6 Nov 2007

I've been using a Mac alongside my PC for about two years now.  In fact, I have two Macs and three PCs.  After a lot of use, I can honestly say I enjoy using the PC better.   I know Mac users are fanatic about how the Mac is more user-friendly than the PC, but I suspect a lot of that is just iconoclasm.  Here are some features that make the PC more user-friendly than the Mac:

• Windows lets you resize a window by grabbing any of the four sides or any of the four corners.  Mac, you can only resize by grabbing the lower-right corner!  This is very annoying, and especially puzzling because the 15 year old Unix windows manager Motif had the "all sides, all corners" resizing capability.
• Each program in Windows has its own menu bar.   In Mac, all programs share a single menu bar at the top of the screen, which is inferior to Windows because (1) The menu bar is far away from the program's window (when the program's window is in the lower part of the screen), and (2) If you are running two or more programs, you can only see one menu bar at a time; and (3) if you want to use the menu bar of program A, but program B currently is active, you have to first click on A's window, and only then is A's menu bar visible.
• The right-mouse button menus are under-used (based on Apple's long-time insistence one "one button" mice), and common actions like renaming a file are no where to be found.  Sure, there is a way to rename a file (shift-click on the file name), but on Windows you can right-click on just about anything, any time, and discover the world of actions available to you.

To be fair, there is one thing I like about the Mac:  the confirmation dialogs allow any wording on the Okay/Cancel buttons, so you can have things like "Page is too large, continue with conversion?    Convert /   Cancel" .  On Windows, the default dialogs (granted, there is an obscure way to get special text) generally only permit "Okay/Cancel" wording, so you can get some real confusing dialogs, like "Page too large, continue? - Okay / Cancel".

4 Nov 2007

I've got this really great poster of the periodic table, that is super-handy for teaching my kid about chemistry.   I figured I'd buy a similar poster illustrating the tree of life, and evolution.  No luck.  I spent literally 4 hours hunting, and apparently such a poster does not exist.  I have seen some good illustrations in books, but I guess no one turned it into a commercial poster.    So, I drew one myself.  Used a vector-drawing tool Xara Xtreme.    Whipped out a 24" x 48" poster in PDF format in about 12 labor-hours.  Still need to get it printed on hardcopy.   I put it online.   I tried to put a link to it in Wikipedia's evolution entry, but some nazi undid the change.   The link I put in Wikipedia's  Tree of Life page is still there, but for how long?

3 Oct 2007

Following up on the prior post:   One question that arises is what sort of religious outlook is consistent with a rational view of the world?  I think it is possible to be religious and rational, and I would expect such a person to have views such as:

• I believe my faith is best for me, and will guide me to happiness, virtue and the right path.  However, I respect other faiths, and do not claim that other faiths are false or inferior.
• I won't try to convert people of other faiths to my faith.
• I'll educate my children about my faith, but also expose them to other faiths.  When they become adults, I will respect whatever choice they make regarding faith.
• I will never use my faith as a justification for oppressing other people or causing harm.
• When the majority of respected scientists publish new results that conflict with my faith, I will not denounce the scientists or their results.  I will look for ways to integrate my faith with accepted science.

29 Sept 2007

Read "God is Not Great" (Hitchens, 2007), another in a recent string of books promoting atheism (or at least agnosticism or Unitarianism).  Others include Dawkins ("The God Delusion") and Sam Harris ( "The End of Faith" and "Letter to a Christian Nation").

These books are rational, reasonable, and persuasive ... but they are (no humor intended) preaching to the choir.  I cannot imagine any religious zealot getting converted by the arguments in the books.  The arguments are the same old ones, apparent for centuries - millennia even - to any inquiring mind:

