demagogue

What I find funny about these sorts of religious debates is that they rarely seem to cover the issues for which people find it so important to have religion. Things like cosmology, evolution, political dynamics (maybe it's just my narrow perspective, but to me radical fundamentalists blowing things up looks a lot more like politics-by-another-name than serious theology) ... such debates don't seem to me to really getting to the heart of what's at issue with religion, which is how we ought to live good, fulfilling lives and find meaning in what we do and where we find ourselves in the universe. In that respect, I respect groups like the existentialists, because they seemed to take more seriously that arguing religion is a lot more than just quibbling how old the earth really is or how to reconcile aberrant social behavior with religions doctrines. Get rid of religion and you still have the tough job of explaining why any of this means anything and what our little lives has to do any of it; or actually, even keep religion and you still have the same problem, IMO. That's the part that I want to know, and these debates never really seem to get seriously near to an adequate reply for me. This isn't to disparage this interesting debate for what it is, but it doesn't do much for me personally because of that.

My first reaction to the Neandrethal possibility was like oDDity's ... but I saw some ethicist give some impassioned case for bringing them back, and I thought I'd try to reflect some of it just to get it out there. I'm not sure I can believe what I said, though. To give some perspective, I think human clones, as long as some very important details about identity and health issues could be taken care of, could get along ok. I think Neandrethal clones have the capacity to get along; I mean, considering the bell-curve mental capacity of most humans they don't seem that far down. But I can't help think that, if they became a community, they would be increasingly isolated from the economy around them -- they can only breed with one another. And as we all know, any time a community isolates itself from the global economy around it, it's in for pretty a wretched living standard ... but this time without much hope for later integration. This is even putting aside where they could even live as a community (to stick with the racially charged speculating, we could give them a slice of Palestine or West Africa, a little money, and a pat on the back: Good Luck; or we could try to integrate them into a developed State and jam them right into the social security network). Most of our historical experience and intuition says any way we'd try to fix it would be trouble. This is still somewhat in the realm of speculation though. The counter-story would be something like Alien Nation, where an alien slave ship lands on earth and the alien community becomes integrated into earth political economies. It seems like it's possible in a modern society to pull something like that off. 150 years ago people questioned whether other races (by which they meant Italians and Irish) could ever integrate into American society, much less Africans (where people questioned it less than 40 years ago), but today it's not a problem. We might be surprised how it could work. I'm willing to think about at good arguments for it, but in the end like most everyone else I'm skeptical. What's still kind of hardcore about it is that ... there's lots of reasons *not* to bring them back, but if they ever were we might be in a can of shit because we couldn't treat them like just any other animal. Some maverick geneticist could pull it off and a lot of people would probably feel compelled to do something. And I still don't doubt that it would have a pretty big effect on how humans think about their place in the universe. It reminds me of a story about how Carl Sagan wanted to pull off an alien signal hoax just to enlighten people, but knew that too many smart people would figure out the hoax. I think Neandrethal could have a similar effect, but the price, or at least the risk, is too great to actually pull it off. By the way, as an aside, I was interested to learn that they recently discovered a non-human homonid that lived on the earth as recently as 12,000 years ago in Paupa New Guinea, Homo Floresiensis, alongside human communities (and if you believe local folk lore, which tells about the hobbit like community, they were last seen less than 300 years ago when Europeans arrived; also, confirmation of a "discovery" is apparently still pending). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_floresiensis

On the topic at hand, if I were to speculate why European societies have fared better than African societies, I think the best theory I've read is that it isn't a biological story about race but a political-economic story about different ecological zones. Technological-progress and industry develop faster among societies in temparate climates and are consistently stunted in tropical climates ... practically as a rule with few exceptions. That some racial features also vary by tropical vs. temparate environment (skin color being an obvious one) is then something of an incidental side-effect and not helpful to understanding what's really going on. Rather than risk messing up the argument by trying to recall it myself, I'll just post the paper where I read it (a .pdf file): www.proses.sciences-po.fr/documents/Sachs_Tropical_Underdevelopment.pdf --------------------------------------- Why *wouldn't* they want to bring them back? Man, if I were a geneticist I would try it. I think it's nice karma for humans to start bringing species back from extinction now that they've effectively instigated the latest mass extinction event, and I feel like we have a particular debt to owe in whiping out neandrethal, not just some random species but an intellegent, communicating social animal like ourselves. Also, I think it would help give people a perspective on what humanity really means in the grand scheme of things, to finally have a non-human, intelligent species we can communicate with. It might help us not be so anthropocentric with everything and keep making the mistake that we are the center of the universe or something, sort of in the same line as discovering intellegent alien life. I think it would have a pretty immediate and big impact on how humans think about themselves for the better.

