| Date: | 2025-09-14 15:02 |
| Subject: | Favorite Posts |
| Security: | Public |
| Mood: |  cheerful |
If you're new here there's some posts I'd like to share.
Requirements Kill: How projects can be ruined by the sheer number of requirements on them.
Feeds, Seeds, and Gray Goo: Nanotechnological manufacturing will be driven by logistics--and that's what keeps the "gray goo" scenario from being a real danger.
Other engineering essays:
The issues with engineering as a career, the problems with engineering education, and how to become an engineer if you just can't resist it. The reasons to avoid government projects. Don't be this kind of whistleblower. Why licensing software engineers is a bad idea. Even in fiction it's hard to keep ahead of advancing technology.
Analyzing specific spacecraft: Rocketplane's tourist design, the hypothetical Blackstar RLV, and off-equator space elevators.
Medical doctrine: I have issues with the childhood vaccination schedule and the innumeracy of medical researchers. They're not all bad though.
I've written a few pieces of fanfic and a whole bunch of book reviews.
Playing MMOs has gotten me thinking about how we could use one to test changes to our real world and what would be the signs that we're actually living in a simulation.
I've written a few things specifically about World of Warcraft. A rant on the brainpower needed for tanks to taunt mobs. A missing piece of backstory on the Defias. A suggestion for monetizing add-ons within the Blizzard rules. Reflections on how much more the Horde storyline focuses on PvP. And a discussion of how the Iliad would look in WoW terms.
2 comments | post a comment
| Date: | 2012-05-15 22:21 |
| Subject: | Castle Ficlet |
| Security: | Public |
| Mood: |  silly |
( A possible first scene for Season Five of Castle )
7 comments | post a comment
Steve Jackson is running a Kickstarter for the "Designer's Edition" of Ogre. I'm an Ogre fan from way back. I still have the counters from one of the $2.95 Microgames, even if the rules and map have vanished over the years. GEV was my favorite of the series--once infantry could fight from cover and make overruns I was hooked. I even sold Pyramid magazine an article with more rules and scenarios, naturally titled "Poor Bloody Infantry". So I'm in on the Kickstarter for a copy of the game. It's running wild. They'd originally wanted $20k to support printing and distributing (and to enable pre-orders). Now it's coming up on half-a-million dollars and Evil Stevie is frantically trying to come up with stretch goals to justify having this pile of money dumped on him. He's got some nice ones too, including a Tom Smith album of Ogre theme music. Which just got unlocked.
So I'm trying to get a boardgaming friend to make time to actually playtest some of the new scenarios. And I've signed up for Board Game Geek Con this year (made easier by the November drill being moved to a different weekend). And I'm coming up with an idea for the scenario contest.
2 comments | post a comment
It's been 4.5 years since I've GMed a tabletop role-playing game. The skills haven't completely atrophied though. I applied some of them today running a command post exercise for my battalion. One of the exercise inputs was a Facebook rumor that the derailed tanker car of chlorine gas was actually a tank of ethanol, with the whole evacuation an excuse to keep people from getting at the 'shine. Alas, they went into rumor control mode before I could justify sending in a pickup truck loaded with some empty 55-gallon drums and a welding rig.
2 comments | post a comment
I just brought ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=91.7) celticdragonfly home from the hospital. A little later than they'd planned to discharge her, they were worried about her O2 sats. She's resting comfortably and trying to keep from talking. Should be back on solid food in a few days.
I couldn't find our bell, but we have a hobby horse that whinnies. So if she needs something she just has to squeeze its ear.
2 comments | post a comment
We need to make November 1st a Federal Holiday. It can't be All Saints' Day, that's religious. But we could have White House Day to honor John Adams moving into the first White House or Taxation Without Representation Day to make us remember the British enacting the Stamp Tax. But whatever we pick I want this day off so I can stay up late at the Halloween parties and have a day to recover.
2 comments | post a comment
XKCD has figured out a practical application for the Turing Test.
4 comments | post a comment
| Date: | 2010-10-23 17:37 |
| Subject: | GIP |
| Security: | Public |
| Mood: | amused |
The Warcraft folks announced how big the Big Bad of the new expansion is. I responded with a wisecrack. amiyuy was amused enough to make an icon of it.
I like it. :D
3 comments | post a comment
Rational Optimist
Matt Ridley wrote this book as a rebuttal to the ever-present, ever-changing prophesies of doom for the human race. Right now global warming and peak oil are the most popular ones, but there's still people talking up overpopulation or pollution as likely to cause a global collapse. Ridley doesn't just go after the individual theories. He's describing a comprehensive theory for how we got to our present level of wealth and power from our Stone Age origins.
