What you’re seeing there is a project by the Tampere University of Technology in Finland to create the world’s biggest game display by using the windows of an apartment building as pixels. Here they’re implementing a version of Tetris specifically written for the project, though I must admit that the player playing it isn’t much good.
Pretty amazing project though and it would totally rock to see it implemented on a larger scale on skyscrapers.
This new service for WOW players seems ridiculously cool: select a character on any server, select what items you own that you want displayed on the character and the service makes a customized figure of that character. It won’t be available until December 11 and at US$120.00 including freight charges it isn’t exactly cheap, but this is exactly the kind of business idea that makes stupid sense retrospectively. Considering the amount of time that MMO players spend on their characters and how important it is to most players that their characters look cool, it’s pretty obvious that this is exactly the kind of product that would appeal to a big segment of the market.
I’m still playing WOW on and off but mainly because it’s the only game I can play together with my wife. We’re still at level 64 after a few months of Burning Crusade, so that’s some super-casual playing for you.
Pope Benedict XVI targets atheists in his second encyclical, the most important papal document possible. The most immediate target is actually the Russian revolution and the suffering it caused. The gist of the Pope’s arguments seems to be that all attempts to make life better on Earth without involving God is doomed to failure as he notes, “A world which has to create its own justice is a world without hope.”
This is a huge slap in the face for atheists of course, or for that matter anyone who believes that human efforts in the here and now to make the world a better place do make a difference, but not unexpected for the Pope. After all, as the Pope, he has to believe that faith in God is a necessary component, even the only component that matters, in the salvation of humanity.
A more pertinent criticism is that the Pope seems to imply that the suffering and “violations of justice” that occurred under communism are typical results of such efforts to improve the world without the involvement of God. This not only ignores the suffering and injustices that occurred directly under the auspices of the Roman Catholic religious authorities including the Crusades, the persecutions of the Huguenots and flirtations with antisemitism, it also discounts the improvements to overall social well-being that occurred in spite of the church’s objections such as a reduction in prejudice against women, a wider acceptance of homosexuality, an increase in the usage of birth control methods and proper family planning and arguably, due to its resistance against the idea of separation of church and state and the idea of individual freedom of conscience, the rise of modern liberal democracies as the most effective and moral form of government.
There are many possible objections to this statement from a philosophical point of view as well, including what would human effort and determination to improve life on Earth mean if none of it ultimately matters except faith in God and what the often vaunted statement that God did indeed give humanity free will mean in this context. More generally, the sheer arrogance of the Pope’s statement makes me wonder, not for the first time, what is, if any, the net contribution of religion to society? The Pope sees that religions now play a smaller role in people’s lives both public and private than in the past and blames the present ills of society on this. I see that the present time offers a higher quality of life and greater freedoms for the average inhabitant of planet Earth than at any other point in human history and if He existed, I’d be inclined to thank God for being born in an era in which his influence is weaker than in any previous one.
While we’re waiting for Heroes season 2 to be completed before we start watching it, we wife and I have been hunting for something interesting to watch on a regular basis. We tried an episode of CSI: Miami at first, but it was so atrociously bad that I refused to watch any more of it. Slow-motion scenes which serve to do nothing but show how cool the main characters look? Pointlessly violent and unrealistic gunfights? Super-technical solutions that are improbably illustrated with pretty 3D graphics? Please no. As I recall series star David Caruso first made a name for himself in the highly regarded NYPD Blue, which was a well-written police drama that focused on character development. CSI: Miami is simply inane and shallow in comparison.
From time to time, I’d like to highlight some of the most thought provoking articles on science that I’ve read recently. To me the most interesting ones tend to be ones that have some sort of philosophical implication, either on human nature or the nature of the universe in general. In this entry, I cover two recent articles on human nature, one on the latest attempt at a comprehensive theory of everything and finally one on an extremely speculative theory of what happens to the universe when humans simply observe it.
Continue reading Recent Interesting Science Articles (Oct – Nov ’07)
Man cannot survive except by gaining knowledge, and reason is his only means to gain it. Reason is the faculty that perceives, identifies and integrates the material provided by his senses. The task of his senses is to give him the evidence of existence, but the task of identifying it belongs to his reason, his senses tell him only that something is, but what it is must be learned by his mind.
– Ayn Rand in Atlas Shrugged
[This is part 1 of a planned 3 part series on the philosophy of Ayn Rand and its influence on my life. This first part serves as an introduction to Ayn Rand and her philosophy and the context within which I first learned of her work.]
Like religious belief, the late Ayn Rand is not a subject for polite conversation. She evokes such extremes of emotion in those who know of her that it’s almost impossible to have any rational discussion about her or the philosophical movement she inspired. Coupled with the fact that Ayn Rand’s ideas have had an immeasurably profound influence on me, this makes the present essay the most intensely personal and hence most difficult to write of anything in the entire site thus far.
[The above image is taken from Sager’s official website.]
I noticed this ludicrously powerful notebook computer in the news today. It has a quad-core CPU, dual 8700M-GT video cards in SLI mode and triple 200GB hard drives. It’s so powerful in fact, that instead of having a battery, it claims to have a built-in UPS instead. And since it weighs 11.5 pounds without including its power brick, can you really call this thing a laptop?
I’m an tech enthusiast myself, but this item serves as a perfect illustration of my puzzlement at how some people go completely crazy in an overboard way over the latest and greatest gadgets. I play a lot of computer games so naturally I need a gaming computer, but from my observations there are people who will happily pay ridiculous amounts of money just to be able to own powerful computers that they don’t really take full advantage of. Similarly, I can appreciate the utility of devices like mobile phones, PDAs and even ebook readers but I’m certainly not the kind of person who buys them just for the sake of buying them.