Again, I’m a little late on this one, so apologies. Three articles for this one, two on different aspects of human nature, and one on cloning. It does seem that I’m focusing a lot on biology these days, but that’s because such articles are more interesting in how they shed light on the human condition and have more potential to fundamentally alter how we view life and the universe than yet another article showcasing some new technological development.
The first article is from The Economist and deals with measuring the difference between the levels of prejudice that people admit to and that they actually seem to have. It summarizes the findings of two different groups of researchers, one at the University of Chicago and the other at York University in Canada, who looked into the matter.
Since I knew I wouldn’t have access to my gaming PC over the Chinese New Year holidays, I made sure to have something to play on my PSP in the meantime and the game I picked was Armored Core: Formula Front. I’ve had an eye on this game for a while now but couldn’t find an English language version of it and playing such a complex game without being able to understand the on screen text was completely out of the question.
I’m normally not a fan of Japanese games, so I had to look it up to know that Armored Core refers to a fairly well established mecha action game series. This PSP version involves mecha as well, but the twist here that made me interested in this title in the first place is that you’re not really supposed to manually pilot the Armored Cores, as the mecha are known. Instead, you’re supposed to put together your own stable of ACs from a collection of parts, devise a strategy for them and the AI will try to implement your strategy as well as it can in a series of gladiatorial one-on-one fights against ACs from other teams. This makes it more of a strategy game than an action game as success depends on finding the optimal combination of parts to make an AC that’s well suited to carrying out a particular fighting strategy against enemies with specific builds and strategies of their own.
Obviously, I’ve been away for a while during the Chinese New Year holidays. My wife and I spent three days in Penang with my parents. This was mostly to make my mother happy because she grew up on the island and wanted to see the familiar places and sights from her childhood again. This made this more of a trip out of duty rather than pleasure for my wife and myself, but it was an okay experience overall.
My parents were particularly pleased with the Penang food though personally I could have gone without the ridiculous crowds and extremely poor service. Other than that, we did the usual rounds of meeting friends and family while in Kuala Lumpur. The only interesting thing that I did was installing a new ATI 4670 graphics card for my nieces’ gaming computer. We’re back in Kota Kinabalu now and happy to be reunited with our dog Spidey. We’d left her at a boarding school and she’s lost some weight and has shed quite a lot of fur while we were gone. I think it was more out of being miserable at being left alone than because she was treated badly, but she’s delighted to go back to our normal everyday routines now.
Considering the number of posts I’ve written about Fallout 3 already, an official “review” of it wouldn’t be appropriate, so I thought I write a summation of my final thoughts about this game. First up, this is easily the most controversial game of 2008, at least within the gaming community itself. On the one hand, the game has been an undeniable success, selling faster than Bethesda’s previous hit Oblivion and selling more than all of the previous Fallout titles combined. Its review scores are uniformly high across the board, with the PC version in particular being widely recognized as the best across all platforms. This last part is especially impressive given how badly the PC ports of games like Grand Theft Auto IV and Saint’s Row 2 have since turned out.
On the other hand, ever since it was first announced, this game has spawned a small but extremely vocal gang of detractors. Explaining the full history behind all this animosity would take far too long, but the short version is that they call themselves diehard fans of the original Fallout games and are disgusted that Bethesda bought the rights to make this game when, according to their sense of justice, it should have been made by the group behind the original titles. It’s not like there’s no substance to their arguments, but the sheer spittle-spewing vitriol of their attacks makes them look bad, and not unlike what you may find posted on sites like Free Republic and Hillary is 44 on Barack Obama’s inauguration day.
Someone posted a link to this photoblog on QT3 and I now intend to check it regularly for updates. It’s collects examples of badly used English in situations that make it humorous. Check it out. It’s awesome.
Maybe it’s just me, but I found this article published in the Malay-language newspaper Utusan Malaysia hilarious. To recap, Malaysians are supposed to boycott products and services made by companies linked to either the U.S. or Israel due to what’s been happening in Gaza. This isn’t anything official and the government has said that it’s up to the conscience of each Malaysian whether or not to actually boycott anything.
It should be no surprise that Malaysians have by and large ignored the call to boycott. No surprise to anyone except Utusan Malaysia apparently. You can just hear the petulance in the article’s whining over how Malaysians are apathetic to the plight of the Palestinians and continue to patronize businesses like McDonald’s and KFC. Remember that “This is Sparta!” line from 300. Guess what, Utusan Malaysia, “This is Malaysia!”
Plus, extra points for trying to link this to justifying the existence of the ISA, however tangentially. Your political overlords must be proud of you!
Since I gushed over the first season of Heroes so much, it’s only fair that I take the time to write about how awful it’s become. My wife and I have just caught up with the first half of Season Three and though it isn’t exactly the debacle that Season Two was, it’s nowhere close to the greatness that was Season One. It appears that the main lesson the producers learned from the previous season was never be boring. Things move along at a breakneck pace and there are plenty of action scenes through with hardly any quiet moments at all.