I'm curious about what might happen if scientists decide to clone another homonid species. Apparently, they will have enough of Neandrethal DNA preserved in bones, etc, to do it someday soon (if not now). Now we are talking about another walking, thinking, talking hominid that quite clearly has a different brain structure ("inferior" maybe only in the sense that they were selected against while competing against humans in a very specific environment that no longer remains). I was trying to think about the problem as a lawyer thinking about anti-discrimination law... because one of the foundations of that law (and constitutional law generally) is that many distinctions behind discriminatory behavior are not relevant to the actual cognitive capacity of the discriminated person to perform (leaving slightly harder cases where it might be an issue, like pregnancy, but then only to the extent it affects capacity). But if suddenly we had another hominid species walking around, we'd have to really think about how "human rights" might apply to them.

I just checked. Some of Faust is up at Youtube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1HJcijYmFk And some of Alice is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5wHMgTPF-s There's bits and pieces of a lot of his stuff actually, http://www.youtube.com/results?search_quer...p;search=Search I would probably never have checked...

I think I recall seeing this, although it's been a while. Funny enough, I had once dreamt of making an animated version of Faust myself; I think after watching the Batman animated series and another series I can't remember the name right now, but really dark, I wanted to make something dark and classic (not really seriously). But when I saw that Faust had been done before, I was interested. It was quirky, that's for sure. Not quite the same (more somber) aesthetic I had in mind, but I liked it.

I wasn't going to use the "cash cow" term, but then I thought ... well, if you come right down to it, the basic motivation for keeping the sequals going was the astonding box office returns from Star Wars; and I'm not sure Lucas had much of the same "pure" experimental motivation he had with Star Wars, which was thought of at the time as really a niche piece, almost an academic excercise to cross Kurosawa and cold war scifi. It just goes to show that money doesn't always corrupt, and in fact can lead to real masterpieces (esp for Empire). Another good example was Casablanca, even though it was written committee style, subject to the "worst" sort of bureacratic oversight, and a genre movie through and through that dogmatically followed about every rule in the book. And after all of that it was STILL a masterpiece! All of this has me suspecting whether there are any hard rules. Oh, why do I keep this OT topic going?

This is exactly the trap I was thinking about in talking about how single-shot movies get revamped to support series. Star Wars did not become Episode IV until years after its completion. From the beginning, it was meant to be a more-or-less close approximation remake of Kurosawa's Fortress, except set in outerspace rather than feudal Japan. The story was no bigger in scope than Kurosawa's. After its commercial success, Lucas was persuaded to create a series, and it was only then, in 1979 (or whenever), that he created the 9-part story we know now (6 of which were filmed; the last three were published in book form), fitting Star Wars into Episode IV. This is clear from his interviews. The "Episode IV: A New Hope" we now see at the top didn't get added until the rerelease of Star Wars shortly before The Empire Strikes Back release, in like 1981. In the 1978 original, it wasn't there. Star Wars is like *the* paradigm case of a single-shot story that suddenly, unexpectedly gets revamped to support a whole series to keep the cash cows coming home. They pulled it off so well most people don't even recognize the fact. As for the difference in quality, there I can take your "Not really" more seriously. What is remarkable about the Star Wars case is how seamless he made the original trilogy after the fact; I thought Empire was excellent, and Jedi got hokey at parts, but I still loved it. In that sense, it's sort of the exception that proves the rule. The main problem I saw with the Ep. I-III was that the story was too diffuse; they had to retroactively set up the conditions for the original 3, so had to get into big dynamics like the civil war and political intrigue and factions, etc, all at the expense of more interpersonal dynamics and good characterization. This is much closer to the big problem with post hoc story writing, and I thought they fell victims to it. As for Thief 2, come on, you have to admit that Karras and the whole art deco look is a little campy. I liked the game a lot, too, of course. Inferior quality wasn't exactly the point I was thinking about. When I wrote that I was thinking about one of the developers that posted on TTLG, when asked where the T2 story came from or something. He said that when they made the Dark Project, they didn't have a sequal in mind, and were really being driven by pure inspiration. Then he said when they started 2, they had in their minds to make it more gameplay oriented, since on reflection TDP missed a lot of opportunities to really take advantage of what the game was about, so they wanted to add more "pure" thieving, and set up interesting gameplay situations, etc. Then he said, while he thinks they succeeded, it was at the expense of some of the "magic" of the original, which was more bred on inspiration and an encapsulated story, wheve everything sort of comes together. T2 was more wooden, more "gamey", where more rooms were set up more apparently with gameplay design in mind than the more aesthetic ideas driving the original. I thought both T1 and T2 were great; I just had his comments in mind when I was thinking about the subject of sequals. What I said in my above post was much too simplifying, of course, but I still think it captures a general theme that comes up a lot of times. I don't think it always applies, and obviously there are plenty of sequals as good or better than their originals (System Shock, Star Trek 2). It's just a kind of theme about the economics and egos of movie/game making that makes it persist.

