read a little bit more. /politics - permalink - comments A poem, by Ethan Kennerly. Lichen laden rock o'erlooking frothin' sea. Wind ascending scrubs the knoll. Waves betoll, a serpent singing under foot in silent key. Summer simmers down the nappin' noon time day. Yonder emerald firs gather shadows, shiv'rin' spring's tune, buryin' shade for winter's play. Ere down there a ville is kissin' a merried sea. Whisked and frothin' salt, salt whippin' wind, whippin' stone away from saline whitened bay. With crow-like cawing, winding to a huntin' height, a boy's pretended wing ensnares the whippin' wind. Below vermin vault from his faux hawkish sight. Green-eyed boy with hair of gold, ascends the slab of rock o'erlooking the wroth, sea-beaten bay, near the serpent hole on the weed-wanton hill. He spies a tangle gray, once green, now bleached away. The perchin' boy laughs atop the lichen laden rock, "Ashen tangle, did you have your vibrant day?" In the wind the rock sits, while the boy trails away. "Boy," the rock says, "She was not always this way. That shrubb'ry gray was once an emerald queen." The boy, fell-laughin', raps the hollow house of prey. Out flits the double dagger. The stab, the stagger-- the serpent slinks away a-hissin', "Sap the green!" While the listless child staggers and lays upon the slab of tranquil slate, his green-eyes fade to gray, near the faint hole dotting the weed wanton hill. "Harken now!" the voice of stone uprising, unlike the hissin' stabber, it says, "Listen and lay. On my wise slab, lies relief from a poisoned will. In my day, I traveled round the hill, the wood, and high upon the mountain as you can see today." The nodding boy, respitten, forgot his bitten wound. "Time since, journeys landed me upon the hill you find me at today. The sun bespoke in gold, promising begird ascent among the mounts of old. But an emerald swaying in the wind haloed my hardened heart, so I stay a stone and listen to hear her windy song along the summer blow. My hardened face of gray, collected green, her gift of tears. I sat, witnessing her final years. One by one the green'ry faded away. The weeds surrounded her, crowded her, sapped her gray. She, husk of tendrils, I still see, through lichen lidded eyes, an emerald green as cedars in the vale." After nappin' hours the sun ignites the sea. Green-eyed dreamward fallen boy relaxes on the soothin' stone. The rock abrades the napping son, "Dinner time's come, and mother wants you home to stay. Get up! Get home to mother, sister, and kin." Backtracking to the ville o'erlooking the frothin' bay, he glimpses at the green and gray, again to listen. It says, "There're later days for tellin' tales, and I've my comp'ny through the silent night and day." /entertainment - permalink - comments Wednesday, December 06, 2006
Mystery, Mood, and Outsmarting Opponents Knobloch-Westerwick and Keplinger studied the appeal of mystery stories and their correlation to the reader's self-esteem. They concluded that a person having a dejected day prefer predictable stories, which enabled the reader to guess the ending well before it was officially revealed. Whereas, readers feeling good about themselves preferred a surprise ending. Their interpretation is that when you're blue and feeling dumb, a predictable story in which you believe you are outsmarting the plot boosts something related to self-esteem. To learn more, read the article. In the realm of interactive entertainment, imagine some speculative implications. If the psychological principle of self-flattery holds true during periods of dejection and abasement, one could expect a correlation between abasement and less cognitively challenging activities, such as solitaire, modestly paced platformers, such as Ratchet and Clank, or a casual game, such as Diner Dash, or Wii Bowling. Whereas, on days when a player is feeling important and loved, the player might prefer a challenge, such as Vagrant Story, Puerto Rico, or Go. Of course, individual skillset, tastes in genres, aesthetics, and subject matter dominate the players' preference for any particular game. If a player associates bowling with stuffy rooms, bad shoes, sprained elbows, and poor beer, then bowling might not be a pick-me-up. Yet one would expect general preference for challenge, allowance for defeat, and an acceptance of unexpected outcomes when the player is feeling important. This has further implications for interactive entertainment, because the interactions of the game can have an influence on one's own self-esteem. Winning a significant game, especially against another human player, often elevates the player's self-esteem. Within the span of an extended game, such as multi-hour console videogames, the player has the opportunity to elevate or depress self-esteem. Once the player's self-esteem (or at least temporary mood and subconscious self-appraisal) is elevated, we might expect the player to prefer plot twists, and increases in challenge. This is an unsurprising speculation, given Csikszentmihalyi's psychological principle of flow. As relates to the above, flow includes a balance of challenge and ability. The contrapositive, that when the player is feeling low from poor performance in the game, the game might not only ease difficulty, but do so in a manner that is predictable. Rather than rebalancing the statistical model to increase the odds of success (such as health-dependent potions dropped in The Two Towers), simplify the strategy and tactics of the opponent. Therefore, the player can congratulate him or herself on having outwitted the opponent. /entertainment - permalink - comments Saturday, December 02, 2006
