No posting for a while, thanks to Fallout 3

I won't have much time for blogging for a while, as currently exploring the Capitol Wasteland is consuming
what spare time I have. After a slightly slow start Fallout 3 is rapidly becoming an engrossing experience, despite the annoyance of horizontal colors bands below the HUD that may signal problems with my Xbox 360's graphics processor.

Electronic waste

Scientific American online has a short article on e-waste - junked electronics such as old computers, televisions, iPods , and so on, which contain a variety of toxic heavy metals.

An investigation by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) earlier this year found that the EPA had "no plans and no timetable for developing the basic components of an enforcement strategy" to ensure proper disposal of harmful e-waste, which includes recycling components and safely handling and disposing of toxic materials, including lead, mercury and cadmium, despite having launched new e-waste guidelines in 2007 called "Responsible Recycling," or R2.

But the EPA's standard does nothing to prevent e-waste export or keep it out of landfills, nor does it offer any tracking of toxic components to ensure proper disposal. As it stands, the U.S. produces three million metric tons of the estimated 50 million metric tons of electronics garbage produced worldwide annually, according to EPA.

Often recycled e-waste is exported illegally (in ways that circumvent what rules exist) from the US to China or other developing world countries, where their citizens and children suffer from the resulting pollution.

Another interesting factoid from the article is that process of making a computer from the raw materials consumes about 4 times more energy than the computer itself will ever use.

At the same time, it takes 1.8 tons (1,630 kilograms) of raw materials and roughly 529 pounds (240 kilograms) of coal or other fossil fuels to manufacture every personal computer—81 percent of the energy an average unit will use in its lifetime, according to a study from United Nations University in Tokyo. By extending product life, such energy expenditure—as well as recycling issues—could be restrained.

Recycling old electronics in this country as a private individual is difficult - RadioShack and BestBuy will accept and safely dispose of (?) old batteries, including laptop batteries. Dell and Apple supposedly have programs to take back old electronics from you, but I'm not sure if they'll take anything or only their own products when you buy something new from them. Other than those examples I have yet to find a place that accepts broken computer electronics for recycling without charging you.

Review: Eschalon Book I

Eschalon Book 1 is a deliberately old-school computer role playing game produced by the indy studio Basilisk games, and available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. By old-school I mean turn-based, isometric, fixed camera, with strong textual elements, think of an intermediate between Legend of Zelda and Neverwinter Nights. If you liked those games, then for $19.95 Eschalon Book I might be worth your consideration.

Online reviews of the game can be found at the following sites:
http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=1485
http://jayisgames.com/archives/2008/06/eschalon_book_1.php
http://www.2404.org/reviews/2881/Eschalon:-Book-I-Review
http://www.scorpia.com/?p=812

Overall, I quite enjoyed the game myself, although the first few hours were tough on the Ranger character I generated, as I soon ran out of arrows and the money needed to buy arrows. The strong element of random encounters in the game, while familiar from the pen and paper RPGs I used to play as a teenager, also made life difficult as I'd camp to try to heal wounds only to have camping lead to a random encounter that would cause me more wounds, and exhaust my meagre stock of healing potions and arrows. Reading the reviews shows that others also thought that the random encounters and early game money scarcity needed better play balancing.

Ultimately I got a bit tired of the grind - at one point I had to fight opponents with my fists as I'd broken my only dagger trying to open a sealed barrel (note to self: I should have RTFM before beginning playing, as it tells you to use cleaving or bludgeoning weapons on barrels and chests) and didn't feel like restarting with a swordsman or a magic user.


For the Linux version Basilisk had fixed the game exploits found in the Windows version, so I took matters into my own hands and used a hex editor on the same game file to give myself 45000 gold. After that, able to buy whatever I wanted, and all the arrows I needed, the game was actually a lot more fun.

I was finally able to take the time to notice the excellent audio(*) sound effect work (owls hooting as you walk through the woods, for example), and the prettiness of the level design given the limitations of the isometric engine.

