Old Rants

This is not a blog. Forgive my typos, I don't use a spell-checker.

The older rants are semi-regularly moved off this page. You can always read the old rants here if you're a masochist. If Google sent you here, it's wrong.

6-20-05

6-20-05

6-20-05

I think it's a common thread in my ranting - things like insurance companies, your friends' common decency, the Geneva Conventions, etc. - as long as things are going well, everyone is hunky dory. Then, suddenly there's some difficulty and people say, well, this difficulty is unexpected and we have to break the rules. Well, what the fuck are the rules for then? You follow them when there's no reason to break them, when life is easy, and then when you're supposed to pay the piper and the rules really come into affect, that's a special circumstance and it's an excuse to break them.

6-20-05

This would bombing pipelines idea struck me as the plot of a bad movie, and of course it is, it's sort of in the Bond movie The World Is Not Enough

While researching this idea I found two semi-crackpot web sites about the oil pipelines in Afghanistan, still interesting reads - wanttoknow , newhumanist ; these are classic examples of the principle that crackpot ideas are over-represented in open debate, because crackpots are far more motivated to exposit their views than sane people. I also found this amazing web site from the amazing "World Press" web site summarizing lots of news on Afghanistan, oil, Islam, etc. at worldpress.org

6-20-05

6-19-05

p.s. Robert Horry is a god in the clutch; correlation would suggest he is responsible for most of the recent NBA champions. See previous predictive post; the original prediction about the "Robert Horry Factor" is due to Andy Richter when the Rockets were playing the Knicks.

6-18-05

On the other hand, it did give me some perspective about costs - though that's actually something I've been getting already from talking to my girlfriend and her friends, who basically all work minimum wage jobs. They make roughly $50/day after tax. I used to make around that in an hour. In the last few days I've made $500 just playing a little poker on the net (yes, I started again). All the little things I buy that I don't even consider luxuries - things like canteloupe and prosciutto for a snack - are just insanely expensive by minimum wage standards. Of course, we wealthy American consumers become incredibly blase'. Something like a nice ice cream or a fancy cup of coffee are special treats to someone who can't afford them, but they're just little snacks or part of the daily ritual to us.

I wonder if some day we'll have tourism to things like minimum wage living. We almost do already, where rich people can go and rough it in the jungle for a few weeks and pretend they're living like the natives.

6-17-05

6-17-05

6-17-05

6-17-05

6-16-05

6-16-05

6-16-05

6-16-05

Around 2/3 of the terror suspects takes since 9/11 have been released due to lack of evidence. For any law maker who believes the treatment of these men is justified and just, there is a simple mental test : imagine yourself in those camps, wrongly suspected of terrorism.

6-15-05

6-15-05

Marie Brenner writes great in-depth investigative articles. You can read them all on-line.

6-15-05

The key issue here is with close games and with the end of the game, because that's really the key moment we're watching for. Imagine a tie game with a minute left to play. That should be incredibly exciting - it all comes down to this, the crucial moments, the big plays! What really happens in the NBA in these situations? Almost always a tedious, painful viewing experience, with the problems I describe above. This should be the best part of the game, not the worst!

So, how might we fix these? Well, one step is easy - reduce the number of time outs, and get rid of the rule that the time out advances the ball to mid court. Perhaps also limit how often you can take a time out. The next thing to address is the fouls. Part of the problem with the fouls is that when a ref sees contact and isn't sure whose fault it is, they'll just randomly pick someone and call the foul. This call is easily biased by stars, floppers, etc. A far better option is to simply not call the foul if you aren't sure who did it. If there's contact and it's not clear that one side is at fault, you let it go. Now, this will result in far fewer foul calls and could lead to more contact, but you can fix that easily, you simply have to make it worse when a foul actually is called. We can preserve the two-shot foul shot, but make each shot count for 2 points. Another option would be to keep the foul shots the same, but make them like a technical foul, you retain posession of the ball. This makes it very undesirable to commit fouls. We could also change the foul-out from 6 to 3 or something like that. Basically the goal is to make it more like a yellow/red card in soccer - penalties are rarely called and they don't interrupt the flow of the game, but when they are called, they're quite bad, so it keeps the players from just constantly fouling each other. The result is that the normal flow of the game can go on for much longer stretches, there's more pure play, less of the officials getting involved in the outcome of the game and breaking up the drama.

This kind of thinking is of course crucial in game development. You have to decide how you think the game is best played. Many designers chafe at this - they protest "the player paid for the game, they should be able to play however they want!". Not so, the goal is to encourage the kind of play that will be most satisfying for the player. Rules and penalties are important to keep the game played the way it will be most satisfying. This is most obvious in multiplayer games, but it's certainly true in single player games too. Part of the reason is that in a single player game, you are not only the avatar in the game, you are also a spectator whatching the story of your avatar unfold, and it's a better story if you are winning through prowess, not exploits.

6-14-05

Tom rightly points out that this is roughly what the labor party has done in England ; by moving severely to the middle/right they've controlled politics for years now. Part of the problem is that the voters are fickle. If labor has some scandal (such as Blair on Iraq), the voters will vote for the opposition even if their politics are much more aligned with labor. The voters simply like to switch parties every few years, sort of to show the politicians who's boss, and because they get sick of the same flavor.

6-14-05

6-13-05

I listened to an interview about white collar crime. One of the ridiculous things about modern white collar crime is that you can commit heinous crimes and be totally unpunished if you didn't realize it was illegal and harmful. This makes it the burden of the prosecutor to prove that you knew what you were doing was wrong, which is incredibly difficult. One of the things prosecutors use is any evidence that you were covering up your actions, trying to hide them, destroy evidence. Thus we return to the idea that if you just commit your crimes out in the open and never try to hide them, you go unpunished.

The news media doesn't know how to handle events that ramp up slowly or continue for a long time. Reporting and TV news are all about big edge events, sudden, breaking, exciting news. Thus, things which happen gradually can easily slip through the cracks and be consigned to back pages.

Most young people don't even know what Watergate is (see my previous post); I blame not the young people, but our woeful education system, which has almost zero accuracte modern history. Furthermore, I think newspapers could do a lot of good if they would include a paragraph or two of context with each major story; eg. instead of the 1000's of words wasted on this pointless nonsense about the revelation of who Deep Throat was, spend a few of those words on reminder context.

6-12-05

6-12-05

6-12-05

6-11-05

6-11-05

The powerful minority in Bolivia is trying to figure out how to retain power but regain peace. Their callow proposal is to separate the small, oil-rich region they control and the large indigenous region. Most likely, that plot will fail. The correct way to retain power is to give in. Give up power, speak for "democracy", but also speak of "capitalism" and "opportunities", give some of the Indians a taste of advancement and wealth, let them think all of them can acheive that success in a "free market" system. Let them compete, but of course retain control of your power networks and corporations and wealth. Let them choose their own trap, let them cheer for "freedom".

6-09-05

6-09-05

6-09-05

Random things along the way - Elko Nevada, a mining town, has the stinkiest men I've ever met (B.O. smell) and lots of sad sad bars with men sitting silently in the dark drinking slowly; near Salt Lake City there are many crazy sights - an art work set out in the lake that's like a tree with planets growing on it, made of metal and 200 feet tall; a huge smoke stack for a coal burning power plant, literally as tall as the mountain next to it; salt flats and playa where they race cars, turned to mud by recent rain; near Reno there are some super-hot hot springs which make steam rise out of the earth, and the dirt is hot to the touch; some sort of mining operation which has stripped the face of an entire giant mountain; in Iowa, the freeway rest stops have WiFi, most of the truck stops along I-80 have WiFi too; I watched two truckers get in a fist fight in a bathroom in Nebraska; two truckers in a Wendys in Iowa - they're fat, Russian twins, and they constantly have their arms around each other and whisper in each others' ears; so many dead deer on the sides of the highway through Illinois, Ohio; the toll roads from New York to Illinois cost about $10; the toll roads are like isolated systems, you're far from other traffic or the cities, there are very few entrances and exits, maybe 20 miles apart on average, and they have these areas you can pull over and buy gas and such without leaving the toll enclave; NPR is my savior, but I hate the way Terry Gross says "Fresh Air" so enthusiastically; everyone on NPR is using "iconoclastic" the wrong way, they're using it to mean "iconographic" or "seminal" which is entirely incorrect; the whole state of Nebraska stinks like cow shit and pig shit; Wyoming is insanely windy, I thought the hood of my car was going to be ripped off.

6-05-05

6-05-05

6-04-05

Out with some of my sister's girlfriends last night. In the middle of a conversation, one of them mentioned "Black guys and puerto rican men *love* me". Wow. If you've ever been to New York, you know the men here are really aggressive with girls; it's far worse than the classic construction worker stereotype; they will literally hit on your girlfriend while you're holding her hand, press their bodies right up against her, etc. and by far the more aggressive are the african american and puerto rican (and also italian and cuban - more consisely, equatorial cultures). And yet, this girl had personalized it. Never mind that that guy on the corner has been hooting at every girl that walks by, when she walks by and get hoots it's because she's special, he really likes her. I never understood how this technique of hollering so agressively at every girl worked (except when they're really drunk, then it certainly works on everyone), but I guess this is how - some people are so hungry to be loved they don't care what form that love takes or where it comes from.

6-04-05

Art review : Daniel Buren's in-situ installation at the Guggenheim. The Guggenheim museum has long been the locus of a battle in the war between art and site. Wright's fanciful spiral ramp and top-heavy facade are far more famous than any painting inside, and more powerful; this tradition is continued by men like Frank Gehry and Calatrava who create flamboyant architecture that steals the show. Daniel Buren's installation does not try to do battle with the architecture of the Guggenheim, to overpower it and win your attention back to the art - rather, he harmonizes with it, accentuates it, and plays with it. His iconic vertical bars are placed around the museum, highlighting the curves and corners; he adds mirrors and colored windows which cast the architectures in new lights, literally. As you wander around the old exhibits, which seem like odd bystanders in this duet, you find his mark in unexpected corners, painted on the building's white walls. A few of his pieces are too whimsical, too psychadelic, but otherwise he correctly lets the real star shine. In the end, Buren's work does what good art should - it shakes your perception of an old icon so that you see it in new light and appreciate it anew.

6-02-05

Ate Peruvian food last night; it was quite excellent, Peruvian food is similar to other South American food, perhaps a bit like Cuban food, which is to say it's mainly meat and rice (or plantain or yuca) with spices, the differentiating factor being the spices, which are earthy but more herbaceous than the Mexican palate (which is dominated by the earth and smoke of cumin and peppers).

I know it's been said a million times in bad poems, but the landscape of the city really does remind me of wilderness. The city streets are canyons, the cliff walls of buildings towering on both sides; the traffic is a river, ever flowing; in the distance, the great range of big sky scrapers looms high against the sky.

It's funny how it's very easy to mistype words that sound alike. For example, their are words I often misplace. This isn't like "accept" where I actually make a mistake; if my mind is focused on the spelling, I'll always get "their" or "there" right, but if I'm just thinking about the content and thinking ahead about what I'll say next, I can often type the wrong spelling. It seems to me that this indicates that the language portion of the human brain is working phonetically. That is, when we engage in writing, what's actually happening is we're having thoughts in some deep part of the brain; some higher level translates those into structure, sentences, but not yet words; the next level then turns them into words - and this is really a speaking function; in order to write, we simply cut off the link from the speaking brain to the lips, and instead some other part of the brain watches what the speaking brain is doing and turns those sounds into spelling. Of course mistakes can be made in each part of the operation, and one of the cool things about the brain is that it's massively parallel and the various portions work autonomously, so the portion of the brain that's doing the sound -> spelling translation is doing it independently, like a stenographer, and it's not really aware of the meaning of the sounds, that's in an earlier part of the brain. If that earlier part of the brain is paying attention, it will correct you as you go. This sort of brain model is being proven now with things like FMRI (Functional MRI) which show the indepedent bits working and the neurons that are like network cables between these independent bits where they communicate. I think you don't need the FMRI, you just need to engage another part of your brain which can sit and watch the rest of your brain work.

6-01-05

Driving into New York was quite the ordeal. New York drivers are by far the worst I've ever encountered. I don't mind the weaving around lanes, the honking, etc. that's just agressive, and that's necessary in a crowded city. The huge moronic thing here is that everyone blocks the intersections, which then fucks up the traffic going the cross direction and just slows everyone down overall. If people wouldn't pull into the damn intersections all the time, all the traffic would flow so much better. The other thing that's really annoying here is that if you are at all polite or reasonable, the other drivers get mad at you. For example, if you don't run over the pedestrian in front of you, the drivers behind you will honk; if you don't run a red light, they'll often honk, etc. I'm also having to move my car every day because of the insane parking hours thing. All the spots here have various exclusions, a lot of them are no parking 8am - 6pm ; the others have street cleaning hours when you have to move your car, things like no parking MWF, midnight to 3am. He's a quiz - when it says "no parking Tuesday midnight - 3am" - what does that mean exactly? Is the the evening of Tuesday or the morning of Tuesday? The answer is the morning of Tuesday; I find their use of "midnight" objectionable, and of course military time sure would help.

My sister wants a system where she and her employees can update an Outlook-like Calendar with PDA's and have them all update to each other over a cell network. After an hour on the phone with Sprint, it appears this is possible, but mighty complicated and expensive. You have to set up a dedicated server somewhere, either on your machine or in some server farm colocated somewhere. You have to run Exchange Server on it, which is very expensive. You also have to run their cell server, for Sprint it's the Business Connection Enterprise Edition. Then with your PDA/cell service you have to pay for connectivity to that, and they serve you updates over SMS. It's very difficult to figure out how to do this stuff, because their web sites are shit, and when you call them up, you get complete morons. All these companies have tiered tech support now. When you first call, you get a screener who's a complete moron. They quickly pass you off to a Tier 1 person. The Tier 1 person is basically a moron who's had some training and can read the web pages to you, but knows nothing. The trick then is to convince the Tier 1 person that you need better help so they'll pass you up. Unfortunately, my Tier 1 person had an attitude problem where they didn't want to admit they were a moron, even though I kept asking questions they couldn't answer; finally they passed me up to Tier 2. The Tier 2 person is reasonably competent and can often help you, though it's still the kind of person who doesn't actually understand the concept of applications, files, and networks. Unfortunately, these people deal with absolute moron callers 99.99% of the time ("my cell phone doesn't work" "is it turned on?" "oh, oops"), so they treat you pretty badly. I chatted with the Tier 2 person a while and got them to happily transfer me to a Technician. The Technician actually know what a computer is. Unfortunately, my Technician wasn't familiar with these exact applications and what I'm trying to do. Sigh.

It's crucial to bounce your ideas off other people. Someone like me who sits and percolates in my own broth will metally wander off and produce loads of silly bullshit. A few minutes of conversation and seeing someone else's reaction can give you a test of what ideas are actually interesting, and where you're way off base.

I've discovered someone near my sister has an open WiFi. Yay!

5-31-05

On the way in to New York I took the scenic route out of Pennsylvania to go through Amish country. I've been there before, when I was a kid, but two things really strike me now - 1) lots of hotels in these random little towns; how odd for it to be a tourist attraction to just go and be near some humans who live simply; 2) I saw an Amish guy on a modern hip cruiser bicycle, which looked very weird; I also saw an Amish guy on one of those old foot-pushed scooters that you stand on with the big rubber tires, like people my age had in the 80's (of course, it was cool, so I didn't take a picture).s

5-30-05

The Robert Horry Factor.

My back is killing me from all the driving and crappy beds. I dream of doing things like the Peace Corps, but my body is such a wreck, I can't handle hard living. I think my youth of computer obsession has permanently crippled me. It's odd because I look so fit, but in reality I'm a mess, I have pinched disks, a bone spur on my spinal chord, locked hips, displaced vertebrae, bound facia, etc. etc.

For some reason I find highways numbering really interesting. As I drive around I try to predict what the next highway's number will be. Over the years I've guessed at the system, but I guess you could just look it up online. The even numbers go east-west, the odd numbers go north-south. The multiples of 10 are the major E-W interstates, and they start lowest in the south with the 10, highest in the north. The tens plus 5 (like 45) are the major N-S interstates, and they start in the west with the 5, end east with the 95. The other evens and odds below 100 are semi-major highways that fill in the gaps. The 100's are offshoots of the corresponding sub-100, so like the 110 is an offshoot of the 10, meaning it connects to it and runs roughly parallel. The 200's are transfers or connections, so like the 210 is a highway that takes you to the 10, connects to it, but is not equivalent. The 600's are local loops, again labelled by the sub-100 they connect with. I'm not sure what the other 100's are, the 300's, 400's and 500's. I know the 405 in LA is of course related to the 5, but I can't figure out what the 400 means; maybe it indicates an alternate route for a portion of the sub-100.

Cotton thread count is the new shaving razor blade-count. People blindly think larger numbers are better. 300 thread count used to be deluxe, now it's 400, 500 - I saw 650 the other day; I'm not even sure why higher thread count has any beneficial properties.

How arrogant of us to call ourselves "American". That's a label for the people from two entire *continents* and we take it to mean just us. That's sort of like using the word "human" to refer to whites, it's supremely disrespectful of all other people who should be included under that label.

The defining characteristic of separate species is that they don't (willingly) mate. For example, horses and donkeys are separate species because they will not willingly mate, even though they are capable of copulating and producing young. The many types of domestic cat are not separate species because they will eagerly mate. The many types of big cats are separate species because they will not mate, even though they could produce offspring. Based on this definition, I conclude that ugly people and hot people are different species.

One of the crappy things about getting older and dating older girls is that they have more sexual history, roughly proportional to their age, though there is a lot of variance. I have a very hard time being with girls with a big sexual history; I can't stop wondering about what they've done. It's sort of like in Amelie or "Jeux d'Enfants". I imagine I'm a person who can touch a thing and suddenly have images of the past of that thing.

I'd like to do a video study on how blind people dance. Not people who went blind, only people born blind - people who have no idea of what "proper" dancing looks like, people who just move naturally to the music, unselfconcious, unaware of other people looking at them.

I'm dating a girl I really love, but I still think about meeting girls. I always have, I guess I always will; it's not that I really want to, in life I'm perfectly faithful, it's just that the romantic dream of meeting is always there; I'm bombarded with meeting fantasies in pop culture - all romance is about the new thing, not the lovely old thing. I dream of going out and picking up chicks, but the whole point of that is to meet someone great, so why would you want it when you have someone great?

I used to think I needed to get better at relating to ordinary people and enjoying their company. Not so. Ordinary people are shit. I need to find the good people, and stick with them and be good to them and cultivate those relationship - they're rare and special and worth it.

The Bridge Bust is a fair on the bridge over the Susquehana between Wrightsville and Columbia, quaint small towns in Pennsylvania. They close down the whole bridge and set up booths with crafts and crap and people walk around. The original bridge was burnt by the Confederates when they retreated across it, and at the fair they recreate the burning. Some of the old country homes and farms around here are just amazing.

I've been reading Michael Crichton's book "Travels". It's not fiction, it's a collection of non-fiction essays about his many wild adventures. It's rather a strange reading experience, because it's quite interesting, but I absolutely despise him, and it's strange reading the words of someone you despise; a sarcastic voice in my head does running commentary along with his narrative, picking on him, and pointing out the gross errors in his prose. Mike is a whiny, rich, lucky, spoiled bastard, who drives around in a Porche and dates young starlets nearly half his age, a different one each week; he of course is not happy with his riches and fame and women, so he seeks fulfillment in new age spiritualism and exotic travel. He goes on wild exclusive jaunts, like trekking to Shangri-La (in the near-Himalayan mountains of Pakistan), or to see the wild mountain gorillas in Rwanda (similar to what that Gorillas in the mist lady did). His insights into people and life are incredibly shallow and self-serving, generally rationalizing his own childish behavior. He has one whole essay about how people love to fear wild animals even though they're not dangerous (eg. people are afraid of snakes and spiders but they are incredibly unlikely to hurt you - the real things to fear are cars, hamburgers, cigarettes, etc); he comes to various silly conclusions and completely misses the right answer - people love to be afraid of those things because they aren't really dangerous, and it distracts us from the real fears; we don't want to see horror movies that are realistic, that would be terrible, we can escape the really scary things by pretending to be afraid of silly thing. One positive thing I get from the book is just the idea of making treks for really specific wild purposes. Generally when I travel I just like to go some place and be there; I don't even like to plan to see the tourist sites or anything, I want to meet the people there, wander, explore, just be there. That's all well and good, but it can give you a sense of pointlessness, and it doesn't generally lead to good summaries of what you did. If instead you make some random specific purpose, like kayak down the Nile, you can go and "just live" for a while before your central activity, then "just live" a few days after, and you have this focal purpose to give the trip an anchor. I like that idea, I think I'll do it in the future. addendum - the book turns into a metaphysical load of new age shit in the end, please do not buy it.

Statistically, if you hook up with someone random, you're far more likely to hook up with someone who is extremely sexually active than someone who is not. The variance is extraordinary - there are people who have been with 100+ partners, and others who have been with 1-10. Those people have drastically different chances of hook up, perhaps 50% for one and 5% for the other.

The Republicans clearly should be happy that they are in power. However, if sensible Republicans would look down the road a bit, they should be very concerned. 1) they've cultivated the power of the religious right, which is A) increasing the power of fringe groups, and B) may create a backlash from mainstream America if it goes too far. 2) they've broken down any government based on truth, and made it all image and pitching and PR, which is good for them now since their PR machine is so much better than the Dems, but long term it means that you can't fight real bad actions, the judgement is all based on non-facts.

G Love ; I'm watching basketball! Screw John Tesh.

5-29-05

What species lives in more habitats and climates than any other? Homo Sapiens of course.

The vast majority of people at the veterans cemetery yesterday were very old, 70 or older, people who were contemporary to WW2 veterans, I imagine, spouses and friends and brothers of the dead. Most of our deceased veterans are from WW2, partly because those people are of the age where they're dying naturally, but also because that war was by far the most deadly in recent history. Even wars like Vietnam were pitifully harmless when compared to the great bloody war when this country made a true sacrifice. The young are taking their holiday and having fun. It's easy to romanticize WW2, because it was a just war, there was clear evil, and combat and strife for a good cause are ideals we can support. On the other hand, we didn't seem to care when the Japanese were torturing and enslaving people on the mainland, we didn't get mobilized because of what the Nazis were doing in ghettos and camps, rather we were mobilized for self-protection, and to compete with the USSR in the global power grab.

I'm crap at taking pictures. I never take pictures of the fun stuff. I used to want to be a photographer, because it's an easy way to be an artist with no talent, and the work seems great - you get to travel to cool places like war zones and night clubs and document the life there. You could also be a photographer of models or fashion where you'd get to pick up hot chicks. Unfortunately I find photography really boring, so despite my efforts to make myself get into it, I just can't. Especially these days when there are a bazillion great photos on the internet, why should I bother taking a photo of anything when I know a better one is already out there?