It seems typical that sequals always tend to be more campy than great originals, and lose a lot of the magic as the writers start fishing for some way to keep the story going. Star Wars, Raiders, Thief, Deus Ex ... were all written as one-shot stories that suddenly found themselves as unplanned preludes to something bigger and a little dumber.

Bwahaha... nice.

I haven't read the thread that this is from (yet; maybe a good thing?), but I don't think it should stop me from replying. I would just point out to Orbweaver that the kinds of experiments he suggested are actually done all the time. The context I've seen this happening is legal cases for gender discrimination (or racial, etc...). Say a prospective employer denies a job to a woman or an apartment owner denies an apartment lease to a woman (or black or gay or whatever; we'll stick with woman) without reason and she suspects it's because of sexist reasons. She goes to a lawyer, and the first thing the lawyer will want to do is get in touch with a research agency that specializes in this sort of thing. They will start sending control and variable subjects (men and women, across a wide range of traits) to call in about renting the room. They are all very carefully scripted to ask for the same things, and react in the same ways. And very quickly the agency can see whether the owner has a double standard across, e.g., a gender line. I don't think it is as difficult as you think. I've read some of these transcripts, and very often it's obvious because if an owner is really sexist, he is really going to use much different language between male and female applicants that stands out when the exact same questions are met with very different responses. And when this same pattern shows up over 20+ subjects -- every time the same double-standard in the same way across 10 men and 10 women -- this kind of evidence is so powerful in court because it is so damning. This applies to overt sexism in a more "scripted" sort of situation (like renting an apartment or getting a job). I'm not sure if here you guys are talking about this or maybe something which is more like passive/non-overt sexism in more "open" situations, where it might be harder to decide whether sexism is really driving the negative response. This is probably a harder question (although you might be surprised how a creative experiment could really separate discriminatory behavior from non-discriminatory once you read the transcripts). But, one thing to say, that difficulty shouldn't detract from being able to notice clear, overt sexism when it occurs. Maybe a general observation I've made is that context matters; very often the more obvious the discrimination it is, the more ethically wrong it seems it will be to the victim. And discrimination seems much worse in government or market transactions than just day-to-day banter (the kind of wrong we should probably be taking more seriously, IMO; more legally wrong, e.g., in terms of what relief they can expect, from expecting an apology up to compensation). At the same time, even in day-to-day banter, some people might not realize what they're saying hurts the victim a lot more than they might expect because of history and prior experiences of the victim, etc., (of course, it's much worse when they *do* realize how much it will emotionally hurt the victim). Anyway, the point is, one should always try to keep this sort of context in mind, IMO, in any discussion about whether a behavior seemed discriminatory and how morally wrong we can say that that discrimination was in the larger picture, as well as when thinking about what we might do to make the world a more pleasant place for everybody.

Pagans were in T2. They were distinguished basically by appearing to be covered in animal skins, and a gruffer look (dark stubble for men; muffed hair for women). There's really only so much you can do with those blocky models. I don't recall anything specially distinguishing about the pagan models themselves.

Not to mention way over-used. Man, one of the backdoor best things about TDM is that we get fresh assets, because even if the gameplay might not get old, hearing m03chimes and seeing victwal1 for the gazillionth time sure as hell can.

I like the screenshots, Bob. The only comment is maybe the ceiling panels; if they are going to have that amount of apparent depth for the flat texture, it might look better if the texture were higher up (further from the PC's fov), so the actual flatness isn't so obvious and deflate the effect a little, or maybe use panels without as much apparent depth (i.e., shallower) if you want to keep the lower ceiling. But that's just a minor quib since even that probably looks good enough in-game. Generally speaking I really like the look and feel of it all. Good work. As an aside to the on-going discussion, I was working in dromed recently making a Romanesque fountain on the side of a wall, with jetted water particle beams up-front, and rows of ivy objects against the back wall. I was annoyed that the up-front jets of water, except from one narrow angle out of the way, kept getting rendered *behind* the walls of ivy, although the brushwork from which they spurt was in front. Everything else can look great (by dromed standards), but as soon as something like that happens it manages to shatter the whole area because it's such an egregious violation of expectations.

That would be cool. It'd be a really good way to quickly see some ways how TDM adds to D3 by itself.

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.