The Liquid List has a post up with a great quote to mark the passing today of Coretta Scott King. I’ll try to reproduce it here, at some risk of kicking Fair Use squarely in the cods:
Dr. King said of his wife, in an interview in 1967 that, [...] “I must admit—I wish I could say–to satisfy my masculine ego, that I led her down this path [of economic and racial activism]; but I must say we went down together, because she was as actively involved and concerned when we met as she is now.”
In her own words, “Struggle is a never ending process. Freedom is never really won. You earn it and win it in every generation.” *
* Can’t find a primary source for this quote – it’s widely attributed to her online, but the bulk of the citations that Google finds are from term-paper mills, and I ain’t gonna link to those…
Posted by protected static as politics at 8:44 AM UTC
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The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
—William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)
#30… That’s all.
[via TBogg]
Posted by protected static as geek, random at 11:12 PM UTC
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Newsweek has an interesting article out about the people within the Department of Justice who resisted the Administration’s embrace of torture and refutation of international law. It also provides some insight into the infighting that took place during Ashcroft’s tenure – infighting that I suspect led to his resignation.
It’s a heartening read, if only because it reminds one that there really are people out there who care about the rule of law. Of course, it’s a depressing read as well: if this debate had been more public, how much of our current mess could we have avoided?
Posted by protected static as politics at 10:53 AM UTC
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Andrew Sullivan:
But this is the Bush administration. King George doesn’t have to obey the law; and his military can do anything they want.
Kidnapping, hostages, collective punishment of civilians for supporting insurgents: these are all war crimes. This is not some “he-said/she-said” dispute over how white phosphorus was deployed in Fallujah – this is the US military openly admitting to committing war crimes.
(Yeah, I know… if you’re a regular reader of this blog, you probably read Atrios, which is where the Sullivan link came from.)
Posted by protected static as politics at 10:44 PM UTC
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As of yesterday, 27 Jan 2006, Western Union will no longer send telegrams. (Surprised? Evidently, the telegram isn’t quite extinct yet…) One-hundred-seventy-five years, plus or minus a decade – longer than the rotary phone, eh? Not a bad run for the telegram; I wonder if the internal combustion engine’ll last as long.
Posted by protected static as geek, random at 8:17 PM UTC
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My 3-star review of Developing Serious Games was deleted from Amazon. WTF? The only review that’s there now is a 5-star review by someone who has no other reviews, and who clearly hasn’t read the friggin’ book…
Grrr…
Update: I posted another (3-star) review, titled “Okay, but not great”:
I had high hopes for this book, as I work for a small software company that is teetering on the brink of becoming a producer of ’serious games’. Unfortunately, this book failed to meet my expectations.
The book is a good overview of the contemporary state of the field. It touches upon games development in general, best practices for software development, ditto for game development; it covers dev tools, platforms & engines; it covers art and sound resources. It discusses funding sources, and the differences between ‘entertainment games’ and ’serious games’. There is also a good history of ’serious games’, starting with the earliest military flight simulators and ending with current releases for, among other platforms, the iPod.
In short, it covers everything. And, as such, it covers nothing in particular in much depth. Apart from the history, there really isn’t anything in this book that probably can’t be gleaned from spending time on Gamasutra.com, gamedev.net, or igda.org.
I also found some of the editing to be sloppy. The writing is quite strong, but the proofreading left a bit to be desired: “a” for “an”, “fist” for “first”. There may not have been a lot of these typos, but the ones I noticed were quite jarring.
If you’re looking for a 50,000-ft view of the field, this book will probably suffice. If you’re looking for an intensely geeky dev-oriented book, you will probably be left wanting more. Don’t get me wrong – there are some great things in this book for a developer, such as the appendices with their snapshots of tools and concepts. It is also a great ‘all-in-one-place’ resource. But I’m not sure if this book will stay on my shelf of ‘keepers’; we’ll see.
