Just because I haven’t posted a frivolous picture in a while, here’s one that I picked up from QT3. I have no idea what is going on or where this is, but you really have to wonder whether that lone driver there is brave or recklessly heading towards something everyone else is desperate to avoid.
With crime in the spotlight in Malaysia (again), I thought I should highlight this article from The Economist. It’s about a series of experiments performed by Kees Keizer and his colleagues at the University of Groningen to determine the truth of an old idea: that physical disorder in the environment can lead people to commit crimes more readily. This is the same line of thinking that inspired New York’s efforts to fight more serious crimes by cracking down on minor offenses like graffiti, breaking windows and other forms of vandalism.
One such experiment took place in an alley in which people frequently parked their bicycles. To create a disorderly state, they covered the walls of the alley with graffiti while the walls were freshly painted in the orderly state. Under both conditions, a prominent “No Littering” sign was displayed in the alley. Once bicycles had been parked, the experimenters quickly moved in to put a fake advertisement flyer on the bike in such a way that it would have to be removed in order to ride the bike. When the owners came back, they had to choose either to remove the flyer and keep it on their person somehow, throw it onto the ground, or put it on another bike. The experimenters secretly observed and recorded these reactions and considered putting the flyer on another bike as an act of littering.
The final result was that when the walls were clean, only 33% of bicyclists littered, but if the walls were covered with graffiti, the figure increased to 69%. Other experiments in the same vein showed similar results. If the environment was clean and orderly, people were less likely to commit crimes or break the rules, but in a disorderly environment, people seemed to think that breaking the rules was no big deal.
I point this out because I think that it’s particularly relevant for Malaysia. This is after all the country where putting a prominent “Dilarang Buang Sampah” sign up anywhere guarantees that a pile of rubbish will show up at the spot. One of my pet peeves about Malaysians is that everyone thinks rules and laws are meant to be bent. Just look at the money-lender advertisements everywhere in places where they plainly don’t belong or traffic violations like double-parking. But as these experiments indicate, if you want to live in a safe and orderly environment, you need people to perceive the environment to be safe and orderly, and the only way to achieve that is by cracking down on all crimes, especially the small but highly visible ones, and enforcing the law to its strictest extent.
I’ve been waiting for the PC port of Grand Theft Auto IV for a very, very long time now, but after reading everyone’s complaints about it, it’s looking more and more likely that I’ll be skipping it, at least until it gets a decent patch. Where to start with the litany of complaints?
How about the extremely lengthy and tedious installation process that requires you to sign up for and be logged into both Microsoft’s Windows Live network and Rockstar’s own Social Club network? If you’d bought this via Steam, you’d naturally need to be logged into that as well, though Steam won’t sell GTA4 to customers outside North America. If you’re a Vista 64 user, you’ll be upset to learn that you’ll have a hard time getting it to run due to a Windows Live incompatibility, despite the fact that according to Microsoft, compatibility with Vista 64 is a requirement for the Games for Windows label.
Next, if you actually manage to get the thing running but were hoping to play it using a gamepad, you’ll soon discover that the only gamepads that will work with it are the Xbox ones. PC-only gamepads, such as the ones manufactured by Saitek that I’ve been looking at buying, simply won’t work with the game.
Finally, the one that’s really big for me, is the realization that no current computer on Earth can run this game at max settings. Even IGN had performance issues running the game on a beefy system (Core 2 Quad 2.40 GHz, 2 GB RAM, 768 MB GeForce 8800 GTX with Vista 32) after turning the settings down. I think my poor 512 MB 8800GT will choke on it. Yes, the game looks good, but not that good. As many others have observed, it’s likely that Rockstar didn’t put much effort into porting the game over and optimizing it for PCs. And if you have an ATI card instead, be warned that there has been massive complaints about graphical glitches that Rockstar has said it is aware of and are looking at finding solutions for.
Fortunately for us, the PC port of GTA4’s main competitor, Saint’s Row 2, is due out in January next year. While it’s not as technically impressive as GTA4, plenty of reviewers have named it as the better game. Unless Rockstar cleans up its act and fast, that’s what I’ll be spending my time and money on.
