Orisinal
I have to admit some of the stuff I have been commenting on lately has been rather heavy. I will choose something more light-hearted tonight. If you are searching for some good video games that are not violent, no Dooms or Dragons or anything of that sort, try Orisinal at www.orisinal.org. Earlier I had commented on the Bubble Bees game. This is the game where you blow bubbles and try to catch bees and once in a while a clock, in them, hopefully two or three at a time. I play this when I want a break from what I am doing. Yes, you catch bees with bubbles. And you catch clocks. That is what makes these games so neat. They are nonsensical and silly, and are generally, but not always, nonviolent.
I found out tonight that there are about a score of other Orisinal games you can play. I tried a few. Some of them I could not get, like the one on stars. How are you supposed to catch them? In one you are a kid on a bicycle trailing a kite, and you are supposed to speed up or slow down to make the kite go up or down so it can catch little starlets that are flying around, but NO BIRDS! If you hit a bird, you are penalized and too many hits and you are out of the game. This whole idea is silly, and the idea of avoiding hitting birds promotes the idea of protecting the environment. Some are romantic. A video game about falling in love? The attempt here is a cruising Freddy Eynesford Hill at a building serenading his paramour with a guitar. She responds by throwing roses at him but the other neighbors don't take kindly to the noise and they throw teapots and coke bottles at him. The object is to collect as many roses as possible without getting hit. Cute.
Some of them have some violence. In "Snowboarding", you see skaters skating peacefully on a frozen pond until you hurtle huge snowballs at them to wipe them out. Some really get crazy. The ozone hole is damaging the environment of penguins so you are supposed to shoot them and thereby encase them in a big ice cube. That saves them. That's right. You hear it right. That saves them. Ok…
My favorite is still the Bubble Bees. The best of the others I saw tonight is "It takes Two". In this ludicrously cute game, a puppy and a kitten bounce up and down on a see-saw at your command. Fruit, pies and other food fly in the air and you are supposed to hop the kitten and puppy up and down on the see-saw to have them hit the food for points. You can either hop the kitty from above onto food or you can plop him on the see-saw causing the doggie to pop up in the air and hit a pizza and a hot dog.
To me these games will appeal to children up to about age 12 and to adults from 35 on up. Doom people between 12 and 35 years old seem to be too tied up in reality to appreciate a game of this sort but I invite them to try it too.
A Journey through Blogrealm
Blogtrek
Blogtrek
2002/09/13
2002/09/11
Hypermedia Day
I was going to go to a memorial service but I didn't. All the books in my attic crashed onto the floor, so I needed to straighten that out. But I didn't go mainly because I got overdosed on Planeattack. I have been dwelling on it too much and thinking about towers falling and people running for their lives. But although this is something I could have done something about, the media did not help much. They overdosed us all today on Planeattack, devoting entire news segments to the anniversary and wiping out all other programming. I did not get much local news at all because the local news program was devoted to national ceremonies.
Although I think there should be memorial services throughout the nation today to help those still suffering from depression and grief to assuage their sorrow, the media does not need to broadcast it all. There were plenty of other news today. How about the primaries in Florida? Once again their electoral process has failed them. What about the threat of war with Iraq and the resulting rise in oil prices? That will hit your pocketbook eventually. Johnny Unitas, the American football star, died today. I did not hear a bit about any of this on the national news tonight. I heard mostly about Planeattack, an event that has already happened.
Besides, why all this focus on a tragedy that killed 3,000 people? Auto accidents kill 44,000 a year; we don't hear about them. About a decade ago, a conflict between rival tribes in Rwanda, Africa killed 200,000 people. This surely was a vaster tragedy. If Planeattack had called for wiping out all other programming for a week, surely we should have heard nothing but what happened in Rwanda for a whole year. But we only got two weeks of occasional headlines about one of the greatest tragedies of our time, and I did not hear of much people feeling sorrow for those who lost loved ones there.
