Around 5:45 Julian says that free-form strategy games cannot guarantee that the player will always have something interesting to do, and that, in his view at least, you couldn't get away with that sort of game anymore today.

Paradox Interactive with their Hearts of Iron, Europa Universalis and Victoria franchises are still up and running. Hearts of Iron 3, in particular, seems more popular than ever, after the release of the third add-on, "Their Finest Hour". And if anything, HOI3 is even more of a sandbox than the original XCOM.

Similarly, Bohemia Interactive's Arma series as a comparable counterpart in the field of first person shooters is gaining massive popularity as well, even though it incorporates extensive "downtimes" for players.

You can't churn out annual iterations and expect AAA-rate numbers of sold copies, but the community is still large enough to warrent a couple of these franchises.

And just to re-iterate for those that don't know me, I live in Canada. We are not allowed to use guns in self defense. Neither was the 14 year old girl in england who was killed by a pack of dogs...happen often? nope. But s*it does happen.

My interest in guns is a hobby, I'm safe and legal and resent people equating my sport with crazy lunatics who go on sprees like the guy who ran over 4 people killing 2...crazy.

Honestly, it's not that all news is bullshit, it's that most (all?) news outlets commit the same fallacious and detrimental information practices as always will happen in any system when experience is posited as "truth".

In the business world we are almost always working to change our perspective on how data flows and how best to store and distribute info; setting our educational bias aside when need be. One particular failed practice that does NOT get enough high level analyzing due to the nature of the bias in which the problem itself creates: Information siloing.

In this case, we have the American people silo'd (and if we don't have them silo'd, we actively seek to silo these "undecided" minds) as either liberal D or conservative R. Once you're silo'd, you now have the ability to be fed limited information, based upon limited experience, as the Truth. This is called a hook. A hook is exactly what you think it means and is not bad of itself, because hooks exist in all systems for better or for worse. Otherwise birds of a feather would not flock together. (They flock together because of hooks in their code and the world aka science around them which helps facilitate that hook.)

Now that the hook is in, we have separate news organizations that cater to the data bias you signed up for. You're a human with a blank slate, so don't you dare argue that your opinion is anything but inconsistent, even after education; because you assume that the patterns of existence taught as theoretical and scientifically posited "truth" scale in a reality based upon butterfly flaps of causation. Just accept it: You are fallible and the defects are inherent at every step of our civilization. (Algorithms of usefulness to engineers are only useful if they lessen the load on the user, otherwise we'd all be typing 1s and 0s; so the logic of simplicity suggests our systems are fucked and holding to them is an anarchy unto itself, where ultimate complexity becomes entropy -- LESSEN THE COMPLEXITY. That should be a rule for all government and economy.)

Liberals claim they cater to all sides and conservatives complain that if it wasn't for Fox, there would be no objectivity in the news. This further complicates the matter, but is itself a red herring because it's an argument that essentially says "YOU MUST GET YOUR NEWS FROM A MAJOR NETWORK." If you actually believe that these media giants are the end all be all to gaining information from the "truest" perspective possible, you are a dummy and you need to WAKE UP.

If you never made a thought pattern along these lines, you also need to wake up but I'm not mad at you. Information that deviates from a human's factory defaults (early family and life experiences in the form of fear induced bias) is difficult to objectively analyze. I fault you not, but your call to awaken is noted and will be remembered at the end of all (if you believe in any sort of karmic ending, Christians included). If you don't believe this, then your inability to rule the boundaries of your mind in the present is damning enough. Fuck you. And fuck your offspring. Subjective fear consume thee as your desperate and once nurturing stride for survival is abstracted into selfish, power seeking nihilism.

Information siloing creates tribal knowledge (which is information held by a select group, and then touted as negative patterns like nationalism and corporate thuggery), and tribal knowledge creates boundaries based upon a skewed perception of what the truth is; which in turn, creates subjective and often intangible competition within a system that should be making strides to improve its process via iteration.

MUD SLING AWAY. Or join me in narrowing the argument to its lowest common denominators and then objectively analyzing the system, starting at a generic starting point and building up to a truer understanding.

Iwould make the same sort of "assumptions" if you told me you had a new type of gasoline that could make cars fly. Its not that I'm some sort of car-genius, its just that I have some general knowledge about what cars are and where they come from.

The context is everything.

Just like modern cars are the result of an iterative process that stretches a hundred years, our brains are products of a purposeless biological evolution that has been churning away for hundreds of millions of years. Our consciousness is perhaps a bit like a driving computer in a modern car, its a byproduct of the ultimate purpose of the thing: in the case of a car, to make an optimal driving machine, in the case of the brain to make an optimal survival machine.