• How can your particular religion be the only true religion?  What about the millions of souls on other continents that were never exposed to your faith?  Are they doomed to hell?
• Isn't it obvious that the book your faith is based on was written by mortals?  It is riddled with myths, contradictions, fairy tales, mistakes, and is written in the style of several distinct authors.  Many of the myths in the book date from centuries before the book was written.
• Your religion, although it ostensibly promotes virtuous behavior, has been frequently used by its adherents throughout history to commit horribly evil crimes on a mass scale.  Conversely, many atheists can and do live virtuous lives, with no need for faith to provide guidance.
• Your faith is indistinguishable from silly superstitions like astrology or numerology.  These superstitions have no basis in fact, science, or proof, yet have their adherents.   These superstitions are often abused for profit  and take advantage of the naive.
• Isn't it obvious that all faiths - your religion included - fulfill a deep-seated human desire to grasp at some explanation of the afterlife:  to give us some assurance that there is more to life than the handful of decades we spend on the planet?  
• Similarly, isn't it clear that religions also fulfill a psychological need to explain why horribly cruel, inexplicable disasters happen to innocents?  When a young child is horribly tortured or crippled, doesn't religion bring some solace?  
• And isn't it obvious that the "fire and brimstone" warnings about hell and damnation are just one technique to persuade impressionable youngsters (and some grown ups, too) to live virtuously?
• What about all the silly rules in your book:  Can't eat pork;  cant wear linen and wool together; must stone the children of adulterers?   Don't these rules prove the book is written by mortals?  Or at least that it cannot be taken literally?
• Your religion has many offshoots and sects.   Who decides which offshoot is the correct one?  Christianity is an offshoot of Judaism.  Islam is an offshoot of Christianity.  Protestantism is an offshoot of Catholicism.  Mormonism is an offshoot of Christianity.  Who decides which dogma is correct?   Doesn't this perpetual off-shooting prove the man-made nature of religions?
• Why is your religion fanatically denying scientific progress?  From the earth moving around the sun, to the age of the universe, to evolution, to geology:  religion routinely finds it necessary to combat reason and experiment.  Doesn't this demonstrate a subconscious realization that your faith is really a superstition and you are worried that science will reveal that truth?
• Why do most religions find it necessary to say that they are the exclusive truth?  Why does Islam hate infidels?  Why does Christianity hate Islam?  Why do Jews reject Christianity?  Why so much hatred of other religions, each of which claims to be the one true faith?   Doesn't this prove the man-made nature of religion?
• If God genuinely cared about humanity, wouldn't God make his instructions a little clearer?  Wouldn't God provide the entire planet with some uniform guidance?   Why has God not appeared, nor presented any verifiable miracles, since pre-historic times?  Isn't it a bit odd that God appeared so frequently to the Jews prior to the Old Testament being written, then disappeared?  What does god think about all the offshoots of his original religion?

9 Sept 2007

Reading a book "The History of the Ancient World" (Bauer, 2007), which suffers from the usual flaw of history books by limiting itself to politics, kings, and wars.    Yet it did contain a few facts that I found interesting:  (1) The last king of ancient Rome, Tarquin, raped the wife of a nobleman, Lucretia.  This caused the Roman populace to exile Tarquin, and begin a new form government, wherein dual leaders (consuls) were elected.  Thus began the Republic (509 BC).   (2) This story, from Livy and Ovid, is the basis of Shakespeare's poem "The Rape of Lucrece".  (3) Livy writes of this event "My task from now on will be to trace the history of a free nation, governed by annually elected officers of state and subject not to the caprice of individual men, but to the overriding authority of law".   Livy was writing around 10 BC.

Once again proving the adage that we moderns rarely invent things ... Romans had rule of law, and knew it was special, long before the U.K. or U.S.A.

14 August 2007

I took an upper division course in Group Theory in college, but shamefully for a math major, I never really grasped what groups were all about.  I partially blame the class, which was _way_ too theoretical and - to my recollection - never gave a single example of what a real group was.  So here are a few examples:

A group is a set of objects, and a  function on that set that inputs two objects, and outputs one object.  The output of the function has to be inside the set.    By definition, a group must be associative, meaning that   a*(b*c ) = (a*b)*c.   By definition, groups must include an identity object "I" defined so that a * I = a for all objects "a".   Groups can be commutative ( a*b = b*a ) or not.