It must be annoying living near the border of Virginia and West Virginia. You'd get all kinds of confusion like "I'm in western Virginia" or, "it's in eastern West Virginia" ; I found myself saying "I'm in the western part of the state named Virginia, not in West Virginia".

Did you go to the University of Tennessee or Texas?

Pirates - we put the "Aarrrr" in robbery. (disclaimer : this might only be funny after sitting in a car by yourself for 10 hours).

Driving so much, I've been thinking about the "highway pickup". Many girls I know have told me that they met guys while driving, somehow flirting with each other through the windows of their cars. I've never met a guy who has done so. I have no idea how such a thing could ever happen; it's easy to summarize, but what exactly happens in the details, how does it get started? How do you pass your phone number without crashing? You'd have to take both hands off the wheel to do numbers. There are a lot of these things in life where people will summarize events, and it sounds reasonable in summary, but I just cannot imagine for the life of me how the details are filled in.

Ate crabs last night; Crabs are associated with Pennsylvania for me because we always got them here when we visited (they're very popular here as a party food for gatherings), even though the crabs are all from Maryland or North Carolina. Apparently there are seasons for crabs and this is just the beginning of the season; they're best in summer, I guess. The other foods of Pennsylvania are sweet white corn (in August), Lebanon Bologna (best purchased from a real country curing barn in Lebanon, PA), and the weird Pennsylvania Dutch food like scrapple, hog maw, or pork & sauerkraut.

I think the key personality difference between Dems & Reps is that Dems consider it more admirable to live to a high moral standard and fail (aka be hyppocrites) while Reps consider it more admirable to live to a low moral standard (what some would consider "evil") and succeed.

When I went to pick up the crabs, I was going to use a cardboard box that my grandma had. She didn't want me to use it, because she liked that box and didn't want the crab juice dripping on it. I tried to explain to her that if I didn't have the box, it would be dripping on my car instead, and my car is rather more valuable than a cardboard box. She said, well, she needs that box, she likes it. I find most people act this way in their lives, and certainly our country acts this way in our foreign policy. We'd rather destroy something of great value to someone else than inconvenience ourselves in a small way. We'd rather destroy the natural resources of the earth, which will permanently affect the planet that billions of our children will live on, rather than pay a little more for gas or lumber or paper. We'd rather kill a hundred thousand Iraqis than risk the remote possibility of that country contributing to a terrorist threat which might possibly kill a few hundred of us. We'd rather use subsidies and restriction to prop up American mega-farms, plunging millions of Africans into poverty and famine, rather than make a few American farmers find other jobs. Of course, when I face my own decisions of whether to make a sacrifice for others or not, I usually choose the greedy path, though I strongly reject the idea that you can only preach standard to which you live.

5-29-05

Camped in the Great Smoky Mountains (Appalaichans). There really are strange hicks out here. The town of Bryson is a quaint old mountain town, with lots of innertube rentals. Back East here, it seems like almost every little town is nestled in a picturesque valley, filled with history (often involving how we killed the Indians who originally lived there). When I got here it looked neither Great nor Smokey, more like the Nice Green Hills, but on my way out it was raining and the clouds were depositted in fog banks in the nooks and crannies of the mountains, and I saw the smoke. There really are hicks in the small towns around here. Saw lots of wild turkeys hiking out in the backwoods. Turkeys spot you or hear you from far away, and they fly a short distance and make a mad dash into the brush. They make horrible crashing sounds, they seem very clumbsy, but they get away well. Turkeys here are small and reddish brown. There are lots of bears here, I was hoping to see one and wrassle it, but I never saw one.

5-26-05

Stopped in Athens, Georgia. Nice area, lots of old houses, lots of trees; walked around the botanical gardens. The downtown area is really cool, lots of nice cafes and restaurants and cool shops and stuff. It's about the same population as San Luis Obispo, but so much more is going on, the area is beautiful. Unfortunately it's blazing hot in the summer.

Southern kindness, my ass! People here are just as unhelpful as everywhere else. Maybe they're a bit more polite in their verbiage, but not one actually helps when you ask for things.

5-25-05

Georgia has "Package Stores". From what I can tell they're a type of liquor store; the only difference with a normal liquor store seems to be that they're not allowed to sell single beers, but everything is very cheap.

Most of the cities down here in the south have no NPR station, but they have an abundance of christian news/talk stations.

5-25-05

I'm not trying to meet girls on this trip, but I do like to meet people and talk to them, and it's just impossible to meet a guy and have a conversation, you men are so brusque and unemotional around other guys; the only people I can easily meet are girls that are cruising. I can chat a bit with girls that are with some other guy, but their attention is elsewhere.

I saw Antonio Esfandiari tonight. (for those of you out of the loop, he's a top poker pro, made famous by the WPT, but many of us consider him a jackass and rather lucky). This will be the 3rd celebrity of met and trash-talked! It's so much fun, I encourage anyone who meets a celebrity, do not just adulate them, flame them! They must get it all the time, I'm sure they're not amused, but it's great fun. It went something like this - me, not sure : "Antonio Esfandiari?" him, trying to get a cab - "you got it, kid" , me : "let's play some poker" , him - "not today, I'm playing tomorrow", me : "you scared of me?" , him - "yeah, I would destroy you, save your money" - me - "what are you gonna do?" - this is where I wave my arms in the classic Antonio way; his friends all laugh as he gets in the cab to drive away.

I hate people who are always in a "correcting" mode, even if they're often wrong. I realize I'm like that.

5-24-05

New Orleans is fan freaking tastic. It's a great party town, great jazz, fun bars, you can drink on the street and wander from bar to bar, the girls are wild and showing their tits all the time, everyone is dancing and having fun, and the quarter is cool, small streets with all the people crammed together. What's more, it has the history and food and great antique shops and such which make it interesting during the day. The India House Hostel is cool; it's very social and fun. The beds are horrific and the place is generally in disarray, I've hardly slept. Some guy in bunk room kept having nightmares last night, he'd yelp in his sleep every ten minutes. My aching back!!

Met some girls from Oregon last night who were here on business trip; they bought me drinks on their expense account. A lot of the drinks are cheap here, you can get $1 beer on the street and $2 beer in bars, and not Bud Light, but decent beers like the local Abita and Sam Adams or Newcastle.

New Orleans is an olfactory experience. Bourbon street is all tourist's perfume, puke and spilled beer. The Garden District is heavy and musky, with moss and mold and magnolia. The heat and humidity are sensual.

Saw Star Wars for the 2nd time. I liked it, but it didn't really hold up for me on 2nd viewing, though Natalie Portman's performance seems even better, the fact that she's able to convey some real emotion despite the ridiculous non-acting of Hayden Christiansen. The thing that really made it drop off for me was the CG. First time I saw it the CG just blew me away - the level of detail and realism - but now some thigns really annoyed me. The background and metallic stuff is still very good for the most part, but the organic stuff sucks. I *hate* that stupid lizard thing that Obi-Wan rides, it moves so horribly, and its shaders are poor - it looks like something from Babylon 5, all shiny and gay. I *hate* that they put CG bodies on the storm troopers even when they're using human heads - it would be CHEAPER to just use a real human for the whole trooper and it would look so much better. I know there might be a consistency issue, but that sets their standard for rendering the CG guys - make them look like the real one. Yoda still bugs me, and all the bits where the humans become obvious CG in their lightsaber fights (Count Dooku becomes CG pretty badly a few times). It's amazing how good human eyes are at picking up when something is off, even if you can't figure it out in your conscience mind. A lot of times I'll see some background and think "ugh, fake CG", but I can't say exactly what makes it look wrong unless I think about it for a long time. Somehow the subconscious can tell something is wrong, but it takes the conscious mind a completely separate analytical effort to explain it - the funny bit here is that the realization it's fake and the justification are totally independent mental actions.

5-22-05

Another thought on the NoT - I heard this interview on NPR with the head of the French national library. He was complaining about the fact that Google has a US bias. He totally understood the Google ranking. Some stupid bitch from Google was interviewed as well and didn't understand his point at all, she just kept saying Google's ranking was like a democracy where the internet voted for the page ranks. The French dude made two perfectly valid points about how the Google rankings are biased - 1) Google ranks have massive inertia, because once a page is highly ranked, people visit it even more, so it gets linked more, and 2) the Internet at the moment is massively U.S. content dominated, so the ranks of pages is heavily U.S. biased. The problem is if I'm some French dude, I want to see rankings based on my culture, my worldview, pages that matter to me, not to that American scum. Of course the anser to this is just the NoT. It provides page rankings that are customized to your own worldview, so if you are in a different culture and have a different set of connections, you get those pages.

I miss the good old Republicans. Of course, they never really existed, Republicans have always been fractured and corrupt just like the Democrats, but there's this idealized image of what the party was about, really in the 70's and 80's - the old idealized Republican was pro-business, free markets, civil liberties, balanced budgets, small government, less regulation, etc.. Now, like I said, that never happened, in reality the Repubs have presided over some of the worse imbalanced budgets and huge government growth, but it was the ideal. Now, I also disagree with that ideal in many ways, but I can at least respect it! It's a valid alternative view of how to run our society, and we could debate about it and reach a compromise, and it would be cool. I think it's great to have people with alternative views and we can all debate and learn from each other. I miss the good old idealized republican.

5-22-05

Being alive I measure analytically by your frequency of "active actions". I know that's redundant; the first step is an "active choice". Then an "active action" occurs when you turn an active choice into actual action, eg. you do what you decided, just thinking is not enough. An "active choice" occurs when you make a decision about something that you don't need to decide about, eg. no one else is making you even think on this topic, you chose to think about it on your own, eg. it's outside of your routine, it doesn't come from an external force. The frequency & "activity" of "active actions" is your rating for "being alive".

It's so hot and humid in Houston, if you go outside and do anything physical, you're immediately drenched in sweat, just coated in liquid. It sort of feels good, it makes me want to have sex (even more so that usual).

5-22-05

5-22-05

I'm partly doing this trip so that I can tell people I did it. That sounds horrible, but it's not, bear with me. Many experiences are sort of mediocre, but are important to do, because not doing them is worse. Hell, almost every time I leave my house I regret it, I would actually have more fun at home, but I have to go out, because if I don't I feel like a bum staying home all the time, and you have to see different things, get stimulation, even if the experience isn't actually fun, it gives you food for thought, helps your mind stay grounded to reality and connected to the cosmos. The real reward then comes after you go back to your normal life and you can look back on it and remember.

5-22-05

Get Jimmy "Suave" Smits and Sam Fucking Jackson out of my space opera!!

How lucky was George Lucas to get John Williams? Wow, the music is still great and it's really carried the franchise.

Natalie Portman really reminds me of my dear Dan; maybe those are just beer goggles. It reminds me - the movie Closer stinks terribly, but it has a nice strip-dance scene with Natalie that's almost worth it (no nudity though) (also, Clive Owen does a great Pacino impersonation that's quite entertaining).

Huzzah to Lucas for putting in the political subtext. Star Wars was always a bit of a hippie message against power, but with this movie he's very obviously tied it to current events, and done it with lines that are obvious enough even for the pathetic average American to pick up on, like - "If you're not with me, you're my enemy" . Apparently there are lots of stories on this floating around, such as , so I won't dwell on it.

I'm sure I've written this before, but I really hate the whole Metachlorians thing, and more generally the way the Jedis are super-powered in these movies. Let's go back to when we saw the first Star Wars. Coming out of that movie, I wanted to be a Jedi so bad, and the powers of the Jedi were not ridiculous. The Force was just the energy that binds us all. If you close your eyes, maybe you could feel it! Certainly in the arms of your lover you could close your eyes and feel the power of the Force between you. The Jedi trained hard, controlled their minds and emotions, and developed quick reflexes and steady nerves and the power to feel the Force. Maybe I could do that too if I was pure and good and worked hard! What a beautiful dream. The new movies have crapped all over that. Jedis are not normal humans, they have these nano thingies in their blood that give them super powers to flip around and jump 100 feet in the air, etc. etc.

They could have done a better job connecting Episode 3 to Episode 4. As it is, the gear from Episode 4 that they link in looks very out of place and just silly low-budget (which it was). Most of the links were just pointless - Episode 4 is another 20 years or so in the future, there's no reason why Princess Leia's ship needs to be the same, and those guys need to be in the same uniforms. There are a billion logical flaws in the movie, I'm not here to point them out, Star Wars is not about logic, you have to set that aside.

5-22-05

Heard an interesting interview with the new commerce secretary, Gonzalez, about the import limits we just imposed on Chinese textiles. It was an NPR interviewer who as usual was being polite and not really digging into hippocracy and contradiction and such, but the interviewer did poke a little bit, with a question like "how does this limit on textile imports fit into the administration's policy of free trade?" (this of course is happening while we're pushing for CAFTA), Gonzalez squirmed a bit, but then uttered one of those political statements that was very telling - "this administration's policy has been very clear and consistent - we support free trade around the world, to provide opportunities for American business to grow and reach more markets" , something like that - very clear in that the policy is to open markets for American companies, not to open markets in general, and there's no reason to open our own market, in fact the truth is we are one of the most protectionist countries in the world by far.

I finally finished the book about Rwanda - "We wish to inform you that we will be killed tomorrow with our families" (longest title ever). It's a very good book, everyone should read it and feel ashamed. There are any number of things in it that are just horrifying, but the thing that I keep thinking of is just the basic fact of human nature that most people are really really horrible people. That is, first I content that people in Rwanda are fundamentally just like people anywhere else (and places like Nazi Germany have mimic'ed this behavior). Second, in Rwanda when the Hutus were slaughtering the Tutsis, nearly every single Hutu participated in one way or another - some by acting, most simply by going along, naming names, or even just by not objecting, not helping the Tutsis. Only a few did anything to try to stop it, maybe 1% of the populace or less. Add 1st and 2nd and you can only conclude that the vast majority of humans, when confronted with the decision to either oppose a massive horrific human tragedy, or go along with it to save their own skin, they'll choose the second one. I walk the streets and look into the eyes of my fellow men. If a genocidal group came to power here and they were advocating the whites killing all the minorities (and killing any whites that don't go along with the plan) - would you go along with it, or fight it? I look into the eyes of my fellow men, and see people who would go along with it. Afterward they would claim they did nothing themselves, that they didn't know it was a genocide, that they had no choice, they would be killed if they didn't go along with it. I see all those Hutus as guilty. I see all the Germans in Nazi Germany as guilty, I see the Indonesians who did nothing for Timor - guilty, the Turks who did nothing for the Kurds, guilty, and all these Americans walking the streets - not only are they guilty of inaction on various cases of American attrocities around the world, but they are guilty of potential inaction - that is, put in the same situation as the Hutus in Rwanda, their actions would be shameful, and they carry the stink of their potential sin.

Maturity can be analytically measured. I believe the single behavioral observable sign is in the time horizon that the person uses for decision planning. That is, when the person makes action decisions, how far ahead are they (correctly) optimizing for happiness. An immature person (eg. a baby) makes decisions based only on immediate happiness - will choice A or B make me happier right now. The farther you plan (correctly) for happiness, the more mature. Note that I add correctly because planning far ahead, but doing so incorrectly, is not maturity. Note that incorrect is not the same as making mistakes - mistakes are okay; incorrect planning means using the wrong criteria or wrong method entirely, for example if you have a long time window, but you only plan based on happiness at the end of the window rather than for happiness over the period with some weighting (eg. making decisions that give you some happiness 10 years from now but sacrifice much happiness in the mean time, this is a false maturity).

The air quality in Houston & Dallas is some of the worst in the country, frequently at dangerous levels of pollutants. I realized just now that the people here really don't care, because nobody goes outside here anywhy, it's ridiculously hot & humid, people just stay in their nice air conditioned homes and offices, and if the outside air were poison gas it wouldn't really affect people much.

5-21-05

A little techy note for you game developers - I've been listening to a lot of radio driving through the heartland and have heard a lot of interesting things. A lot of radio stations have done little blurbs on E3, and they'll do those little news comments, where like they run the report from the man on the scene, usually a standard AP report or something, and then the local personality makes a comment. Overwhelmingly, the local personalities are telling me one thing - PS3. A lot of game developers say maybe Xbox360 could take off, grab a good lead of market share and actually beat the PS3. I used to think that might be possible, but now I've totally changed my mind. The brand domination of Sony and Playstation is just too strong. For god's sakes, if they took a PS2 and scratched out the 2 and wrote in a 3, it would sell better than the Xbox360, no matter how much the Xbox stomps it technically.

I must become like a samurai, like a lama, like the kwisatz haderach - fully in control of my self at all times, master of my own mind.

I like the hotels in Arizona and New Mexico in the middle of nowhere. Pretty much everyone staying there is on a big drive between someplace in the east and someplace in the west. The whole town has a strange empty surreal feel; there's nothing to do at all, perhaps one dive bar, a really crappy swimming pool. Everyone is sort of in a limbo state, tumbling.

I think CA housing is clearly in a bubble, but I can't figure out how to profit from that.

5-20-05

I hate the way karaoke has become this fancy event now, where everyone sings so damn well, and shows off, like American Idol, doing vocal flourishes and stuff. Karaoke is fun because everyone is *bad*, you sing bad, you get embarassed, everyone laughes; Karaoke is also only fun

The right way for advertisers to beat TiVo and such is to make commercials that are so entertaining, people choose to watch them. That's really not that hard, they can do great comedy bits with real comedy stars, like Dave Chapelle, or do installments of dramas like the old coffee ads, etc.

I'm not sure what I hope to find out here on the road. At the moment it feels like medecine - long hours in the car, sleeping in my uncomfortable camp bed or the uncomfortable cheap hotel beds, away from my lover and my home. I'm going to force my self to stay out here on the road until I find whatever it is I'm looking for.

Today I saw many amazing things that I didn't take pictures of. For some reason I get in this mood sometimes where I really can't be bothered to get my camera out. Some of the things I saw - near Amarillo : that cars stuck in the ground thing that's quite famous involving some Ant people or something, the Big Texan, which has the 72 oz steak that's free if you finish it, huge huge stockyards full of cattle waiting for the slaughter, huge huge grain silos and grain elevators; here in Oklahoma, I've seen fields of wheat, still young; wheat mazes, not yet operating; giant modern windmills, like white obelisks, futuristic; one of the giant windmills underconstruction, with an even bigger crane lifting up the massive propeller fan.

In the panhandle, it's like a foreign country. Wide open fields. On the radio in Texas, at the hourly news break the announcer went over the prices of beef, just like most news people go over the DOW, eg. march cattle is up 35 cents to 80.75, etc. apparently they track a different price for each month. On the radio in Oklahoma, they do the same thing with wheat, winter wheat, etc.

Yesterday I was in eastern Arizona. Record heats for this time of year, 105 degrees, the kind of heat that makes you want to not get out of your car.

5-19-05

I'll put some photos on the Yahoo photo page. I've just been at the grand canyon and picked up a bit of a sun burn. The grand canyon is amazing, but perhaps it's too amazing; it bludgeons you with beauty until you're numb and can't see any more. It's much easier to appreciate small beauties, a little twinkle in an ordinary scene. The grand canyon is one of the most international places I've ever been. German and Japanese tourists come in by the bus-load. The hikers I meet are Italian, French, Swedish. There's a full grocery store, the hotels are right on the rim; too many tourists, ruin the isolation. The checker at the grocery store is from Ecuador, he's here on a work-exchange program.

I haven't got into the road trip mind set yet. Maybe I'm still too close to home; I can think of just turning back and going back to San Luis and my beloved Danielle, and that sounds mighty good to me. I wish I could smoke; when I think of great road trips, I remember big American cars with a bench front seat and smoking.

5-16-05

A continuing feature : what should I do with my life?

• Make indie video games. Work at home and make games by myself, with contract art & sound. I think I could do this and perhaps be successful enough to support myself. There are some big downsides to this - for one, it's very isolating, you work alone all the time. The other is that this business is turning into the mainstream game biz - production values & costs keep rising, and it will be hard to compete with PopCap, etc. On the plus side, my productivity when I work alone is incredibly high.

• Make interactive multi-media and art. This is similar to the above, but instead of making games, I'd be making interesting interactive experiences. This is actually much more intersting to me, but much harder to make a living at; I'd have to get funding from art galleries and grants and such, and I hate working that scene, basically begging people for money.

• Write fiction (+ write music). This has always been one of my dreams, but it's the kind of thing where I could spend months on it and wind up with nothing. I'm also way out of practice writing real fiction, I probably suck these days. Making a living at this is hard to impossible.

• Write non-fiction (on poker & software). I think anyone who reads this site agrees that my non-fiction writing is pretty reasonable. I think I could do this and make a living at it. Not sure how fun it would be. I currently have a half done book on poker that I think would revolutionize poker study, but the market for poker books is flooded right now, and without a celebrity's name attached, it would die. (if you're reading this and you're a well known poker pro, drop me a line).

• Be a poker pro. This sounds good until you actually think about it. I also don't think I actually have what it takes to be a pro. I do think that my understanding of the game is good enough, my problem is that my emotional reaction is too strong, I can't recover from bad beats. On the other hand, guys like Mike Madusow seem to be able to have success despite being emotional babies and poor play, so maybe it's easier than I think? In any case, this doesn't seem like an actually fun job - the average hourly wage is not great, and it's very stressful.

• Be a political science professor (write books, help think-tanks). I just had this idea recently, and it's sort of appealing. On the down side, I'd have to go back to school for a while, but politics and learning is very stimulating to me. I've always wanted to be involved in politics somehow in a way that would actually make a difference, and volunteering for the pol parties never seemed like it would help much. Being a prof, I could certainly reach all the kids in my class, and maybe write books, papers, that might have some affect (though plenty of wise profs already do this and it doesn't seem to help much). The down side is all the reality of academia - that's part of the reason I dropped out of my physics studies. To go from a BA to a PhD to a post-doc to an assistant professor to a tenured professor involves a lot of social politics and maneuvring and beaurocracy that's incredibly unpleasant.

• Be a chef. I love to cook, but I think I like it more as a hobby than a job. This is one of those things where it would be great to be on top - be an executive chef who designs the menu and supervises the kitchen, but doesn't actually have to be in there slaving in the heat and the stress every night. Being a line chef actually seems pretty horrible, though it's romanticized in "Kitchen Confidential" and "Mostly Martha" and such.

• Run a cafe or restaurant. I've always sort of wanted to do this, but I have no idea if it would actually be satisfying. Certainly it's incredibly financially risky (90% of them fail). I also would have trouble dealing with the stupid customers (if you've seen the British show "Chef", that's me).

• Work on video games in the industry. This is the "keep on keeping on" option. I could work with a good team and make good games. I'd love to work with some smart, interesting guys on exciting stuff, and I certainly have that option now. But, life is short, there are so many other things to try...