Our brain evolved for things like survival, parental care, tool-use, pattern recognition and language processing, probably roughly in that order.
EDIT: And consciousness emerges from a combination of these features.

It is in this context all claims about dualism ultimately must be seen: When and where in this process did the magical unicorns insert the secrets of the universe, or the eternal soul or whatever else into our brains?

Or are you just tripping?

My assumptions then , I make because its a whole lot less to assume than what I'd have to assume if the opposite was true.

It's an interesting video, and honestly, I'm not sure whether I agree with it or not.

I suppose I'd segregate it into art and engineering

On the one hand, having a single creative vision can result in some great art.

On the other hand, almost all modern engineering of any kind is a collaborative effort. Systems are simply too big and complex for one person to exercise an auteur-like control over.

The problem to me is not collaboration. The problem is getting the right kind of collaboration. The "design by committee" argument is a result of bike shedding.

Henry Ford famously said “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."

Pretty good argument for single creative vision, right? Clearly the "people" didn't understand the paradigm shift.

But no great invention occurs in a vacuum, and no great invention was ever perfect on the first iteration. It's an incredibly hard problem. Feedback from users is undeniably important, but a good engineer must be able to differentiate between useful feedback and people who don't understand the problem domain.

Personally, I work collaboratively 90% of the time. The 10% is the interesting bit though

Republicans!!.........DEMOCRATS!! CEO's, bankers...(watching the world burn and editorializing on the spectacle with in-eloquent, imitated verbiage, through smudged, mud-encrusted goggles.)

TYT claim to fame (using newsspeak) making a name off of the opinion of their fawning press and how peeps REACT to anything completely out of their control, AND LAUGH AT YOU WHILE THEY SUCK AT IT!! I maintain as always, TYT yet another iteration of the same fucking tools, designed to render helpless those who may not be capable of using a simple implement.....saaaay, a shovel or mallet.

Here's a forgotten limited-edition iteration from Fender Rhodes division that has a a similar signature all it's own.

>> ^MonkeySpank:

I wholeheartedly agree with Lewis that you cannot talk about the economy in 2 mins when color commentary on a football foul can last 10 minutes. Just how much attention span do the American people have? How much can we trust them with?


In England under medieval Catholic rule you would be tortured to death for merely OWNING a copy of the Bible in English rather than Latin. They still use Latin in law and other 'Elite' interests. Having the general public follow what's going on has NEVER been on the menu.

US Corporate 'news' is just the latest iteration for keeping people running around in circles while the money flows in to the same type of families (in the Uk actually the SAME FAMILIES!).

But, you know, there's always 'Trickle Down'... or sorry, now its 'Wealth Creators'.. or, wait, lets check FOX for the latest spin..

Yes, Yes, you are correct
I don't no why I wrote all that - I just had a moment of rebelling against political correctness.

The truth is, other than on TV, I've never seen anyone dress up as the sexy whatever costume - at least not to extreme (outside of maybe at night clubs aka. the bars). Most people I know are fun and reserved and not at all pretentious and actually come up with some very original costumes..

The best costumes are the scary ones where you can't even tell who is wearing the costume.
"Sexy" as a costume - IS NOT A COSTUME. I don't even know why women would bother with them. I assume it's because they are too cool and are too insecure to let anyone see them except at their best - even when "Best" is artificial and shallow.

(Disclaimer: I don't even know if this makes any sense, Sorry, I'm tired and my kids are all in room blasting Youtube videos - on two different computers, across the room - making it hard for me to think or form any coherent sentences.)

My real opinion is that from all the videos I've seen this year - people are over-thinking their costumes and Halloween. The truth is, the costume doesn't matter - It's how much fun you have that counts.

Also: A knife in a box of cereal does not make it a serial killer costume

>> ^bareboards2:

@Sagemind -- I think you are missing the point.
Or maybe -- rather -- Your second line is exactly the point. "Did you ever stop to think that maybe guys like the whole sexy look?" Good lord, as women we can't get away from what guys want. It should ONLY be what the women want to do.
It is about giving a different message to young women. Right now, they get inundated with one message only. This is what guys want. In magazines. In the movies. On television. (And yes, men are starting to be pressured in a similar way, but I don't see that as progress. I see that as the disease is spreading.)
I live in a town where "dressing up" everyday is frowned upon. Lots of "dressing down" here. When Halloween hits, the Sexy Everything shows up in spades. Men and women both. Then the next day, they go back to six layers and flannel. It's a great release, it's great fun.
You aren't the target audience, dear Sage. The target audience is young women who have never thought about being Louis CK. The target audience is young women who perhaps have never considered having their own fun with a costume, having their own self expression, rather than yet one more iteration of "this is what guys want."
What do THE YOUNG WOMEN want?
They choose sexy? Fine. They choose to be a paunchy balding ginger? What a hoot!