In short: Trade is the root of all good. People specializing in producing something can make more of it and trade it someone else who has something they want, benefiting both parties. Keep increasing productivity and we have the extra time needed to create art, fight for freedom, or just enjoy life more without fearing next year's drought. It's not a completely new concept (Nonzero has a good take on the same issues), but he does a damn good job of pulling out evidence to show how far back trade goes, and how far things could spread geographically. Tasmania is a scary example of how a population could regress when cut off from its trading partners. Without a steady flow of tools and ideas from the mainland, the islanders couldn't maintain the technology to feed their original population and their numbers declined until they hit the minimum technology the island could support by itself.
It's not just physical goods--exchanging ideas is more important. Combinations of ideas are more powerful than individual ones. The combinations produce new ideas . . . which Ridley describes as "ideas having sex." Give that free reign and soon your society is prospering and expanding.
I strongly recommend this book for everyone. If you don't have time for the book then watch Ridley's TED talk or read his article introducing his ideas.
Girl Genius
My favorite webcomic has won a second Hugo! You don't have to buy a book to read this, it's all online. But I'm still buying the books. They beat hell out of waiting for the webpage to load page after page. If you haven't read it, start from the beginning. Mad scientists are fun. Lots of mad scientists running around gets scary. Or funny. It depends on the experiment.
Darkship Thieves
The protagonist of Darkship Thieves is a teenage girl visiting a strange new culture. But she's only superficially Podkayne of Mars. Actually she's got a lot of the Stainless Steel Rat in her, much to the dismay of many other people in the book. The setting is a few centuries into the future, with a nasty government controlling Earth to prevent technology from growing to a Singularity. Even with the fancy spaceship and biotech it's much more realistic than the typical space opera I read.
Best of all, Sarah Hoyt is coming to fencon this weekend! This is the first book of hers I've found and I'm hoping I can find some of the out of print ones beginning the other series in the dealers' room. With luck she'll be reading from the sequel to Darkship Thieves there.
"Jerry Smith's War: 2025."
I don't read many short stories these days, and this one isn't a great piece of fiction. But it is a well done scenario exploring how changes in technology and infantry tactics can revolutionize the way we wage "Small Wars." Useful reading for anyone expecting to be involved in a war in the coming decades.
post a comment
I just got a catalog from University of Southern California Bookstore. I flipped through out of idle curiosity. Turns out there were no books offered at all.
7 comments | post a comment
Toy Story 3
The kidlets love the Toy Story movies, so I took the older two out to see it on the big screen. Very well done story. It builds on the theme of the original two movies that toys exist to be played with. They avoided turning Andy into a jerk and even gave him a very sweet moment at the end. I heard a lot of adults crying during that scene. It was awfully scary for a kid flick, though. It was much rougher than I expected it to be. This is the first time I've ever been asked to not get a movie on DVD. She said she was afraid it would be too scary for her baby sister but I have my doubts.
To answer joyeuse13's question, TS3 does tie into the Declaration of Independence. The non-Andy part of the story has our heroes overthrowing an evil toy dictator*. The dictator makes fascist speeches. Barbie rebuts him with an appeal to the "consent of the governed." I loved it.
* If you don't want spoilers you should've seen it by now. Besides, it's Disney, you know they win.
Inception
I want to go see this a second time so I can check for details, especially the wedding ring. It's a fantastic movie, something much more complex than I expect to see coming out of Hollywood. It's actually good science fiction, a story based on a new idea that looks at the implications of it in a realistic way. Unlike other SF movies I've seen playing with dream-vs-reality it avoided having massive logic holes.
It doesn't consider all the implications. We came up with a long list of possible applications for the dream sharing technology. Not least of which is what a good dungeon master could do with it. The potentials for psychiatry and education would be much more important.
Inception also managed to be a good movie as well as good SF. Interesting characters, great visuals, and action sequences that didn't confuse the hell out of me. All this while avoiding stupidity such as making Ariadne a replacement wife for Cobb.
I expect we'll be getting the DVD and having a whole bunch of rewatches to settle arguments.
Ukiah Oregon series (Alien Taste, etc)
At first this reads like a young-adult novel of a boy taking on a man's job (tracking down lost kids and kidnap victims) and growing into his full maturity. And, in a certain sense, it is. But goes way off the normal track of that kind of story in amazing ways. If someone described the premise behind this book to me I would have skipped it because it would obviously break my disbelief suspenders. Wen Spencer made it work for me, mostly by making the protagonist as shocked and amazed by the discoveries about his own nature as the reader is. Even when stuff got over the top I cared enough about these people to want to know what happened next. Alien Taste stands alone well but I read the rest of the series as fast as I could.
post a comment
( Sorta spoilers for the movie )
8 comments | post a comment
ESR on why women are such a small minority of programmers and other high-tech professionals: Women, in general, are not willing to eat the kind of shit that men will swallow to work in this field.
Now let’s talk about death marches, mandatory uncompensated overtime, the beeper on the belt, and having no life. Men accept these conditions because they’re easily hooked into a monomaniacal, warrior-ethic way of thinking in which achievement of the mission is everything. Women, not so much. Much sooner than a man would, a woman will ask: “Why, exactly, am I putting up with this?”