• Be a tech director or other type of manager in the game industry. This is my fallback career for when all light burns out in my spirit. I can become a corporate zombie and make good money with reasonable hours.

• Run an alternative health clinic with my sister. My sister is a successful pilates teacher who has a small business and a big opportunity to grow. I think this is a fantastic growth business to be in. I would get a massage license and maybe a Doctor of Chiropractic or something so I could help, but mainly I would contribute money and business advice, and really it would be her business, she's the one with the skills. Certainly this would be very good for my half-crippled body.

• Write newspaper/online reviews of restuarants, movies. This would be a pretty great job, and I think I'd be good at it; like most people, I think my taste is great, but in all seriousness I think I have broad taste and can express clearly what I think is good & bad about things. It seems reasonably easy to get into this field, because you can start small, just writing reviews online, then for the local small newspaper, and move into the bigger markets. I imagine it's very competitive and hard to crack into the real top newspapers.

• Be an architect. I love architecture and think I have a good sensibility for it, as well as the good mix of math, physics and artisistic/spatial/emotional skills. On the down side, this would take a lot of school, and architecture is a nasty field where it's really great if you can be at the very top where you get a lot of freedom, but 99% of architects wind up designing strip malls and tract homes.

• Coach a pro football team. This is included just because it was one of my childhood dreams. It's very hard to crack into this business without having been a player and moving up through the ranks, though it is possible (see Bill Parcells, for example). Working at the lower levels is not very appealing to me, that's more baby sitting than strategizing. It would be cool to be a consultant and do proper EV analysis of football decisions (run or pass, etc.)

• Be a writer for the Daily Show or other smart comedy. This is included just because it was one of my childhood dreams. This would be an absolutely fantastic job, but surely very hard to get, and it seems I'm not so funny as I was in high school when I used to write comedy sketches all the time with my friend Jordan.

• Just do fun/miscellaneous jobs. This might just be a temporary thing too. Some options are - work in a state/national park, work as an activity coordinator at a resort in Hawaii, work as a tour guide for rafting or biking trips, etc.

5-16-05

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5-13-05

Another thing in "The Dark Crystal" made me rather sad. There's this creature "fizzgig" which is a small, cute ball of long fur that hops around, but when it's mad is surprises you with a massive snarl of sharp teeth. In one scene, the heroine, a female Gelfling, gets captured and is strapped into a torturous operating chair, and the evil mad science doctor (a Skeksies) is going to drain her life to feed to the emperor to make him young. Fortunately, she's surrounded by cages full of these cute little animals, and she has the ability to speak to them; she calls to them to save her and they break out of their cags and suddenly transform from cute to snarling and jump on the doctor, while some bite her straps and she escapes. Some of you may find this scene eerily familiar.

5-10-05

5-08-05

5-07-05

The answer is 42.5532% pennies , 8.5106% nickels , 17.0213% dimes , 31.9149% quarters. It's a lot neater written as the average amount of change you get from a random transaction : 2 pennies, 0.4 nickels, 0.8 dimes, 1.5 quarters.

addendum - Ignacio says the more interesting problem is to figure out how to define your change system to minimize the average number of coins people cary. That is, assume a system with 4 coins of integer value, how do you set their values such that the average number of coins made from change on a random amount in [0,99] is minimized (you must be able to make exact change).

Just guessing wildly I think the answer is 1,3,10,32 , which is an even logarithmic distribution, but apparently that's not even close. The answer is here ; obviously it's easy to solve by computer sim, but I wonder if there's any math/analytic way to jump to the answer? I hate discrete math.

5-04-05

5-04-05

Other discoveries in SF : "The Crepe House" in the tiny pretentious Hayes Valley area has mediocre food but great espresso; personally I've come to hate Lattes and Capuccinos, I try to find proximities to a Cafe Creme, and if you ask for a "dopio with a little steamed milk and foam" at The Crepe House you'll get a good facsimile. The Lower Haight was a big disappointment, not much real interesting life, just hipsters and stoners; none the less, Ah Bodhran is a great Irish Pub, unlike most; what makes it great? 1) no puke smell, 2) real Irish people go there 3) real Irish decor and beers, including nicely poured Guiness and Murphy's 4) a full bar with bartenders that make proper cocktails 5) nice lighting, 6) good music (hip, not pub crap).. Axum Eritrean/Ethiopean in the Lower Haight was pretty good and very cheap ($12 for the platter for two). Lush Lounge is an old favorite; it's a neighborhood bar in the strip club and prostitute neighborhood around O'Farrell; the bartenders are friendly and mix great drinks, the crowd is unpretentious but cool; unfortunately, they seem to have gotten rid of their piano and closed the upstair balcony, so it's not as much fun as the last time I came. My new discovery of the trip was the Clement St. hub of the "Richmond" neighborhood - this is an ethnic neighborhood, very cheap, very lively, with great restaurants, asian groceries, and cool cafes.

We also saw the movie "In the Battlefields" at the San Francisco International Film Festival, at the Kabuki theater in Japan-town (stop at a grocery for Guava milk drink, and dine on Shabu-Shabu). "In the Battlefields" is a great film - go see it if you ever get the chance. It's a story of a little girl coming of age in Lebanon a few years ago; the background of the country is never really explained, it's just the life they have; they family doesn't even talk about the violence and poverty around them, they just deal with their own problems and make do; a beautiful movie, incredibly realistic, including one of the grossest sex scenes I've ever seen, not because of what happens, but just because it's not sanitized.

4-29-05

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4-27-05

But is that sexism a bad thing? This is an old old argument that keeps being retread every year as one feminist calls for complete equality, and another calls for a celebration of the "female role" (vive la difference, the latest twist on this retread is to celebrate the sexism in other cultures, like continental Europe). Certainly a little sexism is the spice of a sexual relationship; it feels good for the man to be chivalrous, but also occasionally domineering, powerful. The ideal bodies in our era have almost a 2:1 weight ratio of male to female (strong 200 pound man like a basketball player or quarterback, and a 100 pound waif vixen), which means the sheer physical strength difference creates a tension of danger where the man could hurt the woman easily, even just by accident (though this is reduced somewhat by the trend towards fitter women). The best sex has a slight hint of physical danger to it, almost wrestling, flexing, the man hunting the woman and doing what he wants with his willing prey. This may be - but if this is the form of sexuality, it creates an undertone of inequality which seeps into higher forms of interaction. The "vive la difference" crowd will claim that you can have this in the bedroom, but still be equal colleagues in the conference room. They also claim that women can dress sexually and flirt at the office and still be respected. Not so, that's a fantasy. Even with the most well behaved people trying to not be sexist, as long as the dark secret life of passion is based on unequal roles, it will bubble up into ordinary life, and it will be even worse with people who's egos are not so well in control of their id.

Back to racism - Kristof also mentions Denzel Washington, who I've been thinking about lately after seeing a tiny bit of "Training Day" on TV. "Training Day" is just a horrendous movie, and Denzel does a really hillarious impersonation of a "street-smart thug", trying to talk like a black man from the 'hood or something. Denzel's abject failure to portray a stereotypical urban black male just drove home A) what a terrible actor he is, and B) how white-bread he is. And yet, Denzel is celebrated by all levels of society. He's doted on by women, admired by men, loved by the urban blacks and elite whites. It occurs to me that if Denzel were white, not only would he lose the acclaim of being a "black role model" or a "great black actor", he would simply be boring. That is, if you ignore his skin color, he's really just very bland, very ordinary, lacking any charisma or virility. All of his exoticism and masculinity derives from the color of his skin.

4-27-05

A government representative meets with ten people. He puts $10,000 on the table and says "don't take that money, it's illegal, but if you do, I'll have no way of knowing who did it, and I won't investigate". He then turns his back and closes his eyes. The ten men all look at each other, and nine of them each grab $1000. One man doesn't take any money. The agent then turns around and sees only $1000 on the table. He takes it and says "well, you all took the money, I can't punish you, but since you have that money, I'm now going to charge each of you a $500 fee; everyone must pay now." The one man who didn't take the money protests - "They all the took the money, I didn't, this isn't fair, they should be punished!" The agent chides him - "Now, I can't just believe you, I don't know who took the money and I don't have time to investigate, and shame on you if you didn't take it, it was right in front of you; now everyone pay up". The honest man pays the fee and feels a fool.

I hear parents talk of their children dropping out of college, throwing huge parties and trashing their homes, drinking, sleeping around, going to jail. There's pride in their voices - they're bragging! At some point if it happens too long, the pride turns to exasperation, the kids should get over it already and do something with their lives, but initially it's pride, and perhaps envy.

4-24-05

4-24-05

4-24-05

Another question is the growth of sections of the economy. There's a general assumption by foolish people (eg. our government) which is that if the GNP increases, Americans are better off. Well, back in 1820 that may have held some water, because if the country made more money, it was from making more steel, which made Carnegie rich, but also helped his workers, and the grocers who supplied them, etc. etc. These days, all of our mass-employment industries are shrinking. Our economic growth comes from IP (intellectual property) and financial services. When our economy grows, it's likely because a US investment bank took an Indian company public and helped sell it to Saudi investors. So, Citigroup got a nice profit, but 99% of that profit went to the top executives and bankers. That money then hardly trickles down at all, especially under our new tax laws where it may be hardly taxed at all. I can easily imagine that in the future, the US economy will continue to grow, but if you sort of mentally split the US into two countries - the "Unites States of the Rich" and the "Unites States of the Masses" , the USR economy would be growing robustly, and the USM would be shrinking per-capita (partly because the USM bears the cost of supporting the increasing poor and elderly, etc.)

4-22-05

4-21-05

4-21-05

4-20-05

4-20-05

4-20-05

4-20-05

4-20-05

Cartoon characters : Miss Chief (the Native-American S&M mistress) & Dolly Lama (the large breasted Buddhist).

The B in subtle is very subtle.

Men who don't masturbate are a menace to society. They either wind up as womanizers, rapists, serial killers, or priests.

4-19-05

4-19-05

4-19-05

4-17-05

1) I'm going to San Francisco on April 30th - anyone know a good, cool, cheap hotel, somewhere near the city?

2) I'd like to travel somewhere exotic and cheap soon, like Vietnam or India or something like that; if any of you have done that recently and can share some tips, that would be lovely.

3) I'm thinking of driving across the country soon; if you live in any of the middle areas between the coasts (other than Texas) and I can show up with minimal announcement and sleep on your couch, let me know, it would be much appreciated. (unfortunately, it costs a small fortune in gas to get across the country these days)

4-17-05

4-17-05

4-17-05

4-17-05

4-17-05

4-17-05

4-17-05

4-17-05

4-17-05

4-16-05

4-16-05

4-16-05

4-16-05

4-16-05

4-6-05

"A person needs new experiences. Without change, something inside us sleeps and seldom awakens. The sleeper MUST awaken."

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

4-4-05

4-3-05

4-3-05

When you're riding a loop, you may think it doesn't matter which direction you go on it, that it's the same ride either way. That's far from correct. Consider a simple loop ride with some elevation change. There are two inflection points - the lowest point and the highest point. You can ride it clockwise or counterclockwise. First of all there are differences of what side of the road you are on - the inside or the outside of the loop, and which scenery is on your left or right. Let's ignore those small details. Also, let's assume that the two inflection points are equidistant in either path, and that the slope is roughly the same either way, to remove those differences. So, you can either climb A and descend B, or climb B and descend A. These are drastically different rides because climbing and descending are totally different. In the A-B ride, you spend 90% of your time in the A section, because climbing is so much slower than descending. You will see more of the micro scenery in the A section. On one ride that I like, the Pozo-Las Pilitas ride, it's important to descend through Las Pilitas because it's full of loose dogs that will attack you; if you climb up Las Pilitas you're moving too slow and the dogs will get you (as Iain and I found out a while ago).

A lot of people confuse the feeling of exhausting their blood sugar with getting a good workout. If you do a hard ride and just drink water and don't eat at all, you will feel totally wasted by the end because you've burned all your easily available sugar (you get light headed, dizzy, can't think straight, can hardly walk). Most people think "whoa, great workout". Not so. If you do the same ride and drink a sugar solution and eat some snacks, you'll feel tired but functional at the end. That's a much better workout.

4-2-05

4-1-05

I'm going to sonic war. Whenever I leave the house I'm going to point my big, nasty speakers at them and blast the worst sounds I can find.

4-1-05

4-1-05

4-1-05

I wish I had talent - art or music or something. Artists can get away with anything - drugs, women, being absolute irresponsible bastards, and people will just say "he's got that artistic spirit!" and still admire and respect you.

3-31-05

3-30-05

Brett says a Pizza stone would help; yeah, that's surely true. Also, opening the oven door a minimum amount is always a good idea.

3-30-05

I've been privileged to work with a great crew at Oddworld; I'm proud of the work we did. The games didn't ever work out quite the way we wanted, but at least we tried to do something creative and different, and mostly succeeded. It's a real tragedy that Stranger's Wrath is not getting any marketting at all; I think it's a pretty good game (and the reviews bear that out). It's also a shame that we aren't able to make another game on the XBox; I'm proud of the engine we made, and the pipeline and toolchain and process that we finally had set up for our new game (Fangus) was really smooth. Our overall development process is the best I've ever seen at a small developer; I feel like we just got the factory really humming, all ready to pump out widgets, and now we're closing the doors. It's a shame that the great team we have here is going to be broken up and spread around the industry. But, so goes the tide of the game industry.

3-28-05

3-28-05

3-28-05

com·mu·ni·cate v. com·mu·ni·cat·ed, com·mu·ni·cat·ing, com·mu·ni·cates v. tr. To convey information about; make known; impart: communicated his views to our office. To reveal clearly; manifest: Her disapproval communicated itself in her frown. To spread (a disease, for example) to others; transmit: a carrier who communicated typhus.

3-28-05

3-28-05

Gus and Antonio have the big stacks at the table; both have near $450k. The next stack down is around $250k - and he's a fish, so his stack is not worth much, and the rest are around $150k. If Gus calls and wins, he'll knock out Antonio and have a $900k stack. Since Gus plays a big stack so well, he's got a 90% chance of winning after that. If Gus folds, he'll have a stack around $350, and Antonio will have a stack around $550. Now Antonio is favored to win, and Gus is closer to the low stacks; Gus here maybe has a 30% chance of winning the tournament. The pot odds in this individual pot are irrelevant. This is also a winner-take-all tournament so the chance of winning the whole thing is all that matters. If Gus calls, his chance of winning the hand is P. His chance of winning the whole thing is then P*.9 , since if he calls and loses, he has almost no chance. If he folds, his chance is 0.3 , so for the call to be good, P must be >= 1/3.

What can Antonio have? Any pocket pair would probably play that way, though he would have limped some of the time with AA and KK. AK and AQ would have played that way, and against Gus he may have done it even with AJ, and perhaps even KQ and AT. Antonio is also a bit wild sometimes, he will make that play occasionally with any two cards. Gus says "since I have ten high", which tells us he's putting Antonio on high cards, and Gus thinks his two cards are live. Against two high cards, Gus will win about 37% of the time. Against a lower pocket pair (77 or lower) Gus wins about 45% of the time. Against 88 or 99, Gus wins about 30% , against TT or higher, Gus wins about 16%. Let's count the hands.

22 - 77 (45%) : 6*6 = 36
88 or 99 (30%) : 3+6 = 9
TT - AA (16%) : 3 + 4*6 = 27
AK,AQ,AJ,KQ (37%) : 16*4 = 64

Now, the thing that makes this a great move is that most people don't realize this is simply a good mathematical EV move, so they think you are playing crazy, which makes them play badly against you. If Antonio thinks Gus is crazy and is playing more liberally, it makes Gus's move even better. After Gus does this, everyone else at the table thinks he's nuts and starts to play worse against him, making his EV for his whole career better. I'm on to you, Gus Hansen, look out!

The other big factor here is that winning this tournament means almost nothing, the prize is so small. Even if it's a bad move for winning, it's a good move for Gus's career, because it adverstises his "crazy" play which will pay off in the more important tournaments in the future.

3-23-05

3-23-05

3-22-05

3-22-05

Dave and I at work constantly get into big arguments and after much debating and misunderstanding and clarification, we finally realize we're both arguing the same side of the issue.

3-20-05

At the bottom of Death Valley, hundred of feet below sea level, sits a huge salt lake; all around its shallow shores are deposits of crystalized salt that form a crust on the spongey earth of clumped crystals that look like cauliflower heads. All around death valley are a tall ridge of mountains - mountains of many forms; some volcanic jagged peaks, some sandstone soft and rounded by the wind. All the rocks are strange and vibrant colors - magenta, green and ochre . In the middle, the hills are covered in wild flowers of many types.

3-18-05

3-18-05

3-17-05

3-15-05

3-13-05

3-13-05

There are a lot of things that I like a certain way. I like the big spoons separated from the little spoons in my silverware holder. That way, when I have a spoon emergency, I can quickly grab the right type. What do I do when someone comes over and puts the spoons away the wrong way? I'm grateful that they're helping me with the dishes, but at the same time I just saw them do it wrong. If I say nothing and just correct their work, they'll get annoyed because I'm watching over their shoulder correcting them, which is annoying to everyone. If I tell them how I'd like them to do it, they get annoyed that I always have to have things my way.

I don't know how to trust people; I just really can't figure this out. When someone regularly does the wrong thing - how can you fully trust them? How can you ask them to do something critical for you, and not check up on them, not supervise them, when you know that they often make mistakes? It's easy to just not trust these people, but "these people" are 99% of the world, and if you don't trust them you can't have any kind of mutual relationship with them.

I really have no idea how to spend an evening without booze or TV; sure, there are rare cases where you can do something fun that occupies you, or work through the night on some exciting project, etc. but on a daily basis, when I'm tired and uninspired, I feel like I'm just trying to make the hours go away, which is a horrible thing.

3-13-05

3-13-05

For example, let's imagine I'm starting with a guy at rest. I push the stick slightly forward, which makes the pelvis go forward a bit. At first, the feet might just stay locked where they are, and the guy just leans a bit. If I leave the stick forward, he'll take a little step to catch up, but he might just step with one foot first; if the pelvis is still between the two feet, there's no need to step with the other foot; now if I move the pelvis to catch up with the forward foot, he'll bring the back foot forward. Now let's say I slam the stick forward before the back foot even touches the ground - now instead of landing that foot next to the forward one, he'll pass it by and take a bigger step.

An interesting extension is to provide feedback from the legs to your drive force. That is, look at the configuration of the legs and determine how they can apply forces and only allow those forces to the pelvis. So, for example, if you're in the middle of stepping forward and your foot is off the ground, you wouldn't be able to reverse direction, you have to wait for your foot to hit the ground, then you can apply that force. A less intrusive compromise might go like this - let the simple pelvis model run, but force each footstep move to finish - eg. don't cancel or reverse a footstep move in progress. Then, constrain the pelvis moves based on the foot IK - eg. the pelvis moves as it wishes, but only if the feet can stay IK'd and not distort the legs beyond some limits.

3-13-05

The Unreal 3 Engine is rapidly becoming the only viable choice for AAA game development. Unlike most people, I don't find it particularly amazing; the graphical features are still behind the literature, it's just a reasonably good execution of what's well-known. The lighting is still just a conglomeration of hacks, they're not really trying to be more physically accurate, which is something I'd love to try some day. However, there are basically no viable alternatives. The Renderware guys have not proved they can make a decent engine. Source is pretty cool, but it's very specialized, and Valve is not putting the work into nice tools the way Epic is. [...]

3-13-05

3-13-05

The Mission looks like a promising place for me to live in SF. It's a bit grungy, there's real life there, hipsters and artists and working people. There's a park where the people go and sit in the sun on nice days. There are pretty good clubs in walking distance. There are quiet residential streets just one block off the party streets. The only big negative is the crime. It's one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in SF, plagued by hispanic gang violence. On the other hand, most of the cool & affordable neighborhoods are known for their crime. It's bizarre to me the way poor people can live in these areas with crazy high rents and home values. I grew up in LA which is severely financially segregated for the most part - the poor are isolated into ghettos by property costs. A small studio apartment in The Mission costs around $1000/month - how do the gang bangers afford that?

It's really interesting to me walking around The Mission District as opposed to the other "bad" neighborhoods in SF that I've been in lately - parts of Oakland, SOMA, the Tenderloin, etc. The Mission is primarily hispanic, and that influence is thriving and vibrant there - lots of panaderias, latino music stores, markets, restaurants, working people walking around, and lots of wire services to send money to Mexico. It's amazing to me how the hispanics in America work so hard and send so much money back to their families (it's the #2 industry in Mexico, after oil, bigger than agriculture, manufacturing, textiles, etc.). The Mission is poor, but vibrant, working, you can feel the community and pride in their culture. The other bad neighborhoods are predominantly African-American, and they have a totally different feel. There are a lot more bums and drunks just sitting around on the streets, begging, people in groups just hanging out doing nothing; the shops are boarded up, the buildings are run down, the streets are dirty; you feel hopelessness there, people who are poor and believe they will always be poor.

3-12-05

"Dog Day Afternoon" is a big disappointment. Maybe back in the 70's when it came out, Al Pacino's screaming over-acting was fresh and energizing, but now it just feels like part of his "Hoo Ha" oevre of "Scent of a Woman" and "Scarface" and "Dick Tracy". It's another one of those stories that takes a little tiny narrative path and just keeps diverting it and piling obstacles on it over and over to stretch it out.

3-12-05

An example to illustrate this goes like this - on the button with 53, Gus might raise the blinds to make it 3X the blinds to go. He doesn't want action here, he just wants a fold, but if he does get a call and sees a flop, you might catch something and surprise him (he won't expect you to have the 53), that way you win a big hand. Let's say the big blind raises all-in. Say you made it $30k, and he had $100k, so it's $70k more to you. If you call the pot will have $205 (beause of the small blind), and it's only $70 to call. You're getting good pot odds to call, even with the 53. When you turn it over, everyone thinks you're crazy, but they were good logical moves all the way. The fact that everyone thinks you're crazy playing the 53 will pay you off even better in the long run.

Note that these types of plays may not be good in your home game. They're based on the fact that most good tournament players fold a lot; if you're playing against calling stations, these moves are not profitable. On the other hand, home players will adjust even more poorly than pros adjust to Gus, so advertising your "craziness" may pay off even better.

3-12-05

3-10-05

One of the great things about Poker is that it's one of the very few games where a novice and an expert can play together and both enjoy the session. Obviously that's not always true, but it is exceptionally so. In most games - traditional board games like Chess, video games like shooters or fighting games - when an expert and a novice play, it's no fun for either because the expert just dominates the novice. In poker, you can sort of play on different levels. The novice doesn't really understand what's going on, so he's happy when he makes big hands and wins some pots, and occasionally he'll even win the session. The expert knows the luck will come and go, and he's playing 2 or 3 levels beyond the novice, setting traps, gathering information, learning the novice's patterns and slowly milking away his stack. In a ring game with a few experts and a few novices, everyone can have fun.