Okay, I’ve officially given up on finishing the Americas campaign of the Kingdoms expansion for Medieval 2. Mainly because I’ve just discovered that as New Spain, you really have only one option when conquering a native city: exterminate them all. Sure, the game presents you with the additional options of either conquering the city (relatively) peacefully or looting it for all it’s worth, but if you actually choose any of those two options you’ll just end up with a huge city full of enraged native Americans that you’d need a full stack of troops to garrison just to keep the rioting under control.
Normally, having a large population should at least confer advantages in the form of a larger tax base, making a populous city a more valuable source of income. In this campaign, however, I haven’t been able to see any noticeable increase in revenue due to a larger population, which makes exterminating them all the only viable option. Since games are all about having multiple choices and options, each with its own set of advantages and disadvantages, a choice that is really no choice at all is a cardinal sin.
In my game, I’ve been mostly looting the cities I’ve captured, which has caused my offensive campaign to be bogged down by the need to allocate the majority of my troops to police duty. I could “cheat” by completely abandoning the cities to the rioters so that they rebel and then move back in with my troops to conquer them all over again, only this time choosing to kill everyone, but just thinking about playing that way just takes the wind out of my sails.
So I’m done with the Americas campaign. I might come back to the other campaigns in the expansion, but after this, it’s likely to be later rather than sooner. In the meantime, I have plenty of other games to play.
By way of Jed Yoong’s blog, I’ve learned of the Bicycle Campaign by Jerit, short for the Malay name of the group, Jaringan Rakyat Tertindas. The campaign which starts today involves cyclists setting out from both Kedah and Johor towards Kuala Lumpur. They plan to stop at every town and city along the way to raise awareness of their demands. When they reach the capital on the 18th December, they plan to hand over the full list of their demands to the Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi.
Continue reading Counterproductive socialist demands by JERIT
Three science articles for this month, one on an exciting new development in the ongoing quest for a real cure for AIDS, one on nuclear energy, and the last one on a theoretical attempt to create a scenario right out of Jurassic Park.
In the AIDS-related news, The Wall Street Journal reports the case of a doctor, Gero Hütter, who managed to functionally cure a patient of the disease at the Charité Medical University in Berlin, Germany despite not being an AIDS specialist. Instead, Dr. Hütter is a hematologist, a specialist in diseases of the blood and bone marrow, and his patient suffered from leukemia as well as AIDS.
Continue reading Recent Interesting Science Articles (November ’08)
In a recent review of a book published in The Economist, I noted something that I had suspected all along. In Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World, author Don Tapscott argues that not only are the children now growing up in a world of networked computers more intelligent and well-informed than any previous generation, they are also more tolerant of diversity and more concerned with social justice.
This is an argument that makes a lot of sense to me. After all, it doesn’t matter what skin colour you are when you’re interacting with each other on all sorts of forums, using instant messaging software, in multiplayer games, on social networking sites and even using old-fashioned e-mail. What does matter are the quality and content of your posts, messages and other forms of communications and it is by those standards that participants are judged by the communities they choose to be a part of. What could be fairer than that?
In a previous post, I addressed some concerns about racial segregation in Malaysia. I argued that the existence of vernacular schools had little impact on whether or not Malaysians of different races would cooperate and coexist peacefully in society and that the divisions between the races are the result of government policies, and not prejudices learned as children. I reiterate that stand here. The largest Malaysian forum on the internet, LYN, is full of Malaysians of all races, of all religions and many different types of schools. Yet, none of that matters on the net.
Folks are segregated on that forum, but they are segregated not by race but by the choices they make: what hobbies they take up, what shows they like, what games they play, how outgoing they choose to be and so on. It’s hard to argue there isn’t a great deal of tension between the different races in Malaysia now, but again, I say that this is due to politicians playing up the issue and instituting policies that are expressly designed to create divisions. Here’s to the hope that the net generation will prove wiser and more resistant to such divide and conquer tactics.