And then a Field or Ring is nothing more than a group with a second function: about the only decent example is numbers:  which have addition and multiplication.   Fields are almost always distributive, so a * ( b + c ) = ( a * b ) + ( a * c )

6 August 2007

Read "A New Kind of Science" again, thought I'd give Stephen Wolfram a second chance.  But it was still as laughable as the first time.  Tho this reading I finally figured out what is "Principle of Computational Equivalence" is:  

If you have a simple iterative algorithm that produces tremendously complex/chaotic output (e.g. mandelbrot set, or Wolframs "rule 31") , the only way to obtain a future state of the output is by running the algorithm through all the iterations leading to that state.  There is no "fast" or "closed form" algorithm that will directly produce the future state.

Found a very amusing web site:   www.bash.org.  Nothing to do with the bash script: it is a collection of humorous chat room conversations.   It looks like they've got several thousand snippets.  I've never run an IRC client: in fact I know next to nothing about them.  Im not sure if the Windows Messenger uses the IRC protocol or not?   It may be that Messenger and the similar AOL IM both are layers on top of IRC?

4 Mar 2007

Wow.  Found a fantastic site (courtesy of Cruel.com)  that describes how to build a simple foundry to cast gold, silver, or bronze in your own kitchen microwave!!!   Up to 1/2 lb!  The web site is David Reids Foundry.   Briefly:  make a wax model of your object;  "paint" the wax model with many thin coats of  very special material: alternate coats of carbon (graphite in a clay slurry?) with iron oxide (magnetite is best).  Not sure how many coats:  too thick or too thin is bad.  The walls have to be strong enough so they dont break, hence mostly clay with graphite and magnetite included.    Build an "ingot chamber" on top.  Melt the wax out.  Put the ingot in the top ingot chamber (when the ingot melts, it will flow down into the model region via gravity).   Cover the ventilation holes in the microwave (disable cooling system); remove rotating plate.   Put mold into microwave.   Turn on microwave for 10 to 15 minutes on high.   The key here is finding the right materials to coat the mold with: they must absorb microwave radiation: cant make the walls too thick, though, because then they hold too much heat and the metal doesn't get any heat.  Iron and steel have very high melting points and may not work, but silver and gold are more feasible.

I'm getting quite a backlog of web-discovered experiments Id like to perform, including

• Measuring gravitational constant G
• Measuring the speed of light
• Simple motors

8 Apr 2007

Read a distressing story in the Washington Post  today   -  Jeff Bell, one of the world's top classical violinists, went into a DC subway station and played several classic pieces for 43 minutes, with the violin case open.  Of 1,097 people that passed by the Post reporter accompanying Bell counted 7 people who stopped to listen (for a minute or longer), 27 threw in money, and the total take was $32.  At no point did a crowd form.  One person did recognize him and listened until the end.   To be fair to the passers-by, the time was 7:30 am on a Friday morning, at a subway station that is almost exclusively used by federal employee commuters.  Perhaps many did want to pause, but had to get to work.

7 Mar 2007

I'm not much of a philosopher, but there are a few philosophical concepts that I keep noticing in everyday life:  

1) No matter how many accomplishments and possessions we have, we always want more.  We are perpetually unsatisfied.  Even when we are healthy and prosperous, we manufacture challenges and strife in order to keep life exciting.   The happiness horizon is forever receding.   Tantalus.

2) We measure our contentment based on the relative measures, not absolute measures.   A 14th century starving peasant, brought miraculously into our own time and given plenty of wealth, would soon be comparing his own station to that of his neighbors (the Smiths just got a Jaguar ... I need to get one!).  Likewise, a middle class person in our own age, who says "Id be happy if only I had a new car and a room addition", after winning the Lottery, is suddenly not satisfied with the earlier goals: new, more exorbitant goals are invented.

3) If we are in dire straights, and recognize what is truly important, and resolve to "seize the day" (or "stop and smell the roses" ... fill in your favorite aphorism) .. that feeling can only last for a short while.  An individual cannot sustain a heightened sense of aliveness 24/7.   Most of the time we have to live in a somewhat senseless stupor.

