January 2012
1 post
The Surprised Man Anti-Charity Game...
Kieran and I were unable to take part in Ludum Dare #22, despite really wanting to. So we cooked up a plan to do our own Jam, at a later date. That later date is from midnight tonight, and since announcing it a couple of people have expressed an interest in joining us in our quest. Great! But in the interest of consistency, here are the rules in full: 1) The Jam will start at midnight tonight UK...
September 2011
2 posts
Why __________ Won't Ruin Everything
Often when a new technology comes along, people worry. There are perhaps things they like about what they have now that they fear will go away forever. But when you look at how new technologies have grown up, historically, that rarely happens. There are three main thresholds to break for a new technology to succeed: value, quality and usefulness. I may have missed others, but they’re the...
Facebook and the Internet
Dear The Internet,
I have a Facebook account. I don’t mind having one; it’s useful for a few things, I use it rarely and I don’t post up anything on it which I want to keep private. But I’m not everyone. And I’m finding this new trend of requiring Facebook for things that aren’t Facebook plugins a little bit disturbing.
There’s really only one good...
August 2011
1 post
Fun With Mental States
“You fucking idiot. Why did you even think you could possibly apply for that job? Sure, you got an interview but that was always going to be a matter of getting your hopes up before seeing them inevitably dashed. You should have seen it coming. This is just another data point on the general trajectory of your life which is, apparently, a downward trend of having all these disparate skills,...
July 2011
3 posts
Anathem
Anathem is a story set on another world where many people live out their lives as sort of scientist-philosopher-mathemetician monks who are cut off from the outside world for years at a time. “I think Anathem may be my favourite book of all time!” is what I said when I first read this Neal Stephenson novel a couple of years ago. Now that I’m a third of the way through it for a...
No Song is an Island
I’ve sort of talked about this subject before, but hey, I’ve got a bee in my bonnet. My bonnet, as it happens, has served as temporary accomodation for numerous bees over the years, and this is just another one. So.
I understand why people would want an iPod shuffle. It’s relatively cheap, at least for an iDevice, it’s small, and it enables you to carry around a bunch of...
My Response to Boots
Dear Boots Press People, I’m a little confused by a response I read on the internet regarding your advertising in the News of the World and the ongoing allegations.
“We do listen to our customers and will be carefully reviewing and monitoring customers’ views on these allegations before making any decisions.”
That was part of your response, but I’m a little unclear on...
May 2011
3 posts
How the L.A. Noire overheating issue might not be...
I’ve been looking over the stories about L.A. Noire overheating PS3s and 360s and the response from Rockstar and Sony and it occurs to me that there is a perfectly plausible explanation for this which puts it all down to chance factors rather than any actual fault. I don’t have any data to support this, I’m merely suggesting that this is plausible and consistent with what...
Why atheism is not a position of faith
This has been talked about endlessly before, but never by me and I thought it would be fun. One thing that many atheists are wrongfully criticised for is that because they have no proof for their position so it’s a faith position like belief in a God, and it’s arrogant to claim that it’s anything more.
Absolute proof is an ideal concept, and most rational people wouldn’t...
Why Aren't We Teaching Kids Science Properly?
I am perpetually baffled by the public-at-large’s failure to understand the very basics of how scientists go about finding things out. It’s not a particularly tricky concept to grasp and, once grasped, a lot of the misunderstanding about what is actually going on when some bit of science is reported on could be avoided.
Here’s the short, simple version:
A scientist working in a...
April 2011
2 posts
Could Someone Figure This Problem Out?
So I’ve had this weird problem ever since I got this Packard Bell laptop. Usually it’s fine, but occasionally I experience these really bad artefacts on web videos, like this:
There are several ways in which it’s kinda weird:
*It’s not every video, even when those videos are on the same site. I can’t really figure out a pattern to which videos it’ll happen...
Planning for Slackers
Richard Wiseman’s book 59 Seconds is full of neat little pieces of science-based advice, but the one that stuck with me most is the idea that it’s better to plan to do something for 2 minutes only, rather than a long amount of time.
The thought is that it’s the starting that makes it hard. If you know you’ve set aside 2 hours to do some writing, or a whole day then the...
