demagogue

I think that that (re: trust) depends on the culture of the people you're hanging out with. I'm a lawyer and practically everything is built on a kind of blase working cynicism of both corporations and the gov't. It's kind of funny, but it definately keeps us from thinking we can expect too much from them. For example, we take it for granted that a corporation is rational in maintaining an harmful activity (inadvertantly, not illegally) if the cost of fixing the problem is greater than the court judgments/settlements for harm; it's cheaper for them to just always pay damages. We can expect Coke will continue producing bottles that explode on (rare) occassion and not produce more expensive caps. We have a snappy equation for the idea: B<PL. Unreasonable behavior iff "Total Benefit" is less than "Probability (of harm)" * "(magnitude of) Loss". Coke isn't acting legally unreasonable unless the price of the new caps were *less* than the settlements (oh, small footnote or it doesn't make sense, sorry, Coke still has to pay because it's strict product liability, doesn't matter if they were reasonable or not, but in practice it works out to the same thing: Coke does what is cheaper, fix the bottles or pay damages, institutionalized cynicism if ever there was. For other activities, where you don't have such rigid economic thinking, "unreasonable" behavior is necessary for liability, and you compute it in the same way so you get the same result. Incentive to do the "right thing" if it's cheaper than damages; no need if it's not). It seems healthier to me to just take cynicisms as a starting-point, and not lose much sleep over it. ------------------------------------------- The bottom line for me has always been (maybe pushing the topic a little, but it's what I'm thinking): you can't expect anything of spiritual or real cultural value from anything corporate (or gov't/administrative) ... Even if it happened inadvertantly, you can expect it will probably get tainted sooner or later (Star Wars). You can only expect it from individuals or groups who are very talented, very scheming (to get the resources needed to do it), and bucking the system as a full-on ethos ... But when it works best, it doesn't happen often in history (e.g., the interwar Paris avant gard, maybe postwar NY scene), and even then it's a kind of living paradox (anti-capititalist yet supported by capitalist benefactors). When I think about the culture of grads concentrating in video game technology, it's a far cry from this. My feeling is, it's really the duty of any individual that actually cares about the cultural worth of something to really take the initiative themselves and work towards lifting standards, to themselves stay on a high level and try to persuade others the value of higher standards, while flat-out assuming the cultural industry and its markets won't really be sensitive to it, nor would we really want them to be. Let them go as they will. No need for us to go through the motions of being "shocked" or "betrayed".

Happy New Year's! One of the traditions for New Years here in Japan is a big music show on TV the evening before. This year, for one number, they had a whole chorus of women in "nude" body suits with their breasts flopping around as they can-can'd, on public TV. They later had to announce on the air -- because they were getting so many calls -- that they were just body suits. But the idea of women wearing nude body suits that look pretty much exactly like the real thing sounds just so incredibly dumb to me. Why even bother? But then again, I've learned not to question this country over things like this. I wish everyone a good year.

An AI professor of mine at UT was working on just the sort of AI involved in the tank battle scenes. It's not surprising this sort of technology is developed for these sorts of war games, since the Department of Defense one of the most generous benefactors for it (I'm guessing); it was funding most of his work iirc. A similar thing may have happened here, where some CS graduate students were working on such a project, and one of the first obvious public applications for it is in these sorts of games. It's cool to watch, anyway. It reminds me a little of the Assassin's Creed trailer, as an example of an actual game that looks like it's taking advantage of this sort of thing.

That is just about why we all (outsiders) keep coming here, isn't it?

Tch is right in his answer, since I confronted this same issue not too long ago (and I took Copyright law). Photographs of public domain artwork are also in the public domain *if* the photograph does not add any original elements on top of the artwork ... so if it is basically shot head-on perpendicular to the artwork and the boundaries of the artwork matches the photograph frame, etc. It might be different if it's photographed at another angle, or showing the area around the artwork, or sometimes showing a detail of the painting, anything that could be labeled as a "creative" contribution, and EVEN THEN, the copyright is only for the creative contribution (the angle or the arrangement of the surrounding space). So, e.g., you could arguably crop the photo to just take away the public domain part of it and be ok if none of the creative part remained.

Happy Birthday, Spar. Have a good one.

Actually, U.Texas won the Division I national championship last season ... so there's a good reason to follow them right there. And when I was in school, we had Ricky Williams as runningback winning the Heisman trophy (best college player of the year). It's a very good team. I guess I was speaking more generally; I'd cheer for them in any event. All the better that it's actually a winning team. My brother went to Texas A&M which isn't all that great, but they have spirit coming out their asses like sunshine. Oh, also to distinguish college from professional US football. I really don't feel much pull to cheer for the city of Dallas (the Cowboys) and follow prof teams, nothing even close to the pull to cheer for the Univ of Texas and follow college teams. The connection just isn't as strong. That's what I was thinking in that post.

