demagogue

I read this two years ago, well, right after Hu became the leader of China, but it's still a classic. It also reminds me of another spoof done of this routine on an 90's cartoon series called The PJ's, where the main character -- Thurgood Stubbs, a custodian, played by Eddie Murphy -- and the local crackhead (Smokey) form a comedy duo, and their routine is "Who's on crack, Say What's on smack, and I Dunno freebases." Eddie Murphy's voice made it funny. A recording of it used to be online, but now I can't find it.

You say that the feeling is just based on this "neutral" stuff, but it seems that your attitude towards it plays a role as well ... as if you might feel these things differently if you had a different attitude towards it (otherwise, how you regard it would be "irrelevant"; it would feel "good" or "bad" to you no matter what). I don't know if you think that or not, but that's how I tend to think about it ... I mean, if it's the "rush" of gore, you're talking basically about the limbic system. There's the "neutral" part (the genetically based design, and it later adapts to stimuli), but there's also a role for "agency", a chosen attitude/value in how it works, too, sort of like a special stimulus, at least as I think about it. On that note, to guess at an answer to Dom, I think people adopt a value or attitude that this stuff is a "thrill" and then live as much off the expectation than the experience itself; isn't that how fetishes usually work? The limbic system has its hardware to give us a rush, but I personally think we can cognitively manipulate it (like when you know you're going to get sex later in the day; you get so much more excited waiting for it all day than if it's just gratuitously given without foreknowledge; seems similar with a game or movie you know should be violent than violence/sex that is very out of place). But anyway, even aside from how it "feels", whether we think it's a desired thing we go after or a neutral thing to ignore has even more to do with our chosen attitude and values than the feeling itself, I think. And for *that*, I think a lot of the people that get off on violent games because (for the majority of cases, anyway) it's a way they can affirm a very particular kind of value, like that games give them a chance to flaunt their "power", even if it's just virtual power -- and that's what they're after. And just as a person can't really feel a powertrip if he's doing something he's *allowed* to; so if it's something that's very unallowed but nobody can stop him, the it hits home that he's really free to do what he wants, as far as he wants to go ... And the more unallowed, taboo, unacceptable, etc, the actually stronger that message is. And maybe violent movies are a way to vicariously get the same feeling. But it's that attitude that seems more important than the feeling by itself. People that think gratuitous power trips are petty things will find the "as socially-unacceptable as possible" part just as off-putting as the former find it appealing. In both cases, the limbic "rush" you get from the gore itself it is just playing a supporting role, the same feeling thrilling one side and nauseating (or just neutrally off-putting) the other.

I read this editorial in the newspaper today and it reminded me of this thread. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/20/opinion/...l?th&emc=th

Speaking of that morbid topic, it always stuns me that in the West the idea of a rape game sounds so shocking that we'd be surprised to see one come out, whereas in Japan, every year dozens, even hundreds, of games come out in the genres of rape, teacher-student rape, chikan (public groping/rape), biko (stalker rape), mutilation sex (whether by monsters, tenticals, sadists, etc), humiliation themes (maids, bondage, torture, etc), brother-sister incest, mother-son incest, nephew-aunt incest, father-daughter incest, etc, etc... And they are so blase to the whole debate. Links to title-lists to make the point (also has thumbnail box scans, so NSFW): 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. That's just the tip of the iceberg ... a few that are licensed for this shop and have the right title. Well, Here's 150 titles in the "black" category (an umbrella keyword for violent rape games) from the last 3 years alone (also NSFW). (I wish I could find a genre-sort to really see how many there are instead of by ad hoc keyword. I know there's one somewhere. It'd be well into the 100s). Anyway, for every one of these, imagine another 10-50 in the market (the keywords I'm not finding) just like them. It really astounds me sometimes how blithe the market is about the whole thing in the face of such a flood. It's like they can't get violent rape and incest fast enough. And notice that new releases are usually priced over $70-$80, dozens and dozens of them. So it's not just that they can't get them fast enough, but are willing to pay heaps of money for more and more of it, so that the market is practically salivating for more violent rape. My thinking is that a great many people would have to basically set aside their paycheck to buy a $80 rape game every month or three to sustain a market like that.

