Profile for Student of Trinity
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Displayed name | Student of Trinity |
| Member number | 3431 |
| Title | Electric Sheep One |
| Postcount | 3335 |
| Homepage | |
| Registered | Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
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| Author | Recent posts |
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| Educational Segregation in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, August 29 2007 03:43
Profile
Tiny people playing volleyball on ping-pong tables, spiking those little plastic balls over those little nets .... Come on, now, that was hilarious. [ Wednesday, August 29, 2007 03:50: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| The Sky Is Falling...? in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Tuesday, August 28 2007 23:55
Profile
Grrr, that Stephen Hawking. I was going to say that bit about north of the north pole. It is possible that I came up with it independently just now, but it is very likely I who stole the line from him, and forgot my source, since I have read his book. This sort of thing happens all the time, I'm afraid. Many of my best ideas are other people's. When I was much younger this bothered me a lot more than it does now, when I know that this is true of everyone else as well. I expect Hawking wasn't the first to use the north pole thing, either. About Occam's Razor: I guess up to a point I like it as much as anyone, but I do try to remember that it isn't really sound. It's just an aesthetic principle, and there's no guarantee that it leads to the truth. [ Wednesday, August 29, 2007 00:02: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| A5 Questions in Avernum 4 | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Tuesday, August 28 2007 13:35
Profile
You had D's?! We had to push the beads around on the abacus. But the gameplay was awesome. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Questions in Geneforge 4: Rebellion | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Tuesday, August 28 2007 10:21
Profile
In general the game does not get harder on revisits. It gets easier, because everything you kill stays dead forever. There are, however, a few zones in which fresh monsters are constantly being generated, by something. Those don't get much easier until you stop whatever is generating the monsters. And in a few zones there are specific actions you can take which will alert an enemy, or activate a defense, or make somebody angry. Usually these then stay alert or activated or angry. So some zones may indeed be tougher on your second visit than it was on your very first entry. But this is not the general rule in Geneforge. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| The Sky Is Falling...? in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Tuesday, August 28 2007 10:13
Profile
quote:In view of your subsequent statements about time being and temporal sequence existing, I am not sure what you mean by time not existing. Time does not exist, but yet somehow it does, and possesses certain necessary properties? It may well be that you have a coherent theory of time that is hard to explain, but I'm afraid this is word salad to me right now. quote:Why does a beginning entail a moment before the beginning? I agree that most moments are preceded by other moments, but the Big Bang is a unique case. I simply don't see why every moment must necessarily have a predecessor. The sphere model I described is a perfectly clear explanation of how time can have a beginning; it is not meaningless word salad. No logical contradictions are involved; only conflicts with your intuitions about time. But many people's intuition is that a roadrunner who runs off a cliff will travel horizontally for a while, then fall straight down. If you're not prepared to let a concord between extensive data and clear theoretical explanations overrule your intuition, then your rationality differs from that of natural science. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Educational Segregation in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Tuesday, August 28 2007 06:00
Profile
Yeah, I remember the kind of people who signed up for Volleyball and Table Tennis. Tiniest guys I ever saw. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| The Sky Is Falling...? in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Monday, August 27 2007 22:41
Profile
My work now is only very indirectly related to cosmology, but I was more closely in touch in the past. Basic Big Bang stuff, though, is part of any senior undergrad course in general relativity. It is conceivable that light frequency patterns from distant galaxies are all shifted down for some reason other than the expansion of space or motion of the galaxies relative to us. But there are no reasonable and plausible scenarios as yet available for this, just wild speculations, or even crackpot notions based on ignorance of available evidence. Expansion of the universe, in contrast, is essentially required by general relativity, theoretically; and observationally it fits a large amount of data very well and very easily. Everyone's emotional bias is for a static universe. Albert Einstein was so sure that the universe ought to