3-09-05

3-06-05

3-03-05

2-27-05

2-24-05

2-24-05

Step 1. Read all the instructions before proceeding.
Step 2. Take a piece of paper and fold in half, then in half again
Step 3. Cut off the four corners of the paper, at 45 degree angles, half an inch from the corner
etc. etc.
Step 10. Don't do any of the above steps
Step 11. Write the word "done" on your piece of paper.

2-24-05

2-22-05

"Nine Queens" is ok. You riff-raff would probably love it, go watch it. The acting and direction is quite good. The story is rather frustrating. The twist is obvious pretty much from the beginning, and then it just becomes the story of how we get to the conclusion. That would be all well and good, but it's one of those stories where the actual task is very simple, but you keep getting problem after problem thrown in the way - you're so close to the end, then whoah another problem, over and over. It has no solid story arc that progresses. The dialog is good, the sets are good.

"Life is Sweet" is a solid movie. It's rather hard to watch, it doesn't really go anywhere, and the characters are quite annoying. On the plus side, the acting is strong, it's very realistic, it's not insulting, it doesn't have any big mood moments or silly twists, etc.

"We don't live here any more" is a great movie, I adore Mark Ruffalo, he's a fantastic actor, though that's almost spoiled for me now because when I see him I see Mark Ruffalo instead of the character. Laura Dern is just horrible.

"The Five Senses" is a great, great movie. I think I first saw it long ago, perhaps in Seattle, perhaps with Tiffiny? Or maybe it was alone. I remember the guy getting the late night massage; I thought he had AIDs, but now I see that's not in the movie? It's simple, there are some rather poor/cheesy characters, but overall it's beautiful. The Marie-Louise Parker character in particular is annoying, she seems to be trying to say sexy/shocking female things, but they don't come out that way, they're just awkward.

2-22-05

2-21-05

Preheat oven to 350. In a big stew pan, sear your meat to brown. Lots of types of meat are good here - chicken, duck, lamb, pork shoulder, etc. Generally choose the same cuts of meats you would use in a pot roast, something that will tenderize nicely with braising; rustic country cuts & flavors are good here, and using very lean cuts is okay. Generally you want to use at least 2 different types of meat, and some type of sausage. For example - duck sausage and pork shoulder - chicken thighs and lamb shank and pork sausage - etc. Work in batches, brown meat and remove to the side; be careful not to burn the brown bits on the bottom of the pan; salt and pepper of course; if the meat is at all fatty, no oil is needed at all. Add 1 diced yellow onion and cook slowly to brown slightly; add butter or oil if the pan is too dry. Deglaze the pan with liquid of your choice - white wine, beer, or stock are all fine. Now add the meat back in, add 1 quart of stock, and any root vegetables or aromatics - chopped carrot is nice, celery, turnip, garlic, pearl onions, etc - not too much though, this is about the meat and beans, not the veggies. Add bay leaves, thyme, and 1 dried red chili. If you want you can do a bouquet garni, but I usually don't bother - let people pick the herbs and stems out on the plate, it's fun. Put in the oven to simmer with the lid on for about an hour. After the hour, add the bits that don't need so much cooking. Now's when you add the beans, I also like to add some canned whole tomatos (diced) (again, Trader Joe's or Progresso). Cook for about another half hour. Take the lid off if you have a lot of liquid, leave it on if you don't. If you have too much liquid, pour some off and reduce it on the stove and then add it back. Serve with a sprinkle of parsely and toasted baguette. Note - bacon or similar fatty pork is delicious in this, but I try to avoid such poison; use it if you wish.

2-21-05

I feel like I'm repeating myself; I'm a record caught in a rut; I keep having the same ideas because I keep having the same stimulus. I need to be kicked.

2-21-05

2-20-05

2-20-05

2-19-05

2-15-05

2-13-05

2-13-05

2-13-05

2-13-05

2-10-05

2-10-05

2-10-05

2-8-05

Cheaters on the Social Contract.

Morality is what you do when noone's watching.

How you think you made up a song, then realize you heard it without knowing.

I have total disdain for rich people that shop in thrift stores and dress emo or punk, yet I am one of them.

2-8-05

2-8-05

2-8-05

2-6-05

2-2-05

2-2-05

1-30-05

1-30-05

Rhythm typing watcher and dynamic music. I love coding or writing and feeling the beat of the music and sort of typing along with it; the problem is the music doesn't always make a good beat for typing. The solution of course is to make the music from your typing. It works like this - typing, or any other form of activator (like a web cam) drives a music sim. The music sim could be very simple - it starts with just a nice mellow background track that's always playing at the zero activation level. This background track is at some base BPM. As you start typing, the system sees the activation, and each keypress is a beat. The amount of typing also gives an intensity measure. The system guesses the BPM of your typing and tries to scale the background track to match your BPM or some integer multiple or divisor of your BPM; eg if the base track is 40 BPM and you're typing at 73 BPM, it would try to match 73/2 (36.5) by slowing down the base track. Based on your level of activity, higher tracks would ease in, first like maybe a simple hi-hat at your exact BPM (73), then some embellishment tracks; they would fade back out when your activity dropped off.

1-26-05

One thing that's bugging me is the reviewers that give the game like an 8.5 (out of 10) and list all these great things about it, and don't really mention anything bad. I know there are a lot of flaws with the game, I could list them, but how as a reviewer can you get off giving the game an 85% when you don't mention any flaws? Game industry journalism in general is absolute shit, but of course criticism in general isn't much better.

I hear a lot of complaints about the camera in reviews, but I'm not really sure what people are complaining about. Some people think the first person camera is too slow. I'd like to see actual usability testing on the speed of the fps cam look to see if that's really an issue. I suspect that the real issue there is that the first person camera is different than Halo, and everyone is used to Halo, so anything different feels bad. Some people complain about the 3rd person camera being too slow; again, I'd love to see real testing. It's about the same speed as the cams in Sly Cooper or Rather & Clank, but it is a lot slower than the first person cam; it's a navigation cam, not an action cam. Some people complain about the 3rd person cam getting caught on things. Yeah, that's unfortunate, but I've always found the alternatives to be worse - bring the cam closer is bad, making the cam really stiff and twitchy or making it cut, all are bad. It would've been nice to have some more nice smooth camera repellers on objects the camera can get stuck on. This is one of those areas where there's no replacement for lots of testing. The camera feels great to me because I've worked with it so much, it's what I'm used to. You need to be able to actually watch virgins get their hands on it - and their words really are pretty useless too, I need to see what is actually happening to the camera when they're feeling frustrated.

1-24-05

Crab cakes are another classic dish you should get out and not at home. Way too much work for the value if you do it yourself.

1-24-05

1-11-05

1-11-05

1-11-05

1-10-05

1. The laws of the universe are finite and knowable (knowable means knowable in principle, not necessarily knowable in practice).

2. Everything in the universe is governed by those laws.

That's it. But that's sort of just my choice - I choose to not believe things that are unlikely or unsupported. Other people choose to believe things without evidence. They find life more enjoyable if they simply choose to believe certain things without really having evidence. In general there's a spectrum of human thought and evaluation, where different people need more or less evidence to jump onto some belief.

1-10-05

The other type of game that I really love are the very simple games built on some fun mechanic, like Tetris Attack, Marble Madness, Boulder Dash, etc.. These are fantastic, but almost impossible to make. The inspiration for a simple mechanic that makes a game is not something you can just have on demand.

Why has no one made other games for the DDR pad ? The DDR pad is the biggest selling alternative input device on any platform, there are lots of them out there, the market is easily big enough to sustain a cheap game, and you could do lots of fun games for it, especially party games for two pads would be great. Even simple workout games would sell, I think.

1-10-05

1-10-05

1-10-05

1-9-05

1-6-05

1-5-05

1-5-05

1-4-05

1-4-05

1-4-05

1-3-05

1-3-05

1-3-05

It's funny sometimes how poverty and crappy systems can actually lead you to better things (better IMHO anyway). Everyone with money uses it to isolate themselves and provide comfort - a nice house in the suburbs, your own car (a metal coccoon from the scary world), your own home theater so you don't have to go out for that, your own espresso machine. In France people don't have those fancy things at home - you go out for your coffee, your movie, you take public transit, you go to a Net Cafe to play games. Similarly, because they don't have great roads and cars, they've built great railways; we took the TGV from Paris to Marseille - so smooth, so fast, comfortable, great views, the best way to travel - and it leaves and arrives exactly on time, you can show up at the last minute and get on, not like horrible horrible air planes. The cell network in Europe is far better than America - partly because they had such crappy land lines, expensive fees for land line calls, no high speed networks, very little cable TV lines; on the other hand, we had great land lines (subsidized by the government and developed by aggressive venture cap), which puts far less demand on the cell network, especially for things like internet and high-speed access.

12-25-04

12-22-04

On the other hand, if you actually think about working for minimum wage, it's mind boggling. Think about it - $6/hour, for 8 hours, gives you $50 a day. I spend nearly that much on food on many days! $50 a day, for your rent, health care, utilities, clothes, transportation, food, everything!? My god, what's the point of even going to work if you make so little. That's $1 for 10 minutes of work. You surely make more money begging. If you ever have any hope of making decent money, then it's foolish to work for minimum wage. eg. if you're a kid in college - don't work some stupid job, just get loans. You'll easily pay them off later, and it's better to just have that time to enjoy. If you don't understand this, think of the value of an hour of leisure. Maybe it's $20. Thus, if you earn $40/hour, you're effectively getting a +$20 value for that hour, since you're losing an hour of your life in exchange for the work you're doing. If you work for $10/hour, you are losing $10 each hour! That is, the value of your life that you are giving up for that hour is worth more than what they are paying you. If you really think your life is only worth $6/hour, that's very sad.

12-22-04

Responsibility and impulsiveness. This is sort of an interesting and difficult life trade-off. On the one hand, if you are wise in your decisions, you can avoid regrets - note that this does not necessarilly mean you are just a cautious stick in the mud, you still might make decisions like running away with the Circus or doing drugs or whatever, it's just that you actually thought about it, you saw the consequences, and decided that was the good thing to do. To be bold & thoughtful is difficult, but it is in some ways great. One problem with this is that making wise decisions takes time, and by taking that time, you will miss many opportunities, especially in social situations where split-second reactions are important. On the other hand, if you are impulsive and don't consider your actions carefully, you are liberated in a way, free from considering consequences, and you can do a lot more fun wild things; the disadvantage is you will wind up doing a lot of things that cause you trouble and pain, and of course you risk a small chance of very bad things like injury or jail. Finding a good balance here is almost impossible, because once you start considering what the right balance is, you've fallen into the careful/thoughtful camp. Of course, what many people do is behave very carefully most of the time, and then get themselves drunk to free themselves from that thought and allow themselves to be impulsive. This is of course very silly - if impulsiveness is good and fun, then it's good all the time, and you should do it when sober too.

The other thing I've been thinking about a lot is the way very small differences in the way you weight various outcomes in decision making lead to very large differences in behavior. Let's imagine you're making decisions as I described previously, by considering the choices and generating an EV based on your perceptual rating of the value of the various outcomes. If we were all perfectly smart, we would still make different choices, because the way we rate the outcomes is different. As a simple example, you have people who generally find confrontation to be very unpleasant. So, any outcome involving confrontation they would rate very negative, and that biases their whole decision making to avoid those situations. Every normal person enjoys good times and doesn't like bad times, but even small differences in how you rate them lead to very large behavior variation. For example, someone might really enjoy the good times (as opposed to neutral times), and not care too much about bad times - this person is more likely to make decisions that have a chance of going very good or very bad, such as running off to Vegas with a stranger; someone else might not rate the good times very high, but rate the bad times very low - this person will have totally different behavior, making decisions based primarily on avoiding the bad times, so they're more likely to just stay home all the time and watch TV.

12-16-04

12-15-04

12-12-04

12-12-04

12-09-04

Being a geek is really stupid. Did you hang out with other geeks in high school, play computer games and D&D ? Yeah, maybe we went to good colleges, maybe we have good jobs now, are we happy? We like to pretend we're so smart and superior to the "jocks", but they were out there living life, having fun - the whole point of life is to maximize your total enjoyment - we have failed miserably. Being a geek is really dumb.

12-07-04

Coders have a bad habit of holding big change lists open as work in progress for a long time. I try to kill that - check it in, or revert it. Either it goes in the main line or it doesn't belong on your system. We also try to get people to check in often - once a feature is working or crash-free, check it in, even if it's not done, then keep checking in the little improvements. Also, we fire builds after each check-in. If there are problems, I want to find them right away, not the next day when everyone syncs. As always, the goal is to isolate the problem - if one guy checks in, fires a build, uh-oh, it failed, he can fix it real quick before too many coders sync to the broken build. Another little thing that helps here is whenever you are adding files or changing the project, go ahead and add empty files to p4 and put them in the project, and check that in so the project changes are done. Then check the files back out and work on them just as edits.

12-07-04

12-06-04

12-06-04

12-06-04

First and mainly, I think I made a mistake in presenting the reason for robustness and decoupling. Robustness is the idea that the game never goes down, even with horribly broken use, and decoupling is the idea that when someone horribly breaks one system, the other systems keep running so people can still work. These are not just important for small teams or with junior people, they're always important. We acheive these things primarily by making the engine and code resilient to even fatal errors. There are other ways to meet these goals, namely Branches (source-control branches, so people work in isolation until their work is stable, then they merge to the main tree), and Build Escrow (in which the coder's build first goes through test approval before going to the content team). Branches and Build Escrow are both good, but they only work once the game is reasonably well established. We were building the code base from scratch, and rapidly iterating on design trying to hit milestones and demos, so it was frequently important to be able to code up a feature in the morning, deliver it to design and have it done by evening. For larger teams, the ideas of robustness and decoupling are even more important. This is part of the idea of overall team productivity. If a programmer takes the time to make his code extra safe, maybe it takes him 5% or 10% more time. If he does not, and he checks in code that breaks the build for the entire company, he's costing 100% of the work of maybe 50 other people. That's a catastrophic loss of productivity, even if it only happens once every hundred days it's a disaster. Most games these days are "design limitted", that is, the things that really prevent you from shipping a great game on time are in design, so it's silly to save coder time and potentially cost a lot of designer time.

What are the disadvantages of a clean self-protecting C++ coding style? Well, the compile times are slightly slonger, but our build is around 10 minutes and Halo 2's is around 7 minutes, so the difference is not very big. Also, that has more to do with arranging your headers well, we're currently sloppy about that, we could do much better to hide implementations. Having more clean separation of modules and opaque interfaces around whole systems would help that immensely. A related problem is that things like smart pointers and classes used in scopes forces you to put some things in the headers; you can't have a pure C-style hidden interface without doing a lot of work with pimpls and such. A lot of people think it takes too much time to code this way - that's just not the case; once you get used to it, the additional time needed is totally negligible, and is more than made up for with the time savings of having nice templates and classes that automate so many operations for you. The only two real disadvantages that I know of are - 1) when you hire new people, you have to teach them your base classes and your system; our system forms a sort of meta-language on top of C++, which is mostly enforced through compiler errors, but there are some things that you just have to know to do; 2) the protections seem to make people lazy, both in code and content; the protections are supposed to be in addition to proper testing and good algorithms, etc, not instead of them.

A little thing - the hierarchical allocation parser can obviously be used on things other than memory size; you can do it on allocation count, you can do it on CPU usage, vert count, etc. It's a nice way to track anything and figure out where it's coming from. This is especially nice with a "long frame tracker". To do the long frame tracking, you just run the tracking stats every frame, and you reset them to zero between frames. Then, as soon as you see a frame that you consider long, eg. longer than 1/20th of a second for example, you log the stats for that frame.

12-04-04

I had to come back from the talk a bit early because we're trying to go gold here (maybe today!). We had four crash bugs when I got back (!!). Only one of them was found by the lovely EA test, and three of them were found by us internally, despite the fact that we have basically no internal test department at all. Lovely. The four crashes were - 1) XACT seems to have a bug with auto release cues and a bad linked list walk, 2) we had a resource registration bug in our code that caused a null deref in a very rare case (only on the DVD build), 3) one crash in the granny "UUU" department, 4) another crash in granny, again UUU/paging related. Amazingly, we fixed them all in like one hour. The UUU bugs in particular have been with us for a long time, and we never had a repro, and in fact I thought maybe they were fixed, but suddenly they came back. In fact, the previous fix I thought I'd done was a total red herring. When I did the fix, I also put in lots of catching to detect if the error happened again. It turns out that my check/catch code was being hit, and the damn content team was seeing those errors reported and skipping past them without telling us or sending us the logs. This has been going on for months, so we could have easily fixed this bug long ago. In general, our whole company and content departments are extremely unaware of how their behavior affects us. In code, we have to start first and crunch hard to get the engine and tools going; then we all work hard, and the content guys slip and slip and finish way late, and then we in code have to continue crunching to finish up. We try to make the code super robust so they can work, we try to put in error checking to help them and to help us find errors and fix them early so we don't wind up with crash bugs at the last minute. It's extremely bad to be making these fixes so late - we've had weeks of test, and we're making these fixes now, so all that testing has not tested these fixes. Also, our producers at OW and EA have become totally irresponsible. They're obviously sick of working on the game and with each other, they just want to kick the game to manufacturing, they don't really care if it's tested right; we make these fixes, they just want to play through it once, call it good and send it out. So, anyhoo, we found these UUU crashes which were tricky little buggers - we've known there was a problem for months and could never find it. I think it was just having those couple of days away at Game-Tech that made it possible. When you work 6 or 7 days a week for months, your brain just gets fried, you can't think straight. Game-Tech was intense, but it was still a break from coding, so I came back with a bit of a clear mind and was able to see the problem. Getting that time away is so valuable for intellectual labor, it's hard to quantify what a productivity boost you get.

11-21-04

11-20-04

11-20-04

11-20-04

I would discourage all programmers from relying on repro for bugs. I don't use repros unless it's a strange bug or needs a specific case to test, etc. Generally I try to fix bugs just by looking at the code. When someone describes a bug to me, I think of where in the code that problem could be caused, then I simply go and look at that part of the code. You can look at that code and see how it might break, and 99% of the time you can spot the bug just by looking and making sure it's robust. Even if you don't spot the bug, if you have a good idea where it is, you just add some more asserts and self-checks and logs in that part of the code, and hopefully those will trip in the future and give you more information, and they can stay there to make sure the code seems strong. Another thing that I emphasize is to look at how the bug happened and try to prevent that from happening in the future. Look at the buggy code - how did that get in? Was it reviewed? Did both people involved actually understand that bit of code? Did they talk to the original author? Did they test it? Did they have good asserts checking the code? I try to not only fix the bug, but also fix the behavior that made the bug. Sure, sometimes you just have mistakes that make bugs and everyone was doing the right thing, but that's actually rare compared to bugs made from someone trying to be too fast or sloppy (often me). Repro is sort of a crutch for bugs. I don't like to fix the code for one specific repro case - I like to make the code bulletproof for all possible break cases.

It's funny to me that we (Oddworld) and Bungie use the absolute opposite coding styles, and yet the result is extremely similar. We use heavy C++, dynamic allocation, multiple inheritance, STL. They use almost straight C, macros, function pointers instead of inheritance, no dynamic allocation at all, etc. In the end, we both push the XBox very hard, running the GPU to the limit, using all the 64 megs of RAM to the fullest. I know they don't believe that we use the hardware or memory optimally (in reality, we do stall on L2 cache misses because of our polymorphism, but that's maybe 3% of CPU time lost), and we don't believe they can possibly develop rapidly and robustly, but probably we're both wrong. However, our situations are very different, and I can't imagine their style would work here. We've had to hack in crazy new features on a daily basis; if I want to make some types of objects support some new interface, I can just define that interface and dynamic_cast to it at the query point; I don't have to push my crazy feature up to the base class.

11-20-04

11-17-04

Some really cool scenarious with the fast run & ram might have been: a chase - some giant guy that you can't kill chases after you; you just have to run away, ala the big rock in Raiders of the Lost Ark; chasing down enemies who are fleeing (we did get some of this) or a carriage hijacking or something - in a big level, a carriage is speeding away with the outlaw boss in it, you have to run up along side it, while his goons on top shoot at you; you can ram it and bump it, you have to get up to speed with it and try to jump in. In general, the enemy could've had fast vehicle you have to run along side of.

Often when I suggest ideas, the designers say "I didn't think that was possible in the engine". Well, it probably isn't, but it easily could have been. Engine features are made based on what's needed for the game. The design has to be done (considering the schedule) based on what will work, not what does work.

11-16-04

11-16-04

11-16-04

11-15-04

We have various different character types and races. In the shipping game, they basically never mix. We originally planned on mixing them, and wrote most of the code for that. Part of the original vision was a sort of play of the races and their interaction - like, you have the oppressed races and their oppressors, you have rednecks and city folk, and they sort of interact and mix and talk to each other and you can interact with them and manipulate their reactions, etc. Most of the races are in the shipping game, and they have their character and whatnot, but they don't interact.

With a lot of features we had a sort of chicken/egg problem. We'd sort of do a feature, like supporting moving collision and animated objects. I always imagined levels where there were giant gears and pistons and you could run around on them - avoid getting smashed yourself, and knock your enemies into getting smashed. Nobody ever implemented anything like this and there was no call from design to improve the "moving collision" code, so we didn't work on it. The result was the code is rather sketchy and unpolished, because it just wasn't a priority. The design guys tend to try to use what works and exists, so they never used moving collision much. This is why coherent direction and cross-department vision is so important, you need someone in design who knows what's useful and what's not, and you need someone in code who knows what can be done and what can't, and they need to get together and agree; then the game needs to be designed based on the features that will exist, not the features that do exist.

Everything takes us 5X longer than most game devs, because every feature has to be extremely polished. A game like GTA:SA could never be done here - their controls suck, it glitches like crazy, but they have tons of features. We would take one of their features and spend years tweaking and polishing it. Obviously GTA:SA is very successful, but I find it intolerable to play. I think the optimal game dev model is somewhere in between, but much closer to GTA. Basically polish doesn't matter much except on the player controls. The game should be responsive and solid so far as controls are concerned, but if it looks like crap, glitches, pops, the animations are terrible, no one cares (well, the average consumer doesn't care), and it's a waste of dev time. In a way, that makes me sad, because I have a very high quality standard and like to work on solid product, but it just doesn't pay in the marketplace.