February 2011
3 posts
Open-mindedness & Getting at The Truth
As I understand it, open-mindedness entails a willingness to consider different points of view and explanations for things. I don’t think anyone ought to be arguing that this is a bad thing. Where it goes wrong is when we fail to be responsible with it.
Think of open-mindedness like trying to build a house with a big toolbox full of all sorts of tools. That doesn’t mean that every...
Radiohead. Thoughts.
I conclude after three listens, the new Radiohead album has nothing to do with why I got into Radiohead.
I don’t mean that in a facile ‘where are the guitars, they should go back to playing Creep, lol’ sense. I mean that their music used to be exciting to me. They had harmonies, rhythms and melodies that made me wish that I’d thought of them first, and they’ve kept...
Why Cynicism is Spineless
Often I have to try to explain to someone that while I am a skeptic - that is, I doubt claims that aren’t backed up by proper evidence - I’m not a cynic, but it can be a fine line. After all, I do see claims that have been thoroughly discredited as appropriate targets for ridicule. For example, you wouldn’t catch me wasting more than a little time on subjects such as homeopathy;...
January 2011
4 posts
Failure of Imagination
Sometimes when I try to explain my skepticism, someone or other will lament that by restricting myself so is a failure of imagination, that it must be a very drab way to live. Well, let’s talk about imagination.
The other week I heard a story of people on a train who saw, out the window a strange-looking object in the sky. Conclusions were hastily drawn, and people were soon ascribing this...
Too Wrong; Didn't Listen
I love albums and I worry about albums. Certainly a lot of people are still making a lot of albums, but the current technology treats them in a brutal manner. What I mean is … well.
In olden days before I was old enough to start listening to music for myself, Vinyl was the medium of choice. Albums played continuously until you flipped the record and started the second side. If you wanted to...
The Decemberists: The King Is Dead. My...
I have now listened to the new Decemberists album four times and as one of The Few (that is, the few bands that I would, hypothetically, buy music from before hearing it) I now have some impressions.
My first impression upon hearing it was of a sort of very mild disappointment, not because I didn’t like what I was hearing, but because of the way that the songs float by serenely and...
Two Thousand and Eleven.
I’ve never seriously made any New Year’s resolutions because:
I see little good evidence that they have a high success rate.
I think New Year is sort of an arbitrary time to go about making changes in the first place.
I’ve never had anything I significantly wanted to change.
So aside from the fact that it was my last night before going back to work, it was almost chance that...
December 2010
1 post
Fun with NGrams
Well here’s an interesting one:
http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=female+scientist%2C+male+scientist&year_start=1900&year_end=2000
How might these curves be analysed? The term scientist started to be found in books at around the mid 1800s, according to this fascinating website, but to see the phrase ‘female scientist’ was unheard of until 1900. Since then,...
November 2010
2 posts
My already-low respect for Alan Sugar plummets
I’ve never been Alan Sugar’s biggest fan, but I at least saw him as having some form of authority with respect to his prospective employees in The Apprentice. This opinion is changing very quickly now. Hearing him opine, “Sometimes there’s no smoke without fire and sometimes there’s not” is one thing, but it’s this week’s “there’s no luck...
Fun With Lotteries
People have a counter-intuitively high expectation of how likely they are to win a standard lottery jackpot. Common things you hear are ‘Well someone’s got to win it,’ (unless of course it turns out to be a ‘rollover’) or ‘I’ve got as much of a chance as everyone else. These of course fail to take into account the fact that you and everyone else has a...
October 2010
1 post
Dice Superstition
I find it funny that dice superstition is so prevalent among board and roleplaying gamers. I’ve lost count of the number of times that I’ve watched someone switch dice because they didn’t like the rolls they were getting with one of them, or whatever other ritual it may be.
It’s not that it particularly matters, of course. People can do what they like, even if it is...
September 2010
4 posts
Musical Taste Is Complicated
Why am I unmoved by a song that someone else finds to be the Best Thing Ever? Why are other people unaffected by songs that I think are obviously brilliant?
The obvious component is taste. There are certain styles of music that I like more than others and if a piece of music isn’t in a style that’s to my taste, I’m much less likely to get on with it. Again: obvious.