Let’s see if this one gets deleted as well…
Posted by protected static as geek, random at 9:33 AM UTC
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Do you remember this moment? I do. I was at school, coming down the stairs with a couple of friends, heading for lunch. Some kids came running up the stairs excitedly:
“Did you hear what happened?”
“What?” one of my friends remarked sarcastically “Did the space shuttle blow up?”
“Yeah! It did!”
Twenty years ago today this Saturday, Challenger disintegrated shortly before noon EST. Two minutes and forty-five seconds later, the crew compartment splashed into the Atlantic, killing all seven astronauts aboard.
Two minutes and forty-five seconds.
Posted by protected static as geek at 10:48 AM UTC
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Ignoring for the moment the surreal feeling I experienced upon reading the headline “Bush: Take bin Laden attack threat seriously” (wouldn’t that be nice…), I was particularly outraged by this line from Bush’s speech at the NSA (paragraph 11 of the article linked above):
Officials here learn information about plotters and planners and people who would do us harm,” Bush said, reading from note cards. “Now, I understand there’s some in America who say, ‘Well, this can’t be true there are still people willing to attack.’ All I would ask them to do is listen to the words of Osama bin Laden and take him seriously.”
(emphasis mine)
Mr. President, if you would be so kind as to point out anyone who has suggested that there aren’t any groups or individuals in the world who wouldn’t like to attack us, I would really appreciate it.
No, really. I’m waiting…
*crickets*
Yeah, that’s what I thought. I am also pissed off by the qualified contradiction of the President’s words that follows in the next paragraph:
However, no one in the political debate over the war on terror or the NSA program has suggested that terrorists no longer want to attack the United States. Rather, Bush’s critics have argued that the law requires him to get permission from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to eavesdrop on communications involving Americans.
“[N]o one in the political debate” – uh… how about just “no one”: “However, no one has suggested that terrorists no longer want to attack the United States.”
It’s a bullshit mischaracterization for the sake of appearing balanced. It gives credence to the President’s bullshit by suggesting that there are some people who think that no one out there in the big, wide world wants to attack the United States. While I’m sure that if you tried hard enough you could find one or two such people, I’m also pretty sure that such people would also be, how shall I phrase it delicately, crazier than the proverbial shithouse rats. (Yes, that’s a technical term.)
So there you have it, folks; I’m calling it like I see it. Fresh, steaming cow pies for the AP and the White House both.
I’m calling bullshit.
Posted by protected static as politics at 8:16 AM UTC
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So, once we finished reading the full Chronicles of Narnia with The Boy, we knew it was really only a matter of time before we tried The Hobbit. We weren’t too sure about the language – my impression is that Tolkien’s work is somewhat more sophisticated than Lewis’, and that’s saying a lot – but a couple of weeks ago something made it obvious that now was as good a time as any.
It’s been a blast… I went and picked up the hardcover edition with illustrations by Alan Lee. After flipping through all the illustrated editions at the UW bookstore, this one was the right balance of images to text: there’s a minimum of one full-page color plate and one smaller black & white illustration per chapter, which is seems to be a pretty optimal mix for holding The Boy’s attention when the words get too dense (not that he’s been afraid to ask what words or phrases mean).
We needn’t have worried – he’s enthralled. I suspect that the illustrations are really just gravy; he’s been a rapt listener, even through the archaic phrasing and tongue-twisters such as “Balin bade Bilbo” (you say that aloud after a glass of Jo’burg Riesling, I dare you). There was even one night this week when he was ignoring us during his bed-time routines – the consequence that he incurred was that there would be no Hobbit that evening. He was heartbroken, sobbing, even though he probably wound up with a story that took as long to read as our bite-sized morsels of Middle Earth.
So… what next? We suspect that Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain books are till too scary, so we’ll probably move on to the first Harry Potter book.