Because of this media overattention on the terrorist attacks of last year, I propose we call this day Hypermedia Day. It is also Remembrance Day, but it is also the day that mediahypism went to its extreme. I think Laura Bush was right. We would have been better off today turning off the TV set.
Planeattack: One Year Later
On September 11 last year nineteen young men saw fit to hijack airplanes and fly them into three of our national landmarks, killing about 3,000 people. It was the worst event to have hit our country since the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941. Like most people, I found some of the events unbelievable and somewhat apocalyptic. I first found out about it when I saw the headline on the CNN web page: "Breaking News: Plane crashes into World Trade Center". My first thought is that this is like the crash of a plane into the Empire State Building in 1945. But I soon found that the towers had serious wounds on them and were smoking into the sky. Shortly after this I saw the towers fall and I heard of the attack on the Pentagon and the plane crash in Pennsylvania. It traumatized me, just like it did most everyone else in the country; of the worst events in my life, this one ranks third. I found it hard to imagine 650 employees of the same company and same office suddenly killed, or 343 firefighters killed. Many acts of heroism occurred that day, but it was still a day of great tragedy. It leads me to wonder: why did it happen, and how can we minimize the chance that anything like this will occur again?
First of all, why did it happen? With most disasters, there are usually several causes. We may not have been watching people at the airports closely enough. Most hijackings up to now have resulted in people going somewhere else other than intended, rather than crashing into a building, so this caught people by surprise. Perhaps security was lax on the airlines. Maybe the FBI did not see the signs of it coming. Then there are the hijackers themselves. What made them do this?
First of all crashing a plane into a building and killing yourself is not something that we would normally do. These people were driven by some other force. It is my belief that this force is a fanatical belief in God coupled with an intense hatred for Israel, Jews, and anything Western. These people believed that they were truly fighting the forces of evil; they were sacrificing themselves to their cause. They were so caught up in their belief that they were willing to do anything for it. What is needed in this world is a healthy belief in self, and a desire to live life to the fullest. If these fanatics had been furthering their own future and causes instead of following the hateful beliefs of those who told them that this was a one-way ticket to heaven, Planeattack would never have happened.
But why did they have this fanatical belief? The reason for that lies in the widespread hatred of Middle Easterners for the United States and Israel. Hatred for Israel is easy to explain. Israel took over land which had been held by Arabs for centuries and is looked upon as an intruder. They are also envious of the United States and its prosperity and feel Americans get too big a slice of life's pie. We consume a lot more oil, food and other resources than they do and live a better life. They also don't like the invasion of Western culture, especially celebrityitis and media hype, into their lands. So it is not enough to heighten security, declare Delta and red alerts, arrest guilty and innocent people of Middle Eastern origin, and declare a "war" on terrorism. We need to address in addition the inequity between the rich and developing nations of this planet and this is not going to be easy. We need to work the processes of peace and develop ways of sharing the world's resources so that liberty, freedom, and just will be the province of all. To me this is the best way of ensuring that a tragedy of this magnitude never happens again.
I was going to go to a memorial service but I didn't. All the books in my attic crashed onto the floor, so I needed to straighten that out. But I didn't go mainly because I got overdosed on Planeattack. I have been dwelling on it too much and thinking about towers falling and people running for their lives. But although this is something I could have done something about, the media did not help much. They overdosed us all today on Planeattack, devoting entire news segments to the anniversary and wiping out all other programming. I did not get much local news at all because the local news program was devoted to national ceremonies.
Although I think there should be memorial services throughout the nation today to help those still suffering from depression and grief to assuage their sorrow, the media does not need to broadcast it all. There were plenty of other news today. How about the primaries in Florida? Once again their electoral process has failed them. What about the threat of war with Iraq and the resulting rise in oil prices? That will hit your pocketbook eventually. Johnny Unitas, the American football star, died today. I did not hear a bit about any of this on the national news tonight. I heard mostly about Planeattack, an event that has already happened.