11-15-04

Clearly the semi-innovative thing about it is the 1st to 3rd person gameplay. This is the first game I know of that has a really fully functional 1st person shooter and a 3rd person platformer/melee/driving put together, and quite seamless and smooth where you can switch back & forth and it feels good and natural. You actually switch in combat to do various moves, unlike some games where you move in 3rd and snipe in 1st, etc. The 1st and 3rd are also actually different, it's not like Heretic or Everquest or something where you can use either view, but the 3rd person is really just 1st person on a stick behind the axis of rotation.

In 1st person, the game is basically a shooter, but the weapons are a bit quirky. Many of the weapons are not basic damage weapons, they're tools for manipulating the enemies, and you can combine them in sequences for "combos". One of the basic combos is just to freeze a guy with bees so you can lay a thudslug or boombat on him. Another common one is to skunk a mob then drop a boombat in the middle of them. There are also lots of environmental traps that you can make use of; there's lots of knocking guys through glass to their death, things like that.

In 3rd person, the game is like a platformer/adventure/driving/melee game. Here, you are fast, very fast, and control sort of like a car or motorcycle (actually the controls morph from standard walking at low speed to more like a car at high speed). You can ram and meelee. One move few people know is that if you jump before you ram a guy, you keep your velocity and go through him - very useful.

One of my favorite things about the game is the twist. I won't give it away (we've asked all the press to keep it a secret), but part way through, there's a big story twist. That's pretty standard in movies and games, but there's a difference - the play actually changes a lot as well. Unlike most games where you get a story twist, or play as the enemy, and the gameplay is basically identical, here the whole feel of the gameplay changes a lot, the pacing changes. It's a cinematic thing, there's a shift and suddenly the feel is different for the 3rd act building to the climax. In the beginning, you're a bounty hunter, in the end?

11-14-04

Halo 2 actually reminds me a lot of "Colony Wars". That was a great game! Great music, story, voice acting, and beautiful graphics.

11-14-04

11-13-04

11-10-04

Engine coding is fun because the technology is challenging, the algorithms are interesting. It's frustrating because an engine in itself doesn't show up on the screen - you need people to use it well, which rarely happens. Gameplay coding is fun because you can do features all alone and get cool results in the actual game. Gameplay coding is frustrating because you do 3 features that are cut for every 1 that's used, and you have to spend tons of time polishing silly little features and eventualities that the player will never notice.

11-9-04

11-8-04

11-8-04

11-8-04

11-8-04

Non-skippable cinematics are just an insult to the player. It tells the player "we don't give a damn what you want to do, we're going to force you to sit there and watch this". There's nothing else like it in media - if I watch TV, I can change the channel - can you imagine a show that prevented you from changing the channel away? I would never watch that show. Can you imagine a DVD that turns off your skip and fast-forward? It's my DVD player, in my house, I'll skip if I want to. (in fact DVD's do have those non-skippable intros which are infuriating). With a book or magazine, you can turn the page any time you want; if the story gets boring, you can jump ahead, but you can also go back if you want. A game is not a movie in a theatre, it's an interactive experience that the user is creating for themselves, they should be allowed to craft that experience for themselves. Now, some people take that too far and ruin the game - the game universe should still have a rule set and logic, and even if people want to do things outside of that, they can't, but they can try (eg. the player might want to drive a future mech tank in your fantasy RPG, don't let them!). You see, that's part of the content, which the game developer should control, the user should be in control of the medium, the mechanism for viewing the content.

11-7-04

11-7-04

11-7-04

11-7-04

11-7-04

11-4-04

A related note is that for difficulty to remain in the sweet spot (I've been assuming you know about the sweet spot - the spot where it's challenging, but not frustrating, where it takes a little while to beat, but not too long), for difficult to remain in the sweet spot as you play, it must ramp up over the course of the game. The reason is that the player is getting better at the game. If you don't give them harder challenges, they don't really have a chance to experience the fact that they're getting better. Some of the old jumping platforms were really good at this ramp. The later levels would have just felt impossible at first, but if you actually play through the whole game to them, they feel fine.

11-3-04

11-1-04

11-1-04

11-1-04

If you're working in some file, and you need to perform some operation, like say a "partial sort" to take the N highest elements of a set to the front, and you code that up your self - you are just wasting a huge amount of time. Not only are you wasting the time to write it, but the time to debug it, the time for someone else to review it, fix bugs in it, learn it, etc. etc. If you're worried about build times, you can isolate the STL usage into cpp files.

Similarly, not using exceptions is just silly. Exceptions have almost no penalty for use, there's only upside. Even if you don't want to throw your own, catching the hardware exceptions (access violations, float invalid ops) is clearly good. This is what has allowed us to keep the game running almost all the time, even when people check in broken code, which is inevitable. People write buggy code, and if that is allowed to bring down the game, you are wasting massive amounts of time. Once you are doing catches for hardware exceptions, you may as well start throwing as well. Throw reduces errors by forcing the caller to deal with it; ordinary error returns can be easily ignored. Any time that continuing to execute will crash the game, you throw, and the game keeps running - just the broken portion stops working.

The next point is using self-checking classes. Rather than using blind data with structs and pointers and such, you use classes which enforce their own correctness with asserts & exceptions and such. Again, on a large team, this is just clearly a win. Documentation and comments are always ignored; the only way to enforce correct coding is if the code itself screams when you use it wrong.

Once you are using all these self-checking classes, it's hard to avoid templates and containers and such. Perhaps you could, and there's nothing wrong with that, but it's certainly easier.

Garbage collection is similar. GC is clearly good, manually managed pointers are clearly bad. Now, if you have some fancy automatic GC solution that's robust and simple and debugged (such as, maybe you are using Managed C++), ok, fine. If not, smart pointers are a very simple, low-overhead, easy to write & debug way to do GC. This is actually related to all the other points; smart pointers or GC pointers are just examples of types that check & handle themselves and clean themselves up when they go out of scope.

In general, objects that close themselves and clean themselves up are clearly good; forcing the user to do it is always worse. Once you start doing that, use of tight scopes is clearly good. It restricts the lifetimes of variables, which reduces bugs.

Now, I just have no idea how to write software without polymorphism. Even my very first C apps had polymorphism; eg. you have some base type (Object) and many different variants. If you're going to do polymorphism, you should do it in the language. Some home-brew with function pointers and manual casting is just worse, because it's not safe. There are some very rare cases where home-brew could be beneficial, such as very deep in a performance-critical section where you want to avoid the virtual functions, but this is quite rare.

etc. etc.

10-27-04

10-27-04

The two-phase style is not just about scheduling and focus. We also see it with oversight. In the first phase, people are just sort of doing tasks and they get checked off the list, and nobody verifies them. The executives and directors and such as paying very little attention to development, which of course is hurting production efficiency. In the second phase, oversight goes crazy, suddenly the directors want to verify every bug fix. This also severely hurts productivity.

10-27-04

10-26-04

10-24-04

10-23-04

10-20-04

10-20-04

10-19-04

There are the people who really just have no idea what's going on in the world. These people still think Saddam had nukes and was helping Al Qaeda. They think "Clear Skies" actually is a pro-environment program. Well, you can't blame them all that much, because the media and the administration constantly lie at them. Something like 50% of the population is in this group.

There are the absolute wacko Christians. I'm not talking about your ordinary Christians. I mean people who believe that Angels really exist and come down to earth, people who literally believe in a fiery hell, people who believe the world will come to an end and final judgement will take place in the next 100 years. This is roughly a shocking 20% of the population.

There are people who are afraid of all foreigners. In their mind "moslem" and "islamic terrorist" are roughly the same thing; and those Chinese, they're communist right? Hell, we invaded Iraq, and I don't care if they had weapons or dictators or what, this is a Crusade - it's a war between civilizations.

There are the people who just want their money. This is a wide group, consisting of business and labor groups that want various shelters and protections and tax breaks that Bush has given (such as for cotton growers, the steel industry, all agribusiness, pharma, aerospace, etc. etc.). It consists of many of the rich, who want their lower taxes (so low, that many of the super-rich (like Dick Cheney) pay around a 5% tax on their total income). It also consists of foolish people in lower tax brackets, who will take a $400 tax break and lose $2000 of government programs (these are the same people who pay for $20 for discount club memberships in order to save $2).

10-19-04

10-18-04

10-18-04

10-17-04

10-17-04

10-17-04

10-16-04

Prozac and other mental health drugs have never been shown to be beneficial in impartial long-term studies, and yet they continue to be heavily prescribed. Seratonin-inhibitors (SSRI's) have now been shown to greatly increase the suicide rate (in addition to their many previously known side effects). The negative studies were intentionally not published. The entire psychiatric drug industry is a scam, since the doctors really have no idea what they're doing, and placebos are extremely effective at treating all the mild psychoses. I can't easily find total numbers for Prozac proficts, but it was around $3 billion/year at peak, so something like $10-20 billion over the life of the drug seems reasonable. (of course Prozac was also relabeled Serafem and sold under that name for a while).

Drug companies *each* pay roughly $15,000 of semi-legal incentives to doctors to encourage them to prescribe their drugs. In the old days (5-10 years ago), they used to actually send checks to doctors that said "I recommend this drug" on it, you sign it and send it back, they deposit it for you. They aren't so obvious any more, but they give grants for "trials", fly doctors to conferences, hire them for speaking engagements, buy them dinners, take them to shows, etc.

A lot of the problem is not just that the doctors are corrupt and taking the kickbacks from drug companies, it's that the doctors don't have time to independently research every drug they prescribe. They see all this marketing from drug companies (drug companies market to doctors directly with tax-deductible funds), and they believe it. The drug companies publish a bunch of positive clinical trials (they are not required to publish them all, so they just do 100 and pick the good ones), so the drug looks good. The next problem comes with the HMO's, which offer prescription advice. The HMO's really are corrupt and in league with the pharma companies.

How do we solve this? First of all, we need some good trial lawyers to sue these bastards to straighten them out ;) Second, you require all drug studies to be supervised by some independent body (like the FDA); you require all studies to be published whether they are positive or not. Next, you make it illegal for drug companies to offer any prescription incentives to doctors or HMO's. You have the FDA prepare summaries of effectiveness and side effects for all drugs, and this should be the primary prescription guide for doctors. In the end, the system has to be reformed in some way to give doctors and HMO's more incentive to choose the cheaper alternatives. This is a hard problem. It's hard to restrict the pharma companies without infringing on their rights to free speech. One key point is a principle of Chomsky - the rights of corporations should not ever be protected over the rights of individuals. The big "prescription drug benefit" that our government now provides is yet another big benefit for big business, not for people.

reform pharma , pharma bribes doctors , prozac is crap , drugs kill people

10-14-04

10-14-04

Dick Cheney at Halliburton has always pushed for the US to drop sanctions on Iran. He also pushed for us to drop sanctions on Iraq.

Within twenty five years, only six countries will have all the oil reserves in the world - Iraq, Iran, Venezuala, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and United Arab Emirates. Saudi Arabia has by far the most.

Saudi ARAMCO promo site (this site is really sick, they're a Saudi promo site and they show all these pictures of US presidents hanging out with the Saudis.)
In 2020, the middle east will have all the oil , with Iraq being the #2 or #3 player, and China and India and others very thirsty for crude.
Oil in the Iraq wars

10-14-04

10-12-04

10-12-04

10-10-04

10-10-04

10-10-04

When judges vote along party lines, it's a mockery of our government system, a mockery of justice, a false-justice, a kangaroo court. It clearly shows they are voting based on their party and not on the facts of the matter at hand. Judges are supposed to be above that; they're supposed to defend the law and the constitution and peoples' rights. Even the Surpreme Court of the United States has become basically a partisan rubber-stamp machine; their party-line vote to interfere with the Florida election in 2000 was just a part of their recent history of voting exactly on party lines.

The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati ruled on October 7 to kill a man for party politics. Paul House was sentenced to death for the murder of Carolyn Muncey over 15 years ago, and has been on death row all that time. Recent DNA evidence has exonerated him, and eyewitnesses have also cleared him and pointed at Muncey's husband, Hubert Muncey. Despite all this, the 8 republicans on the appeals court have ruled that House's conviction should stand, and he should die. Presumably this is a show of toughness and support for the death penalty - it's unconscionable! Those judges should all be stripped of their seats. The 7 democrats who voted to clear House are not necessarilly any better - they happen to be on the right side of this issue, but confronted with another partisan issue, would they just vote on party lines as well?

Read about the case at - NYT op-ed , AP white-wash , death penalty info , truth in justice , TCASK

All presidents in recent history use their power to pack the Federal Appeals courts full of un-qualified compliant partisan judges. Judicial appointments have become merely ways for the parties to keep some power over longer spans of time. Congressional approval of judicial appointments is supposed to be a check to make sure that they are qualified and reasonably non-partisan. In recent years, the president has swept aside that approval and rammed through judges that congress won't approve - Bush avoids approval of Pickering , The Pickering Affair , Progressive judiciary watch , Politics in the Judiciary , On republican court-packing

10-10-04

10-10-04

Kerry : This administration has not created jobs.
Bush : He's a flip-flopper!
Kerry : He claims to be pro-environment, but actually has weakened environment protection on power plants, opened our national forests to logging, done nothing to clean the air, and allowed destructive forms of strip-mining!
Bush : But he changed his mind!
Kerry : He took us into Iraq and took our focus off Al Qaeda and allowed Osama bin Laden to escape!
Bush : Doesn't he look kind of French to you?
Kerry : He said Iraq had WMD's, was trying to make nuclear weapons, and had ties to Al Qaeda, and claimed it was part of the war on terror.
Bush : I think he's a wimp; he wouldn't have the guts to use American Power
Kerry : He is using the war on terror as an excuse to dismiss all critism and take war-time powers; he's pushed the Patriot Act which does little to help security, but a lot to invade the privacy of American Citizens; he's holding Americans and others hostage in prisons around the world, with no trial, and torturing them in interrogations!
Bush : He uses big fancy words.
Kerry : He refuses to admit that he's made a single mistake!
Bush : I like cheese.
Kerry : He's cut taxes, primarily for the very rich, including huge tax cuts on dividends, capitol gains, and inheritance - that doesn't boost the economy or help any of you!
Bush : But he's a flip-flopper!

Ah, yes, well done Mr. Bush, that debate was clearly a tie.

10-8-04

10-8-04

10-7-04

10-7-04

10-7-04

Look, this is not some small thing. To say "they both got things wrong" is a huge distortion - that's what Fox News would say - Cheney's lies were not some small arcane points that you have to search around to find the problems - anyone who understands English knew he was lying the whole time. He was attacking Edwards with bogus points. He was saying "Edwards got his facts wrong", when in fact, Edwards was basically right and Cheney was completely wrong. It's all so unbelievable.

10-6-04

10-5-04

10-5-04

10-5-04

10-5-04

• 1. Be aware of inconsistency/error conditions

• 2. Assert about them

• 3. Detect input errors and report them to the content creator, allow the game to keep running but show the pieces that are in error.

• 4. Don't allow content out of the tools that's invalid; give instructions on how to fix it.

• 5. Detect runtime logic errors (aka bugs) and report them appropriately; allow the game to keep running if possible; remove the broken objects from the sim. (this is easiest to do using exception handling).

• 6. Avoid runtime logic errors; make them impossible.

This last step is the "nirvana" of robust coding. Most people don't even know it exists, and few really see it. Basically any time you would assert(), or any time you say "oh, this must be done", get rid of that - don't assert, don't say "this must be done" - make those conditions happen automatically!

The first place to start is pointers; if you say "this pointer must be released". Don't say that. Put all your pointers in smart pointer classes that auto-release. Now you might say "make sure to use the smart pointer class". Don't say that. Have your class factory always return a smart pointer. Similarly, you might do something like take a mutex lock with EnterCriticalSection. You say "make sure you Leave". Don't say that. Hide the OS calls and make a Mutex class that lives on the stack and does Enter/Leave with its lifetime.

Any time you have an assert like ASSERT( x == y ) - get rid of one of those variables! Any time there's a relationship between state values that must hold, get rid of them!! In general, less variables makes code more robust. In a very technical sense, your variables are degrees of freedom in the state space of the simulation - the goal is to make every value in those DOF a valid state in the simulation. If you have extra variables with constraints (such as x == y), you're doing an un-necessary cover of the state space with constraints. Everyone in physics knows contraints are a pain - try to find the minimal set of variables that describe the actual free degrees of freedom. You are removing logical constraints and making it impossible to invalidate the sim state.

10-5-04

We've done a very good job of writing a robust, friendly, error-tolerance engine. The result is that our content guys have made content with lots of errors.

10-5-04

10-4-04

It's so naive to think that we can create democracies in Afghanistan and Iraq and that that will lead the neighbors to follow, as Bush has said repeatedly. Iran already knows what democracy is like - they see it on TV, they were moving in that direction. Now, we have created the fear that America will strike them, and we've make an American client state on two of their borders. This has driven them back to extremism. In Saudi Arabia, they see the Iraqi state and fear the American military power. Do you realize that Al Qaeda started its Jihad against America because we had troops in the holy land of Saudi Arabia? Now we have troops all over Iraq, in some of the holiest places in Islam!? Saudi Arabia is an incredibly important state, and it's very unstable. The people are largely moslem, and the government is not. In Afghanistan, democracy is a sham. The power brokers in Afghanistan are - the US, Iran, Russia, Pakistan, and the warlords who are heavily armed and deal in opium. The warlords have alliances, mainly with Iran, Russia, and Pakistan, all of whom continue to provide money and arms in Afghanistan. The US is trying to balance those powers by supporting Hamid Kharzai; our aid to help the election has been de-factor aid to help Karzai. We fear that anyone else who wins may be a puppet of those other powers. Pakistan's secret police help set up the Taliban, and are still operating in Afghanistan. We don't stop them, because we fear the situation in Pakistan - they are our purported ally, but they are the world's largest illegal nuclear proliferator, probably harbor much of Al Qaeda.

Which reminds me - I wrote on 9-28-04 about the "big announcement" that you then roll back. I read about a nice one in Pakistan recently. President Musharraf is the basically secular dictator of Pakistan. Over the last 10 years, Pakistan has harbored many terrorist cells, some of which it intentionally helps to fight the war in Kashmir. They claim that the Kashmiri fighters are local guerillas, but actually they are terrorists that live safely in Pakistan, where India dares not attack them. They were trained by the Pakistani secret police, in conjunction with the Taliban; many of them were mujahadeen who fought the soviets in Afghanistan. Anyhoo, Musharraf made a big show of "cracking down on terrorists" in Pakistan, and he arrested some 2000 of these fighters. This was a big announcement, blah blah. Unfortunately, Musharraf has no real power to fight terrorism, since much of his country is Pashtun, and the terrorists have close ties with his military and secret police, both of which he controls only as long as they like him. A few months after the round up, the vast majority of the fighters were released, to little notice.

10-4-04

10-4-04

10-4-04

One specific "flip-flop" accusation is over this $87 billion vote. Part of the problem with that is it was a piece of typical politics in Washington. When the war funding bill came up, the Democrats proposed a version which would pay for the $87 billion by cancelling GWB's tax cut for people with income over $200k. Now, first of all, let's make sure you understand - that $87 billion has to come from somewhere; if it doesn't come from the richest Americans, then it will come from all Americans. There are many mechanisms for that, one is that the federal govt just gives less money to the states (as they are doing), so the states then have to 1) cut programs, which mainly help the poor, or 2) raise taxes, which are mainly regressive taxes like sales tax or utility surcharges, etc. So, Kerry voted *for* the democratic version of the bill. Of course that bill was killed, and the Republican version came up, which would just spend the $87 billion and not worry about where it came from. Kerry voted against that version of the bill. This is a standard move in congress - the votes were already counted, he knew it would pass, there was no danger of not providing that money, it was just a vote to show that they preferred the other version of the bill. To call this "flip-flopping" is to show a complete mis-understanding of the democratic process.

10-4-04

10-4-04

10-4-04

10-2-04

10-1-04

10-1-04

10-1-04

Prop 59 - provides more access to public documents - Yes
Prop 60 - provides access to all Primary winners in the general election - No (let's leave the law alone, no need for more cooks)
Prop 60A - directs funds from sale of state surplus properties to pay back bonds - Yes looks a little corrupt, but WTF
Prop 61 - money for children's hospitals - No (I oppose all money allocated by propositions)
Prop 62 - allows only two candidates in the general election - NO
Prop 63 - tax on incomes about $1 million to pay for mental health care - NO I like the tax, but I don't like locking it into mental health care programs
Prop 64 - prevents consumers from suing business for unfair practices in some cases - NO
Prop 65 ?
Prop 66 - limits on 3 strikes law - YES
Prop 67 - funding for EMS using a regressive telephone surchange - NO No funding in propositions and no regressive tasks
Prop 68 - changes tax structure on Indian gaming and opens up more gaming - NO We shouldn't allow any new casinos to be built without higher taxes on them
Prop 69 - DNA collection - NO I don't like the idea of the gov having a database of everyone's DNA
Prop 70 - opens up tribal gaming laws and reduces gaming taxes - NO
Prop 71 - provides for a stem cell research institute - NO As much as I want to stick it to GWB, funding stem cell research seems unwise
Prop 72 - requires many employers to provide reasonable health care to employees - YES This is imperfect, but better than nothing.

9-30-04

9-30-04

9-30-04

9-30-04

9-28-04

9-28-04

Which reminds me - the guys at work frequently make fun of hippies and tree-huggers and activists (as does South Park and countless other comedies). I have great respect for those people. Sure, there are a lot of loser hippies who joined the movement just to have sex and smoke pot and hang out (ok, maybe that's the majority), but the core of the movement is a really beautiful thing - the idea that love and community and peace and cooperation and our planet are more important than posessions and money and nation-states - that's a beautiful idea, that's what life is all about. To actually give up your comfortable yuppie life and go chain yourself to a tree (or whatever) and get thrown in jail for it, you should respect that. Yeah, maybe the guy is confused and not really helping the message, but he's trying to do something for what he believes in; he's not being ruled by his greed or his gluttony or his lust, I have huge respect activists and believers of all types, including the ones whose cause I don't agree with.

9-28-04

9-28-04

This is part of the standard Johnnie Cochran style defense. Basically your jury (the populace) are a bunch of morons. When somone presents some really strong evidence against you, what you do is find some little minor pointless issue that they got wrong, and you attack the hell out of that. Like, let's say Bush's policies have put us $537 billion in debt, and his tax cut has given $52 billion back to the top-1% of the rich (I'm just making those numbers up). Now, some democrat makes a speech and says "he put us $500 billion in debt and gave $60 billion to the rich". The next day you get GOP operatives all over the news going "this democrat is lying to you; how can you even trust him if he can't get his figures right? blah blah", then the news focuses on the attack and the counter-attack, and the original point is lost.