(The title comes from the description of Bilbo’s reaction to seeing the scope of Smaug’s horde for the first time – and it does yeoman’s work describing The Boy’s reaction to the book pretty well, I think…)
Posted by protected static as random at 8:23 PM UTC
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Serious games are video games that serve a serious purpose: they cover the gamut from the military’s most sophisticated simulators to iPod- or PDA-based games designed to assist surgical residents. That’s a lot of turf, on a lot of platforms, using a lot of tools… and this book, Developing Serious Games by Bryan Bergeron, shows it… I just got the book today, and just finished it an hour or so ago. Here’s my Amazon review (‘wickerman’ is another, older ‘net pseudonym I’ve used) – I gave it three stars:
I don’t know what I expected from this book, and, as a result, I think I probably got what I deserved. I had high hopes for this book; I work for a small software company that is teetering on the brink of becoming a producer of ’serious games’, and I was hoping for some kind of bolt from the blue, some kind of revelation. My career, my company at a frontier – should we cross in? Or should we run screaming? Peering into the entrails of this book, what dark auguries could I see?
Unsurprisingly, the answer is ‘not too much’. That’s too much to expect from a book, and honestly, I knew that going in. So what is the book good for?
The book is a good overview of the contemporary state of the field. It touches upon games development in general, best practices for software development, ditto for game development; it covers dev tools, platforms & engines; it covers art and sound resources. It discusses funding sources, and the differences between ‘entertainment games’ and ’serious games’.
In short, it covers everything. And, as such, it covered nothing in particular in depth. Labeling on the back to the contrary, I didn’t feel like this was a book geared towards software developers. Rather, it felt like an accessible book geared towards anyone with some familiarity with software development: PMs, VCs, CEOs, software devs and testers, media and art specialists… There’re a couple of C/C++ code snippets, there’s some pseudo-code, but compared to, say, the pages of calculus in Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, the technical content of this book is really quite low: if you don’t need to understand code, you can probably safely skip these bits and still understand how the big picture bits apply to you in your role.
I also found some of the editing to be sloppy. The writing is strong, but the proofreading left a bit to be desired: “a” for “an”, “fist” for “first”. CRM: sloppy, sloppy, sloppy. There may not have been a lot of these typos, but the ones I noticed were quite jarring.
If you’re looking for a 50,000-ft view of the field, this book will probably suffice. If you’re looking for an intensely geeky dev-oriented book, you will probably be left wanting more. Perhaps I’ll change my mind in a day or so, but I doubt it. Don’t get me wrong – there are some great things in this book for a developer, such as the appendices with their snapshots of tools and concepts. But I’m not sure if this book will stay on my shelf of ‘keepers’. We’ll see.
Random and tangential thought… With Amazon’s new ‘tagging’ system, you can create your own taxonomy for your books, much like Technorati or Ice Rocket allows for blog content or Flickr does for images. If, as in the case of this book, a potential reviewer sees that the author has personally tagged the book, what impact do you think that’ll have on the review? More fawning? More confrontational? Or will the prospective reviewer be intimidated enough to not post a review at all?
Posted by protected static as geek at 8:30 PM UTC
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The lions of the Serengeti ain’t got nuthin’ on a room of kindergarteners in the presence of a substitute teacher. Fear? Weakness? Uncertainty? Blam! They’re on it, teeth sunk in deep, claws raking, head shaking to tear off chunks of steaming flesh.
It wasn’t pretty. Me, I think her mistake was not responding to them like Ash in Army of Darkness:
Now listen up, you primitive screwheads. See this? This… is my boomstick!
This is why I will never be a teacher.
Posted by protected static as random at 11:20 AM UTC
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Driven by the desire for authenticity, writer/director Terence Malick of the upcoming film The New World wanted the lines of Pocahontas and Powhatan to be spoken in Virginian Algonquin. No problem, right? Too bad no one has spoken that dialect in over 200 years.