Besides, why all this focus on a tragedy that killed 3,000 people? Auto accidents kill 44,000 a year; we don't hear about them. About a decade ago, a conflict between rival tribes in Rwanda, Africa killed 200,000 people. This surely was a vaster tragedy. If Planeattack had called for wiping out all other programming for a week, surely we should have heard nothing but what happened in Rwanda for a whole year. But we only got two weeks of occasional headlines about one of the greatest tragedies of our time, and I did not hear of much people feeling sorrow for those who lost loved ones there.
Because of this media overattention on the terrorist attacks of last year, I propose we call this day Hypermedia Day. It is also Remembrance Day, but it is also the day that mediahypism went to its extreme. I think Laura Bush was right. We would have been better off today turning off the TV set.
Planeattack: One Year Later
On September 11 last year nineteen young men saw fit to hijack airplanes and fly them into three of our national landmarks, killing about 3,000 people. It was the worst event to have hit our country since the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941. Like most people, I found some of the events unbelievable and somewhat apocalyptic. I first found out about it when I saw the headline on the CNN web page: "Breaking News: Plane crashes into World Trade Center". My first thought is that this is like the crash of a plane into the Empire State Building in 1945. But I soon found that the towers had serious wounds on them and were smoking into the sky. Shortly after this I saw the towers fall and I heard of the attack on the Pentagon and the plane crash in Pennsylvania. It traumatized me, just like it did most everyone else in the country; of the worst events in my life, this one ranks third. I found it hard to imagine 650 employees of the same company and same office suddenly killed, or 343 firefighters killed. Many acts of heroism occurred that day, but it was still a day of great tragedy. It leads me to wonder: why did it happen, and how can we minimize the chance that anything like this will occur again?
First of all, why did it happen? With most disasters, there are usually several causes. We may not have been watching people at the airports closely enough. Most hijackings up to now have resulted in people going somewhere else other than intended, rather than crashing into a building, so this caught people by surprise. Perhaps security was lax on the airlines. Maybe the FBI did not see the signs of it coming. Then there are the hijackers themselves. What made them do this?
First of all crashing a plane into a building and killing yourself is not something that we would normally do. These people were driven by some other force. It is my belief that this force is a fanatical belief in God coupled with an intense hatred for Israel, Jews, and anything Western. These people believed that they were truly fighting the forces of evil; they were sacrificing themselves to their cause. They were so caught up in their belief that they were willing to do anything for it. What is needed in this world is a healthy belief in self, and a desire to live life to the fullest. If these fanatics had been furthering their own future and causes instead of following the hateful beliefs of those who told them that this was a one-way ticket to heaven, Planeattack would never have happened.
But why did they have this fanatical belief? The reason for that lies in the widespread hatred of Middle Easterners for the United States and Israel. Hatred for Israel is easy to explain. Israel took over land which had been held by Arabs for centuries and is looked upon as an intruder. They are also envious of the United States and its prosperity and feel Americans get too big a slice of life's pie. We consume a lot more oil, food and other resources than they do and live a better life. They also don't like the invasion of Western culture, especially celebrityitis and media hype, into their lands. So it is not enough to heighten security, declare Delta and red alerts, arrest guilty and innocent people of Middle Eastern origin, and declare a "war" on terrorism. We need to address in addition the inequity between the rich and developing nations of this planet and this is not going to be easy. We need to work the processes of peace and develop ways of sharing the world's resources so that liberty, freedom, and just will be the province of all. To me this is the best way of ensuring that a tragedy of this magnitude never happens again.
2002/09/10
Front Street Syndrome
Last year on this date, the worst terrorist attack ever occurred on American soil. America responded to this by invading Afghanistan and helping the opposition overthrow the tyrannical Taliban and replace it with a more moderate regime, and American troops also helped the Northern Alliance kill, capture or chase out as many Al Qaeda forces as possible. So does this cure the problem of terrorism from Al Qaeda? Maybe not. We may have created Front Street Syndrome.