All of the above have the same theme:   We cannot be happy, content, complacent.  Humans are genetically programmed to continually strive for more, for better.   In the absence of actual poverty and strife, we manufacture fictitious poverty and strife.   For every hurdle we leap, we build a new hurdle in front of us.  The happiness horizon is forever receding.   Has evolution played a role in this?  Those people that are constantly striving, achieving, looking for more, are the ones most likely to survive a catastrophe, more likely to pass-on genes.

4 Mar 2007

Gian Carlo Menotti died last month: the composer of one of my favorite pieces Amahl and the Night Visitors.  Reading his biographies (obituaries, more accurately) I discovered he was gay, and his partner was Samuel Barber, who composed another of my favorites:  Adagio for Strings.  That household must have had lots of good music in it!   I wish I knew of some way to turn this into a persuasive argument to present to anti-gay bigots, but classical music is not too inspiring these days.  The best I can do (and I have,  a few times) is describe Alan Turing's work to break the Enigma code in WW II ... a gay who, arguably, saved more lives than any single soldier.   Alan Turing committed suicide in 1954 after being convicted of homosexuality (a crime then in England).  Oscar Wilde suffered a similar persecution.

2 Feb 2007

I just perfected Gears of War.  By "perfected" I mean "completed all the achievements, at the hardest difficulty, that can be done without an Internet access".   I think about 40% of the games achievements require "online" tasks, meaning you have to get on the Internet and play interactively with other players.  Which I've never done.

I'm not too much of a game addict:  I didn't even get my first game until 2003 when I was 46 years old ... and that was 4 years after I had a computer.  Here is a quick rundown of the games in the order I played them.  The dates in parenthesis are when the game was first published, not when I played it (I played all these games from 2003 onward).  When I say "finished" that means I completed the offline story all the way;  "perfected" means I finished the offline story at the hardest difficulty; and accomplished all offline achievements.