Is this who we want to win (I'd lean towards BioShock, Assassin's Creed) or who we predict will win (I'd lean towards Crysis and Halo 3, maybe Mass Effect)? Well, I'll just mix the two. The GTA franchise has already gotten enough accolade in the past to raise eyebrows now. Sort of sad the number of sequels over "2" in that list, actually. Usually I'd think those would be good sellers but not get as much critical attention ... but I guess the rules will have to bend on that if so many of the best games coming out are like that.

Status crimes are a bad idea! You're a dirty drug user ... you didn't do drugs, we just picked you up for loitering, but off to jail with you anyway. You're gay; we'd never prosecute straight sodomy, but for you ... off to jail with you. Atheist, Nazi, Communist, gang member ... you say? Off with his head. You're rich and can't sympathize with the hard knocks of poor people, and get way too many privileges in life ... of to jail with you to compensate, nevermind that your offense isn't a jail-able one. All of these things can be terrific symbols of justice (if you like the outcome), but are themselves injustice. If a normal person would not get jail, any person should not get jail under the same circumstances, esp not because of their status. The more I look at this, the more I see a sheriff's office that would not imprison someone for this offense being under tremendous public pressure to "do something", so tries the next best alternative ... just let her sit at home; everybody wins. She shouldn't be in jail anyway. But at least this will appease the public looking for rich blood to spill. You're all a bunch of sick-o Robespierre's just happy to see her suffer for no better reason than its own sake -- always pushing aside the fact that her offense wasn't actually drunk driving, just speeding on a suspended license, the kind of thing the cops always just fine people for ... unless they're rich. Just think of the alternative? Everybody sits around and agrees with each other? How dull!! Anyway, I'm just stirring the pot with this post to help make your point. It's not actually that big of a deal to me; she can sit on her hands for just 3 more weeks to pay for the sins of the rich. And she did do something personally stupid. So there you go.

1 dromed unit is much bigger than an inch! Garrett's dimensions are 3 units wide x 6 units high (4 units crouching). If you make a door-way this size, he will just be able to squeeze through. So most people got into the habit of thinking of 1 unit as about a foot (since a common height of a male is about 6 feet). Then the 12:1 ratio makes sort of sense.

I think it depends on the situation. Some times a hint of the expanse that lies beyond, like a teaser about where you are going, can be used to great dramatic effect. It's like the view you got of Angelwatch before you went inside. I could imagine the same thing if you got a teaser view of this mass expanse of city, buried in the mists, at night ... to actually heighten the mystery of it. There were places in Calendra's Leagacy, like the museum, where you could look out a window at the city and I thought that was pretty cool, just a tease view of the expanse. But there are other cases, like NH, where I could imagine such a view having just the opposite effect and making the scene just look pedestrian, just another neighborhood (e.g., full-on, daylight shot). It just depends on how well the author does it ... could be hit or miss IMO. That city screenshot reminds me of that one early screenshot in T3Ed, where someone was just stacking buildings on top of buildings ... and I remember thinking that was kind of cool.

Just to be completely clear more concisely: I didn't mean to say the infraction was trivial. It isn't. Far from it. What seemed low stakes IMO was substituting one form of punishment (30 days sitting in a cell) with another form of punishment (30 days in home confinement) for this case. She's getting punished no matter what, in a situation BTW where normal people probably wouldn't get jail time under the same facts of this case. It would have been much different story IMO if the underlying crime were a serious danger to the public like drunk driving (it was speeding, sober, on a suspended license, bad but not recklessly dangerous, and not normally jail-time worthy) or if she was getting pardoned with no punishment at all. Those would definitely not have been trivial things, but those are not exactly this case. ALSO, THIS POINT CANNOT BE MISSED: If anything isn't "fair", it's that people have this "I'm not sympathetic" trip on this case and thinks she deserves more punishment just to "feel what it's like". I'm not sympathetic to her, either, but the "unfairly deferential" sword cuts both ways. Granted her whining doesn't help her cause. But anyway, like I said from the beginning, 30 days in a cell isn't that much different from 30 days home confinement, so in the end, it's a lot of talk about principled unfairness on both sides for not much practical difference.

Is it easy to set up loadzones? I would think if you really want to make that massive of a city, you could just have a wall & gate (or series of them) at one far end of a map that bottlenecks the area and put loadzones to the other half of the city that's just a completely new map, and it really wouldn't be so bad ... as long as the open playable area itself were massive. So you'd only run into a loadzone after hours of play, and only once, and then you're in another massive open playing area for hours.