When I was growing up a notorious street in the city I grew up near (Rochester, New York) named Front Street was well known to be the hangout for all the bums in the city; those that did not have a home and were possibly addicted to alcohol as well. The city tried to chase them out by rebuilding the area and making it look nice, but this merely scattered the homeless people, with some showing up rather surprisingly in better areas of the city. So just like the bums in this city that were scattered all over the place, so too are the Taliban and Al Qaeda now, possibly making the job of going after them more difficult.
Media Hype again
This time the headline read "September 11 weighs on the market", explaining why the stock market averages are down again. How can a date weigh? This does not obviously mean a person of the opposite sex for which you have an amorous appointment, who happens to be overweight. There are better names for the tragedy of last year, such as Planeattack. But still, how can an event weigh? It's just another way of creating drama in a situation which does not call for it. My belief is that most stock market movements are random, and those that aren't are caused more of the time than not by the media.
Last year on this date, the worst terrorist attack ever occurred on American soil. America responded to this by invading Afghanistan and helping the opposition overthrow the tyrannical Taliban and replace it with a more moderate regime, and American troops also helped the Northern Alliance kill, capture or chase out as many Al Qaeda forces as possible. So does this cure the problem of terrorism from Al Qaeda? Maybe not. We may have created Front Street Syndrome.
When I was growing up a notorious street in the city I grew up near (Rochester, New York) named Front Street was well known to be the hangout for all the bums in the city; those that did not have a home and were possibly addicted to alcohol as well. The city tried to chase them out by rebuilding the area and making it look nice, but this merely scattered the homeless people, with some showing up rather surprisingly in better areas of the city. So just like the bums in this city that were scattered all over the place, so too are the Taliban and Al Qaeda now, possibly making the job of going after them more difficult.
Media Hype again
This time the headline read "September 11 weighs on the market", explaining why the stock market averages are down again. How can a date weigh? This does not obviously mean a person of the opposite sex for which you have an amorous appointment, who happens to be overweight. There are better names for the tragedy of last year, such as Planeattack. But still, how can an event weigh? It's just another way of creating drama in a situation which does not call for it. My belief is that most stock market movements are random, and those that aren't are caused more of the time than not by the media.
Simplicity is not simple
The theme for SUUSI 2003 is "Simple Gifts", i.e., the idea of simplifying your life as much as possible. Yesterday the lead article title of a magazine "Math Horizons" startled me. It's title: "Simplicity is not Simple: Tessellations and Modular Architecture". The article was about dividing up two-dimensional space (e.g., office space) into identical regions or cubicles. The square grid is one way of doing it, but hexagons save on partitions (but I have yet to see a workplace that resembled a beehive). Their point was that the problem of making things simple is not simple. In this case the obvious answer was not the optimal one. A quote from a mathematician in the article named Gregg Fleishman: "Making a good system from only a few pieces which are not too hard to machine or build is quite difficult".
Another example I can think of is, say, a UU District Executive who wants to visit all the congregations in his District. To make the job as simple as possible, she would want to minimize the total mileage she has to drive or fly. The very problem of determining the order of congregations she should visit (which one first, which one second, and so forth) is itself one of the most difficult problems in mathematics. You could check all the possible routes but with 15 congregations that would take millions of years. However, no one has come up with a solution that is that much better, and many think there isn't one. However, even that problem, that of proving for certain there isn't one, is itself an even harder mathematical problem (the P = NP conjecture).
Seeking simplicity leads to contradictions. We get contradictions when we look at the Ultimate. An omnipotent God that can lift a stone that is so big that even God can't lift it; an omnipotent, omniscient, good God in a world with evil, the smallest number that cannot be expressed in less than twenty words (that phrase has less than twenty words), the SET of EVERYTHING (just add that very idea of such a SET to that SET), and the set of all sets that are not members of themselves (is the set in itself?) are all examples of such contradictions. And simplicity joins this list.
