Nathan Campbell – Page 192

Saved by WoW

If you go out in the woods today you better have played some WoW, at least if you’re going to confront an angry moose. That is one of the coolest sentences I’ve ever written. But it’s real. Two Norwegian siblings were confronted by an angry, and territorial, moose while on a jaunt through the forest. The twelve year old Hans Olsen saved his little sister by bringing skills he’d developed in the WoW world into the real world…

Thanks to his numerous encounters in Blizzard’s MMORPG, his first reaction was to “taunt” the moose so that it would ignore his younger sister. With its focus shifting to the boy, the sister was able to flee and head for safety.

In the PC game, taunting is the ability to draw the attention of the attacking beast away from the lower-level and less-armored party members. Apparently it works on real-world beasts too.

After the girl escaped, Hans initiated another World of Warcraft tactic he learned at level 30: feigning his death. Dropping to the ground and remaining inanimate, he waited for the moose to sniff him out and lose interest.

June 14, 2010

The perils of so-called “privilege”

Sometimes I feel like being a straight, white, anglo-saxon protestant, with a physically imposing stature and strong (some would say over-inflated) sense of self worth, means I’m not allowed to voice an opinion on any minority position, or indeed any power imbalance… and indeed, when I dare to question a gay atheist, or contribute to a discussion on gender politics, my contribution is somehow invalid because my shoulder is not chipped the same way. What really gets me though, is when this happens in discussions about social conditions in an egalitarian, democratic society with universal suffrage. Life’s tough? Well vote the other people out and change it. Whiners. Sure, some WASP guy just took the job that you thought you were entitled to and is going to get paid more than you would have… well, perhaps he’s a better negotiator than you. Perhaps he went to the right school. It’s not always about gender. I don’t know about you, but if I ran a business I’d be wanting to hire the most competent candidate for the job. Gender is only an issue if you make it an issue. As is race. Sure, Andrew Johns made a profane and offensive statement, I’m not going to condone it, but do you think he thinks poorly of Greg Inglis because of his skin colour? His whole statement was predicated on Inglis’ extreme talent. I’ve got no doubt Johns said similarly derogatory things about Darren Lockyer. South Park’s Hate Crimes episode had it right – normal people these days don’t tend to pick on people of different races because they think they’re inherently less valuable than their own race. They just pick on people because of their own inherent sinfulness (all crimes are hate crimes).

Oh, to be an oppressed first world minority.

I think, if I ever want to tell people to just get on with life, I’ll need to invent an alter-ego who is a female, Muslim, gay midget from a third world African country with 18 children.

I could listen to Rage Against the Machine or enjoy other forms of artistic protest without feeling pangs of privilege induced guilt. Like a celebrity member of PETA. Then I could comment on any issue with impunity. And nobody would be able Most of the time my advice would be “life is not fair, suck it up, and get on with it.” Does anybody know of anybody with the aforementioned qualifications who voices such a message. I would buy their books.

As a member of this aristocratic class by a quirk of happenstance and genetics I feel like I’m missing out on plenty of opportunities to tell other people what to do, and can’t do so without appearing to be a bully.

I read all these minority reports online wishing I could be part of a minority so that I could passionately own a cause. Even the teams I support in sport are the “overdogs” – though there was a period of about ten years when Manly were lucky to win a game. There is no area in my life where I can call out “help, help, I’m being oppressed,” I’m not a member of any proletariat or suffrage movement. I didn’t ask to be who I am. There is not a majority position that I do not instinctively support. I am as boringly conformist as Kevin Rudd. I don’t even belong to a fashionable subset of society. I can’t dress to express myself, to distinguish myself from the masses of which I am a part. I am bland beyond individuality. A sunflower in a field of sunflowers. My cause du jour is the cause de rigueur.

There are many like me. Many not interesting people. Without exotic foibles. Without histories of oppression. Without an inherited sense of entitlement engendered by years of ancestral persecution, or the memory of a past wrong. For us there is no “audacity of hope,” but in its place the mendacity of hope.

White anglo-saxon protestant males earned their social standing. There is not a skerrick of progress in the western world in the last two thousand years that we have not worked for. That’s why we get paid more. That’s why the cards of society seem to fall in our favour. We see opportunities and we take them. Carpe diem.

If those in the minorities feel aggrieved by the power imbalance and wish to protest our implicit superiority – then why not stage a revolution. That’s how minorities achieve their ends. It’s not through whining and holding conferences or talkfests. Knock us off our perches. Don’t just complain that we’re on them. Just do something.

That is all.

June 14, 2010

Schrodinger’s LOLcat

I don’t do LOLcatz. Except maybe if they involve cats doing ninja like stuff. But this is irresistible.