(snip)
If we really want to fix the problem of too few women in computing, we need to ask some much harder questions about how the field treats everyone in it.
I'm all for that.
8 comments | post a comment
Jamie's gotten really good at reading. He's at a stage where he can look over my shoulder and read out loud whatever he sees. So I had to turn on the profanity filter in Warcraft.
3 comments | post a comment
| Date: | 2010-06-19 13:36 |
| Subject: | Crying Wolf |
| Security: | Public |
| Mood: | amused |
Alanna has a new trick to get attention--claiming to have an sudden owie. She'd be more convincing if she didn't keep doing this while standing still on a padded surface. Last time she did this I went over and asked "Did you hurt your wolf bone? Is your wolf bone hurt?"
"Yes."
So I kissed her on the forehead.
"All better now!"
1 comment | post a comment
| Date: | 2010-06-17 14:27 |
| Subject: | Random Stuff |
| Security: | Public |
| Mood: | cheerful |
We had a joint birthday party for the girls last weekend. I expect Maggie will start wanting a party of her own by her teens but so far they're happy to have one big party.
Best joke at our annual training camp: telling people my badge is "Buzz Lightyear's belt buckle." It's pretty damn close. Only worked if they had kids in the right age range, though.
Best moment of AT: hearing the exercise evaluators report that the troops handled every input thrown without hesitation or mistakes.
Playing Warcraft with my family now includes my father-in-law, sister-in-law, and daughter. The Borg got nothing on Blizzard.
Interesting list of the built-in tendencies that keep people from making rational decisions. Hat tip to nancylebov.
5 comments | post a comment
| Date: | 2010-06-06 22:16 |
| Subject: | Nerd Reaction |
| Security: | Public |
| Mood: | mischievous |
Being the sort of nerd I am, my reaction to this was to wonder how bad any spills/meltdowns/whatever would be.
Failure modes and effects analysis is important!
2 comments | post a comment
| Date: | 2010-06-02 22:55 |
| Subject: | Story Time |
| Security: | Public |
| Mood: | amused |
Jamie decided tonight that he wanted to be the one telling the story. And not just any story, but one he made up himself. He's not very good at it yet, but I encouraged him all I could because it's great to see him using his imagination and making something of his own. So Maggie and I got to listen to the story of the Three Little Fishes and the Big Bad Shark. With their houses of seaweed, sand, and pirate ship.
"Not by the scales of our finny fin fins!"
2 comments | post a comment
| Date: | 2010-05-18 07:19 |
| Subject: | Booty Call! |
| Security: | Public |
| Mood: | cheerful |
Munchkin Booty, that is. We've just gotten the pirate card game and want to break it in. Everyone's invited to come by our place this Saturday at 1pm for that and other games.
5 comments | post a comment
I took celticdragonfly out to the movies to celebrate Mother's Day. We saw Iron Man 2 and loved it. You do need to see the first one to appreciate it, it's a continuation, not a stand-alone story. We really want Natasha to have her own movie. Whee.
There's various stupid stuff in the movie, most of which I just ignored as comic-bookisms. A few forced me to throw brown penalty flags. The pretended impotence of the US government relative to Tony Stark was annoying enough to get a post of its own. Linear accelerators do not get adjusted with monkey wrenches. There are undiscovered elements out there. They're undiscovered because they break down faster than anyone can find them. This keeps them from being an OSHA-friendly replacement for whatever you'd been using.
A more subtle technical complaint: if you're making armored drones there's no point in making them bipedal. Tanks are shaped the way they are for a reason. You want to take advantage of the cube-square law--the less surface area you have the thicker the armor can be.
Tony and Pepper really aren't going to have a decent relationship until they're in the habit of being honest with each other. So, never.
Of all the high tech wonders shown in the movie the one I want the most is the augmented reality social display. Arrive somewhere and it automatically highlights the most important people and displays their identity and key data about them. Oh, yes, please. Heck, I'd settle for one with a "What's your name again?" button that'll pull it up on request.
All the fussing over whether Tony should have a monopoly of the Iron Man suits does involve a real issue: who can be trusted with that kind of power? The movie is a good argument against entrusting it to mentally unbalanced alcoholics. I know a fair number of people who wouldn't be happy with the US government having it. But once the genie is out of the bottle, what do you do with it?
This debate happened before with nuclear weapons. Heinlein tackled it with the stories "Solution Unsatisfactory," "The Long Watch," and Space Cadet. His method relied on recruiting people with the moral fiber to choose suicide over wealth and power to stick with their principles. I think the first title holds true. celticdragonfly came up with some ways to make that system more reliable. I pointed out she'd recreated the Guardians from Plato's Republic. She pointed out we were probably the only people who watched a superhero movie and wound up referencing Plato. Best practical possibility we came up with was a carefully recruited order of Catholic monks. Which would, of course, be the Brothers of St. Michael.
I completely agree with Howard Taylor about what Tony should be doing with his reactor.
12 comments | post a comment
|
thoughtful
irritated