So simplicity is not all that simple. Seeking simplicity is a complex journey, and one of the things I hope we learn next year is how to pursue simplicity in a world of antinomous complexity.
The theme for SUUSI 2003 is "Simple Gifts", i.e., the idea of simplifying your life as much as possible. Yesterday the lead article title of a magazine "Math Horizons" startled me. It's title: "Simplicity is not Simple: Tessellations and Modular Architecture". The article was about dividing up two-dimensional space (e.g., office space) into identical regions or cubicles. The square grid is one way of doing it, but hexagons save on partitions (but I have yet to see a workplace that resembled a beehive). Their point was that the problem of making things simple is not simple. In this case the obvious answer was not the optimal one. A quote from a mathematician in the article named Gregg Fleishman: "Making a good system from only a few pieces which are not too hard to machine or build is quite difficult".
Another example I can think of is, say, a UU District Executive who wants to visit all the congregations in his District. To make the job as simple as possible, she would want to minimize the total mileage she has to drive or fly. The very problem of determining the order of congregations she should visit (which one first, which one second, and so forth) is itself one of the most difficult problems in mathematics. You could check all the possible routes but with 15 congregations that would take millions of years. However, no one has come up with a solution that is that much better, and many think there isn't one. However, even that problem, that of proving for certain there isn't one, is itself an even harder mathematical problem (the P = NP conjecture).
Seeking simplicity leads to contradictions. We get contradictions when we look at the Ultimate. An omnipotent God that can lift a stone that is so big that even God can't lift it; an omnipotent, omniscient, good God in a world with evil, the smallest number that cannot be expressed in less than twenty words (that phrase has less than twenty words), the SET of EVERYTHING (just add that very idea of such a SET to that SET), and the set of all sets that are not members of themselves (is the set in itself?) are all examples of such contradictions. And simplicity joins this list.
So simplicity is not all that simple. Seeking simplicity is a complex journey, and one of the things I hope we learn next year is how to pursue simplicity in a world of antinomous complexity.
2002/09/08
Planeattack
Earlier I said I had suggested to columnist Kathleen Parker, who wanted a better name for last year's terror than September 11, a better name. Since I have not heard from her, I will mention it now, just before the anniversary. I suggested "Planeattack". It describes what happened: planes made an attack. It was the airplanes themselves that attacked, not objects from the airplanes, as was the case with the Pearl Harbor attack of 1941. It applies to all four incidents on 2001 September 11. I had thought of "Towerfall" earlier, but that applies only to the two attacks on the World Trade Center. So I turned to "Planeattack", and I will be calling it that from now on. If anyone can think of a better name, let me know.
Earlier I said I had suggested to columnist Kathleen Parker, who wanted a better name for last year's terror than September 11, a better name. Since I have not heard from her, I will mention it now, just before the anniversary. I suggested "Planeattack". It describes what happened: planes made an attack. It was the airplanes themselves that attacked, not objects from the airplanes, as was the case with the Pearl Harbor attack of 1941. It applies to all four incidents on 2001 September 11. I had thought of "Towerfall" earlier, but that applies only to the two attacks on the World Trade Center. So I turned to "Planeattack", and I will be calling it that from now on. If anyone can think of a better name, let me know.
Turnings
The service at the Unitarian church I attend had a responsive reading that started with:
"Now is the time for turning."
Turnings are interesting; I had been interested in Strauss and Howe's theory of generational turnings in The Fourth Turning. Their theory is that our present time is about to turn into a Fourth Turning; i.e., a period of crisis similar to the Great Depression and World War II. So I hear them proclaim in church that the turning is about to occur.