• Myst (1995, PC) - First Person adventure.  Difficult puzzles and a very creative fantasy world.  The outstanding graphics come at a price:  No dynamic movement:  You just jump from static scene to static scene.    Finished.
• Riven (1998, PC) - Just lke Myst, but more elaborate.  Never finished.
• Need For Speed - Hot Pursuit 2 (2002, PC) - A great, realistic car race game.  Perfected.
• James Bond Nightfire (2002, PC)  -  Truly outstanding action/adventure game.   Very creative sets and scenes.  A great sense of international (and outer-space!) intrigue.  I wish they would update it for XBox 360.   Perfected
• No One Lives Forever (2000, PC) - Hilarious and fun spoof of the spy/action genre.  A female Austin Powers.   Yet a genuinely challenging game.  Bravo for the creativity and humor.  Finished.
• Half Life (1998, PC) - First Person Shooter.   Winner of many awards.  Exceedingly creative and intelligent.  Aliens invading earth, and you, Gordon Freeman, must save them.  Oh, and by the way, the US Government is out to kill you, too.   Perfected.
• Marble Blast Gold -  Now here is a rarity:  A simple game:  simple in concept, simple in algorithm and graphics, that is very difficult and challenging.  Reminds me of chess: a simple game that is infinitely satisfying.   I think there are around 75 levels, and I've gotten "gold" times (really, really good times) on about half of  them.  There are some that are insanely hard ... there are about 15 levels I have not finished at all, let alone in "gold" time. Of course, there is some guy that did finish all the levels with gold times, and wrote a walkthrough.   Did not finish.
• The Lord of the Rings - The Return of the King (2003, PC) - My first 3rd-person game.  Did not like, not so much because of the 3rd person, but because of the reliance on button-combinations:  AB, BAB, ABBA, ABA, BB, I mean, how can you know which you are pressing?  Got 95% done, but couldn't master the Black Gate battle.  Gave up.
• Halo: Combat Evolved  (2001, PC) - My favorite game of all time.  Played on PC, tho it was originally developed for XBox.   Dated graphics by 2007 standards, but the scenes and sense of other-worldliness are extraordinary.   The arrival of The Flood (a class of enemy) was one of the scariest moments of my life.   The toughest battle (on Legendary difficulty) was Truth and Reconciliation (the turret/gravity lift battle) immediately followed by Into The Belly of the Beast (the square room).   To beat the latter, I had to start the whole level over just to make sure I brought a fully loaded sniper rifle with me.  Perfected.
• Halo 2 (2004, XBox) - My first non-PC game (played it on the XBox 360, tho it was developed for the XBox).  Took me a couple of weeks to get the feel of the controller (I maintain it is faster and easier to aim with a PC mouse, but I've read studies on the web that say the controllers are just as good).  The toughest battle in Halo 2 (at Legendary difficulty) is right at the beginning:  Homefield Advantage.   Perfected (except for finding all the skulls).  
• Sonic Heroes (2003, XBox) - A kids game, very Japanese style:  very arcade-like:noisy and bright colors.   Pinballs and Pachinko.   Not to my liking.
• Burnout Revenge (2006, XBox 360 (2005 on XBox)) - Great car race game.   Fun at parties because of the crashing.  I never felt good about the rubber-banding (when you crash, the other cars slow down so you can catch up; and conversely, if you are racing great, the opponents never fall far behind) ... Need for Speed 2 had realistic racing:  one crash and you'll never catch up.  Perfected.
• Lara Croft - Tomb Raider - Legend (2006, XBox 360) - A unique 3rd person action/adventure game that straddles the child/adult audiences.  Sixth or seventh in the franchise.   My first Lara Croft game, and now I see why so many teenage boys are enamored with her :-).  Finished, but not perfected.
• F.E.A.R. ( 2005, PC) - Over-hyped.  Must have been a slow year for games.  A straightforward, earth-based 1st person shooter. About the only unique aspect was the horror-movie scariness, shamelessly based on The Ring (Ringu) movie.  Perfected.
• The Elder Scrools IV: Oblivion (2006, XBox 360) - My first Role Playing Game (RPG).  Did not enjoy.  Probably better in the on-line experience, certainly World of Warcraft has lots of adherents.   I think an RPG with just you and the computer is not what the game designers intended.   Did not finish.
• Viva Pinata (2006, XBox 360) - My first Sim-like game (SimCities, the Sims) where you are managing a virtual world, and your goal is to enlarge it and interact with the  occupants.  Too slow and boring.  Did not finish.
• Kameo - Elements of Power (2005, XBox 360) - One of the games that accompanied XBox 360 when it was first produced.  A 3rd-person action/adventure, that does an outstanding job of entertaining both kids and adults.  Very creative and lots of detail.   Many aspects to the game (speed, exploration, combat skills) so it can be played for many months without getting bored.  Perfected.
• Cars (2006, XBox ) - A rather simple child' game, but still took awhile to finish.  Perfected.
• Gears of War (2006, XBox 360) - A game that, finally, takes full advantage of the XBox 360 hardware:  Lots of texture, lots of detail.  Great facial expressions, outstanding scenery.  Grainy, gritty look.  First to use a 1st-person  / 3rd-person approach:  You walk/run in 3rd person (good because you have more peripheral vision) but you shoot in 1st person.   The game is great, but not as memorable as Halo, because GOW is a bit short (I read that the GOW release was rushed because they wanted to make the Xmas 2006 shopping season, and Microsoft wanted to steal the thunder from PlayStation 3), and because it takes place on earth, so can never really have that "oh wow" sensation of Halo.     Perfected.