Addiction Defined, Neurochemically Christian Luscher and Mark A. Ungless define the onset of addiction as a release of mesocorticolimbic dopamine. They believe that many, if not all, addictive drugs conform to this neurochemical mechanism. Care to read more about it? Until videogames can be held to such a rigorous neurochemical mechanism, I will have none of the shennigans that videogames are addictive. As Theravedan Buddhists have known for millennia, unhealthy attachments to worldly things leads to suffering. Anything can be used unhealthily, and its user can be compelled to continue use despite the detriments to health. In fact, the politicians so feverous to claim videogames are addictive are more than likely suffering from a form of addiction themselves, addiction to power. /science - permalink - comments Tuesday, November 28, 2006
Coordinating Scandals /politics - permalink - comments Burning ManDavid Kennerly 
Above, the gemmed azure is The naked splendour of Nuit; She bends in ecstacy to kiss The secret ardours of Hadit. Liber Al vel Legis, Ch. I. v. 14. PrologueGray clouds hung in frayed hairs, fine enough to make out the strands. It was a marvelous veil of rain in the still, clear distance. Phantom electricity scratched the sky. HandSatyrday night the Man stood some hundred feet away in the center of the circle, illuminated orange in anticipation. He stood so still, a man knowing He is about to die. He grew fidgety. His arms slowly moved away or toward his torso, catching the encircling cloud of humanity He was about to inhale. * We sat under the Army radar/air-surveillance camouflage canopy, erected by a pole, topped by a Grateful Dead Jolly Rogers flag, and the Greek letters of the Stanford co-op, XOX (Chi-Theta-Chi). It was a lull, the afternoon. The miles-wide, 20,000 people deep party (formally known as Black Rock City) recharged its batteries in the sun. Bored. * Luminous, monochrome flame-orange men hefted a small cauldron of molten yellow. They carried it to the wood frame of the lying-down obtuse angles of a minimalist icon of the Man. He was some three men-long, lying down. A band of shadow-orange onlookers sat and stood behind a thin orange band. I removed the orange-tinted ski goggles, handed them back to Mike, and thanked him for the monochrome view. Sparks had flown from the ass of the huge, tall chimney in which iron ore churned. The sparks danced off the Mylar man that bled the orange-hot metal. We had gathered in anticipation, waiting the chill wind of the dark, dry playa by this outpost of heat. Finally they tipped the molten java mug into His hand. It filled less than a twentieth of the Man. This would be a ceremony deep into the night. We filled in Him in our imagination and left to finish our Thirstday night in dance, trance, and so on. * Without warning His fifteen-foot right arm erupted. Sparks, flames, white fairies leapt over his lattical biceps. Surprised shadow dancers below looked up and hurried themselves to catch up to his imminent ejaculation. Torso The white-hot leapt from His right arm to His chest. He breathed a lungful of flame and expired dazzle into the night. There was no stopping Him now. * Gray beige dust waves swept behind each wheel of the RV ahead as I drove into Black Rock City on Thirstday afternoon. Flecks of dry, dry playa skin; that's the skin of the Man. Signs marked the edge of the long, long driveway: "To do something completely" ¡¦ "And leave no trace behind." * Fryday morning I joined the cracked, cracked, cracked pale playa to bake in the sun. I performed the Diamond Sapphire, radiating light to all sentient beings. The Man smiled. Walking back, the gray dust blanket snuck in so thick I couldn't see ten feet in front of me; just the cracked skin of the playa below my own two feet. * Thirstday night, a gently yellowed Buddha sat in a meditative posture on the night playa. Silhouettes of humans blocked only the base of the thrice-human height, yellow wood Buddha. Walking closer, it broken into blocks. Its blocks broke into spines of encyclopedia, classics, and other old volumes. The Buddha was made of books, and was turning its finger over a huge tome that was a collage of volumes. A scraggly old man hunched in front of the book; "I spent a week designing this." "Looks like work," a clean blonde Spectator on a bike said. "I thought this was vacation." "Nah," the scraggly beard said in a bad-toothed, white trash grin with a slight slur. "For vacation I'm going down to Monterey." He continued on about how he dumpster dove for the Reading Buddha. * The man with the squeaky rat but no voice whispered into my ear, "I lost my voice." I nodded. "I built this," he continued. "I wired this and built it." I was impressed. The forty-foot iron hemisphere of the Thunderdome held great ropes, speakers, and our singular attention. It focused our eyes at the center. Two women collided and brutally swung at each other with thick, padded swords. The music repeated the name in neon, "¡¦ Thunderdome¡¦" The arena master held a death's head staff, wore black wings, black flowing things, and skated the dry playa on all-terrain wheels of roller skates. The priest of death's voice boomed in modulation between the heart-racing techno music. I clung to the dome and watched him as much as the combatants. He swung his staff to level toward the winner. The estranged engineer combed his remaining hair with a fork. The MC frowned and looked at his list. 