Only...
Derren Brown, Statistics and Richard Feynman
I very much enjoyed Derren Brown’s latest, and I approve of the message about engaging with life, something I’ve been trying to figure out how to do better.
One thing that didn’t sit with me so well was his talk about how unlikely it is that this person was born considering all the things that had to happen to lead up to that event. Derren Brown is a skeptic and so I thought...
Life Is Good; Let's Make It Better
A while ago I earnestly talked about my perceived inability to follow through with all the things I want to do, my lack of motivation compared to a surplus of ideas. That’s still all in the back of my mind, but since identifying it and trying to engage with it things have felt different. I’m starting to realise that I can do what I want after all and things are actually pretty good.
...
banginstall asked: think I brainfarted (I don't think you can review these things). all those 1/5's should be 1/6's, i.e. 1/2*1/3*1*1, 1/2*1*1/3*1 etc, and there are 6 permutations (3*2*1)
August 2010
1 post
July 2010
3 posts
Focus
One of the problems I have, I think, is that I have a mess of ideas for stuff that I want to do and there’s no proper boundary between projects I am officially working on, stuff I’d like to do, or just vague ideas I have in my head. If someone were to ask me what sort of creative projects was working on at the moment, apart from my (almost) weekly Nukezilla column, I could only give...
Top Ten Problems With Monkey Island 2: Special...
Context! I like the Special Edition of Monkey Island 2 a lot. But certain things disappointed me, mainly around some sloppy implementation of the (fantastic sounding) soundtrack. I keep on having to explain them to people so instead I scribbled them all down last night so I can just link people to it. I’m sticking to stuff which is actually incorrect or broken, rather than stuff I just...
June 2010
6 posts
A Familiar Pattern
When I was at school I had this strange jumble of interests. I’d be good at creative writing, but then I’d discover a talent for writing music. But I was also better than average at maths and I loved computers. An especially good teacher would ignite a love of physics which seems to have endured.
By the time I got going to university I really didn’t know for sure what I wanted...
A Small Thought About Nintendo
There was a time when Nintendo would be able to say “we’ve got this new guy, he’s a plumber who eats mushrooms and rescues a princess from a bunch of turtles,” and everyone would reply “sure, why not?”
Sure, they were simpler times when this was about the best idea going in gaming and of course their fans were less discerning. Nevertheless the character became...
I am looking forward to lots of things!
In the next 16 days, I expect 6 things to happen:
2 days until getting to leave work early, then I have 4 days off. 5 days until I see They Might Be Giants. Somewhere between these the above and below, Telltale’s Puzzle Agent game should drop. 9 days until my birthday. 12 days until super secret thing. 16 days until Monkey Island 2: Special Edition.
So that’s the next couple of weeks...
Developers I Would Give A Trophy To
Valve for sheer brilliance in game design.
Telltale for getting better and better at making games just for me.
Nintendo for delivering my childhood whever I need that.
Harmonix for doing what they do the right way.
Double Fine for making me smile.
Valve for deserving another trophy.
A semi long-winded question about probability
I recently had a brief exchange with someone on Twitter, who mocked someone coming up with a probability of each team getting through their first group of the World Cup that added up to 200%. At first look, the probability calculations made sense to me since two out of four teams qualify in each group, the one that comes first and the one that comes second (which are mutually exclusive). But he...
“Young people who pretend to be wise to the ways of the world are mostly just...”
– Stephen Colbert (in serious mode) (via sharpless) (via onceeverafter) (via samit) (via thelattice)
May 2010
2 posts
Making Playlists and Spotify
I’ve been doing an occasional playlist called Songs I Like Right Now using Spotify. Each of the playlists is exactly ten songs long and is sort of a snapshot of what I’m listening to at the moment combined with some old favourites of mine.
I’m now on the 7th one and while they haven’t always followed this earlier on, I’ve started to develop rules on making a good...
The Idea
I don’t seem to have a place for thoughts that are too long for Twitter but not long enough for an article at, say, Nukezilla. The idea is that this is where all that stuff will go. It might not work out that way. But that’s the idea.