Another good trick I've seen a lot of recently is the "big announcement" followed by inaction or retraction. There have been some nice ones in corporate America. Some company is accused of cooking the books and financial fraud, etc. They make a big announcement, and the CEO steps down. That all makes the front page of the business section. A few weeks later, they re-hire the same CEO, and he gets a nice signing bonus. That makes page 5. The gov does it a lot too; some big attrocity happens, like the Abu Ghraib torture, etc. so they act all serious and "form a committee to investigate". That's all front-page. Time passes and people forget about it, and finally the committee announces its findings (hopefully after the election), which is a lot of BS, and never makes big news.

9-28-04

They say ".. we have few options with North Korea. The Bush administration has been in intensive negotiations for two years...". Um, no, no we haven't. This administration intentionally cut off negotiations with NK as a show of macho strength, and as part of their policy of intentionally not doing anything that Clinton was (such as pursuing Al Qaeda). All signs seem to indicate that a humble U.S. negotiating team could have made a deal to provide security and economic development to NK in exchange for disarmament, but our gov didn't want to give them any prizes for their thuggery.

The NYT says "the high cost of health care pays for innovation". Um, no, maybe a little bit, but mainly it pays for profits in health care corps; it's also not malpractice insurance that's driving up the cost over all (as the GOP would have you believe) (except in a few specific cases). In general, it's the use of unnecessary expensive treatments, and unnecessary expensive drugs. The pharma companies and other heavy push their product on doctors (providing semi- legal kickbacks and incentives in various ways); the vast majority of recent "miracle drugs" are no better than the previous drugs (such as aspirin), but cost far far more; many have worse side effects. All the recent fancy pain killers are in this group, most of the recent ant-acids, and all the recent psychotropic drugs.

9-28-04

Just in case you haven't been paying attention at all over the last four years I'll give you a quick hit list - GWB says "clean skies" and rolls back environmental law, and the EPA sues states to defeat their environmental laws, the gov releases the name of under-cover CIA operatives to try to quiet anyone who speaks out against them, the gov detains US citizens indefinately with no charge, and tortures people in Guantanamo, Iraq, and Afghanistan; the Justice department preps for a case to claim that the Geneva Convention against torture does not apply; the gov takes us into Afghanistan, but does not create stability, leaving armed warlords in power, and setting up a puppet democracy with our hand-picked partisan (Karzai) receiving US aid to campaign; the US supports the Pakistani leader Musharraf and says nothing against their country, while they harbor the greatest force of Al Qaeda, as well as the world's worst nuclear proliforator Dr. Khan, and a huge terrorist province of Waziris; the gov leads us into the war on Iraq, which they were planning for even before 9/11, with false claims of terrorist ties and WMD, which they pushed the CIA to find evidence of, they lie to the public repeatedly before going to war and after, and now Iraq breeds more terrorists than ever; the US does nothing about the major Israel-Palestine problem, as the Israelis continue to build a wall across their country; the US calls Iran "evil" and dis-engages diplomacy (which was working, with a moderate president in power), and Iran becomes more and more conservative and anti-US and steps up development of its nuclear arms program; the gov tells us "if you vote for Kerry, you vote for terrorists"; the gov tells us "really the media is to blame"; the gov tells us "if you don't support Bush, you're unpatriotic"; the gov says they want to roll back the tax cuts, but they propose rolling back only the tax cuts on the POOR! so of course all the tax cuts must stand; the gov says the tax cuts stimulate the economy, but the tax cuts were planned when the economy was still at its peak! the gov says they support the assault-rifle ban, but they let it lapse. The gov says they are pro-free-market, but they increase protection of steel and increase farm subsidies, because that plays well in the swing states. Our gov has run its military time table based on the US election schedule, which is jeopardizing Iraq and Afghanistan.

How can you possibly not be outraged and see that there is only one reasonable choice? And don't be a goon like Nader and abstain or something because "they're both bad". Yes, they are both bad, but you still need to choose the lesser of two evils.

9-28-04

9-28-04

9-28-04

9-19-04

9-18-04

This is part of a principal of investing - you need opportunities that are safe enough that you can get into them heavily. Something like the Chinese market looks very appealing, but if you only put $1,000 into it, even if it goes up 10% (very nice), that's $100. To make big money, you have to commit big money. You make more by putting $10,000 into a plain savings acount that gives 2%.

9-16-04

9-14-04

9-14-04

9-13-04

9-12-04

Yesterday I rode Old Creek and Santa Rosa Creek Road . Total climbing is about 6000 feet, but that's doesn't tell the story of the brutal grades. I had to get off and walk some of the hardest bits near the end. I was in excruciating pain from head to toe - not just in my legs, but in my stomach from eating too soon before the ride, and in my lungs, and my side and my back and neck. The weirdest thing is that the whole day after the ride, by chest hurt like crazy, it still does. Any time I breathe deep or swallow or cough or anything I get pain all through my chest - it feels like a broken rib, but I can't imagine that's the case. I've never felt anything like this pain, it's quite extraordinary!

9-11-04

9-11-04

9-11-04

T = (I - D)*R

I = income
D = deductible
R = tax rate
T = tax

You set your taxes with D and R. Obviously T is clamped at zero, not allowed to go negative. I can't say exactly what D & R should be, they need to be tweaked to keep the total amount of taxes collected roughly the same. It's important to keep the discussion on changing the tax formulation separate from the question of changing the total amount of taxes collected.

My rough thinking would be that R should be 35% (0.35), which keeps the tax on the top bracket roughly the same. D should be something like $30,000 , so that anyone making less than that (eg. people near the poverty line) pay zero tax.

I would also propose that you remove all deductions - children, houses, etc. get rid of them all, they're just too easily abused. Also, all forms of income count as income - capital gains, inheritance, etc. all go into your income for that year and get taxed as part of this total. Furthermore, there's no separate Social Security tax or anything like that, all this money goes into the general pool and gets divided out as needed.

The result of removing all the shelters and loop-holes is that the rich would get a real-world increase in their tax rate. The poor would get a huge real-world reduction in their tax rate. The government would also save a huge amount of money by simplifying the tax code, you can cut the IRS severely. Furthermore, the American economy gets a huge boost by not having workers waste time doing complicated taxes.

9-11-04

9-11-04

9-10-04

I watched a little bit of "Out Foxed" , the documentary on Fox News. I couldn't watch all of it, because it just made me so mad. It's also all stuff I already knew; you just have to watch Fox for a minute and you'll see these incredibly disgusting manipulative tactics, blurring reporting and fiction, presenting propaganda as fact, mixing messages in an intentionally confusing way. The heads of Fox News, Moody and Ailes, intentionally spin the presentation to benefit the Republicans, and they refer to this as "Patriotism". The sad thing about this kind of movie is that the people who really need to see it are the people who watch Fox News, and of course they won't watch it, and they'll call it "liberal black helicopter shit". Furthermore, there's sort of a nasty media balance at play here. If you make some outrageous lie, even if it's not true, it has a lot of impact, a lot of publicity, it sticks in peoples' heads. Now if someone else comes out and goes "wait, he's lying", that is pretty boring, it doesn't even makes the front page. The result of the whole exchange is that people remember the lie.

A good example is this whole "Swift Boat" bullshit. Of course John Kerry served admirably; maybe his Purple Hearts weren't really deserved, but that happens all the time, lots of sort of marginal hearts are given. George Bush got a sweet-heart deal to stay in the US to avoid the war and didn't even show up for his National Guard service. The "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" are clearly a hired gang representing the Republicans and intentionally spewing lies to smear Kerry. Reasonable people know that, but for the average American, the original lie is stronger in their memory.

There's sort of an interesting thing that happens in a debate. You need to debate in a way that sways your audience. Consider the difference between lawyers arguing before the Supreme Court or a Grand Jury vs. lawyers arguing before a normal jury of peers. In the former case, the lawyers know their audience is wise and won't be swayed by theatrics, so they have to win on substance. Before a jury, the truth of the case hardly matters - it's about who makes a more impactful statement, who seems more believable. This is the situation of politics.

One of the problems with liberals in politics is they're far too reasonable. The Republicans are destroying the liberals using tactics that the liberals find disgusting and cheap. The liberals don't use those tactics, and it's killing us. We need to fight fire with fire, we have no choice but to drop to their level. Some of the general things you have to do -

• Unwavering party loyalty. Never say anything bad about anyone in the party. Of course this is ridiculous - reasonable people within the party will disagree and there should be a wide variety of views, but this has to be stopped. You must have a clear strong single message and present a unified front to the simpleton public. Individual people in the party can actually go around and say totally conflicting things, but you never admit that they're conflicting. In fact, you can promise different things on different days if you're clever, but you never admit they're opposing.

• Never admit a mistake or a change of mind. No matter how clear it was you made a mistake or changed your mind, you claim it was what you meant to do all along. This is the Pee Wee Herman school of showing strenght - ("I meant to do that").

• Use slanted/biased media, and don't point it out. This is one of the big failings of the liberals - they're far to virtuous about using questionable media. Michael Moore and his like are doing a great thing by countering the Republican message; yes, it's slanted, so what? So many liberals speak out against his reporting - don't do it! You never see the Republicans saying anything bad about Fox News! Rather, you should say things like "a lot of what Michael Moore says is true".

• Create nasty stereotypes of Republicans and push them over and over. We need a few archetypes of unlovable Republicans, and we have to keep casting them in those stereotypes. The Republicans have destroyed the liberals with the "upper-west-side jewish, rich, out of touch, pretentious" image. We should counter primarily with one sinister image - the "fat-cat abusive rich corporate corrupt spoiled trust-fund boarding-school capitalist". Often that image is true, but it's important to push it over and over, even when it's totally absurd, or your candidate actually fits it more, it doesn't matter.

• Politicians should be actors. Actually qualifications don't really matter; what you need is a guy who can believably represent the image you want - the common man, strong, masculine, decisive, etc. Qualities like experience and intelligence are as much a liability as an asset.

• Use plausible deniability and proxies. If you ever want to do something that you don't want to take the heat for, have an underlying do it, and then claim you had nothing to do with it. This lets you get away with vicious, ridiculus attack adds against the opponent, which you should use without mercy. Attacks are also best done with a counter-punch, let him attack first, and then you counter-attack hard.

• Repetition. Make a few simple messages and repeat them over and over, like "fat-cat Republicans are getting rich off your labor!". The shorter the better, and just keep saying them, regardless of their relevance or how ridiculous they may be. If you say things enough, people believe them. You can say marginally truthful things like "Dick Cheney's company is getting rich from the war in Iraq". Sure, it's not really quite true, but you also can't say it's false, and if we say it over and over people will believe it and it will affect them. Another good one is "George Bush is driving you into debt!", again sort of true, if you look at the average debt of Americans or the national debt, the good thing about this kind of message is it sounds bad and it sounds personal, and it lets people blame their own problems on politicians.

9-07-04

The other tricky thing is that I always think in terms of the "deltas" (differences) from what I assume is the baseline opinion. For example on 8-18, I wrote how I "hate DVDs". I don't mention any of the good things about DVD's (better video quality than VHS, great sound quality, instant seeking to labels, etc.), because I assume you all know them, so I don't need to go over them. I only mention the points that aren't generally accepted, which are often critical.

This same principal is at play in the news. Newspapers (and TV news) generally only cover the new developments, they don't give context because they assume everyone knows it. Of course, the vast majority of people actually don't know it, and the result is a very strange understanding of the world, because you are only reading the "deltas" from the past and you don't know what the baseline was.

There's a similar principal with stocks and happiness. The baseline expectation for a company is already built into its stock price. So, if the company does very well, the stock won't rise if that was already in the valuation. Even if the company does very well, if it's below expectation, the stock will fall. This can lead to a very strange predicament where a company has a great hugely profitable year, but the stock falls because it didn't meet expectation. Of course the same thing happens with human emotions. You build up expectations for something, and then even if it's great, if it doesn't meet expectations, you won't enjoy it.

9-04-04

9-02-04

It's funny watching preseason football, because it SUCKS. The games don't matter, and they play the 2nd string guys. But then I realize - these guys are still like 100X better than me at football, and yet it totally sucks to watch them? That must mean it's agony to watch me play sports.

I rejoice in the different speeds of seeing the world. Driving - you see a vineyard, a barn, a road, a cliff. Flying - you see a green square, a line of mountains, the line of the coast. Walking - you see a rose bush, a nickel on the sidewalk, a doorway. Biking - you see the wild plants between the houses, the prices on the road-side farm stand.

9-01-04

I hate it when bands have one lead singer and then they do that one song on each album where they let some other douche sing who wants to break out of his role as just a member of the band, and he always just really sucks bad.

9-01-04

Here are the negatives - 1) The American economy is largely driven by consumerism within America, which requires strong buying from the average person, which is in major trouble. Income inequality continues to grow, which is driving down the real wealth of the average person; the number of Americans under the poverty line is now 36 million and it keeps growing (many of these people work full time). 2) The housing market is dangerously close to exploding; people who can't afford it have bought in heavily, and then have re-mortgaged and taken even more debt to get more cash; any sort of down-turn could make this system explode. Already forceclosures are occuring at a record rate. 3) American consumerism is heavily driven by debt spending in general, related to #2, again this is trouble. Especially as interest rates begin to rise back to normal levels, the heavy debt of many Americans will destroy their spending power. 4) As mentioned in #3, interest rates must rise, this will slow the economy.

So, I have no idea really if stocks will rise in the next few years.

9-01-04

This is an excellent way to make games (it seems to me Doom 3 was made this way). Pick one strong tech or design feature that's novel and interesting and then build up a game around that feature using well-known and traditional elements (car driving, shooting, what have you).

8-30-04

Ok, I confess, I don't like Wilco. I know I'm supposed to like them, but their music is so incoherent, their albums have no flow, it's very lurching and random. I also hate all music that musicians love. They love intricate technical well-crafted arcane crap. Give me amateur, simple, unsophisticated, technically poor music, if it's creative and has feeling and reality. The Decemberists have some really great tunes, but the lead singer has that funny Brittish "W" accent, where everything is a "W", the funniest is when he says "willows" and it sounds like "wiwows". It's just really hard to listen to them and take it all seriously when the guy is saying "when-ewer I wondaw whehw youw ahw". Other good stuff - Elefant, The Kills. Mediocre stuff - Songs:Ohia, Fridge, more.

Is it just a coincidence that Kyoto and Tokyo are anagrams?

So, I got this parking ticket a little while ago. It's like the most ridonculous parking ticket in history. The ticket is for crossing lane markers. Now, I could see if I was the jackass in his Boxster who intentionally parked in the middle of two spots to avoid dings, or the jackass in his giant ass Ford F150 who parked in a compact space and wound up taking like five spots. Neither of those happened - rather, I was slightly offset in the space so that my car was just crossing into an adjacent space. Making it even more ridonculous - I parked there after the neighboring cars had already parked and were shifted over. Making it yet more ridonculous - this was all at one end of a row of parking spaces, where people routinely park shifted over to give everyone more space. So, anyhoo, I submitted a protest of the ticket, where I described these conditions. I just recently got the reply, which was - "citation upheld; if cars have previously parked out of their spaces, you must find a different parking spot" - which just adds yet another piece of ridonculosity to the whole thing. So, of course I'm not going to pay this damn ticket, so now I have to go to court. I'm trying my best to get prepared so that I don't show up in court going "fuck the fucking ridiculous fucking screw you all fucking hell".

I've discovered that barbecued trout is fantastic (purists would point out that it's actually "grilled" trout). Very simple - just stuff it with rosemary everywhere you can fit it, and of course coat in salt, pepper and olive oil (that almost goes without saying, everything I do is with SPOO (Salt, Pepper, Olive Oil), I bathe and moisturize with Salt Pepper and Olive Oil).

I did Old Creek again yesterday. I had to stop again, but just once, briefly. I was standing almost the whole way, I hit the whole thing very fast, just one hour round trip. Next time no stopping.

8-28-04

How much is a year of your life worth? If someone came to you and said that you had to be locked in a little box for 60 hours a week during the best years of your life, how much money would you demand in exchange? A million dollars? Ten million? Most of us take that deal for $50k or less. You never get that year of your life back.

8-23-04

My freaking CD's are better sorted than my MP3's. That's so fucking stupid it hurts me. My MP3's should be indexed by my quality rating, my mood classification, by genre, by similarity and relation to other artists, etc. I should browse my MP3's with something like GNOD , but better cuz it would have all this other metadata.

I want to watch the olympics, I really do - NBC , I want to watch your advertising! but the presentation is just so horrible I can't stand to watch it. For one thing, it's never on when I flip to it - it should be on CNBC like 24 hours a day - what do you have that's better? John McEnroe stumbling over topics he knows nothing about? For another, you only show me the damn Americans, who often suck. Show me the best damn athletes! I want to see beautiful human achievement, not some stupid Americans. For another, give me announcers who have charisma AND know something about their sport, not this horrible mix of two guys - one who knows nothing and and ex-athlete who is a terrible speaker.

The best sites for music on the net - matador , insound , epitonic , kexp , other?

I'm extremely attracted to mothers and pregnant women.

Poor Stephen Malkmus. His life has no further purpose. He should just retire and wait for 20 years from now when he can get together with his old, fat, washed up mates and do a sad Pavement reunion tour for all the aged hipsters-cum-yuppies.

Distributing a free promo MP3 and not filling out the artist/title metadata is just about the stupidest thing you could ever do. Nice one. I hate songs that do a big switch between hard and mellow. Pick a fucking mood and stick to it. I'm listening to your music in the background and I want it to fit a certain mood, so when you try to do some artsy-fartsy shit and mix in a big rock break-out in the middle of your ballad it just doesn't work.

Yo La Tengo is touring for John Kerry . How in the world could you possible vote against Yo La Tengo? Oh yeah, I forgot, you're a total moron, you like Lincoln Park ("Linkin Park"), and professional wrestling, and such. God help us.

8-23-04

Movie review - "The Fog of War". First of all, it's very interesting, everyone should watch it. It's an interview with Robert McNamara. He's a very interesting sort of mildly pathological personality; he's an excellent case study of someone who's basically reasonable, very analytical, tries to be rational, and winds up doing horrible things. As a movie, it's only mediocre; it doesn't put in context the reality of what McNamara did or the views of him by others, it also has this sort of pretentious method of conveying import with long musical interludes. Yes, I get it, that was very heavy, move on already. Directed by Erol Morris - a very over-rated documentary director.

Movie review - "American Splendor". Crap, so disappointing, could have been so good. Tries to be creative by mixing the real people and the actors, but it doesn't work and just goes nowhere. The basic material is very interesting, the characters are fascinating, the acting is good, it should have been a good movie, but it is just too concerned with form and should have just been a more traditional narrative movie. The directors seem like newbies, hopefully they'll get better.

My favorite directors are getting ruined by hollywood, as so often happens - Caro & Jeunet - down the tubes - Guillermo del Toro (not to be confused with Benicio, the poof).

8-23-04

Why does Rose McGowan have blonde hair now? What the hell is wrong with the world? Who allowed this to happen?

I need my Network of Trust. I know there are good DJ's out there making great song selections - why can't my mp3 player tap into their mixes? I know there are people with good taste in movies making movie lists - why can't I get that? The whole idea of "critics" is obsolete. What we have instead of networks and taste-clusters. People with similar opinions on topics are grouped and share information.

8-23-04

8-21-04

I can't stand the noise of TV's ; I need a web site that has decibel readings for the ambient noise of TV's so I can buy the one that's the quietest.

Our office Republican (Drew) used to appeal to me about the Bush administration - "these people are not evil, they love America and they're doing what they think is right for the country". Well, first of all, I don't believe that one bit, I think there are quite a few people in the administration who are really just evil (evil = selfish, egomaniacal, dangerous, destructive, greedy, corrupt, etc.). On the other hand, I do believe there probably are a lot of people in the administration who actually believe they are doing what's best for the country (G.W. may be one of these, in a sort of naive manipulated sort of way). The problem with this is that there's a sort of diabolical narrowness of vision that comes into play. When you believe that America is really great, and whatever America wants for the world is what's best for the world, and you administration is great, and having your administration in power is what's best for America - now you are a truly dangerous man. I believe that much of our administration is in this camp; it's sort of a righteous narrowness of vision, very similar to a religious jihad martyr - you believe your cause is so right, that any sort of immoral act you may do to advance your cause is justified - breaking the law, lying, bribing, manipulating, war, imprisonment, torture, murder, etc. I suspect people like Hitler and Stalin really did believe they were doing what was best. I think the clear conclusion is that "good intentions" is not a valid defense for anything, and patriotism is a very questionable attribute.

8-20-04

8-20-04

NetFlix is okay, but the selection is rather poor, very mainstream. That may just be because a lot of things don't exist on DVD, dunno. The great thing about NetFlix is that you can select your movies at any time. In general, removal of temporal constraints is a great thing. If I have to do A some time this week, ok, that's cool. If I have to do A at exactly 5:00 PM on Tuesday, that's much much harder, not just because I have to remember to do it, but I have to make sure that leading up to that moment I'm in good condition to do A, whatever it is. If an artist could never paint when they wanted to, and was only allowed to paint when you told them "go", their work would be shit. You need to be able to do a task when your mind/body/life are in the right state to do that thing. In general the modern work-place goes totally against this principle, which crushes the productivity of creative/compulsive/inspired performers.

8-18-04

I cashed out of Party Poker. I think I'm done with it. I make good money there, but it's just not fun. Well, okay, some times it's fun, when you're winning big, but these days the losses hurt so much more than the wins. Furthermore, I can't really enjoy the big wins either. When I hit a draw on a guy and make a big pot, I just feel guilty, not delighted like I once did.

My job had turned me off of everything I once loved - games, programming, computers - I can hardly stand them any more. I want nothing to do with them in my free time. Perhaps I should do the thing I hate most for a living, since I'm going to hate my job anyway, at least that way I won't ruin something I love. I've always believed that good programming is an art form - it's a craft, artisan, maestria. It's creative, it's not left-brain.

8-10-04

7-24-04

The human mind, as a computing device, is very good at a particular form of problem solution, which is sort of fuzzy matching and interpolation/extrapolation. Humans can look at a Chess board layout, and recognize that it is "tactically similar" to something they've seen before, even though the details may be totally different. Computers are very bad at making this sort of reasonable judgment of similarity. Humans can also recall the right move in a similar situation and extrapolate that to make a very good guess at the right move in a new situation. This kind of thinking seems to be something we're extremely good at - when we see a new situation, we can recall other situations that are similar in key ways, and we can interpolate/extrapolate to make good decisions.

