04 NOV 2018 by ideonexus
Player Types and Rule-Breaking
The Standard Player: This player type is a "standard" and honest game player that plays the game as it was designed to be played, following the rules and respecting their authority. The Dedicated Player: This close cousin of the standard player studies the formal systems of a game in order to master and perfect his or her play of the game, often finding and exploiting unusual strategies in order to win. Examples: professional athletes, hardcore gamers. The Unsportsmanlike Player: This third...10 MAR 2017 by ideonexus
Four Game Mechanics
Agon: This ancient Greek word—meaning “struggle” or “contest”— defines those games in which some aspect of a player’s or team’s skill is measured against another player or team. Any game that is based on skill and eliminates luck is a game of agon. The best examples of this type of game are athletic games such as wrestling and baseball. The games of chess and checkers are also classic examples of agon. Contemporary abstract strategy games, such as those in the Project GIPF ser...31 MAY 2015 by ideonexus
The Evolving View of Science and Evil
Daedalus begins with an artillery bombardment on the Western Front, the shell bursts nonchalantly annihilating the human protagonists who are supposed to be in charge of the battle. This opening scene epitomizes Haldane's hard-headed view of war. And likewise at the end, when the biologist in his laboratory, "just a poor little scrubby underpaid man groping blindly amid the mazes of the ultramicroscopic," is transfigured into the mythical figure of Daedalus, "conscious of his ghastly mission ...04 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
Computers and Creative Writing
And for all their power and speed, today’s digital machines have shown little creative ability. They can’t compose very good songs, write great novels, or generate good ideas for new businesses. Apparent exceptions here only prove the rule. A prankster used an online generator of abstracts for computer science papers to create a submission that was accepted for a technical conference (in fact, the organizers invited the “author” to chair a panel), but the abstract was simply a series ...Folksonomies: writing automation
Folksonomies: writing automation
A computer successfully got a paper accepted to a technical conference by stringing technical jargon together, which is similar to a scientist who once got a nonsense post-modernist paper published in a journal, but computers can write sports news stories due to their formulaic nature.
01 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
Sports on Phobos
Because of their small sizes, Phobos and Deimos have very low gravitational accelerations. Their gravities do not pull very hard. The pull on Phobos is only about one one-thousandth of that on Earth. If you can perform a standing high jump of two or three feet on Earth, you could perform a standing high jump of half a mile on Phobos. It would not take many such jumps to circumnavigate Phobos. They would be graceful, slow, arcing leaps, taking many minutes to reach the high point of the self-p...How the low gravity and tiny size of Mars' moon would affect the game.
18 MAY 2011 by ideonexus
The Hypocrisy of Elitism
At the same time, children with special abilities and skills need to be nourished and encouraged. They are a national treasure. Challenging programmes for the 'gifted' are sometimes decried as 'elitism'. Why aren't intensive practice sessions for varsity football, baseball and basketball players and interschool competition deemed elitism? After all, only the most gifted athletes participate. There is a self-defeating double-standard at work here, nationwide.Why aren't sports considered elitist?
15 APR 2011 by ideonexus
Consumption of Media Has Moved to Bits and Pieces
The problem is: We just don't do whole things anymore. We don't read complete books — just excerpts. We don't listen to whole CDs — just samplings. We don't sit through whole baseball games — just a few innings. Don't even write whole sentences. Or read whole stories like this one. We care more about the parts and less about the entire. We are into snippets and smidgens and clips and tweets. We are not only a fragmented society, but a fragment society. And the result: What we gain is ...Folksonomies: new media
Folksonomies: new media
We don't consume whole books and albums anymore, but bits and pieces.
28 MAR 2011 by ideonexus
Obama is a Nerd, and That's Bad
[Obama White House is] the kid in school who waves his A test score in front of the entire class but never gets picked to play baseball. He’s an arrogant nerd, and no matter how smart he is, he can’t hit, he can’t throw and he can’t run.Folksonomies: anti-intellectualism
Folksonomies: anti-intellectualism
Mike Huckabee says the problem with Obama is that he's a nerd and isn't into sports.
17 JAN 2011 by ideonexus
Notes from the "It's All Geek to Me" Session
No direct quotes for this meme.These are notes summarizing comments made by speakers and audience during this session:
- Are you a geek? When telling a story, how often do you elaborate on the details? Baseball stat geek, science detail geek, D&D geek, all about details.
- What actually constitutes a geek?
- Student: it’s good to be a geek, it means someone who is passionate about something.
- Student: Geek is starting to be glamorized. Big Bang Theory, Harry Potter movie.
- Radio Show Host: compares herself to scientists, and doesn’t think herself a geek, but the audience is geeks (Skeptically Speaking). Considers herself a translator. Geeks listen more closely to the show, and send emails. Geeks provide feedback.
- “You call it geekery, I call it passion.”
- Geeks distrust social niceties. Why aren't they just giving me the information straight? Tendency towards argumentation.
- What are Benefits and Pitfalls of a Geeky audience? Bonus is passion. Geeks get immersed in details, and have a self-generating energy and will keep working through things left to their own.
- Geeks don’t see correcting others as a slight.
- Accuracy VS Completeness: don’t ever say false things, but you don’t have to get totally immersed.
- Geeks are obsessive enough that they will voluntarily seek out details on their own.
- How to delineate between being too geeky and not geeky enough? Keep things entertaining as a means of keeping people with your content. If it’s entertaining, people will stick with you through the sciency parts.
- Make sure your headline and introduction are not for geeks, but you can geek out later in the story. Skeptchick uses humor to open all posts, post about Twilight. Scicurious has posts that reach out to her audience, Friday posts about sex.
- Catchphrases and Inside Jokes create communities, but they also put up walls to communities.
- Surprise people with a story, ask a question to pique curiosity about how it will affect people personally,
- Whatstheharm.net – anecdotes. Turns on non-geeks, but turns off geeks because we want data. What’s the difference between whatstheharm.net and Rush Limbaugh using anecdotes to hurt science?
- Snark: a way of building a community, but causes pile-ons, turns off outsiders, PZMeyers’ fans attack whoever he points them too. Snark is the nature of the Internet. Radio difference: no snark rule.
- Use snark to empower the weak against the powerful. Use it against trolls against power.
- Try going with a private comment first before going public.
- Remember that it’s the internet, your tone doesn't communicate in the text.
- Don’t do threaded comments.
- You’re going to offend someone. Radio got called a Marxist for her show on gender.
01 JAN 2010 by ideonexus
The Content of Any Medium is Always Another Medium
The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message, as it were, unless it is used to spell out some verbal ad or name. This fact, characteristic of all media, means that the "content" of any medium is always another medium. the content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the content of print, and print is the content of the telegraph. ...Whether the light is being used for brain surgery or night baseball is a matter of indifference. It could be argued that ...Folksonomies: new media
Folksonomies: new media
Mediums are object-oriented, with one extending from another, inheriting from the parent.