I started liking rugby when I realized it and US football were two variations on the same basic theme -- finding the right angles to run, when to have a burst of speed, using teamwork to advance, either blocking or back-passing -- just emphasizing different aspects. Rugby is a lot like a runback in US football on a grander scale, where you can also pass backwards, and I've always found the running game in US football more interesting. I actually find it hard to see how someone can like one and not the other, once you know what's going on, and I like watching both on tv. But I don't follow it well enough to have a feel for which teams are good. Actually, not professional US football either. College football is the only thing I really follow, and that's just because where I come from (Univ Texas), it's sort of an unofficial religion; you are supposed to support your college team no matter what.

Happy Birthday Pakmeister!

Looks like you made it on time. You even got the "quotes" section filled out. Despite the fewer number of entries than previous ones, maybe, this is a contest you can be proud of having hosted, Komag. As I said in the other thread, I find this is a good summary of what made this contest such a great one: Good show.

I like the one where you put a penny on the first square of a chess board, two pennies on the second, etc. By the time you reach the end of the chess board, you have more money on the last square than ... well, you have a lot of money. I'll have to look the number up later; it's big.

Thanks for posting the .jpg here. I just read the TTLG thread on this and figured out you can open the link in a new window, and then hit refresh and then the .jpg comes up. Strange. (edit: is there a way to change the sub-title of this thread?) Anyway, it looks pretty cool if I'm understanding what's going on. Coming from a dromed background it's quite welcome. Re: swappable. It's becoming obvious that one advantage of TDM over a commercial game with SDK, which isn't so obvious at first, is that you are tailoring it to a high level of author-freedom/flexibility. You aren't pidgeonholeing the assets and functionality to just what you need to scrape through one game. Although people have added assets and scripts, etc, to dromed over the years ... this is sort of a more radical take on it, since it has author freedom at the center from the very beginning. So I get the idea that working with it will feel much freer than what we're used to from past SDKs.

A quick note that the link to the "model viewer interface", whatever you want to show the public, isn't public and takes us to an "unauthorized" screen. (See how us interested outsiders are still somewhat useful around here?) While I'm on the subject ... the swappable heads for AI models is a good idea. Also potential for hybrid creatures here too, fish-men and the like. Probably more importantly, it allows for singular identification of particular AI, so you can give them a backstory and it's good for in-game narrative. E.g., you have a better way of identifying a particular AI you have to deal with (by pertinent facial features) than the T2 approach of having to literally knock them out and pick up their body to see their names to be sure. The third guy on the right in your screenshot looks a little sickly there. Don't mess with that guy.

I want to do this in NYC as well. What about normalmapping (3d info)? Is it important (or how important is it) that this be made along with the hi-res photo? I read one insteresting tut where a guy was creating a normal map by taking 3 different pictures of the same surface with a flashlight lighting it at different directions, then colorizing each one and superimposing them. It looked like a good idea, but for relatively small objects you can set up inside; it doesn't look very convienent to do on outside walls. Are you guys hoping to have normalmaps with the textures, and what is the best way to make them? (I saw on Doom3 you could do it with Maya if nothing else.) Actually I just saw a tutorial on there on "creating bump maps with images" that looks better for this job than going all out with a 3D app. ( http://www.doom3world.org/phpbb2/viewtopic...p=107690#107690 ) Also, the tutorial on Doom3 World for making textures, Part 1 anyway, is down. Anyone have a copy of this?

On the other hand, I was in the capital in 1997 when some bat-shit loon ran in with two hand guns and just started shooting at random, running towards the Maj Whip's office and hitting/killing a number of security persons. People complained why the gov't didn't take the "signs" he'd been consistently given off seriously. My friend was in the same hallway when it happened. So maybe the gov't needs to do a better job distinguishing 14-year-old "peace loving" teenagers from the batshit loons that finally crack and run into the capital shooting ... A problem is that they both make "cartoonish", retarded-looking threats. WILLIAM OF ORANGE sent my Congressman a scary letter about every 3 days, written in orange ink, all capitals, on lined paper, with little drawings on the side, you'd think he was 11 but actually in his 50s. I think this girl was just freaked and wants to come out looking like the victim ... I'm sure these agents probably just did their job and forgot about it.

Yeah, Alice is depressingly simple ... pattern-matching at its most primitive, a 6 year old could set it up. It's depressing because it won the Loebner prize in like 2004. The winner wasn't even a programmer, just a magazine article writer that learned a little code just for the contest! I think after he won the judges changed their methods to make sure it'd never win again. But I wouldn't go so far as say that a computer won't be able to "comprehend" human speech conversationally in the near future. I've been studying this for a while, and have seen some pretty sophisticated stuff. It's just, my opinion, the classical approach to formal linguistics has been ass-backwards -- it's most important to give a computer something to say first and then worry about how to say it correctly ... and now that we're into cognitive linguistics and game theory approaches things are scooting along. MIT has put out some pretty impressive Natural Language Generators recently; they've got robots (as well as AI in-game) that are able to look around them and report on what they see; they can imagine things that aren't there and report on their "visions", walk around, pick up what they want, take a rest when they get tired. The Nigel Grammar is being computized a bit at a time; painstakingly slowly but surely. I think things are happening either so fast or behind the scenes that it's not getting publicized, and when something *really* impressive comes out it will take the public by storm ... but researchers have learned not to hype things up and keep things in their techy articles. The whole "strong AI" debate doesn't impress me; it's like any theoretical limit or restriction on an empirical question; it doesn't help anything except distract people from a potential way forward.