The linked MSNBC article tells the fascinating tale of the apparently successful attempt to revive a dead language. Quite an accomplishment, given that of the 15 or so known Algonquin dialects of the East Coast, only two survive to this day.
Working from 16th and 17th century documents, existing Algonquin grammar, and an academic gold standard ‘proto-Algonquin’, UNC (Charlotte) linguist Blair Rudes was able to create a fairly likely reconstruction of Virginian Algonquin. His approach was flexible enough that Malick was able to expand the number of Algonquin-with-English subtitles scenes from two to fifty; they were even able to improvise dialog with minimal turn-around time.
Not bad for a ‘dead’ language. How cool is that?
Posted by protected static as 30-second science blogging, geek at 10:27 AM UTC
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“…most chemical explosives contain less energy per unit mass than ordinary table butter, but fortunately the butter is too stable to explode.”
Fortunate, indeed. Last sentence, third paragraph. (Oh, there’re some cool photos there, too…)
Posted by protected static as geek, random at 6:34 AM UTC
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…is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love.
– Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, 1967
Posted by protected static as politics at 9:25 PM UTC
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I’ve been thinking about the complaints that I’ve read recently from both the right and left about the Alito hearings: too superficial, too much grandstanding, too self-aggrandizing for the Senators involved. I’ve also been thinking about the two remedies that I have heard discussed: limiting the access of television to hearings, and creating a Select Committee to handle nominations either before or in lieu of the full Senate hearings.
Frankly, the idea of creating yet another committee for the Senate strikes me as an awful idea. And the idea of restricting the access of the press to public workings of the Federal Government in an era of press conferences that consist of stonewalling and talking points repeated ad nauseum, restricted access to information previously deemed public, and entrenched talking heads and pundits who exist primarily to preserve their own access to politicians and power brokers… Well, let’s just say that I think such a restriction counts as a Bad Idea-comma-Colossal.
But I have an idea – and I think it’s a good one. I think that not only does this idea tie into our current culture wonderfully, it would decrease public corruption (no more Abramoff-style scandals), elevate public debate (no more grandstanding in lieu of informed discussion), and increase public participation in the political process. And we already have the infrastructure (or at least most of it) that we would need to do so.
Turn the Federal Government into the ultimate reality TV show.
I’m not talking CSPAN’s dry and boring gavel-to-gavel coverage that is devoid of context (and interest). I’m talking Survivor. I’m talking Fear Factor.
I’m talking entertainment, baby!
Think about it: every office in Washington, DC, becomes wired for video & sound, MTV’s Big Brother on a grand scale. Everyone who wants to work for the Feds needs to sign a waiver stating that they understand that everything that they do might be recorded. You want to be a lobbyist? Same applies for you. Congressman? Yup. Bureaucrat? Uh-hunh. Anything that anyone does in the name of The People or The Republic or Plain Old Greed gets recorded (with very specific exemptions for, say, national security). Oh, we can guarantee certain kinds of privacy for family time as well, but even that will be conditional.
You see, we then create a special Public Accountability division of the NSA. They filter every phone call, every taped meeting, every video tape, and apply their Sooper-Seekirt data mining voodoo to it.
Then they focus on the high points, and spin a feed off to the television producers. All the juicy bits, all the arm-twisting, all the deal making and alliance breaking, all the payoffs and promises. All the seductions, fiscal and sexual. All the tradeoffs, personal and political. If something in your life, private or public, triggers an NSA red flag, off it goes into the queue.
Everything. And they turn it into a slick TV show.
And then we get to vote on it, just like American Idol. We get to choose what stories to pursue, what questions get asked in hearings, who should be booted off the island. Imagine the voter guides and campaign commercials that could be made!
And you know how we’ll know it’s working? When we have to cancel the series because of low ratings.
[title from Peter Murphy's song of the same name (from the Pump up the Volume soundtrack); image from iStockphoto]
Posted by protected static as politics at 10:54 AM UTC
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