7-15-04

7-14-04

7-14-04

The government is in breach of its contract when -

it takes public land and allows businesses to permanently devastate that land for the profit of the few, such as with strip-mining or mountain-top removal, or cutting old growth forests.

it allows businesses to pollute, especially with pollution that is impossible to clean up, such as nuclear waste or large oil spills, or the many poisons released into the environment. This permanently damages our earth which we all share, which is the property of all people.

it takes money from all the people in taxes and gives it to the few in the form of subsidies and protections and tarriffs that raise the price of goods the people need.

it wages unnecessary wars that put our peoples' lives at risk and creates hate for us around the world.

it taxes the poor excessively, beyond their means of what they can be expected to pay, making it impossible for them to rise from poverty. These taxes can be in many insiduous forms - local taxes, sales tax, lotteries, credit scams, unnecessary loans, etc.

businesses are allowed to lie or manipulate markets for the profit of the few. The markets must be open, accurate, provide full disclosure to all.

it does not allow reasonable immigration and travel.

it spreads lies and half-truths to manipulate the will of the people.

etc..

7-12-04

They're showing a new ridiculous Republican attack add on TV here, continuing the line of showing nothing but attack adds. This one is really hillarious, classic political manipulation. It's about how John Kerry has missed all these votes (since he started campaigning). The first nice bit is they say "he has the worst attendance record of any senator", then they show the little asterisk (since he started campaigning); of course they don't mention that that's totally standard practice for any senator or congressman running for President; Bob Dole did the same thing; they also don't mention that our Pres Mr. Bush has the worst attendance record at his job of any modern President!! The next bit is another bit of silly political manipulation; they start mentioning all the "important bills" that Kerry has missed the vote on, as if missing those votes means he's against them, and they turn the bills into silly tear-jerker summaries, like "Kerry missed the bill that supports puppies; do you want a President who doesn't like puppies?". I'm Charles Bloom and I support this message.

7-10-04

7-08-04

Some charming moments from the past - the Rove/Hughes have been using the fake new method for quite a while; here's a semi-recent article, link , but the better one is when they pay various staffers to write editorials to send in to the major papers, masquerading as public opinion; there's nothing particularly illegal about this, but it sure is dishonest. This is semi-related link

One of the most disgusting things to me is the blatant Orwellian use of the war and the terrorists as distractions and excuses. There's a great Simpsons where the Principal Skinner and Marge are debating. Marge says "but the children", Skinner says "the taxes"! Over and over. I feel like this debate is turning into "but the jobs" and Bush says "we have to battle evil", Kerry says "the environment", Bush says "evil", anything you say, he says "eh eh, the evil". Anyhoo, the interesting case in point I want to site is when Ashcroft called a news conference a few months ago specifically to say "we've been hearing chatter that indicates there may be an attack soon somewhere in the US". They had no information when or where, or by who, and they didn't raise the terror alert level, and Tom Ridge said he knew nothing of it. Ashcroft is a pure puppet-monkey of the administration, this move clearly had no benefit except to keep the public in fear and focused on the "war against evil".

Perhaps people should have to answer some basic questions about the world in order to vote. If you get your information just from TV adds, you can't vote. I know this is problematic and exclusionary, and would hurt the dems as much as the repubs, but all the morons who pay no attention to world events and then go vote for Reagan because "he seems like a nice man" - that's just sick. We can ask some multiple choice questions about the world, and you only get to vote if you get them right. For example you might ask, what country has the most population (A=China), what country has the largest economy in terms of GDP (A=USA), did Saddam have anything to do with 9/11 (A=no), who provided the majority of the advanced weapons used by the Taliban (A=USA), who has veto'd more human rights in the UN than any other country? (A=USA), etc.

I have great disdain for the average American. I have even greater hate for anyone who takes advantage of the average American, by manipulating them, lying to them, stealing from them, duping/con-ing them, etc.

7-08-04

7-08-04

7-06-04

7-06-04

7-03-04

7-01-04

Paper is too cheap. It's subsidized by the US and Canadian government, and it leads to shit like an un-asked for phone book showing up at my door. I throw it straight in the recycling bin. That's a hell of a lot of paper to just throw out - that should have cost them a lot, a *fair* amount. Capitalism is a pretty fucked up system when left alone (money moves towards the top, it's bouyant and attracted to other money), but capitalism with corrupt government subsidies and protections is a really really fucked up system that leads to all kind of strange skewing in the market and the world.

7-01-04

Here's a pretty unbiased article- link , and here's an anti-TAAS analysis by the ultra-conservative RAND corporation (famous for advocating anti-communist wars and nuclear proliferation) link , here's one more liberal argument - link , or here link

There's no doubt that you can teach math and test math reasonably effectively. The big problem I have is with other skills - and the focus of education; testing in itself is not inherently bad, it's the importance put on the test, especially in Texas - teacher's jobs and the funding to schools depends on the tests, which means that teachers and schools will put all their focus on the tests. I think education is perhaps the single most important thing that government does - it leads to the future of the entire country. How many people are in jail, the economic success of the country, they come from education, and right now, we are fucking it up.

7-01-04

Cycling: To win the 2004 Tour de France 
Closing Date: Jul 03, 2004 04:00 GMT -4  
from Liege(Prologue) to Paris- 3rd to 25th of July 2004
Odds on others available upon request. Place Odds are to finish 1st, 2nd or 3rd  
Option Win Odds  Place Odds  
Lance Armstrong 1.8   1.16   
Jan Ullrich 2.55   1.2   
Iban Mayo 5   1.6   
Tyler Hamilton 7   1.85   
Roberto Heras 14   3.6   
Ivan Basso 21   5   
Gilberto Simoni 29   6.6   
Francisco Mancebo 41   9   
Haimar Zubeldia 41   9   
Christophe Moreau 51   11   
Dennis Menchov 51   11   
Levi Leipheimer 51   11   
Oscar Sevilla 51   11   
Carlos Sastre 67   14.2   
Georg Totschnig 67   14.2   
Jorg Jaksche 67   14.2   
Santiago Botero 67   14.2   
Bradley McGee 151   31   

6-29-04

Michael Moore is obviously a little fruity, but pretty much all of his points are correct, even if he does push the facts a little bit. The one thing that he's absolutely right about is that our media has been shamefully cow-towing to the white house since 9/11, not challenging anything, not asking the tough questions.

I hate people who treat the American people like idiots, but I also have no faith in the American people. I mean, the freaking people believe that Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden were good buddies (thanks to the lies of our government). The moron masses will belive the BS they're told, and then they see the media, which is under the thumb of our government, showing the "harsh other side" (which is some softball debate), and they think they've seen both sides. If something major happens in the next few months, the stupid people will vote based on that, and totally forget everything that's happened.

The democratic party and the republican party are both scum. The party machines both just want power and the money from lobbyists and special interests. Ok, fine, that's true on both sides. Now, there are different views on issues, the republicans claim to be more small-government, laissez-faire, etc. (though, historically, that's not been true at all). The actual difference on issues is that republicans are pro-rich, pro-big-business. Even if you just take that as an issues matter, ok, that's a difference on issues and we can debate that and we can respect different opinions. If you subtract off all that, you're left with the people who are on both sides. If you look at the people, it's just scum on the republican side. You have Karl Rove, the Shrub, Dick Cheney and Rumsfeld, Reagan (the doddering, Alzheimers-inflicted actor), Nixon, etc. On the demo side you have Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, Clinton, Gore, Kerry. Now, remember, we're subtracting off the fact that both sides are political scum and there's a difference of issues. With that basis subtracted off your left with liars and criminals in the good old boy network of big business on the republican side, and perhaps somewhat naive and personally weak good guys on the demo side. Personally, I think the absolute morality of Jimmy Carter stands far above any other politician we've had in recent memory. Sure, maybe he made some mistakes in office, but they all do, but if you look at his record after office - he's the only president, the *only* president in modern history who has continued to work to better the world, rather than just taking lucrative speaking engagements and board seat or partner positions at big businesses that he illegally helped during his term. I believe Jimmy Carter is the only recent president who was deeply moral and trying to help every person in the world with his decisions.

6-29-04

near = f > 0.5

But with hysteresis, you make the previous value "sticky" like this :

if ( ! was near )
        near = ( f > 0.6 );
else // was near
        near = ( f > 0.4 );

if ( f > 0.4 && f < 0.6 )
        // no change, leave previous state
else
        near = f > 0.5


or


if ( f < 0.4 )
        not near
else if ( f > 0.6 )
        near
else
        // no change, leave previous state

6-29-04

The hippocracy of the Republican machine is just shocking. They clearly intentionally have made this election a referendum on personalities, but then they say "why don't the democrats stick to the issues?". Cheney goes around saying "Bush is for optimism, Kerry is for pessimism", and "if you want a leader who's tough on terrorists, vote Bush". Ok, that's fine, but then don't bitch when the dems attack Bush. It's like The Trial (Kafka), the Judge says "now, stop all the personal attacks, Mr. K, we won't stand it. The court now calls Theresa M. who will testify on the poor character of Mr. K". It would be funny if it wasn't so sickening. Of course, this whole administration is a sick Kafka-esque nightmare. All the "environmental programs" like "Clear Skies" which are really rolling back regulations. Reagan was one of the masters of cutting funding for medicare and then taking a photo-op with elderly in the hospital the next day. Slimy sucks.

The laptop boom is going to create a whole new generation of people who are badly crippled. Laptops are terrible for ergonomics, the keyboards are cramped, and worst of all you tend to use them with bad elbow position, and the screen is usually way too low. You should be looking straight at your screen, or even slightly up, never ever down. The keyboard and monitor should generally be 12 inches or more apart, not directly adjacent. Invest in physical therapy and wrist & neck treatment.

Invest in OldCo. The big business of the future is taking advantage of the elderly. This is already somewhat true, but it will be ever more true going into the future. More and more of the population is old. In many countries (Japan, Sweden) it will become catastrophic soon (in 50 years), with over 50% of the population retired!! The old give up their money quickly, and then are subsidized by the government, which pays outrageously high prices for unnecessarry services. It's one of the big ways money is pumped from the masses to private business. So, I'm starting OldCo (TM). OldCo will focus on exploiting the eldery with a many-pronged attack. We will invest in pharmaceuticals, retirement housing developments, nursing homes ("assisted living"), telemarketting scams, bad clothing, golf, Matlock, Murder She Wrote, Cadillac, etc.

6-26-04

The one thing that's very true is that military action only makes terrorists stronger. You cannot defeat terrorists with direct action. Even if you kill most of the terrorists, that just makes them stronger, because it increases recruitment from the millions who support them. The way to defeat terrorists is to get rid of the things that give them support - the Israeli violence against Palestinians, the poverty and oppressive regime in Pakistan, the corrupt monarchy in Saudi Arabia, the corrupt US-run "democracy" in Indonesia and the Phillipenes, etc. etc.

Hezzbollah and the IRA have nearly been defeated, two fo the world's worst terrorist organizations, and the method was not military - it was negotiation and withdrawal. When Israel occupied southern Lebanon, the Hezzbollah attacks were fierce and it was supported all over the Middle East; for every guerilla they killed, ten more took his place; now Israel has pulled out, and support for Hezzbollah as crumpled, and now when the Israelis do strike back at Hezzbollah there's not much uproar from the Arab community. The IRA was engaged in negotiation and brought into the government, and their acts of violence have almost entirely stopped.

You cannot possibly eliminate all the safe-havens for terrorists, not any time soon anyway; any country with massive poverty and anarchy (of which there are many) can be a safe haven. Even the war in Afghanistan was only a temporary setback for Al Qaeda; it forces them to disperse a bit more, but does nothing to destroy them.

When you see children playing terrorist, as you do in Palestine, and now in Iraq, you're losing the real war on terror.

The other argument, that Saddam may have had weapons that would be dangerous for Terrorists to get their hands on - that has some merit, though the evidence was weak, and invasion is a major over reaction. The big problem I have with that argument is that we've done nothing to secure dangerous weapons in the past. We sell our own military equipment to countries that may easily give it to terrorists to use against us (like Yemen, the rebels in Afghanistan, etc.) We did nothing to secure the huge amounts of deadly material in Russia when it broke up - there are literally unaccounted for nuclear weapons from the Russian stock piles. The huge Russian germ development labs were never secured or properly cleaned. There were countless Russian scientists who were experts in developing all kinds of weapons - many people around the world pushed for these guys to get hired by the US or UN so they wouldn't go on the open market, but no one did anything, and those guys can now sell their expertise to the highest bidder. Why did we help India develop nuclear reactors? Why did we allow Pakistan and Israel to develop nuclear weapons?

6-26-04

It's odd how we have so many smart people in the industry thinking carefully about game design, and yet so many of the games that even these smart people make are full of design decisions that are just frustrating and not fun. I think there's a big problem between the theory of games and the practice of making good games; it seems very hard for people to sit back and objectively make good decisions on their own game creations. A lot of people will blame it on the schedule and such, but taking your schedule into account is part of the process. A lot of artists in all media will blame their failures on schedule constraints or budget constraints - that's a total bullshit excuse, it just means they didn't take their situation into account properly.

I see a lot of the Junior High Theory of Game Design - add more skulls, make bigger explosions, make my hero a hot chick with huge boobs, yeah that'll be cool, make my shotgun shoot nukes, etc. I also see the I Know What's Best For You theory of game design - the holier than thou game designer who knows that "real fun" is, and doesn't let the player do what they want so that the experience will be pure or "true to his vision", and winds up just making something painful and frustrating.

People cling to features in game dev just because they've gotten used to them. You must remember the real audience has never seen any of this before. Just because some way you've been playing is "broken" doesn't mean anything's wrong - that's not how the new audience will play.

People do things the wrong way, you keep telling them to fix it, and then it becomes too late to make the changes, and you're stuck with shit. Smart people try to do things right before it's too late.

6-22-04

That damn MoveOn.org goes too far, they spew a bunch of half-truths to try to make their case. Damn you Move On ! It's not necessary to lower yourself to the partisan lies - the truth is bad enough!!

6-22-04

One of the myths about the people of the world is that the mass market really wants crap. That's just not completely true; people are very easily cajoled and carried along with trends, but they usually come to their senses eventually and go "wow, that was crap" (while, of course, jumping onto the new crap-wagon). So, people will say, wow I can't believe we liked New Kids on The Block, that really was shit, but this Nickelback, it's good stuff. Occasionally you see shining exceptions, like the success of Radiohead, or Amelie, that show you interesting, intelligent stuff really can have a pretty wide appeal; there are a lot of people with good taste out there. It's the producers and marketting goons who are really dominated by short-sighted small-minded people. They can't tell quality from crap themselves, so they go with what's easy. The thing that saves the music industry is that you really can still make a record very cheaply; you may not be able to get it distributed, but you can record it, and then shop it around and try to get some money for disribution with a finished product. With games and movies, it's hard to have much of anything to shop around before you get some big money commitment.

6-22-04

Why in the world did we go to war in Iraq? There were no WMD's, there were no terrorists in Iraq to speak of (not compared to Pakistan or Saudi Arabia or Iran or Lebanon or Indonesia or the Phillipenes, etc. etc.), there was zero immediate threat from Saddam to anyone in the US (except perhaps to big oil business interests). You can't say it was "humanitarian", as we do nothing in Chechnya, Darfur, Sri Lanka, Tibet, Colombia, North Korea, Palestine, and countless African nations where rebels and government death squads roam freely. You can't say it was to prevent terrorism; if anything, it's escelated terrorism; it's rather like poking a tiger with a stick, it doesn't make you more secure, it makes you much much less secure. In fact, we're dangerously close to destabilizing Saudi Arabia, which would be a major disaster. Saudi Arabia is run by a US-backed oppressive monarchy; 95% of the people are Muslim, and' a very large percentage are very militant. The stability of Saudi Arabia is hanging by a thread; if their government is seen to be in cahoots with the US, there may be an uprising. Already terrorists are forming and being recruited from the streets. Hmm... maybe that is the master plan; now, this is pure speculation, but it's amusing. Let's say you have a revolution in Saudi Arabia. Then the US military will have to go in to restore the peace, we set up US Oil Companies and make it a "democracy" (what we really mean by "democracy" is a "free market" controlled by US megacorps). Suddenly the oil profits from Saudi Arabia go to US corporations instead of to the people, as they do now (with a large chunk going to the monarchy).

Who was in Cheney's secret meeting on energy policy? Probably Ken Lay. Perhaps a bin Laden, certainly a few Saudis. Perhaps some military advisers? One of the thinly kept secrets of US government is that our domestic energy policy and our Middle East foreign policy have always been tied; they're generally both led by a few very high up people, not separate groups. This administration is very wise about the use of the stone wall. They know the media are fickle and won't stick to issues if they aren't exciting. The administration just keeps stone-walling and denying, and eventually the issue just dies from lack of interest.

One of the funny things about Ronald Reagan is that the reality of his domenstic policy was exactly the opposite of what his fans think it was. In reality he created a massive tax-and-spend stimulus; his government spent more than all previous governments combined (not inflation adjusted). He also presided over the largest import tarriffs, which provided cozy protection from international competition.

6-21-04

6-21-04

6-20-04

Lots of horrific animal accidents at the house recently. A little while ago some baby birds fell out of their nest before they could fly. The cats immediately pounced on them and started playing with them. I tried to save them, but it was too late; they were probably doomed anyway, falling out too soon. Today, a big beautiful bird flew straight into one of my big plate glass windows. Again, the cats pounced in a second and broke the bird's neck.

Holy crap, the freaking mayonaise and butter have big stickers on them that say "0 carbs". The freaking vodka ads are touting their "0 carbs". This is just like the fat-free craze, when all kinds of shit like rice got "fat free" stickers on them. The marketting industry treats us like morons. The sad thing is they're right to do so.

Cakes coated in fondant are disgusting and look terrible. They look and taste like plastic. Food should look like food.

People who are freaky weirdos in some little way tend to be rotten to the core. Perhaps you have a friend who's excessively clean, or who has a freaky obsession with Disney shit. You might thing "eh, he's pretty cool except for that one thing". In my experience, that's not the case. That one obvious freaky thing is usually just the small outward sign of a rotten core, bad mental shit going on inside. He'll betray you, keep him at arms length.

Pretty good result in a multi-table today. $30 NL Holdem, 600 entrants. I placed 25th, it paid like $150 or something crappy like that, all the big money is in the top few places. The blinds get so big near the end, that it gets very random at that point. The blinds were $1000/2000 when I went out, and the average stack was about $20,000 , so the big blind was like 1/10th of my stack, that's a lot. I had 8T from one off the button. Now, you may say that's not a very good hand, but it folded around to me, and everyone is playing very tight. I'm one off the button; in this scenario, I will raise it with almost any two cards - they're just folding so often, it's +EV to raise any two. 8T is actually not bad, because if he does call, I may hit something. In fact, the big blind did call, and I did hit - top pair, the flop was like 23T. I know I'm good. The guy in the big blind is a bad player, I've been watching him and have him picked out as one of the guys who's going to pay me. He bets big on the flop, I go all in, he calls. He has overcards, AQ. He's played it terribly - he should have raised me preflop. Instead he let me flop top pair and make the best hand. He has only 6 outs - that's about a 25% chance of winning the hand, I'm way ahead. Of course, he spikes his Queen and knocks me out of the tournament. I just can't see how anyone can win a multi-table. You have to get in so many times as a 75/25 favorite, you won't win all of those.

Which reminds me - an example of doing math with powers of two. I can hardly do math any more, but I'm a master of powers of two. So, to win a big multi-table tournament you'll have to get all-in at least 5 times, and at best you'll be an 80/20 favorite. To win, you have to win them all, so your chance of winning them all is 0.8^5. That's (2^3/10)^5 = 2^15/10^5 = 32768/10^5 = 0.32768 , about a 33% chance.

6-20-04

Poker has lots of little "bad beats" that aren't the normal kind. Today I played a big multi-table. Some of my funny "bad beats" were - I hit an ace on the flop, play it cautious, make 2 pair on the turn, I trap and pull a nice check-raise, I bet the river; he calls - we have the identical hand. Split pot. Another - I flopped a straight flush (!!), but it's just me and the big blind in the hand! I check the flop, bet the turn, he folds. Damn! Got zero pay on it.

Any potential job I think of just seems a bit tedious, including game programming. One of the fundamental problems I have with "work" is that in America to be at all successful, you have to totally focus on one thing, work 60+ hours/week, live that thing. There just isn't any single one thing I could stand to do 60 hrs/week. I love music, but just a few hours a week, movies, same thing, reading, same thing, eating, cooking, poker, exercise, programming, managing, etc. How can anyone stand to do any one thing with such single focus? It sucks.

6-20-04

The NYT today cautions that the S&P 500 is getting too heavily weighting with financial service stocks. I disagree; that's not some anomaly or mistake in the balance of the index - it's just a reflection that American business is more and more just financial services. We are the puppet master, the controllers of money flow; we make nothing, do nothing, we just own the people who do. I read another interesting figure recently. These days, the amount of money (liquid assets) that are transferred around the world each day is roughly equal to the total amount of hard liquid assets (cash and cash equivalents) in the world. In other words, 100% of the world's wealth is transferred each day. That's quite astonishing; that percentage has been going up rapidly since 1900. Even in 1950 it was below 10%, and in the last 50 years it has grown nearly exponentially to the current 100%. The way that so much money is transferred is because our financial institutions are very highly leveraged; they control many times the amount of liquid assets as the amount of hard cash they can back it with; those liquid assets are in the form of debt ownership, bonds, loans, stocks, etc., and it can be transferred and purveyed into further leveraged assets. This is part of why small problems in any part of the world can cause massive disasters in the financial markets. Let's say some country suddenly can't pay out the bonds its issued to cover its debt; all the finance companies were relying on taking that payout and rolling it back around to other loans; suddenly they have to cover their contracts some other way, so they start calling in their bonds and loans, a chain reaction forms where people have to cover their funny paper with real money, and there's a massive short-fall of real-money; the market instantly tightens up like a python, and crashes catastrophically.

Part of the problem with corporate governance these days is that there's basically no downside to taking ludicrous risks. Let's say I'm some CEO guy; I get the job running a nice solid company like Johnson&Johnson. Now, I could just run it well, stay in our core business, and make money and give jobs to lots of people. The problem with that is it doesn't make me massively rich. Furthermore, the stock holders are pushing for massive increases in the stock, not moderate growth, but big jumps. The only way that can happen is if I go into new businesses, take big risks. So, let's say I see some opportunity; 50% of the time, we'll be massively successful; the other 50% we go out of business. Well, that's really a win-win situation for me; if we're a big success, great; if we go out of business, I get a nice big severance payment, perhaps a massive retainer for "continuity" when the company goes into bankruptcy, I can take a few years off, and then get a new job as a CEO somewhere else. Of course all the staffers get screwed, but it doesn't affect the executives who make the decisions. There needs to be way more connection of management's personal wealth and happiness to the success of the companies they run. This is the principle of "personal capitalism".