Well, drunk driving itself is far from trivial, and there are really harsh punishments for repeat DUI's/DWI's, and if that were the case, throw the book at her; penalties are around 3 years for something like that, much much more for manslaughter if you hit someone. Anyone whose lost a friend that way won't have sympathy, and I won't disagree. But driving perfectly safely and sober, but with a suspended license ... I mean, the cause is certainly good and high-minded, but it's not itself actually a public danger; it's more technical ... the "offense" is about creating the right incentives, sending the right messages, and upholding a punishment for a prior offense, things people debate in a way they don't for actually dangerous offenses, and the proper punishment is part of that debate. Her actions were clearly flaunting authority, which is offensive and stupid; don't get me wrong, I agree. The question isn't whether she gets punished (which would be a serious issue) but whether commuting the last 20 days in a cell into something like six months of community service is ok, given her "condition", and how all of that relates to that more technical debate about what's the right message to send through punishment for this kind of offense, and who decides. She's getting punished no matter what; that's an important part of my last post. It's the penalty nudging on the margins for this offense itself I found had a flavor of low stakes, not whether she gets punished, not of the offense had been an actually public danger like a repeat DWI (both of which are much more serious issues). It's about what's the right message to send for the marginal stakes here (20/30 days of sitting in a cell) for the way she flaunted authority, and on the facts here, reasonable people not only can disagree, but are disagreeing in this very case, the police vs. the judge, both of which are under a lot of outside pressure (police to the family; judge to the public) so you can't trust that their decision has much to do with the actual facts of this case. But those facts are such that the stakes aren't really as high as people may be perceiving them; her condition probably isn't soo much more traumatized by those extra days in jail ... and commuting jail-time to another form of penalty isn't soo undermining when we're only talking about an extra 20/30 days and commuting it to something that's hardly a walk in the park, and it's in the proper legal police discretion to do this (they are not doing anything legally wrong or inherently improper here; the only question was whether their discretion was reasonable in the judge's opinion), and she's still getting proportionally punished no matter what, don't miss that part of my point, again the trivial part I noted wasn't that issue. Anyway, the judge got his victory, and public faith in the system is restored ... it just seems like a small thing when you look to the actual details of what's actually been affected in reality. Just don't misunderstood me, though. I'm NOT saying drunk driving is trivial; it's not. I agree it's a serious offense that isn't trivial. That wasn't exactly what I was referring to.

People are bitching about "special treatment for the rich" and happy that she gets treated "like everybody else". But I tend to think that whiny girls tend to get lenient treatment all the time. If she were a normal girl that easily cries and the holding police were sympathetic and let her off easy (which from my reading seems as much involved as daddy here; the police just didn't see the use of watching her wraith and bitch for a few more days for a petty offense), but anyway I'm sure happens all the time -- anyway, I notice crying girls getting off easy all the time, and daddies getting their way even when they're petty middle management guys -- it's the same thing but I'm sure nobody would have a problem with it. So I think she gets a double standard going the other way too. But my real first reaction to this news was, well, first I laughed like Nelson like most everybody else -- it's hard not to want to! -- but my second reaction was jeez there are real problems in the world for people to be fixated on this. The infraction was so trivial that I don't really care if she spends those extra 30 days in jail or not; big deal. Whether she does or doesn't, it's such a relatively trivial thing (for her and everybody else involved), that it really doesn't make any practical difference one way or another, 10 days, 30 days... if only it weren't for people feeling that "there's a real principle at stake" ... but I'm not sure the term "principle" even means that much when the stakes are this low. I personally don't care enough about her or her "psy issues" or "special treatment" to can't stand her or be sympathetic. It's just not worth the attention for me. Put the news back on Iraq or Afghanistan or real criminals we really should worry about. It does concern me, though, that people's attention on what's "a real problem here" seems so out of tune with the real problems out there, IMO. Why don't people get as heated about "the principle" involved in a wrongful death penalty, or the impunity of warlords and dictators, or real bribery/corruption in a state by the rich where the stakes are at an epic-scale, like wars or famines or state-sponsored killings?