@Sagemind -- I think you are missing the point.

Or maybe -- rather -- Your second line is exactly the point. "Did you ever stop to think that maybe guys like the whole sexy look?" Good lord, as women we can't get away from what guys want. It should ONLY be what the women want to do.

It is about giving a different message to young women. Right now, they get inundated with one message only. This is what guys want. In magazines. In the movies. On television. (And yes, men are starting to be pressured in a similar way, but I don't see that as progress. I see that as the disease is spreading.)

I live in a town where "dressing up" everyday is frowned upon. Lots of "dressing down" here. When Halloween hits, the Sexy Everything shows up in spades. Men and women both. Then the next day, they go back to six layers and flannel. It's a great release, it's great fun.

You aren't the target audience, dear Sage. The target audience is young women who have never thought about being Louis CK. The target audience is young women who perhaps have never considered having their own fun with a costume, having their own self expression, rather than yet one more iteration of "this is what guys want."

What do THE YOUNG WOMEN want?

They choose sexy? Fine. They choose to be a paunchy balding ginger? What a hoot!

like to re-iterate I SO WOULD HAVE PARKED MY CAR ON HIM

Not only was your prior argument fallacious, but I refuted it. Now you're ignoring that and cherry picking your replies here. Seems pretty intellectually dishonest to me?

Alright, Ill answer your "refutations" then:

"Why shouldn't you suspect that decay rates could change?"

If you read my post, I explained why : Because there is no evidence that suggest it is changing, and no known physical mechanisms that can produce such change. The moon could suddenly start orbiting the other direction relative to earth tomorrow, but there is no signs, no evidence, that suggests or implies that it will, and also physics dont allow it unless it is pushed or pulled by some very large force etc.
Bottom line, change in the decay rate is an assumption of something for which there is no evidence. Thats why scientists dont waste their time suspecting this.

As for the line "absense of evidence is not evidence of absense". Well thats a poetic thing and all, but its not really true when you think about it for a little bit: for the most part, this is how we exclude things from our reality, and separate what is real or not. It is perfectly consistent to say "I really dont think this thing exist" while remaining, in principle, open minded. There might be green hairy monsters hiding under my bed, I can never know for absolute certain, but I dont THINK so, the absense of evidence convinces me there are none.

The same is true in say, particle physics, there may be thousands of different "higgs-bosons" of different kinds doing all sorts of crazy shit in physics, but again, in the absense of evidence... you cant just build your ideas around fantasies.

Do you know the geologic column doesn't actually exist in reality?
Are you alking about illustrations of the geologic column? Then yeah, I'm aware that it doesnt look like that in real-life, but the term is definately real, and yes, erosion and things like that can expose old layers to fresh air, this is of course well know in biology and geology. When I say fossils are layed down in order, I dont mean that they are all physically on top of eachother, but that the dating of the layers match with the kind of animals found in that era. IE: there are no "fossil rabbits in the pre-cambrian" as one biologist replied when asked what would truly disprove evolution.


Caylor: "Do you believe that the information evolved?"

MB: "George, nobody I know in my profession believes it evolved. It was engineered by genius beyond genius, and such information could not have been written any other way. The paper and ink did not write the book! Knowing what we know, it is ridiculous to think otherwise."

Hahaha, if that was said by an actual molecular biologist capable of finding his own ass, I'll eat my hat. This is so obviously Creo-speak from here on to hell. The first thing an actual biologist would do would be to question the use of the word "information" (I'm assuming he's asking about the information contained in DNA) in this context. Because we refer to DNA as a language and "it contains all the information needed to assemble a human" and so on, Creationists think of DNA as some sort of literary masterpiece, it seems. The truth is of course that its 4 acids spelling 95% repetetive gibberish intersped with some interesting bits that code for proteins and do actual useful stuff.

They also seems to think that (perhaps because they believe it themselves) humans existed from the get-go, and that DNA somehow evolved inside us or some shit like that. (Like one creationist who asked Richard Dawkins how we humans peed before our penises and vaginas evolved..) Anyway, like our penises, our DNA is of course much older than humans themselves, We are simply the latest iterations of a nearly endless line of attemps by nucleic acids to clone themselves by way of making an animal that does the reproduction.

I highly suspect that interview was faked by creationists , but even if it wasnt, it'd just mean that there's a molecular biologist out there who doesnt know fuck all about molecular biology and hold some strange beliefs, and he's wrong. Simple as that.


You then have the obligatory list of quotations, and what can I say?.. I can see how you think these are somehow indicating a plot or something against creationist, but honestly this is just plain quotemining.

I think it's more of a statement on the nature of intelligence. Many of the behaviors we view to be intelligence are really just emergent properties of iterative algorithms implemented by simple machines. We shouldn't assume intelligence holds some privileged status.