I used to love Tony Shalub's previous series Stark Raving Mad -- an odd couple set up with Neil Patrick Harris -- but apparently it got cancelled really fast ... too bad! I thought it was smarter and funnier than Monk, and more about a relationship than one guy so it had more to work with, but Monk is pretty good too, or was before its quirkiness started getting repetitive.

I think the idea is ... it's not just that the rays run out of momentum at that distance (after being continually slowed by solar gravity). It's that they all run out of momentum all together, at about the same distance. So there will be interference effects; the rays won't just slow down, but will start getting bounced around by other slowing rays, and the faster ones will get bunched up by the slower rays holding them in and bouncing them back, where they'll hit incoming rays and things get bounced around further. So, the point is, you get a little sluggish, semi-turbulent pool of rays bouncing around in this zone, the wind gets *thickened*... rather than the rays just slowing down and dissapating and the wind getting *thinned*, which would happen if there were much fewer of them. It's the "pooling" of the rays that's the important point, it seems, not just the fact that they slow down after a while.

It's more about the pure logic underlying math than math itself. It has one of the best explanations of Turing Machines and Godel's Theorem because it's hands-on ... you are solving them right along with him, but in a fun way. That must be why computer science people like it so much. If you like this book, I'd also recommend The Mind's I edited by the same author (Hofstadter), which uses lots of little stories, essays, dialogues on naturalism ... that the "soul" is the brain ... and the "spiritual" implications of that, fun enough that you can forget that it's also pretty deep. They don't make many books like this any more ... full of little thought-games adding up to a big punchline. Minsky's Society of Mind, maybe. Penrose's Emporer's New Mind tried, and was great as long as he was talking about physics but was just awful on the "mind" part. Hofstadter wrote another book along these lines called Le Ton Beau de Marot on language creation, esp poetry, by brains and computers, but it's much more personal, even sentimental. If I ever become accomplished in some field, I think I want to try to write a book like one of these ... because nothing is more fun than when the author isn't just lecturing the reader but inviting him into thinking through something very interesting together.

There's a great dialogue in the book Godel, Escher, Bach (what's been called a bible for the cyberage) in which 2 characters get trapped in a series of Escher drawings and things like gravity suddenly changing on them occur as they walk across* -- sounds similar to the talking here. Awesome read (the whole book, really) if you can find it. * The whole thing is supposed to be some kind of metaphor for going in and out of nested levels of representation -- as you can do in a computer program -- and then tangling the hierarchy so things get loopy. The sort of thing Godel, Escher, and Bach were masters at doing.

I personally think '80s movies rock; they're always so stupid ... like the one about the journalism girl that dresses like a guy for a story and another girl gets a crush on her and she gets a crush on a guy; the guy that sells his telescope for one freaking date with the popular girl (Can't Buy me Love?); the Last Starfighter ... man, they are all pretty dumb like your post, but in a Mystery Science Theatre 3000 way you can laugh at. And D&D we had good times with, because it was one game that was all about personal interaction, uh, sort of anyway. Where it goes overboard is those people in Society for Creative Anachronism, which literally dress up in chainmail, get nurf-swords, meet on a field and different factions go to war with each other. By the way, I did something like renaissance faires as an actor in college; we put on an annual dinner theatre and I was always the dashing young prince - never the villian (not that I didn't try; I was just so type-cast with my blonde hair and baby blue eyes.) So I sort of have the whole D&D mindset in my blood.

I have to ask myself: is my life is really any better off knowing that this thing even exists? And the answer to that is question is "Yes. Yes, it is."

The good news is, at least we know that uncadonego is actually an uncle now. I'd be a little skeptical if he decided to call himself unca Don just for the hell of it.

Anyway, you can go to thiefmissions.com and search by "author" to answer your question yourself. You'll get this: So it looks like the answer is no, at least not enough to get credited. A Thief Nonetheless was a Komag contest mission, though.

As long as we're on this ghastly topic... A similar thing (as the above quote, from a while back) happened to me as a kid, except: - instead of a big brown spider it was a scorpian - instead of a hand-towel it was a bath towel as I was getting out of a bath - the scorpian actually did bite me - very high on the right thigh, near the joint. Totally oblivious I wrapped the towel around myself and felt a sharp prick, and almost dreamlike I let the towel fall down and saw the scorpian scurry out. And it literally took me a few seconds to comprehend the connection until my leg started burning. And I cried out, not from the pain but because I had no idea what a bite like that could do to me. My parents called poison control and we had to make a paste to cover the swelling bite ... and the whole time I was just in a daze. It was pretty surreal. That right there beats my second story where, on a trampoline, a cruising wasp got annoyed at our bouncing and bit me square between the eyes so that my eyes got swollen and I literally couldn't open them for about 4 hours. Now that I think about it, I guess I grew up in a pretty dangerous place -- out in the countryside in Texas, where most everything seems big and onery.