The reading goes on to say that we can't get out of our current stagnant pattern of life by doing the same things, as we then get the same results we had been getting. We need something to jolt us out of this reverie. I feel like I may be nearing such a point in my life, and according to Strauss and Howe, so is American society. Dotcomitis, celebrityitis, mediahypism, political correctness and corporate deception have been going on too long. Something needs to happen to jolt us out of this, and this is Strauss and Howe's Fourth Turning. They say the previous or Third Turning is a period of growing disorder; I disagree. It is a period of order, when the same things happen over and over again like a broken record and something needs to hop to get the tune playing again or to play another tune. It is a suboptimal stable equilibrium. We need to get out of this to achieve new heights.
AOL Deception
I see them everywhere now. America Online (AOL) discs free for the taking from numerous places, including stores, bundled software, and offices. They say, "Get 1,025 hours of AOL free with AOL 7.0". That sounds like a lot of hours. But if you look at the smaller print, you find that you have to use these hours up in 45 days. If you get out your calculator and multiply the 24 hours a day that there is only that many of by 45 days, you get 1,080 hours. AOL is deceiving us. It may be true what they say. However, the only way you are going to use up 1,025 hours in 45 days' time is to be continuously online 24/7 except for 55 hours. You need far more than 55 hours of sleep in that time. What they are really saying is that you get 45 days of free time on AOL. It is all too easy to deceive by using numbers out of their range. 1,080 hours sounds like far more time than 45 days, yet they are the same amount of time. Further, "hours" in internet service provider (ISP) language usually means time that you are actually logged into their system, whereas "days" connotes time that you are subscribing to their service, regardless of whether you are logged in. So 1,080 really sounds like a lot, like it may last a year or more. But it lasts only 45 days. So AOL should state this up front, in much larger font than the1,025 hours. Their putting 1,025 (which is the wrong number anyway) in the biggest font instead of 45 to me constitutes misleading advertising. They should terminate this practice immediately.
The service at the Unitarian church I attend had a responsive reading that started with:
"Now is the time for turning."
Turnings are interesting; I had been interested in Strauss and Howe's theory of generational turnings in The Fourth Turning. Their theory is that our present time is about to turn into a Fourth Turning; i.e., a period of crisis similar to the Great Depression and World War II. So I hear them proclaim in church that the turning is about to occur.
The reading goes on to say that we can't get out of our current stagnant pattern of life by doing the same things, as we then get the same results we had been getting. We need something to jolt us out of this reverie. I feel like I may be nearing such a point in my life, and according to Strauss and Howe, so is American society. Dotcomitis, celebrityitis, mediahypism, political correctness and corporate deception have been going on too long. Something needs to happen to jolt us out of this, and this is Strauss and Howe's Fourth Turning. They say the previous or Third Turning is a period of growing disorder; I disagree. It is a period of order, when the same things happen over and over again like a broken record and something needs to hop to get the tune playing again or to play another tune. It is a suboptimal stable equilibrium. We need to get out of this to achieve new heights.
AOL Deception
I see them everywhere now. America Online (AOL) discs free for the taking from numerous places, including stores, bundled software, and offices. They say, "Get 1,025 hours of AOL free with AOL 7.0". That sounds like a lot of hours. But if you look at the smaller print, you find that you have to use these hours up in 45 days. If you get out your calculator and multiply the 24 hours a day that there is only that many of by 45 days, you get 1,080 hours. AOL is deceiving us. It may be true what they say. However, the only way you are going to use up 1,025 hours in 45 days' time is to be continuously online 24/7 except for 55 hours. You need far more than 55 hours of sleep in that time. What they are really saying is that you get 45 days of free time on AOL. It is all too easy to deceive by using numbers out of their range. 1,080 hours sounds like far more time than 45 days, yet they are the same amount of time. Further, "hours" in internet service provider (ISP) language usually means time that you are actually logged into their system, whereas "days" connotes time that you are subscribing to their service, regardless of whether you are logged in. So 1,080 really sounds like a lot, like it may last a year or more. But it lasts only 45 days. So AOL should state this up front, in much larger font than the1,025 hours. Their putting 1,025 (which is the wrong number anyway) in the biggest font instead of 45 to me constitutes misleading advertising. They should terminate this practice immediately.
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