Ah, yes, I'd found that chart. On the laser dot "experiment", it reminds me of the important difference between the time-like and space-like areas of a space-time graph, because that's what it's really turning on. Since I'm trying to figure this out too, I'll try to write it out to see if I can explain it accurately to myself, novice as I am, but may be helpful to someone else, too. If you looked at a spacetime graph (like this, forget the twisting; that just shows you how acceleration affects things, but the laser light doesn't accelerate): the top and bottom areas of the X are labeled "time-like", the side areas are labeled "space-like", horizontal-axis is space, vertical is time, mixing together as spacetime, and the dots are arbitrary events that "happen" in spacetime relative to the observer, at the center of the X. the "X" itself (labeled "light-like") is the boundaries of the speed of light speedlimit for information going to/from the observer. So the top time-like area means every dot-event that you can potentially reach within the SoL speedlimit time frame (i.e., pre-event, a future potential connection), the worldline the center follows being the actual connections. The bottom time-like area means signals from past events that can reach you and tell you what "happened" within the SoL speedlimit time frame. The space-like areas on the sides of the X are just out of touch with the observer for the moment; there's a minimum, mandatory waiting time the observer has to wait for them to get into the bottom-time-like area to find out that something even "happened" ... Until then, it hasn't really happened for the observer yet (sort of weird limbo; has it happened yet or not??). (BTW, in the time-like area, there is no minimum waiting time for the mover to connect with the happening, one of the main physical differences in the two; it could make a connection as quickly approaching zero secs as you or the signal approach the SoL; of course the stationary wall always waits a year.) Regarding that space-like limbo: you would have to travel faster than SoL (impossible) to reach a dot in the space-like region in a shorter time than the mandatory SoL-limit waiting period (which is good, because then you'd arrive at the dot "after" the event happens before it happens! The whole logic just breaks down). So the way you'd describe your laser experiment, by the theory/ graph: individual photons of the laser have their own worldpaths where the part of the wall they will hit (the dot we care about) stays inside the top-time-like part of the X the whole trip. But connection with the other photons and their hits (horizontal to that dot), as you can see from the animation, are falling outside the lessening dot-coverage of the top part of the X as time goes forward and the time the center-photon would have left to go the distance to make that connection decreases, up until the moment of the center's own hit at the wall. When they all hit the wall (now assume the center of the X is where one photon hits the wall), it's all "happening" somewhere on the graph of the hit's pov around that moment (i.e., the dots horizontal to the center of the X). But most of the other hits are in the spacelike region as you can see (a relative few, nearby dots may have already hit in the past and are already in the bottom region, they've already signaled their nearby hit before our hit even occurs). But because most are in the spacelike region, all those photons can consecutively/ individually "communicate" with the whole lightyear-long wall in under a light year just fine. There's nothing troubling that it'd require moving faster than the speed of light to cross that wall in the same time it takes all to hits to occur across the wall. That's the very definition of them being in the spacelike region, and the graph lets you visualize it. But because other hits/dots are still outside the graph's time-like region (in this post-hit situation, now the bottom part of the X) after the half-second it took to flick the laser, they cannot all communicate with each other in that same time-frame.* A hit-area could get the signal from a relative few, nearby other hits/dots that get into the bottom-time-like region over the next half-second, but far from all. Over a year's time, all of the dot-signals will eventually enter the bottom-time-like area as it covers more dots as time passes (you see in the animation), so an observer at that wall will see them "trickle" in. The far right end of the wall will actually see most of the light streak go in time-reverse because of this, as the right-most photons hit first, but the left-most photons reflecting off the wall come a year later. I mean, all of this is intuitive, but the graph just lets you see how the experiment actually plays out in the theory, and why it's just fine. ................. By the way, fascinating implication: Some events/dots in the space-like parts can never get into the time-like territory for us to see it, no matter how long you wait; they are so far apart after faster-than-light inflation of the universe (so the theory goes), and the universe is still expanding at lightspeed, so that light can never have the time to cross it all. So there might be two alien civilizations that can never even be able to know about each others' existence, because they are forever in the space-like areas viz. each other; a signal from one can never reach the other. But like Schatten's experiment, both might still get Schatten's laser signals because the planets are both in the two signals' respective time-like areas. And say the decoded signal teaches English, earth culture, plays Simpson's episodes, etc (assuming they are both smart enough to decode it). Both civilizations (in the permanent space-like area viz. each other) might learn our culture and language, and start speaking English. Even though they can absolutely never even know about each others' even existence, it's physically impossible, much less communicate!, they might speak the same language and be able to understand each other, and share a lot of information (mutually taken from us)! An astounding idea, IMO, and all thanks to Schatten's handy experiment. --------------- * Big footnote, this doesn't count quantum effects, where a kind of signal actually could (or seems to) travel across the entire length of the lightyear long wall instantaneously. There is actually an experiment which is set up very similarly to this laser/wall set-up that shows just how weird QT is with this light-year-long signaling. But that's for another post!