• Lost Planet (2007, XBox 360) - Poor quality compared to Halo2 or Gears of War.  Low budget.  Poor textures, poor storyline, poor voicing.  Definite Japanese-influenced appearance (lots of Transformer-style machines).   Over-hyped.  Yet very, very challenging, and especially difficult because there is a clock ticking at all times, so there is a sense of urgency ... even panic.  Unlike other games where you can relax, take your breath, think, look around, snipe.   Perfected on the hardest mode, Extreme, except  I have not yet been able to, at the same time, collect all the Extreme Target Marks.  Finishing on Extreme is hard enough, but doing it while also pausing to collect Target Marks is very, very difficult: the few extra seconds it takes to find the targets reduces the amount of energy you have when you reach the final boss battle!  And every level ends with a boss battle.   The web says that some players got all the extreme target marks, but I find that hard to believe: I'd need to see a video.   Update in Dec 2008:  I find myself reminiscing about Lost Planet: it was so very, very hard, that I miss the challenge.  GRAW and GOW permit you to camp-out and snipe. I'm toying with the notion of re-buying it (I sold my copy) just so I can try to get the Target Marks on Extreme difficulty .. the one accomplishment I was not able to complete. 
• BioShock  (2007, XBox 360) - Unique FPS.   Outstanding storyline based on Ayn Rand's Objectivisim.  Design and ambience are very much art-deco and give a great feel of 1930s/1940s industrial might.   The weapons are very creative:  in addition to normal guns, your body itself can be used for telekinesis, fire, ice, dummies, and so on.   Also has an ethical dilemma that runs thru the story.  Very nice.  Perfected, except I did not find 100% of the tonics or tape-recordings (there are web sites that list all the locations ... but it would take a week or two to replay the game and track them all down).
• Halo 3 (2007, XBox 360) - What a total let down.  Should have called it Halo 2-1/2.  The profit on this game must be huge, because (1) it sold more copies than any other game to date; and (2) the development costs were near zero, since it was all based on Halo 2 models, weapons, voices, and physics.  For $60 I was expecting a lot of unique, exciting development work, that would be an experience above and beyond Halo 2.  Not.  Bungie is laughing all the way to the bank.   Perfected except for skulls.
• Mass Effect - (2007, XBox 360) - Hybrid role-playing-game (RPG) and first-person-shooter (FPS).    I was hoping it was more FPS than RPG, but the reverse was true.  Good science-fiction story, but not that fun for me.  Lots of dialog with other characters, and nearly every step of the way the user gets to choose the response, which determines how the story flows.  Some community outcry because of a tame, merely suggested love-making scene.     Finished the story line, but did not perfect.
• The Orange Box (2006, XBox 360) - A package of Half Life 2, and a new, small game called Portal.  Half Life 2 was just as hard and funny has Half Life 1, unfortunately, they limited its resolution to PC users with vintage-20003 PCs, so it was not very detailed.    Very creative, funny, and the achievements are more broad than most games (e.g. "Defiant" achievement is throwing a soda can at a cop).  The Gravity Gun is a hoot.   Finished the story line, but did not perfect.
• Ghost Recon, Advanced Warfighter 2 (2007, XBox 360) - My first military game, although I insisted on a game set in the future, although only a few years.   Rather realistic.   Not especially hard.   I even played it with the target-highlighting turned off.    I still enjoy science fiction more than reality.   Perfected.
• Beautiful Katamari (2007, XBox 360) -  Finally, they came out with a version of the famous Katamari game (which was only on Playstation) on the XBox.  Cute kids game, but hard enough for adults.  The goal is to roll a sticky ball around and collect stuff.   Sounds simple, but they make it hard by adding timers, or requiring you to exclude certain kinds of objects, etc.   The ball gets bigger and bigger, and you (in some levels) actually end up rolling up the continents, the planets, and the stars.   Perfected, except my collection only got up to 98% ... you have to find 3,500 different hidden items to get to 100% !
• Gears of War 2 (2008, XBox 360) - Sequel to GOW.  Just a continuation. A few new weapons, new locations.   Same great details and graphics.  The big difference was that they eliminated the boss battles (except for one or two) to make the game easier to finish.  Perfected.

Is it cheating to go on the web and look for advice on how to win a particular battle?  Probably not, after all, even the guys (and they are all guys :-) that write those walkthroughs always give credit to others that filled in the gaps for them - so even they did not finish the game unassisted.  Besides, even with the tips for Return of the King, I was not able to finish the Black Gate battle;  nor the final Thorn boss battle in Kameo.   On the other hand, the web was essential for me to finish Halo and Gears of War (the final boss battle in GOW is extremely difficult on the hardest difficulty level, and I had to resort to a less-than-honorable hiding technique to prevail).