From Flickr.

June 13, 2010

Breakfast synergy

Bacon and pancakes? Why not “bacon in pancakes”…

Delicious. Found here. Via Lee (on Facebook).

June 13, 2010

Home grown home brew

This looks like a fun product if you’re hoping to keep your food miles down – or if you’re into making stuff from scratch… It’s a beer garden. And it’s only available in the states… but it wouldn’t be too hard to make your own.

June 13, 2010

The real dangerous book for boys

Because we’re currently childless I take great delight in teaching bad habits to other peoples’ children. I think I’ve found the perfect birthday present for such children. Lets face it, no sane parent is going to buy their child this book:

If a less appropriate book has ever been written, I’ve not seen it. Backwards Masking Unmasked included.

June 12, 2010

Shirt of the Day: Literal Iron Man

Literal Iron Man.

From Threadless.

June 12, 2010

Gilligan’s Island’s subtext gets explained

This is a cool essay explaining the subtext of the show that ostensibly only existed to sell Terry Toweling hats… or so I thought. Gilligan’s Island. It’s deeper than you think.

The Castaways - 1965

“Gilligan, the Skipper’s “little buddy”, embodies every extraneous governmental agency, policy and program ever foisted on innocent people anywhere. It is “Gilligan’s island.” Gilligan is well-intentioned. He sincerely wants to help. Gilligan saves no exertion, refuses no absurdity, respects no boundary in his unceasing efforts to solve, or at least soften, any and all of the everyday problems of the castaways. More often than not Gilligan is the problem. At best he makes a bad situation worse. At worst, he makes a great situation completely unbearable.”

Even this lofty theme is not the primary thesis. The story is actually about something much more fundamental. The most remarkable message of the tale lies in the paradox of the concentrated lust of the castaways — their burning desire to go back. Back to a time and a place that is more familiar and romantically remembered as “better.”

The tragedy of the tale is not that they can never go back. The real affliction is the wish itself. They are all so preoccupied with the notion of going back that they never realize they are already in paradise.

June 12, 2010

Stuff the Internet Likes

So, you like reading cool stuff on the Internet? Well it turns out most of it still comes from traditional media – so says this infographic from Good, a blog.

June 12, 2010

BP meets Mario

When Mario went out to fix an underwater pipe he discovered it was spilling gallons and gallons of oil. From here.

June 12, 2010

He built this city for shock and LOLs

This is a cool story. It comes with a video that I haven’t watched (and I’m currently on mobile broadband so won’t until later). Let me apologise in advance if it traumatises you, or contains foul language.

It’s not the main point of this story, or I wouldn’t have posted it…

The link there contains a Q&A with the guy who built this city… oh he built this city…

It took one and a half years:

“During the planning stage of the city I was also busy constructing other large-scale cities, which laid out much of the theory for Magnasanti. New ways of doing things were not yet developed until experiments were done within the game to verify ideas, and notes had to be taken down in conjunction with each new experiment, as well as devising new experiments to find out if there were better ways of solving the problem. Building cities and doing in-game experiments to obtain the results desired takes time. Additionally, I had other things to do, and only worked on it in my spare time, so it was a gradual development, not something I was working on 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.”

It’s a brilliant piece of social/political/economic art. Here is what life in the city is like for its residents:

“There are a lot of other problems in the city hidden under the illusion of order and greatness: Suffocating air pollution, high unemployment, no fire stations, schools, or hospitals, a regimented lifestyle – this is the price that these sims pay for living in the city with the highest population. It’s a sick and twisted goal to strive towards. The ironic thing about it is the sims in Magnasanti tolerate it. They don’t rebel, or cause revolutions and social chaos. No one considers challenging the system by physical means since a hyper-efficient police state keeps them in line. They have all been successfully dumbed down, sickened with poor health, enslaved and mind-controlled just enough to keep this system going for thousands of years. 50,000 years to be exact. They are all imprisoned in space and time.”

June 12, 2010

Say no to “tweets”

The New York Times has banned its journalists from using the word “tweet” or any derivatives in their stories (possibly with the exception of describing the noise made by birds). Awesome. Instead they must use “wrote on Twitter” or “said on Twitter”… here’s an excerpt from the memo (via The Awl).

“Except for special effect, we try to avoid colloquialisms, neologisms and jargon. And “tweet” — as a noun or a verb, referring to messages on Twitter — is all three. Yet it has appeared 18 times in articles in the past month, in a range of sections.

Of course, new technology terms sprout and spread faster than ever. And we don’t want to seem paleolithic. But we favor established usage and ordinary words over the latest jargon or buzzwords.