Well, I for one believe you when you say you aren't maliciously spamming (seems an awful attempt if you were); you pretty clearly want to post pictures of random stuff you like for us ... for whatever reason. But anyway, we don't see a compass. We see a magazine cover. Maybe the cache to your computer still puts up the compass picture? But you need to double check the link's web address and edit it so we see what you're talking about.

That's an interesting site. I think the general lesson is to just have a reason why you make certain choices over others, which reasons fit into a more general pattern your idea you are working with, so all the features fit together according to that general idea. And then it offers loads of time-tested ideas to start with. I think it's more of a starting place, to get you thinking in terms of patterns and ideas than an "answer" site, per se, but that's more because I've always thought of decorating to be an expression of personal style, informed by good, time-tested sense. (I'm a real sucker for the Home & Garden Channel shows on interior design, actually ... and often try out ideas in dromed). I had problems with the things you were talking about for a long time when I first started using dromed ... I noticed I got a feel for proportions the more I played around with it and I gave myself some simple rules to play with, looking at real world first (doors open from the lesser space into the greater, so from hallways into rooms, except the front door opens in). On proportions, I tend to work in multiples of four and eight. This started from the way textures work in Thief, they tend to divide by 4 and 8, so you want your heights to tend to be some multiple of four; 4 for reliefs, 8 to 10 for small/normal rooms - 8 for the wall and maybe 2 for a border; 12 for larger rooms, relief + wall; etc. And that naturally fed into the way I did horizontal space as well. Then I just sort of figured out my own rules as I went along, and my own sense of style. The tips I read about in magazines and on shows added fuel to my thinking, though. I also just walked around my rooms a lot, in any conceivable way from different angles, as people might actually walk in (thieves running and guards running after them), or just to see how things looked from every angle, so that I placed rugs and furniture and doors in places that made the movement natural to the gameplay and the "look" of it look good from anywhere. One thing to emphasize, as I've been implying, some of the design in a game engine is, in addition to the things that that site focuses on, somewhat uniquely driven by the way gameplay and assets work in the game/engine, such as the way texture space is set or the way a Thief/guards would want to move through a house, etc. The thinking is similar, but some considerations and the "economy" of it can be different. E.g., you don't have to literally worry about a budget and physics in buying/using assets in-game, you only have to worry about it insofar as it looks about right (a peasant would only have about enough money to do this, and the physics generally wouldn't agree with a stone ceiling, but in the margins of fashionable textures and load bearing walls you can push the boundaries in-game more than IRL). But on the other hand, you have to be much more concerned in-game with overusing stock assets (or the work you have to put in to make new assets) and you do have an effective economy for architecture in terms of polygons, etc. Anyway, this site adds a lot more food for thought and considerations that a builder will want to pay attention to. Thanks. Edit: And as I look more into this site, there is a lot of great tips in here. And it is very well organized, almost like a basic, hyperlinked textbook in architecture and design. Really good find.

You might if, just like the card, you already had features of the face (or common features of faces) in memory, and were just confirming if it was the same face, and morphing those features onto the blur. I've seen neural-net setups for face recognition (where a set of hidden-layer nodes are weighted over many trials to conform with some input, like a set of photographs of the face), where they distort an input face quite severely and the computer can still identify it with a high probability. And then, when asked to reconstruct the facial features, a programmer can simply run the distorted information in reverse through the same net that correctly identified it, and it returns this image that is very strikingly similar to the actual, original face. In the example of this I remember best, they occluded like 40% of the face around the eyes, and after correct identification, they ran the occluded picture in reverse through the set of weights and it returned this image that had these really haunting ghost eyes that completely do not exist in the original input ... as if the computer actually had those eyes in its "mind's eye" when making the id.