I've previously mentioned I was giving Indy games a try, given my recent dissatisfaction with recent big-budget big-game studio games that given only a few hours game play for $60. Fully playing through Eschalon Book 1 took me about 25 hours (a little longer than the 20 hours some of its reviews mentioned, but for reasons I mentioned above), so at approximately $1 per hour its pretty cheap entertainment. While you won't get as much for that $20 as if bought a big-studio like NWN a few years after it came out, there is something to be said for supporting Indy game studios that do a decent job. Think of it as buying Organic food - maybe its better for the environment.

(*) One annoyance I experienced was occasional interference-like audio buzzing, but I'm not sure if this was intrinsic to the game or really a pulseaudio problem in Fedora 9.

The problem with the world today is... education

So sayeth the wise and (not learned) Right Reverend Patrick O'Donoghue, Bishop of Lancaster (thats in England, for you safely uneducated folks out there). From the Telegraph on November 16th:

Bishop O'Donoghue, who has recently published a report on how to renew Catholicism in Britain, argued that mass education has led to "sickness in the Church and wider society".

"What we have witnessed in Western societies since the end of the Second World War is the development of mass education on a scale unprecedented in human history - resulting in economic growth, scientific and technological advances, and the cultural and social enrichment of billions of people's lives," he said.

"However, every human endeavor has a dark side, due to original sin and concupiscence. In the case of education, we can see its distortion through the widespread dissemination of radical scepticism, positivism, utilitarianism and relativism.

"Taken together, these intellectual trends have resulted in a fragmented society that marginalizes God, with many people mistakenly thinking they can live happy and productive lives without him."

I suppose the Bishop feels that the marginalization of a mythical figure is too high a price to pay for the "cultural and social enrichment of billions of people's lives."

The Catholic Church clearly deserves more deep thinkers like Bishop O'Donoghue. With more men like him I'm sure the Church can make itself even more obviously irrelevant to society.

[Image: Jan Luyken. Burning. Engraving. XVII.]

Corn monoculture.

I'm glad I avoid fast food:

Americans spend >100 billion dollars on restaurant fast food each
year; fast food meals comprise a disproportionate amount of both
meat and calories within the U.S. diet. We used carbon and
nitrogen stable isotopes to infer the source of feed to meat
animals, the source of fat within fries, and the extent of fertilization
and confinement inherent to production. We sampled food
from McDonald’s, Burger King, and Wendy’s chains, purchasing
>480 servings of hamburgers, chicken sandwiches and fries within
geographically distributed U.S. cities: Los Angeles, San Francisco,
Denver, Detroit, Boston, and Baltimore. From the entire sample set
of beef and chicken, only 12 servings of beef had delta 13C < -21‰; for
these animals only was a food source other than corn possible. We
observed remarkably invariant values of delta 15N in both beef and
chicken, reflecting uniform confinement and exposure to heavily
fertilized feed for all animals. The delta 13C value of fries differed
significantly among restaurants indicating that the chains used
different protocols for deep-frying: Wendy’s clearly used only corn
oil, whereas McDonald’s and Burger King favored other vegetable
oils; this differed from ingredient reports. Our results highlighted
the overwhelming importance of corn agriculture within virtually
every aspect of fast food manufacture.

Hope Jahren and Rebecca A. Kraft, Carbon and nitrogen stable isotopes in fast food: Signatures of corn and confinement, PNAS 2008, November 10, 2008, doi: 10.1073/pnas.0809870105has more.

Effect Measure provides an interesting analysis of this work.

Every day I drive past on the Burger Kings the authors sampled from in Baltimore. Always wondered who ate there. Now I know. ;)

teTex -> TeXlive transition on Fedora 9

Practically every document I have written professionally since 1994 uses LaTeX, either old vanilla latex (tex -> dvi -> ps) or pdflatex (tex -> pdf), often with non-standard cls files (aastex.cls, mn2e.cls).

Ever since I noticed that Fedora 9 was replacing teTeX with TeXlive I've been dreading the transition, and have kept all my work machines on Fedora 8 rather than transition to Fedora 9. (The KDE4 transition also gave me additional reason to wait until the bugs are fixed.)

I finally got time yesterday to back-up all my papers from work to my home Fedora 9 test machine, and just for fun tried running the TeXlive versions of latex and pdflatex on some of my papers and proposals... and they all worked first time, no messing about or reinstalling of the astro cls files required.