One test is to ask yourself whether people outside of a target group regularly employ the terms in question. Many people use Twitter, but many don’t; my guess is that few in the latter group routinely refer to “tweets” or “tweeting.” Someday, “tweet” may be as common as “e-mail.” Or another service may elbow Twitter aside next year, and “tweet” may fade into oblivion. (Of course, it doesn’t help that the word itself seems so inherently silly.)”

June 12, 2010

On the complexity of coffee

Too many people think making coffee is easy (for a significant proportion of that group it simply involves hot water and a teaspoon of coffee flavoured dirt).

Illy is an Italian coffee powerhouse. Giorgi Millio used to work with them. Now he’s a coffee writer. Here’s his description of Illy’s approach to coffee.

“Certainly my views on coffee have been influenced by the company’s scientific environment, created by three generations of chemists; a research and development unit covering agronomy, botany, physics, chemistry, biology, statistics, and computer science; and laboratories dedicated to dedicated to the study of coffee, in areas like sensory perception (not just taste, but aroma as well).”

He’s a coffeesnob. Here’s an interesting fact:

Coffee is intricate and requires education and passion to get right–plus a lot of practice. Espresso is the most complex coffee preparation, containing around 1,500 chemical substances, of which 800 are volatile. There are also more than 100 chemical/physical variables that affect the final preparation—like water composition, the size and distribution of the ground coffee particles, filter dimensions and hole diameter, dynamic water flow temperature and pressure, shape and temperature of the cup, roasting degree, and many, many more …

June 11, 2010

What is a human life worth? $6.1 million

Behavioural economics fascinate me. Here’s a story about a guy named Cass Sunstein who’s a friend (and loosely speaking, an adviser) of Obama’s, from the University of Chicago, who wrote a book called Nudge, it sounds Gladwellesque. It might be my next holiday read…

Here’s a bit of a summary from the compelling NY Times profile.

In “Nudge,” a popular book that he wrote with the influential behavioral economist Richard Thaler, Sunstein elaborated a philosophy called “libertarian paternalism.” Conservative economists have long stressed that because people are rational, the best way for government to serve the public is to guarantee a fair market and to otherwise get out of the way. But in the real world, Sunstein and Thaler argue, people are subject to all sorts of biases and quirks. They also argue that this human quality, which some would call irrationality, can be predicted and — this is the controversial part — that if the social environment can be changed, people might be nudged into more rational behavior.

Libertarian paternalists would have school cafeterias put the fruit before the fried chicken, because students are more likely to grab the first food they see. They support a change in Illinois law that asks drivers renewing their licenses to choose whether they want to be organ donors. The simple act of having to choose meant that more people signed up. Ideas like these, taking human idiosyncrasies into account, might revive an old technocratic hope: that society could be understood so perfectly that it might be improved. The elaboration of behavioral economics, which seeks to uncover the ways in which people are predictably irrational, “is the most exciting intellectual development of my lifetime,” Sunstein told me.

Sunstein now works with OIRA – which, being an acronym, is a government department. A department that looks at policy ideas and ways them up economically using a cost/benefit analysis that controversially assigns dollar values to intangible things… it has previously used these values:

The office’s administrators require that federal agencies express the costs and benefits of their proposed rules (lives saved, swampland preserved) in dollars. Moral principles, filtered through this cost-benefit analysis, find their way into confounding little boxes. A human life, the E.P.A. figured in a 2001 rule about arsenic and drinking water, was worth $6.1 million. (If an environmental regulation would save one life but cost $4 million, it ought to be put into effect; if it cost $8 million to save that life, the regulation would be scuttled.) Each I.Q. point a child lost because of exposure to lead was worth $8,346 over the course of a lifetime. A lost workday was worth $83. Many of these estimates used data from surveys — taken at malls, among other places — that asked passers-by how much more they would need to be paid to take on a job that carried, for instance, a 1-in-10,000 risk of death. Richard Posner, who has the most magnificent and chilly mind in this realm, used similar projections to price the benefit of preventing the extinction of the human race at $600 trillion.

Sunstein wants to bring this utilitarian approach together with his “libertarian paternalism” which would be very interesting indeed.

June 11, 2010

Your favourite games… now with extra Bible

I’ve posted a couple of times about lame Christian computer games. I’d dig up the posts but that would take me five minutes. Anyway. Here are a bunch of currently popular games reimagined as Christian… they made me laugh.

It’s sad because once upon a time Christian game producers did in fact take a cool game (Wolfenstein 3D) and a Bible story (Noah’s Ark) and mashed them together into a game where you ran around slingshotting animals with food and sleeping pills so that you could pile them into the ark. Lame.

June 11, 2010