6-16-04

6-16-04

Some interesting tech things that will be possible in the next gen that could lead to game ideas -

1) Really *really* big worlds, with procedural content, like enormous terrains with lots of detail and trees that just go on forever. Could lead to some interesting play involving some really macro/micro scale play, like you fly a Dragon or a space ship or something and you can zoom all around this planet, and then hop off and run around on the ground and coordinate things and take things back and forth across huge distances.

2) Lots and lots of NPC's. Like you could play in the middle of a war with thousands of guys on each side fighting it out. You're in the mess fighting it up (ala Onimusha), or commanding a squad, or something.

Some game ideas I've always wanted to do - 1) a modern Trade Wars; nobody has done this decently yet; Eve Online is probably the closest thing, but it's too complex and too slow and there's not enough of a macro goal. I actually prefer Galactic Warzone to Trade Wars - simpler, purer, more combat, and more of a goal. 2) a mature Tamagochi game; this is an MMO where you can play single player and build up your avatar, but then get together and fight in arenas or do little co-op runs, and also trade items and do training and such with other people as you need.

6-14-04

6-14-04

6-14-04

The Enron tapes are quite shocking. Just like the torture in Abu Ghraib, they bring us viscellary close to the crime, even though these crimes are relatively minor compared to what the US Power Structure commits on a regular basis. One of the really interesting things I see in the Enron transcripts is how arrogant and small-minded and greedy these traders were (great Republicans!). Several of the conversations were about the price caps that California was trying to establish to get control of the price-gouging that was screwing the CA economy. One trader says about the price caps "it goes against what this country was founded on". The guy sees what he's doing as good capitalism; if he can manipulate markets to make more money, that's good capitalism, what this country's all about, right? Another guy rails that the price caps are "fucking him" out of 500 million dollars. He really believes he deserves 500 million dollars for trading energy contracts, and by trying to keep control of their prices, he's being unfairly fucked.

Fox has taken Andy Richter out of "Andy Richer Controls the Universe" (creative, funny, different, but didn't always work) and put him in "Quintuplets" (predictable, bourgeios, recycled, shmalz). Way to go, America.

The thing that makes America great is the same thing that fucks it. The poor of America really believe they can make it big, buy a nice house, move up and get rich, etc. Of course the reality is that 99% of them won't. But, they still vote for tax cuts for the rich, because they hope to get there some day themselves, and didn't those rich guys earn it?

6-13-04

I've started playing $50 single-table tournaments just as practice for my tournament mojo. So, I'm playing today and I'm totally dominating the game, if I do say so myself. I get the big stack near the end, about 30% of the chips. Everyone tightends up, trying to slink into the money, so I start raising and raising, and I just keep taking the blinds; a few times people play back at me, I fold the bad hands and get all-in with the good ones and catch them a few times. By the time it gets heads up, I have 90% of the chips. I figure I'm a shoe-in to win. Ah, Poker's not so nice! First he gets all in with the Q8; I have the K7. I hit the K on the flop, and he proceeds to hit two running 8's ! Now he has 20% of the chips and I have to worry a bit, but I can still just get all-in a few times and knock him out. We steal each others blinds a few times, until I pick up 44. I raise, he goes all-in (we're both playing very aggressive at this point), I call. He has KT. I'm a slight favorite. He hits trip tens. Now our stacks are roughly even. We go back and forth a few more times, the blinds are getting very big now. I'm stealing more often, but every so often he comes over the top of one of my raises and I have to let it go, so we're staying about even. Finally I raise, he reraises, I go all-in with the A9, a pretty good hand heads up; he has the A4. I figure I'm gold. The board comes all junk, no pairs, I'm starting to dance, then I see all the chips moving to him - what's this? He made a flush! Damn you Richie Rich! Richie played well, but if I'd only hit one of those hands where I was a slight favorite, I'd be in 1st instead of 2nd.

My style in poker tournaments is very aggressive, constant raising. That's not because I particularly want to play that style, it's because my opponents' bad play *forces* me to play that way. When I see people folding to the minimum bet, that just cries out to me "please, take my money, I'm weak, just breathe on me and I'll fold up like origami". So, I have to bet at them. So many players never adjust properly, or they do try to adjust and do it wrong. Many players just always play poker a certain way; they've learned from experience what hands are good, they play by patterns. That's completely the wrong way to play poker; poker is about situational strategies and adaptation; the way you play should be entirely based on how your opponents are playing and responding to you. Since most people don't respond well to variations, you can beat them simply by playing very differently than they're used to. Generally that means playing very aggressive; against some people you can kill them by playing very loose (surprising them by hitting junk flops), or playing very tight (letting them take small pots, but then taking their whole stack when you show a monster).

6-13-04

Our medical system is inherently corrupt. What we have are private contractors (doctors) who get to choose their own jobs, and they get paid more the more complicated & expensive their work is. They are inherently motivated to do more surgeries, prescribe more drugs, etc. They have no motivation for preventive care, because they're hardly paid for that. Also, there's a complete disconnect between what the patient gets and what they pay. Patients have no motivation to choose cheaper care, though by choosing the expensive care it comes back to bite us all in the long run. Patients may choose a $10,000 epidural shot rather than the $4 bottle of aspirin, even though all studies show they are equally effective. In fact, with insurance it's sometimes cheaper for patients to choose the $100 bottle of Clarinex (covered by insurance) rather than the $10 bottle of Claritin (not covered).

Medical insurance is fucked up, but all insurance is fucked up these days. Insurance is supposed to take a premium and hold it (invest it) and pay it out for people who need it for unexpected problems. It's a sort of hedge, it takes out the spikes in random events and puts everyone more at an EV (expected value). The problem is that insurance companies are for-profit companies, and you don't have much choice, and you must have insurance, legally and just because the consequences are too great if you don't. The first problem is that when people make insurance claims, they're way higher than they need to be. When mechanics are working on an insurance claim, they way over-charge, same with doctors, etc. there's lots of collusion and kickbacks between the insurance companies and the people who do the work. The second problem is that your monthly payments have to cover punative damages. Your car insurance and medical insurance are partly going to the big jury awards for accidents and malpractice. The third problem is that the insurance company makes their money right back when something goes wrong; this is legally limitted for medical insurance, but for car insurance, if you have an accident, they immediately raise your rates and make back the value from you quickly. You say, wait a minute, what were all those monthly premiums for?! The final problem is that whenever something really bad happens, they get bailed out by the government. They take your insurance premiums, they pay them out to themselves as salaries and profits, they use them to grow their business, advertise, etc. Then when a big flood hits, or whatever, hey, they don't have the money to cover it, they need the government to step in and pay the people. Well what the fuck did you do with all those insurance payments!? You're supposed to be a hedge that can handle those occasional spikes and make it up over time.

6-12-04

Ben Stiller is not funny. No he's not.

The false casting of the New York Times as a liberal rag is one of the masterstrokes of the Republican machine. It's actually a very mainstream paper; they're generally supportive of Bush, they said nothing substantive against the war on terror; their reporting is generally directly fed by the administration, and they don't even fact-check or apply any criticism to the garbage they're fed. By casting this main-stream view as "liberal", the Republicans succeed in marginalizing the true left. You see the trick? If mainstream people think the NYT is left-wing, then anything farther left is crazy. With tricks like this you can slant and push baseline of popular debate. People are really dumb; people who think of themselves as "mainstream" don't actually have their own views that they stick with; they just sort of take what they're hearing and making a mash of it. If the Republicans go way to the Right (as they have, with massive tax cuts for the rich, complete rollbacks of environmental protection, a total anti-welfare, anti-social-security, anti-medicare stance, invasions of foreign countries, etc. etc.), then the middle goes to the Right.

Eddie Merckx was the greatest cyclist ever. He won the Tour de France 5 times, just like Lance, but Eddie also raced in all the other major races, and won almost all of them at least once. He was a great climber, a great sprinter, he could beat anyone at anything. Lance focuses entirely on the tour, and has a great team focused on helping him. Eddie would take off on his own in Tour stages, leaving the rest of the rides behind, and ride a solo breakway for a hundred miles. Lance is a very carefully tuned machine, he trains and builds for the tour and rides smartly, he doesn't chase down breakaways that aren't necessary. Eddie would chase anyone, he had raw ability unlike any other. Just to try to put it in context - just about any pro cyclist is amazing by normal human standards; those guys can ride for 8 hours, up steep hills, *fast*, like they ride up hill as fast as I ride on flats. In our modern era, Lance has lots of science, he can tell that he almost never goes "Lactic", that is, starts the anaerobic metabolism process that builds lactic acid; that burn in your legs when you've pushed it too hard - Lance never even gets there after 6 hours riding up hills. And Eddie could crush those guys. Unfortunately, biking in those days is somewhat stained by drugs; lots of cyclists took stims. Pretty much any athletic performance from 1950-1995 has an asterisk on it, because drugs were available and testing was basically non-existant. Of course, the baseball goons are still doping up, as are some people in every sport, but these days it's much reduced in most sports.

6-12-04

Ronald Reagan's Chief of Staff was Donald Regan. That's weird. Reagan's own trusted staff said he was inattentive, inaffective, often confused and unaware of what was going on around him. I think it's pretty obvious he had Alzheimers, or some form of senility, while in office. Of course it will always be denied, but he was obviously doddering and not involved in running his own government. He was like your befuddled old Grandpa who keeps calling you by the wrong name and telling the same joke over and over. RR armed the Taliban and created the military force there; he gave arms to Iran (illegally, in exchange for hostages), and fed arms to the Contras in Nicaragua (also illegally, the CIA also had operatives in Nicaragua helping and training the Contras), his "great" negotiation with the Russians was stalled out because he wouldn't abandon SDI ("Star Wars") which never would have worked anyway. The fact that we had a President in office with Alzheimers is just terrifying.

6-11-04

6-10-04

6-09-04

Lately I've really been noticing the way the pros circulate on party poker. There are a lot of pros on all the time; "pros" in the sence that they play poker for a living. The pros are like sharks, circulating, sniffing for blood, they come and go from the tables looking for the big money bleeders. If a table lights up, someone starts pumping money out, the sharks attack, they line up in the waiting list trying to get in. The fish don't even realize what's happening, that they have a big giant target on their head. They think they're playing pretty well, just getting a bad run of cards. We're talking to them, chatting with them, trying to keep them relaxed and happy.

In gambling, the only big long-term winner is the house. Just like in the market, the big winner is the brokers, the hedge funds, and the investment banks.

I've been reading about so many scandals recently, it's just mind-numbing. The justice department believes torture is justified if ordered by the commander in chief; of course American citizens who are even *accused* of terrorism are "enemy combatants" and can be held and tortured outside the law. Bernie Ebbers who ran WorldCom was one of the great corporate robbers of the modern era; he falsely inflated profits, took giant loans from the company for himself, etc, and now it's come out that Citigroup, which underwrote Worldcom and took stock public for Worldcom, knew that Worldcom's finances were shaky, and nonetheless encouraged their customers to buy it and talked it up on the street. I've been reading "The Trial of Henry Kissinger". The crimes commited by Nixon and Kissinger and just staggering. The war in Iraq is a horrific crime against humanity, but it's nothing compared to what these maniacal men did; endorsing genocide in Bandladesh, committing genocide in Laos and Cambodia, assasinating democratically elected officials and conspiring with a criminal dictator in Chile, etc.

6-07-04

6-06-04

6-06-04

Go Pistons! I despise the Lakers, prima-donnas, babied by their coaches and the refs, freaking Shaq the bruiser who fouls basically every time he touches the ball (it's not called); Kobe the sexual-assaulting ball-hog (but damn does he have skills). Rick Fox is no longer much of a factor, but he's such a ridiculous pretty boy, I bet he calls himself "sexual chocolate".

The Nuge Tribe is awesome. Their credo is basically "preserve nature so we can shoot it". Why do so many girls have sex with lunatics like Ted Nugent?

I burned my fingertips bad, it's right on my typing pads, it hurts to write this. I was barbecuing some crusty bread for bruschetta, and I figure "it's bread, I can bare hand it", so I grab it and carry it in the house. Of course I forgot I had painted some olive oil on the bread, so I'm holding scorching hot oil in my hands basically.

I loved playing rugby with a real team, cuz everyone is serious, everyone is giving their all trying to win, and everyone is doing their job, getting their assignments, in the right place. I love playing pickup games too, but it's not nearly as good, it's not the same.

The whole Paris Hilton thing disgusts me. You have all these super-rich trust fund babies (Paris is not even close to the top of the money list), there are thousands of them, and they have some several hundred billion dollars depending on exactly how you count them. What they've done is made it sort of entertaining to the masses to watch these robber-baron's heirs. Of course the Bush repeal of the estate tax just helps cultivate this super-rich ruling class. The world is their playground; the working men are like serfs, but the working people have been conned in the most despicable manipulation into admiring and following the lives of these inhuman bitches.

6-06-04

Party Poker provides free, no-fee money transfers between accounts, no questions asked. The business is in Antigua, the records are totally off-limits to the US Govt. It's the perfect mechanism for money laundering and illegal purchases. Two people make accounts, one puts money in, transfer to the other, they take it out. On paper it just looks like one person had gambling losses, another had gambling profits. Guns and cocaine are exchanged in the real world, the money is all wired and untraceable. Your party poker account can also be directly linked to an offshore private bank account for extra security.

6-05-04

Today I tried another $50 multi-table tourney. Very first hand I get two pair on the flop with a Q9. I bet, he goes all-in, I call. He has TT, which is really a junk hand, all I need is a Q to beat him, and I have Q9! He has two outs, guess what card is on the river? Is this shit going to follow me forever in the multis? Maybe my multi-table play should be more aggressive, more risky, like Hoyt, Barry, and Phil Ivey. That's easy to say, but at the Party Poker tables there are a lot of people you can't bluff out of pots, so big moves with poor hands aren't really a good idea. My strategy has mainly been to make smart steals, come over the top of their bluffs, try to get into a lot of hands cheap and hit big flops and get paid by all the bad players. I mostly try to avoid 50/50 shots (unless it comes from me putting big-raise pressure on them) because I figure I can do much better than that. Maybe it's just been bad luck; I've only played like 10 multi-tables now, so that's still a very small number for statistical variance.

5-31-04

5-31-04

1. They're better than you. That means if you can get all your chips in against a top pro with a 50/50 shot, that's not a bad thing. At the same time, they think they're much better than you, so they will be loathe to risk their chips in a 50/50 shot - they will want to save them for a better opportunity. Put these two together, and it means you should raise them all-in whenever you're pretty sure you're in a race. eg. if you have a low PP and you're pretty sure they're on AK or AQ, or if you have AK yourself. If you were playing against worse players, you would often fold these situations, just as they will often fold when you put all your chips in.

2. Let them push you around. One of the few mistakes that pros will make is that they will underestimate you. They are a bunch of egotistical pricks, and they will try to push you around. Let them think that you are a fish who can be easily pushed around (but don't lose too many chips doing that). You will make your most money by slow-playing, letting the very aggressive pros bet at you, and calling them down with the winning hand. They'll whine and say "how can you call with A-junk, you have no kicker, I could've had blah blah", you just smile and know you played their arrogance like a fiddle.

3. You know them, they don't know you. You've seen them on TV, you've read their blogs, they don't know anything about you. That scared them a little bit. Use your knowledge of them (Daniel and Gus like to play junk, Dan Harrington is very tight, etc.), and also try to stay unknown. Keep your play a little erratic so they can't pick up an easy pattern on you. Some pros don't like to get involved in pots with the "fish" unless they have very big hands, because they don't like playing against unknown factors. This is very good for you, it takes away all their advantages. Steal their blinds, and when they do play back, just get out.

Good luck.

5-31-04

here

Howard Lederer, Daniel Negreanu, John Juanda, Scotty Nguyen - some of the players I admire most. Howard and Daniel in particular are very good players, and I like their style; aggressive and smart. But who's this Minh Nguyen ? Is he part of Men The Master's collusion squad? Or is it just a coincidence?

I also like The Hendon Mob ; Ram is a very good player, and Barney is ok; the other guys are pansies. I just really like the idea of a bunch of blue collar guys from a small part of London forming a Poker Syndicate and travelling around the world playing tournaments.

The animation in Spider Man 2 just looks awful. Someone tells those idiots not to move the camera in strange, digital, herky-jerky ways, especially when the focus character is also moving in weird ways; the combination just makes the motion look really odd.

5-28-04

When you get bug reports you have to consider the utility of examining them. How likely are they to just be user error? Users have to realize that when they "cry wolf" a lot by reporting bogus bugs, they're going to get ignored more because it becomes quite likely that the bug is not worth exploring.

The thing that games in general (and software in general) don't do is to let people control their experience, *and* make the default smart. My thinking in software design is always like this :

The default should be what the *stupidest* user will want, because they don't know how to do anything else. Options that semi-savy people will want (like resolution changes, etc.) can be a little bit harder to get to. Options that only a power-user would want can be very very hard to get to (eg. only in a .ini file or only in script language, etc.)

That way your average dope installs it, all the fancy options are totally hidden from them, and they get a decent game/tool/whatever. Then your more power users still have the ability to make it how they like it.

Controls are a classic example of this - the controls should always default to what the mass-market least-savy user will want. That's true even if you don't think those are really the best controls!!! If the best controls are more "hard core", put it on an option. The hard core people will find them, the mass-market will never touch the options and be happy.

A good way to do development would be with "flash squads" for features. Someone coordinates the squad, generally I would recommend it should be a programmer. The squad is one or a few people from each department, as needed. The squad works together to make the feature; they can brainstorm and talk and try things and get it done. They still get scheduled and such, but they have more freedom to talk to each other and work cross-department. The point here is that the org chart is temporarily changed. Rather than having director/leads/producer assign tasks to each department, and then have the various people doing the work report to their leads & producers, you have the director/producer assign the task to the flash squad; then the people in the squad report to the coordinator; the squad can agree to change up what they're doing, etc. and the coordinate controls it; he's responsible for scheduling and reporting progress up the chain. In the end the whole squad is responsible for the quality of the result, you don't get a situation like "we did our work in code and the artists just didn't make it pretty" or whatever.

The Law of Conservation of Complaints. When I was in physics we used to make a lot of jokes about fake conservation laws. It seeems to me complaints are conserved. The better you make things for people, the more shit they'll find to complain about. When things are really good, people find really dumb little things to be annoyed by. In fact it often seems that people in good situations are more prone to complain because they have the time and energy to do so; people who are really in the shit don't have the time to bitch about what's wrong.

I hate the way people show "direct lighting" vs. "radiosity" screen shots, and they show the direct lighting with no freaking ambient (like here ). Hey dumb-asses, if you used like a bipolar gradient ambient, you'd have 95% of the radiosity affect there. The actual thing that radiosity gets you over decent non-radiosity lighting is a 2nd order effect, it's the subtle darkening in the deeper folds, etc. (affect/effect !)

5-27-04

5-24-04

Something about games makes me always want the one that isn't out yet. I don't do that with anything else - movies, cars, whatnot, I think I'm pretty reasonable about looking forward to things and then also enjoying them after they arrive. With games, it always seems like the game I'm gonna really like is right around the corner, and then when they arrive, they're always just okay. Maybe it's because the hype and promos in games are so much sweeter than the reality of the annoying bugs, slow loads, and repetetive, tedious gameplay.

5-23-04

5-23-04

Another fun project would be a full-object scanner using off-the-shelf parts. To do this you set up a rig that you're place your objects in. The rig is a frame with like 10 high resolution digital cameras (or you could just use one and have motors to rotate the rig around, but it's probably cheaper just to have more cameras), and a bunch of colored lights all around the rig that are computer controlled. You take lots of pictures of the object under different lighting conditions, with different colors and different angles. From this you can deduce the albedo texture on the object, and the BRDF, as well as the (visible) 3d geometry of the object! I say "visible" because this only really works on mostly-convex objects, you can't get into nooks and crannies on the hidden insides of the object.

5-22-04

People who are foolish and wrong hate and envy the people who are right. Fortunately we have the big fucking advantage of being right!

5-22-04

It's funny when the management treats the employees to something nice, I'm very grateful and all, I think it's a nice gesture, but really it's your own money. It's like, hey, all these profits we've gotten from your hard work, here you can have a tiny bit back. It's sort of like after the feudal lord collects the taxes from his hard-working peasants, and then when he rides through the streets he tosses coins out his window for the riff-raff to fight over, and they think he's so kind and generous.

5-18-04

5-18-04

5-16-04

The Lawrence of Arabia / Horse Whisperer game - okay, actually this is like an RTS with heroes. There's an evil race of gargoyle creatures ruling over the land, and the people have started a guerilla revolution to try to overthrow them; you come from a mysterious place and have come to help; you know their cause is helpless without a miracle, but you have a secret. Now, there are several different players you can be - one is like a "beast master" who can talk to animals and recruit an army of wolves, lions, horses, etc. one is a practitioner of black arts who can raise the undead, etc.. The gameplay is like RTS + heroes; you commmand your armies to do what you want, but the key behind the battles is if you can take out the enemy commanders, either personally or by good use of your minions. The play is personal, like 3rd & 1st person, not a top-down RTS. Then the really interesting thing is playing co-op with other heroes who can command different army types, and you get interesting combos of capabilities.

Shaft - you're shaft, a bad mutha, full blacksploitation game, pipms and informants, big afros, just go silly; you get your dual 45's, women are all over you.

Mad Max - this is so obvious and fun; sort of low-tech future weapons, like crossbows and grappling hooks and shotguns, cool vehicles. Make it an MMO, let the user get parts and bolt-ons and customize their cars; ambush other players and take their cars; find an old camaro and bolt on a fully-auto machine gun, etc. I don't want a super hero - I want a big fat character with a mohawk and ass-less leather chaps and football pads with spikes.

Cops and Robbers MMO - bad name, what really would be cool would be like a corrupt NYPD-style police force against the Mafia. When you join the MMO you're a peon, and there's a whole structure you have to work yourself up. You can start by running little missions for your side (shake-downs) and as you advance you get into all-out wars between the sides (and of course, you can also make deals with people on the other side on the sly). In many parts of the city, during the day, the cops and Mafia exist together and can't just take each other out in the open.

WW2 MMO - the idea here is to do the full logistics of a real war. You have a hierarchy of command that people have to qualify for with experience points. The top commanders stay back at base and look at top-down maps (if they choose that role), and they send out messages to the people on their team. You get squad commanders doing coms, people manning supply lines, planes carrying in paratroopers, etc. Your average group of players would sign up to be a squad together, so you could play with your buddies and have basically a BattleField-like experience, but it's part of a big battle, and there's a commander above you coordinating things, telling you your objective, and there are other teams supporting you, bringing in reinforcements, etc. The key would be to combine the ability to have a quick pickup game of BF, with character development and more depth and complex battles and the opporunity for character improvement and advancement. For example, with XP you qualify to move up the chain of command, but that also qualifies you for pilot training or heavy-weapons training, etc.

5-14-04