There was a fun paper a while back on how this could be explained by the use of memristors in a dynamically stable circuit. >> ^Sagemind:

So, does that prove intelligence or just the will to survive?!

>> ^xxovercastxx:

>> ^shinyblurry:


You have to ask yourself, if he's willing to lie about his education, what else is he willing to lie about?
I got about 10-15 minutes in and couldn't listen anymore. I like hearing a well-(in)formed counter-argument but this guy isn't even on a high school level of scientific understanding.


Not only that, but even in the first few MINUTES he already doesn't understand the very NATURE the way the brain interprets data and information. He's spending time talking about this important ability in humans yet leaves out ALL of psychology and neuroscience and what they have to say on the subject. Guess what they have to say? So he goes on and on talking about this WORTHLESS notion of design and doesn't understand that his brain is forcing him to BELIEVE this IS TRUE! All you have to ask him to disarm him is , "Why? Why does it look designed? Why?", then watch him splutter till his brain explodes, you know why, because due to psychology you BELIEVE it does, WITH BIAS--and it goes deeper too (much how you see optical illusions, why do those appear to be optical illusions? I don't know, why does that image appear to be designed?)--he will NEVER be able to answer that question, cause quite frankly he doesn't have the education obviously needed to do so.

His entire speech was over in the first few minutes, let alone ten to fifteen. Doctor my ass, "I" could lecture him into oblivion (as I'm sure a great many other people here could too).

This is why I've watched about three of shiny's video embeds (this being a semi-fourth as I only watched enough to know it was an epic failure). They all come from Christian based scientists that have credentials from said "Universities" or "Colleges" (next to public school, these are actually a step down in your learning experience) and are woefully unexperienced, have literal no knowledge IN THE FIELD they supposedly are talking about; or even worse they do terrible even IN the topics IN their field. This stuff works wonderfully for the religious media, religious politicians, the religious faithful, BUT you never see CERN, ITER, MIT, NASA, The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (NASA's JPL), and the various host of scientific federation teams and organizations working on ALL sorts of projects. They are never together because the other side only presents LARGE quantities BUNK "science" and BUNK or JUNK "scientific" videos. They are rightfully scorned by the media and the true scientific establishment.

You have to understand that the nature of what this man was saying in his video, like what @xxovercastxx said in his post, it's complete garbage. You can't even listen to the first minutes of it because he's already missing the boat. NO ONE except for fellow Christians will come out in support of this man's argument. There will be no "HOLY SHIT, HOW COULD WE NOT HAVE SEEN THIS" moment, because the man is an idiot. While shiny will think it's just bias and bigotry at work on the part of media and "THE WORLD'S SCIENTIFIC MINDS" (that's a lot of people shiny), they'll continue to build us useful things like planes, computers, fusion reactors (2018 for the first one), rockets, satellites, medicines, gene manipulation (already here)--->cures to genetic diseases (around the corner), cars, buildings, bridges, machines, new limbs (2030-40; stem-cell research could go FAR faster depending on how much we help), never dying (this one is tricky; some say 20!, I'd say more around 30-40 years out, BUT who gets it and what happens when we do get it--it could get scary), dams, should I go on i could list ALL night and never stop--scientists have done SO MUCH for us and still do. They are literally are best chance for a better future. People like the man in video are dangerous. They cause distrust and give mis-information about the greatest men and women that live on this Earth (other than those that are TRULY selfless souls, looking out for others always). People like that create a "rot" a disease in society; it's the "depression you feel in the air here in America. I point MY FINGER at them as the cause. They WILL NOT let progress nor happiness win, they are only concerned with what they "think", and what they "think" is not right.

What will these Christian scientists make, invent, or create for humanity, to help? Dams, cars, trains, light-bulbs--no...more videos to show scientists they're wrong... What did you get taught in school?

Momentum can be conserved in a number of ways, and my thought was that if the ball is really stuck to that magnet then rather than ejecting the ball on the other side, the whole lot might just move along the track together. If you've ever played with neodymium magnets you'll know why I think that, the amount of effort required to unstick something from them is surprisingly large.
>> ^messenger:

I think ideally, as momentum must be conserved, that the ball would come in, the other ball would be ejected, and decelerated until it escaped the magnetic pull going the same speed as the incoming ball was before it started accelerating.
On a real physical track like this with friction and sound energy loss, I think the ball would be ejected, not overcome the pull of the magnet, and get sucked back pretty quick. It may strike hard enough to send the other ball out a bit, but after very few iterations, they would be all stuck together.
I haven't thought yet about the effect of the magnet moving towards the first ball as it approaches. Maybe this has no net effect at all.