'Cisco, as the MC had shortened his name to, asked, "Hey," and held out two Samuel Adams. "That's better," the MC said. 'Cisco had insulted him with a bribe of two Coronas, then a scarf, and drunk-hick threat before. "You better party with me," said 'Cisco to me through his beery eyes. He had expedited the fight. I didn't like 'Cisco. I had no plans of playing with him further than our fight. I waited out the end of the night. "This is the last fight. Make it good," the MC shouted above the crowd and techno. Smack. That contact's not going to stay in. 'Cisco swung like it was baseball season. No art, no style. He won. * In the dead of Satyrday night in a recessed white screen, someone killed Kenny. Kenny floated up toward radiant, breast-bared women on white clouds. ACCESS DENIED Kenny fell into flaming, White Zombie, hell. * After Thunderdome, I sought the faint horizon of lights. There, a blue one, the tower Richard had noted earlier. I shuffled back the mile-long trek, from 8:30 Street and Head Space to 4:30 Street and Avenue of the Heart: home of XOX, water, tent, and olive drab sleeping bag. I had swung, jumped, whirled, and fought vibrantly, unconscious of my physical limits. Every step in half a blur, shallow breath, and slight sting of scraped skin reminded me. Zombies move with more vitality. I drug myself home. * Flaming "instant replay" of Burning Man covered the screen late Satyrday night. Burning, on the flat screen, looks like an execution, not a ritual. Legs The wild, brilliant fire spread from His torso to His legs. Explosions, eruptions, "a shitload of pyrotechnics," the chunky Black Rock Ranger had said. * "Invoke me under my stars!" I had recited Fryday in the Diamond Sapphire chant of Liber Al vel Legis. * I hadn't wanted to sit. I had sought out the drumming for the purpose of dance. I danced at the edge of the human cloud encircling the Man on His last stand, Satyrday night. After the chunky Black Rock ranger made me sit, I still bobbed to the drumming two men down. The music moved me. The music moved a dancing Black Rock Ranger. A woman sitting on a man in a wheelchair (both able to walk) insulted the crowd, but accurately, "Look at them. It's like a rock concert." She motioned to their silly glow-things, stance and otherwise cultural grasp of the situation. The soulful Brother to my left heard this and responded in song. He sung of angels, he sung of soul, he sung of the roots of rock n' roll. I was impressed, bemused, and annoyed, altogether, with either the left or right or middle. But, music. * Illuminaughty's mediatronic eye entranced my dancing bones through the dark of Fryday night. Matt said the next day, "I think I saw you there at 5 a.m." That couldn't be right, not that late. No, the X had no effect. But dance. Dance to songs without end or pauses, only slow waves of preparation for the crashing trance tempo, the sea of variety of people. People who knew nothing of raves, people breast-fed on raves, people hungry for people, and people hungry for trance. "Pale or purple, veiled or voluptuous, I who am all pleasure and purple, and drunkenness of the innermost sense, desire you," Liber Al vel Legis chanted. * "Not only does he take out his opponent," the sidelined old, armchair sensei said, "but he takes out the opponent's pillar." I smiled and took my pillar again. "It's all about balance." The large and small fell to their own clumsiness. The big boy who had felt proud at pounding his pugel to imbalance his smaller friends fell to me, a little, unassuming figure. The padded pugels swung. The pillar dwellers collapsed eventually all. The padded pugels swung and smacked without harm. * Smack, plink, clink, and clank. Blink. Metallic percussion somewhere in a wasteland between symphony and cacophony reflected off the dust itself. The sound came from everywhere. At a large jalopy of some metal Azathoth, a crowd of scrubbing humans plinked, clinked, clanked. Blink. Reviving ritual. * Wild things sputtered upward, and exploded in white wheel spokes radiating and rotating toward our eyes, far more effective than the tunnel of lights with iridescent glasses on and acid, herb, and/or X in me. Brilliant, larger than life bacterial suicides of light lived. Blink. Reviving ritual. ZigguratAt the base of the ziggurat, a naked body streaked into the blaze. Was he there before me? He descended he steps, his cheeks dancing to life. Do what Thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. Rangers surrounded him and took him away. Fire dancers appeared all about. Trails of fire followed them. I recognized a few from Head Space the nights before. They'd arced and twirled hot light throughout the night, creating smoky clouds of spectators. The soulful Brother to my left sung: "We're gonna burn this mutha down. We're gonna raze this lattice to the top." Huffs of fireball, the size of small houses puffed upward, lightly baking us all in swiftly rising dough of orange-black flame. The Man wobbled. On instant replay, later that night the Black Rock Ranger firefighters would place their feet on the cables, rocking the Man (I presume), toward a gentle grave. *