My old cls files that were installed in the /usr/share/texmf tree had not been messed with, and the ls-R file had been automatically updated to include them.

I'm pleasantly surprised, given the prevalence of problems a "texlive tetex" google search reveals. Good job Fedora team!

Family Values

Why those elitist coastal liberals are all about true family values.

Funny

Funny pre-election predictions.

I'm quite pleased with myself: predicted Obama getting 367 EVs, whereas the current total is 365 EVs.

90 years since the end of World War I

On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918 the Armistice between the Allies and the Central Powers came into effect and the Great War, the "war to end all wars," was over. Only a few veterans of WWI now remain to mark the commemoration ceremonies.

My grandfather on my mother's side served in WWI with the South African troops, and took part in the battle of Passchendaele (aka the Third Battle of Ypres). There he was captured by the Germans and spent the rest of the war in a prison camp, but was certainly better off than the 140000 Allied troops who died in that battle alone.

Volcano and eruption slideshow

Related to the Lusi mud volcano post from a few days ago, SciAm has a nice slide show of images related to volcanic eruptions.

Michael Crichton has died.

Michael Crichton has died at age 66, after a struggle with cancer. I loathed his writing, but I commiserate with his family over this sad news.

Okteta

Having previously complained about KDE4 on Fedora 9, it is only fair that I also mention something I like about it.

KDE 4.1 comes with Okteta, a gui-based Hex editor, and its pretty easy to use even for someone like me who has no experience with editing raw binary files (*). It turned out to be very useful when I need to alter some Eschalon Book 1 save game files (more on this in a later post).

Still, GUIs are only so useful, and I had to use the command line "cmp" utility to identify the bytes that differed between two different save game files before I could actually do anything useful with Okteta. Another cool command line tool I discovered for the first time: "xxd." Long live the all-powerful command line!

(*) No experience with messing around in binary of unknown format. Binary files with known formats are easy to deal with, you just write a program to process them.)

Do big studio computer games have less bang for buck these days?

Maybe I'm becoming old and jaded, but recently big budget games (PC or console) have been a bit of a disappointment to me.... $60 for <10 hours play time in a First Person Shooter (with maybe 2-3 times more the play time in an CRPG), and frustrating game-play seems the norm these days. I'd even have to buy a new PC to play some of the latest and greatest PC-only titles, as my trusty old Pentium 4 requires the obsolete AGP graphics. With less free time and spare cash (who could have thought that the rampant ideologically-driven deregulation of the financial markets might cause problems!) than I used to have its seems more important to find something decent to play...


After recent disappointments with NWN2 (and its expansion Mask of the Betrayer), Oblivion: Shivering Isles (Oblivion was good, but not as fun as Morrowind) and Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, and giving more money that I can really afford to the Democrats I've been looking for something where the emphasis is on fun and game-play, rather than graphics and movie-quality cut-scene work.

The original title of this post was going to be "Are big studio computer games less fun these days?" But what is fun? Certainly modern computer games, in particular those mentioned above, are graphically outstanding compared to games of even five years ago, let alone 10 or 15 years ago. Yet I remember getting a lot of enjoyment out of such graphically-primitive games such as Legend of Zelda, Civ 2, and X-Com: Terror from the Deep (probably my favorite games of all time). Basically the ingredients and mechanics of game play of different genres of computer games really haven't changed significantly over the same time, and its game play that counts for a lot in terms of enjoyment.

As I also spent vast amount of time playing those games - not only did they take a long time to master and play through, but they kept my attention for the ~100 hours I put into them. If a game is going to be shorter, then I expect to pay less for it. Or to put it another way (combining both fun and value) bang-for-buck is an element in my relative enjoyment of something.

That is not to say pure economics (or buyer's remorse) is the sole determinant of fun (remember, game play counts), but I think it also a crucial part of the recipe. For example, a typical Hollywood big-budget movie (e.g. the latest Indiana Jones movie) might be more fun when rented through Netflix for a net cost of a few bucks, than if you went to the theatre and paid $9 + gas and parking to see it.

Personally, as far as games are concerned I think the paying less than or approximately equal to $1 per hour of first-time game play is great value (e.g. KOTOR, Morrowind, Oblivion), ~a few $ per hour decent (e.g. Far Cry, Half Life 2, Assassin's Creed), and more than $5 per hour (e.g. SW: TFU, Halo 3 single player) poor value for money.

