Science

Recent Interesting Science Articles (December ’08)

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Three articles for this last installment from 2008, though two are from The Economist, both of which are related to human sexuality in some way. The last one is speculation about a device that could one day be used to let someone see what another person is dreaming about.

The first article from The Economist covers a paper by Rosalind Arden of King’s College, London and her colleagues on correlations between genetic fitness, general intelligence and, of all things, sperm quality, in human males. Researchers have recently discovered that general intelligence is correlated with many aspects of an individual’s health including his or her lifespan. This is unsurprising, because it can be expected that people who are more intelligent might take extra care to live healthier lives, but evolutionary psychologists are also interested in the idea that intelligence is a manifestation of a general, genetically-based healthiness which is attractive to the opposite sex. They believe that humans evolved general intelligence above and beyond its usefulness in everyday life as part of a genetics arms race to attract mates, in the same way that male peacocks have evolved elaborate tails.

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News & Politics, Philosophy

Economic growth is good

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This post is an expansion of comments that I’ve made in response to posts made in De Minimis. In a way, it seems odd that I would need to make this post at all. After all, everyone instinctively feels that becoming wealthier is a good thing, right? So what possible arguments might one advance to claim the opposite? There are many levels to the critique made in De Minimis, and in his defense, he appears to acknowledge that this is a train of thought that is still in the making. Still, as I understand it, the argument against economic growth falls largely into the following two groups:

  1. Economic growth is bad for the environment and depletes the Earth’s finite resources in an unsustainable manner.
  2. Striving for material wealth may not necessarily bring about the desired happiness and the stress and conflict this cause may actually turn out not to be worth the struggle.

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Games

Wandering the wasteland

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I’ve been playing Fallout 3 for about a week now, and I can happily say that it’s probably one of the best games I’ve ever played. When people talk about open-world games, the first thing that usually comes to mind is the Grand Theft Auto series and its legion of imitators, but Bethesda Softworks have been making three-dimensional open worlds since Arena was released in 1994. It was at that time insanely ambitious but successfully set the stage for a series that would become known for its huge, open worlds rendered in lush, beautiful graphics and a completely open and free-form design that could leave some players paralyzed by the bewildering array of possible places to go and things to do in the game.

Fallout 3 is in some ways the logical conclusion of one end of that evolution: the video game as immersive virtual world. Reading the comments by detractors in this thread on LYN for example (most of whom it seems were complaining about a game that they’d pirated since they started playing it before it was actually released), it’s obvious that many of them didn’t get what this game is about. Take for example the complaints about how short the game is. It’s still early days yet in my journey through the wastes, so I can’t fully tell whether this is true or not, but I suspect that if you make a beeline for the main quest and barrel through it to the exclusion of everything else, you’d end up finishing the game in fairly short order.

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Politics

Israel is wrong

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I’ve been following the discussion on QT3 on Israel’s recent campaign of airstrikes against Gaza, and one poster really struck home the essential point in just one line:

To The Israelites In Attendance,

I do not know how you people can live with yourselves, knowing what was done to your grandfathers, and doing everything but the last step to someone else’s.

Ouch to say the least. In many ways, it’s an exaggeration of course and there’s plenty to nitpick at if you’re intent on finding differences between Israel and Nazi Germany, but there are enough similarities that Israel needs to sit up and really think about what it’s doing. Yes, Israel has the right to defend itself, but does it really need to blockade the 1.5 million inhabitants of the Gaza strip and prevent food and medicines from reaching them? Yes, Hamas uses it as a base from which to launch periodic rocket strikes into Israel, but does that justify Israel launching airstrikes that kill hundreds and injure thousands, including civilians, especially when those rockets kill only a handful of Israelis every year?

I’m concerned and exasperated by Israel’s actions, which I think are detrimental to the nation’s own interests, because I’m generally sympathetic with the Israelis’ plight. It’s a nation that I’ve come to admire and one that I like to think of as one of the good guys. But part of being one of the good guys is that you don’t sink to the level of the people you’re fighting against. It means winning the moral high ground and staying there even if it means making sacrifices.

Israel needs to understand that bombing a people into submission will never achieve peace unless they’re willing to commit genocide against the Palestinians. Israel isn’t there yet, but that’s the road that its actions are taking it down unless it musters the political will to make real sacrifices to reach a lasting compromise with the Palestinians. Given the particular history of the Jewish people, it is especially shameful that they’re anywhere near that road at all.

Films & Television

Ip Man

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My wife and I went to watch this film at the 1 Borneo Mall on Christmas Day, mostly because her father is staying with us at Kota Kinabalu at the moment and he was bored. I’m not going to go into detail about the story, so if you haven’t heard about it yet, check out its page on Wikipedia.

What really struck me about the film was how safe the producers played. Just about every single event in the film is predictable in the worst possible way: courteous and cultured martial arts master who, of course, is also a Chinese patriot, kicking the asses of arrogant and barbaric Japanese invaders, heroic sacrifices, etc. etc. Haven’t we seen all this before? Apart from the boring similarities with Jet Li’s Fearless, released just two years ago, the film isn’t that accurate a portrayal of the master’s life, if his biography on Wikipedia is anything to go by.

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Games

Ships of Eve Online

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This familiar side-by-side comparison of the different ship types in Eve Online was updated not too long ago to include the Titans, the largest ships available in the game. You can download a full size 4.65 mb version of the image here. Seeing it really rams home the breathtaking scale that this game works on.

I don’t have time for an MMO because playing one would mean having to skip all other games, but I did, the game I’d play would be Eve. It’s easily the most unique and ambitious of all the MMOs and really the only one that hands the power to shape the universe into the hands of the players.

I note that the game has had plenty of problems lately, what with the uncovering of a conspiracy that might have enabled some of the more powerful corporations in the game to exploit a glitch to create some 3 trillion ISK of goods in the economy and the current financial problems in Iceland, where Eve is based. The latest rumour is that CCP might move out of Iceland to make things easier for itself since most of its revenues come from outside the country anyway.

I might not play Eve, but I always enjoy reading the news and war reports coming out of the game and there’s no other MMO that I’d wish more to have a long and healthy life.

Fun

Frosty the Snowman

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It’s Christmas, so I thought I should come up with a suitably Grinchy post for the season. Since everyone already knows that Jesus wasn’t actually born any time even near this time of year, I thought I’d point out a little known fact about another icon of Christmas. The opening lyrics of this particular Christmas song should be familiar enough to everyone:

Frosty the Snowman
Was a jolly happy soul
With a corncob pipe and a button nose
And his eyes made out of coal.

Frosty the Snowman
May the children laugh and play
And were they surprised when before their eyes
He came to life that day.

There must have been some magic
In that old silk hat they found
For when they placed it on his head
He began to dance around.

The interesting fact about this song, first released by Gene Autry in the 1950s, is that the original idea wasn’t for it to be about Christmas at all. In the 1970s, one of the song’s writers, Walter Rollins, confessed in an interview in Life magazine, that it was supposed to be about the consequences of a nuclear winter, with the snowman being brought to life amidst the radioactive fallout and the dreams of children of a world without war. Sounds sinister doesn’t it? Unfortunately the producers ultimately decided that a more childish version of the song would have more commercial value.

A pity because the original version of the song would be just the perfect thing to have on while I play Fallout 3 on Christmas day.

The unexamined life is a life not worth living