Politics

Malaysian Minister: If you don’t like it here, just leave

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My rough translation of first few paragraphs of this news article from Malay-language newspaper Utusan Malaysia:

Individuals who aren’t satisfied with the laws of Malaysia can emmigrate to become citizens of other countries, stressed the Minister for the Interior, Datuk Seri Syed Hamid Albar.

He said that if such persons felt that the laws that are in effect in the country are not appropriate, they are free to choose to become citizens of the countries that they prefer.

If we follow the Rukun Negara, as citizens of the country we must be loyal to it including abiding by the laws that are in effect and if they feel that these laws are not right for them, they are free to choose to be citizens of other countries.

The proof of loyalty can also be interpreted as not inviting foreign powers or other governments to interfere in the domestic affairs of our country, he said while officiating a Gotong Royong Program at Sentosa Village, Sedili, near here today.

Malaysians probably won’t be surprised, though honesty of such frankness from a minister is somewhat refreshing. What’s really funny here is that he then went on to berate an activist from the ethnic Indian minority for having the temerity to call upon India to impose economic sanctions against Malaysia for its treatment of Indians in the country, when the Malaysian government seems perfectly happy to call for sanctions against Israel for what’s happening in Gaza.

Best of all however is the fact that back in December, the Deputy Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak announced that the Malaysian government was willing to help ethnic Malays in countries where they are a minority, which presumably would entail interfering in the domestic affairs of those countries. Double standards anyone?

Also, you’d think that if a country’s citizens don’t like the laws currently on its books, they could, you know, vote in a new bunch of legislators to have them changed. Apparently, in Malaysia, any citizen who dislikes any of the laws in the country is expected to leave it instead.

Games

Fighting in the Wasteland

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After playing through a good bit more of Fallout 3, I thought I’d make a series of posts to note some of my observations about the different aspects of the game. This one will focus on the combat. As expected, this works very differently depending on how much you choose to rely on the VATS system. VATS is really a variation of the bullet-time ability introduced in Max Payne except that it pauses everything while you decide what to do and allows you to target specific body parts. While paused, you decide what actions you’re going to perform using your allotment of Action Points, with different weapons costing a different amount of APs to fire. Once you’ve made your decisions, your actions are played out in a slow-motion cinematic which can be cool to watch the first several times.

Continue reading Fighting in the Wasteland →

Fun, News & Politics

Porn industry asks for bailout

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Since I spotted this both on LYN and QT3, I figured it was amusing enough to post. The adult entertainment industry in the United States has just asked the government for a bailout. The article writes:

“People are too depressed to be sexually active,” Flynt said in the statement. “This is very unhealthy as a nation. Americans can do without cars and such but they cannot do without sex.”

“With all this economic misery and people losing all that money, sex is the farthest thing from their mind. It’s time for congress to rejuvenate the sexual appetite of America. The only way they can do this is by supporting the adult industry and doing it quickly.”

Obviously, this is a tongue-in-cheek move made for publicity reasons rather than a serious grab for cash, though as one astute QT3 poster pointed out, they certainly wouldn’t say no if any cash were actually offered. After all, they’re only asking for US$5 billion, a mere drop in the ocean compared to what’s been doled out already. Still, it does highlight how arbitrary it would be if government’s simply dolled out public money to companies that complained about being unable to survive a downturn. Companies are meant to compete in how well they deliver to consumers what they really want, not in how good they are at persuading public officials to hand them cash.

Games

Defense Grid

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I’m not usually a fan of RTS games, but when I do play them, my favourite maps tend to be the ones in which you have to defend your base against wave after wave of enemy attackers. It’s not too surprising then that I was intrigued when people started making maps and mods specifically for this purpose. As I recall, the first examples appeared as mods for Warcraft 3, but as I didn’t really like that game, I didn’t really check those out thoroughly. It wasn’t until the advent of Flash games that tower defense really took off as a genre. I’ve played quite a few of them on and off, even if I’m not terribly good at them. My favourite is probably Vector TD with its simple vector graphics. I’ve also heard good things about Desktop Tower Defense, but I found the prospect of having to design an entire maze all by myself to be intimidating.

I’ve always known that it was inevitable that someone would make one as a full-fledged standalone game with professional production values and now along comes Defense Grid: The Awakening. When Steam put it on sale at US$14.99 over the holidays, I immediately snapped it up even though I’m still busy with Fallout 3. As expected, there are no great innovations or new ideas here. There’s a campaign that guides you through each map as part of an overarching story, and you’re given more tower types and harder maps as time passes. Completing each map unlocks the next one and allows you to replay the previous one at harder difficulty levels or altering the game settings.

Towers are placed on fixed emplacements on the map. For the easier maps, there are only a very limited number of spots on which you can place them, but later, there are plenty of opportunities to place them in such a way as to block off certain paths to the enemy, which in my opinion is nice way to do some maze-building without making it completely free-form. Still, what really makes this stand out are the great full-screen graphics and the slick interface that lets you easily scroll tower available towers with the mouse-wheel and choose upgrades. There are even multiple zoom levels so you can get a close-up look of the action. Once you’ve played this, you’ll probably have a hard time going back to Flash games.

The question is whether or not it’s worth the full price of US$19.99. For most people probably not, but if you can get it at a discount, you might find it worthwhile for some lighter gaming in between sessions of heavier fare like Fallout 3. I’m certainly happy with my purchase, and as a bonus, it’s one of the very few games that my wife likes to play.

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.

Continue reading Recent Interesting Science Articles (December ’08) →

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.

Continue reading Wandering the wasteland →

The unexamined life is a life not worth living