So if my hypothesis is right, what types of games should be fun if I'm not liking the games produced by the current big game studios?

If game play is roughly the same, and graphics really aren't super important, and bang-for-buck is a factor, then games by small independent developers should be fun. They may be short, or lack graphical or play testing finesse, but they should be enjoyable. (The alternative is simply to purchase the big studio games about a year after they first came out, at which their reduction in price makes up for their imperfections.)

So instead of the big games studios, I'm going to give independent developers a chance. In particular developers who support multiple operating systems (I keep a Windows machine to play games on, but if I could play games on other OSs I would happily avoid the use of Windows).

Playgreenhouse.com is perhaps best known as the distributor of Penny Arcade's "On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness", but it now has a few other games available, all for prices of $20 or less. To put my money where my mouth is I've purchased the old-school isometric CRPG Eschalon Book 1 (linux version) for the princely sum of $19.95.

I've spent about 10 hours playing so far, but will hold off on the full review for a while. In the mean time here are some reviews of the game (with screen-shots in some cases) of Eschalon Book 1, should you be interested in wasting a few minutes reading time:
http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=1485
http://jayisgames.com/archives/2008/06/eschalon_book_1.php
http://www.2404.org/reviews/2881/Eschalon:-Book-I-Review
http://www.scorpia.com/?p=812

Oil drilling most likely cause of Indonesian mud volcano

The BBC reports that the majority of the scientists attending the American Association of Petroleum Geologists' meeting in Cape Town, South Africa, believe that a bore hole drilled by an oil company was most likely responsible for the creation of a mud volcano (Lusi) on the island of Java in 2006.

Since then the mud volcano has continued to spew mud, displacing tens of thousands of people, destroyed four villages and 25 factories, and is indirectly responsible for the death of 13 people. It may continue to erupt for decades.

The drilling company involved denies any responsibility, blaming instead a magnitude 6.3 earthquake 280km away.

You can read more about the Lusi volcano at Highly Allochthonous, with an update here.

I was tempted to title this post "Drill, Baby, Drill!" but encouraging stupidity is never wise.

[Image of Lusi mud volcano, credit: Durham University, found on this UC Berkeley press release regarding the Lusi volcano.]

[update 11/06/08: Highly Allochthonous was at the AAPG meeting and has a nice run down of the earthquake vs drilling talks at the Lusi debate.]

Spore: Unintelligent Design

One of the things that surprised me when reading the initial reviews of Spore (e.g. the gamespot Spore review) was how short the early cell-based, oceanic and land creature phases of the game were said to be. Indeed, the reviews found these early stages, despite their shortness, to be "not very interesting and [to wear] out its welcome quickly."

When the game was first announced several years ago it was exactly those early stages that seemed most interesting and most unique - the later two Civilization-like and Master of Orion-like phases sounded much more traditional and less unique. OK, I realize that as a scientist my interests may not be quite in tune with Joe Sixpack, but I'm pretty sure that you can make an interesting and informative game out of those cellular, oceanic and animal stages. After all, people bought and played Railroad Tycoon.

It now appears that the early stages were indeed going to be far more unique and innovative (cellular automata are indeed cool), but that some of the developers got cold feet and forced the rest to stick to more traditional gameplay. Read the story of the dumbing down of Spore at Pharyngula.

[Update 11/04/08: Carl Zimmer has quick piece up at The Loom on perceived scientific problems with Spore. This is not to say all games must adhere to strict scientific accuracy, merely that adopting features of reality might make for a more interesting and varied game. After all, almost every game these day uses the Havok engine to do some simple physics. At the very least realism aids immersion.]

Core i7 reviews beginning to appear.

Engadget summarizes the Intel Core i7 benchmarks and system reviews that are starting to appear.

I can't wait till they appear on Newegg.

Still Alive

I'm still alive (Wisdom Teeth almost healed, thank you for asking). I haven't forgotten about the follow-up to the first part of my analysis of why Halo 3 wasn't as much fun (for me) as the original Halo: Combat Evolved, but have been too busy to finish editing the post (blogger really lacks a nice way of doing HTML tables).