The first eve there, Thirstday, above the faded mountains, rose-bounded gray clouds clutched the sky. Puffy patches powerfully clung to the last light, squeezing the heart until it was rose. Holy, beautiful. * Sunday, I would wake with dawn and adored Her. Golden lipped clouds kissing the cold, faded mountains over the ring-city of nylon tents, aluminum RVs, and weird wanderers. * Fryday, I walked beyond what would be the head of the mile-long "Beaming Man" created by laser and New Age myth. On the fractally cracked playa I performed the Diamond Sapphire. Holy. The Man to my South, the cold desert to my North, and the Sun to the East. Brilliant light flowing in and to all the ravers, to the dancers whose music was uninterrupted (Did the DJs sleep in shifts?). HeadThe Man's diamondoid head never caught fire, even as it fell backwards. It nearly crashed into the crowd. A few remaining fireworks shot obliquely instead of upward. Did anyone die? The Black Rock Rangers were amazingly calm and civil. The crowd lumbered forward, zombies toward His brain. I stayed back, within my own. * Satyrday, Richard Pocklington asked me, "So what is this?" as we walked in the twilight toward the blue and red neon Man in the center of the playa civilization. Flash. The heat and cracked playa Diamond Sapphire revelation refilled me. Words spewed unfettered, "Hadit and Nuit. Hadit is the Man, and Nuit is the sky above." "So Hadit dies for Nuit?" "Hadit is transformed. Hadit is the brink of a new aeon. It is the spark of change. Nuit is the all-accepting night. ¡¦" We went on. * Richard asked a Ranger several questions after she had said, "You'll have to sit down." She explained, "If you're standing you will have less space." She didn't overtly explain our death. "You'll get hurt." "Is this a request or an order?" Richard asked. I internally echoed Richard's thought, What was the social order of the Ritual of the Man? It went on. I danced and then sat to the source of music: drummers. * Velvet lightning; Electric sparks on a synapse wider than a man is long. The lightning danced and swayed to supernatural forces between a shimmering bar and giant metal mushroom. Will Wright designed a household simulation game, The Sims, with the intelligence in the objects and not in the characters. The refrigerator tells the hungry Sim how to eat. The TV tells the bored Sim how to lounge. The shower tells the Sim how to bathe when dirty. Each Sim uses each object, when that is their state of need, the same. Some variables of Sim state and the broadcast strength of the item determine. The lightning generator tells the Spectator how to ogle. The vulgar Canadian Beaver eating contest at Club Seal tells the crowd how to form. The music, how to dance. "Damn you, Will," I thought while I walked toward the Thunderdome, being drawn toward the Lightning, the Head car, the Reading Buddha, the metal cacophony, and half-dozen other sources of party. Neil Stephenson ritualized the concept as the me in Snowcrash. The Sumerian term, "me," was a set of instructions. How and when to plant the crops, and so on. The priest, the Enki, operated the me. I lumbered toward the Thunderdome, whereat the Death's headed-staff of the arena host commanded the harnessed brutality of the spectacle. A siren had played in the distance, like a few decades old US police siren. I happened to see the head it came from. A light decorated frame of a head encased a custom steel go-cart. The bearded driver sent it into tight circle backwards. The lips, eyes and rest spun round, round. Dizzy, and altogether designed for acid-licked spectators, I was sure. Amused, walkers watched. * "Church of the Electron" read the black-marker across the horizontal beam of the crucifix. Keyboards for horizontal beam; egg timer for a head; poles for skinny arms; burnt and abused circuit board garnish. TV with outstretched arms and stilt legs screamed worshipfully toward his sacrificial savior. * The zombies gathered around the fallen Man, and breathed in the flame. The azure-lidded night bent upon them. * "The Manifestation of Nuit is at an end." 
EpilogueI napped at Tahoe's lapping shore, on a gray log, by the glittering blue water below the watercolor blue-wash backdrop speckled chill white. Clouds basked their bellies in passing over the expanse. Boats lazily swayed in their dock. Wild blue and red berries, and persimmon orange weeds adored the back lot slope ending at a stump of a log and my sleeping, faintly dreaming head.
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