Don't forget a helicopter that circles around, keeping perfect speed as the player and sandwich move at near lightspeed through outer space, with a bullhorn announcing all the cool things he does: Mega-bite!! 3,000 points, Oh YEAA! Because it's the IP part in its most-property-like aspect (alienation) that's being sold from one game company to another when the first goes out of business. Car companies and Microsoft don't usually go bankrupt and have to sell their IP to other companies like game companies do; they license, so it's not really the IP itself, as a piece of property getting alienated, that you're really talking about 99.9% of the time. It's the use. And even when you're talking about when games license their assets, e.g., to mod, there's still a strong alienation flavor to it because you can basically do what you want with it and make it "your own" (more or less perceived as effectively alienation). It's not really about keeping it intact to do just the job you bought it for like a car or OS. Also, computer applications and industrial design have both always had a relatively uneasy status in IP law, so it's easy for people to get categories confused (they are justified in doing so, even legislators, lawyers and judges get things confused!), where cars and OS's don't seem very IP-like, and games do. I think generally speaking, things tending towards the narrative & "look and feel" side of intellectual property (like audio-visual assets, story, characters, etc) are more generally perceived as classic IP, whereas pieces of functional machinery, a car or an operating system, people are more focused on the nuts and bolts of the thing itself doing work, than the design. It's all IP, I mean at a certain point IP is just a matter of a judge's or legislature's opinion, but as to what people call it, it's a matter of perception. Games are just very easy to stuff into the same category as movies and books, where it's the embodied-idea people are buying, as opposed to cars and operating systems, where people are buying something more concrete that gets them to work or gets their computer running. The double-standard doesn't sound so logical if you press it, but that's the way perceptions work. (I studied IP law. So I'm just trying to guess at an answer to your question because it's something I've noticed too.)

Oh, I didn't even notice that. So it really is like an first-person version of Diablo?

It won't really be entirely usable as a playable game until it's feature-complete. So a demo-version wouldn't really be worth it, I'd think. Not to mention it would mean they waste time working on that instead of the release version itself. I think they're better off just focusing on finishing a full, releasable project. And then, when it is finished, there will already be a few test and beta-mapper maps all ready to go, which will serve sort of like demos (on top of being missions we get to play) of what sorts of things we can expect from it. Until then, I think some screenshots and videos of progress are good enough. Well, that's my opinion as an outsider to the project.

Well, I liked Diablo 2, so this has potential. Looks fun. It's basically a FPS zombie-horde fest, maybe a few RPG elements thrown in. It looks pretty "twitchy" to me, so I don't know what you meant by saying it wasn't (as if it were really tactics based, or story based, or something...). But not in a bad way.

Yeah, this isn't a legal issue. Something built in the whatever-medieval-century is as public domain as it gets. And like some of you are implying, it debases what this is really about for them anyway. It's far from the economic interest they hold in whatever IP-assets of the Church they imagine they have. Maybe they have a better claim under libel, debasement of reputation of the organization, or trademark, debasement of brand, but all of that still smacks a little of the wrong interest. It's really a political issue for them. And if they really want to make a stand, they should stand on the merits of what they actually believe ... which is that it's socially irresponsible for them to portray this real-world site in this way, if that's really how they feel, and keep it political instead of legal. I'm not sure they could really mount a credible boycott, though. They should be creative and mount some big campaign against gun violence in the world if they care so much about it ... really show people why they feel the images feel so unjustified/ irresponsible for them in a way people won't miss the unfairness of it.

