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Three science articles for this month, one on how language shapes the way we think, the second one on Nokia’s plans to wirelessly recharge mobile phones and the last one, just for laughs, is a fictional piece on the neurobiology of zombies.

As the first article notes, whether and how much language affects how we think is a subject of much debate that even now is largely unsettled. This field is properly known as linguistic relativity. As someone who’s sympathetic to the views of the evolutionary psychologists, I found myself not quite agreeing with the full scope of this article’s implications, but nevertheless the results are intriguing. The most interesting part is easily the revelation of how language has affected a small Aboriginal community in Pormpuraaw, in northern Australia.

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Once upon a time, the Grand Theft Auto series was held up as the gold standard of open world games. True, the series never actually invented the genre, and if you want to be pedantic about it, early games like Elite were way more open and far larger in scope than any of the GTA titles. But it’s inarguable that the concept only really took off with the release of Grand Theft Auto III in 2001, so much so that similar games like Crackdown, Saint’s Row and Mercenaries were known as GTA clones.

In many ways, the open world genre can be regarded as the apogee of video games. It is after all the ultimate realization of the fantasy of entering a fictional and yet realistic world with its own set of internally consistent rules, densely populated with autonomous AI-controlled agents that you can interact with, and being set completely free to do as you will with the sandbox you’re given. So it is especially sad that despite its illustrous pedigree, Grand Theft Auto IV isn’t much of an open world game and at times even risks forgetting that it is a game at all.

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Even with Michael Jackson dominating all the news, the most interesting thing I’ve read all day is this one, about a girl who apparently haven’t aged since she was born sixteen years ago. The headline to the article isn’t actually true since it seems that she does age, most notably the telomeres in her cells seems to undergo changes consistent with aging, but different parts of her body seem to be aging at different rates and she certainly doesn’t seem to grow much, if at all. I certainly agree that this is a unique and extremely interesting case from a scientific perspective, and probably as close to a real-life Benjamin Button case as we’re ever likely to see.

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Maybe I’m easily amused, but I had fun reading through this huge troll of a thread on LYN yesterday evening. It was clearly posted from a dupe account made for the specific purpose of starting that thread, but the inspiration came from a comment by the real Fikri Saleh during an online interview with the Malaysian Minister for Science, Technology and Innovation Datuk Dr. Maximus Ongkili organized by The Star:

I am an Electrical Engineering undergraduate from the University of Melbourne, currently majoring in telecommunications. In Australia they charge you for download quotas, where the more you download, the more you will have to pay, say 100 GB @ $100 versus 20 GB @ $20, after which the speed is throttled down (slowed). By charging more for more quota, this can improve overall connection quality. The heavy downloaders can still download, but now they have to pay more. Thus we normal users do not have to put up with the network being bogged due to these heavy downloaders, because there will be fewer of them.

Regards,
Fikri Saleh

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I’ve had a Facebook account for ages myself, but never did anything with it until recently. A thread on QT3 about the growing popularity of games on Facebook and the serious sums of money this new niche is generating prompted me to go check it out. It so happens that a few people on QT3 are actively involved in making these games and even established games companies are looking into developing applications for Facebook.

After checking out a few of them, it’s clear that there’s barely enough gameplay in them to actually qualify them for being called games. Two of the more popular games, Vampire Wars and Mafia Wars, both by zynga for example, are basically identical with the main differences being their themes.  Another game I checked out, the relatively new Vikings, Pirates and Ninjas tries to ape fantasy MMOs, except that everything is simplified and doing quests just takes clicking a button. Above all, everything is stupidly repetitive with next to variation at all.

Still, this clearly hasn’t stopped them from being popular or earning a great deal of money, which confirms the suspicion that all gamers really need is to see the numbers on their screen constantly increase. I suppose that aside from their accessibility, the close integration that they have with Facebook effectively means lots of free advertising and allows players to pretend that they’re meaningfully interacting with their friends. These things aren’t really going to hold my interest for any decent length of time, but the really sad part is that most Flash games offer much more gameplay and some are really quite innovative, but none can match the earning power of these Facebook games.

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So, Microsoft Australia is running a competition to encourage people to switch to Internet Explorer 8 by hiding a AUD$10,000 cash prize on a website somewhere on the Internet that can only be viewed using their browser. After all the anti-trust grief Microsoft has gotten, I wouldn’t have expected the company to try something like this. Personally, the only time I ever use IE any more is when I get a new computer and use it download Firefox. I did give Chrome a try when it first came out, but I found its UI a bit too minimal for me.

I have to admit though that I still notice plenty of friends and family using IE. Usually, when they call on me to fix their computer problems, the first thing I do is install Firefox, make it the default browser and hide access to IE. People get confused about why I do that, and are hesitant to switch to a different browser at first, but they get used to it and it sure helps to keep their computers clean.

Firefox is sadly not quite as good these days as it used to be, and every new version seems to be more bloated and prone to crashing than the last. The day may yet come when I’ll have to ditch it for something else but if Microsoft insists on telling Firefox users to get lost, I don’t think that’s going to convince me to move to IE.

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I’m feeling lazy today, so here’s a cut and paste response that I posted to a question in LYN:

Can someone recommend some unit trust fund managers for KLCI INDEX fund? Is the OSK KLCI Tracker the only KLCI index fund around? I cannot believe this. Why other fund managers don’t setup an index fund? Why let OSK monopoly? I can’t even find two to compare and see which is cheaper.

Late reply, but this is something that I’ve wondered about in the past on this very forum as well. If you read a lot of general investment advice that comes out of experience in the US markets, the general consensus you should get is that most ordinary people should just buy index funds and forget about everything else. The rationale is that research has definitively demonstrated that over the long run, index funds in the aggregate outperform actively managed funds once you account for the higher costs associated with the managed funds. While it is possible for managed funds to beat the index, research has shown that it is not generally possible to predict in advance which particular managed fund will beat its benchmark index in any particular year. Research has also shown that the simple strategy of choosing the best performer of last year to invest in every year is a losing one.

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