If you guys want to get into really hardcore "technology", the human eye has some pretty remarkable routines used to resolve blurry images. E.g., when light and dark areas are in proximity, retinal ganglions over-stimulate the light-side (looks even brighter) and inhibit the dark-side (looks even darker) so it creates an artificial, much cleaner contour at the intersection. This is where you get this illusion, among dozens of others (the gray bar in the center is the same shade throughout, you can check by covering up the background). Actually, it has all sorts of tricks to create clean, clear contours where none really exist, which illusions you've probably already seen ad nauseum. This really isn't giving enough credit to Bayesian statistical methods. You definately can posit information that isn't there to resolve signals from noise based on certain assumptions of statistical likelihood, such as shapes and gradients are relatively contiguous and uniform throughout, bound by relatively smooth contours (not the coast of Norway), etc. These methods are at the heart and soul of a lot of signal recognition stuff. I mean, it's not literally "creating" the information, it's just positing it based on previous experience (the true source of the information). But even this can go a long way ... although it has its limits. If you have a valid criticism, it's that the statistics can only go so far in reading information into the noise ... too little signal information or too much noise and it just can't cope, or the statistics just aren't powerful enough. If the blurry photo can't resolve the killer's face in the window, it's probably a problem of degree of hardness, not type of problem, IMO (I guess it depends on the situation).

I think when one has his bottom in the air, that's his bow. The best advice for an addition I heard is that they should put some gratuitous china cabinets, bookshelves, and pedestals with ceramic vases of flowers behind those walls.

That's pretty cool!

This is all very interesting .... too bad it'll probably all be moved to the private forums soon. I studied a bit of Paul Glimcher's lab work on "vision & risk/decisionmaking" in the brain, if you are interested in how the brain's vision system addresses these exact kinds of issues ... in particular I studied eye saccades, which is a kind of search routine. It sounds very familiar to the way Malcolm was explaining it, relative-weighted areas of the vision area getting updated as evidence comes in ... (well, more complicated, as you could imagine ... You could just google Paul Glimcher, vision, and NYU to find his papers if you want more detail on how LIP, the brain area he studies, does it). The one major element it adds to what you were saying is that it isn't just "likelihood" alone, but (likelihood of a hit) * (expected payoff, if it's a hit) ... in effect, relative expected utility of a hit (REU = L*P). You've already thought about likelihood well (shadows before well lit areas, heard sounds+, etc), so I don't need to really discuss it. And you've also got a system where the weights are relative to one another built into the hierarchy of choice based on weight, so I don't really need to talk about that, either. As for payoff, in most cases the expected payoff is probably the same -- a "hit" will be the same thief every time; there he is. It's not like some shadows are more likely to carry more thieves than other shadows so go to those first (the traditional way P works). If the task is just to find that one guy, then that's it. So it might not apply so well. But just so I don't make a completely irrelevant point, another possible way to think about payoff is the same thief in different situations. E.g., there might be situations where the guard has a better chance of catching the thief by surprise or at least off-guard ... that's a higher payoff for the guard. ... So you might tweak the scales a little so that certain evidence that indicates coming from a certain direction might catch the thief off guard (e.g., coming from behind the thief rather than in front of him) will bump up the P factor in the weight just a little more than usual for that direction relative to the other direction (of course, the L factor might still outweigh for the other direction). Or an approach which better cuts off the thief's exit. Or, vice versa, things that lessen the expected payoff for the guard might get bumped down, e.g., if the direction puts the guard in a particularly vulnerable position if he catches the thief, relative to catching him from another position. Or, e.g., distance/work to get to the spot might also tweak the payoff, insofar as it leaves him more vulnerable to fight vs. another approach (need to think about that; if fatigue were a factor it definitely would, but I don't think you'll have that, or some approaches making fighting easier or harder for him, not sure.) The point is that these wouldn't be independent factors affecting the weighting, but a multiplier to the factors you already have (which are most all, in effect, "likelihood" factors), that have the potential to tweak a little in either direction with the right evidence, otherwise it's just set at "1". Although maybe this graduated-approach you have to weighting--bits of evidence tweak the amount this way or that--amounts to the same thing in effect. My examples are just me thinking on the fly, take them with a grain of salt. You need to think the idea through. You might think it might be better to have a hit at all than worry about the relative value of that hit when it happens (well, really this is about a hit from one place relative to the same hit from another place; but from a more/less advantageous position for the guard, coming from the Thief's behind, or cutting off his exit, etc). But anyway, because so much of the literature always has this equation of REU = L*P for rational saccade/search behavior, it's worth spending a little time thinking about how the P (expected payoff) factor might work for you, as well as the L factor that you've been working with ... maybe in a much different way than my examples. Since there's just one hit, maybe it's not all that important as it would be in other situations (e.g., where there are other potential hits at play), but it might come up in other ways like I was trying to think out. It's just worth thinking about, that's all I'm saying, outsider that I am.