be static, that he modified his own theory in an attempt to make it allow a universe that did not expand or contract. This attempt failed: his modified theory still did not allow a static universe in any realistic way. (In technical terms, the Einstein static universe is dynamically unstable.) Then Penzias and Wilson accidentally discovered strong observational evidence for the Big Bang, and Einstein kicked himself for the rest of his life for not having had the nerve to accept the expansionary predictions of his own theory, until the observations came in. He always called this episode the biggest mistake of his career. Theists have been chortling ever since, of course, since atheists had been appealing for centuries to the impossibility of time having a beginning. Atheistic cosmologists either shrug and say a beginning doesn't necessarily imply a creator, or hope that the quantum mechanical loopholes in our understanding of the earliest universe will turn out to have been hiding something other than a true beginning (perhaps a low point in some eternal cycle of collapse and expansion). I'm pretty close to 100% confident in the Big Bang, in some form, and in the expansion of the universe. I'm fairly agnostic about the current consensus that the expansion will continue forever, and even accelerate. This consensus has been stable for several years now, and the evidence we have certainly seems to favor it. But cosmology has wavered on issues like this over the past few decades — it's a much tougher call than the basic appearance of current expansion — and I don't really like the ever-expanding universe. So I nurse some hope that the data will be re-interpreted somehow in the years to come, and we'll end up in a Big Crunch at some finite time in the future, after all. In this I am probably indulging in irrationality; but I'm not a cosmologist. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Which Geneforge game(s) should I get? in Geneforge Series | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Monday, August 27 2007 22:05
Profile
G3 also introduced zones-inside-zones, which added some surprise to the zone layout. It let you build your own artifacts, which were mostly pretty good. It was the first Geneforge game with cutscenes, and with NPCs whom you met repeatedly throughout the game in different places. It introduced powerful 'creator' enemies, as opposed to mere spawners. In Alwan and Greta it gave you NPC allies with whom you could interact throughout the game. It introduced you to advanced Shaper (and Rebel) magic, including long-term mind control, powerful defensive regeneration, and teleportation — none of which the player gets to use, but still, you see them. And it had this six island structure (counting the Monastery of Tears) that was annoying in some ways, but that gave you radically different climate, terrain and atmosphere in different chapters of the game. People dissed G3 because these were all technical advances, and the plot of G3 was simple and comparatively constrained. In other games the actual number of things you could reasonably do at any point might not be that many either, but in G3 the limitations were more obvious: small islands and short-term missions. It was a sort of stepping-stone game, a chain of islands in plot as well as setting. I still liked it a lot, and felt that it was the right game for its spot in the overall Geneforge story arc. The war had been joined in earnest, the battle lines were drawn, the number of options had shrunk. That's how it had to be. But that also means that if you have to skip one of the four games, G3 is the one whose plot is most easily summarized. So I'd agree with the priority ranking 4-1-2-3, or maybe 1-4-2-3. Yes, perhaps 1-4-2-3 is best, as the priority list if you are going to play only one, two, or three of the four games. Because if you really love 1 when you try it, you'll still be able to switch over to the truly optimal 1-2-3-4 sequence. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| The Sky Is Falling...? in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Monday, August 27 2007 21:09
Profile
quote:I applaud the demand for explanations of how, instead of mere claims that. Likewise the rejection of word salad nonsense as acceptable explanation of how. Speaking as a professional theoretical physicist, however: insisting that people clearly explain how the universe was created is setting the bar rather high. Scientific cosmology is an awfully long way from being able to do that. We think we have a rough understanding of how things went after the first few microseconds or so, but our inability to reconcile general relativity and quantum mechanics prevents us from making sense of the Big Bang itself. People are working on it. What we believe we already do know, though, is that time can in fact behave very differently from the way it seems to behave in day to day life on earth. In particular we have a clear mathematical model for the Big Bang, which we know is incomplete at best because it ignores quantum mechanics, but which we think ought to be accurate enough after the earliest moments of the universe. It accords very well with all available data, and by now there is quite a decent amount of data available, which not just any model could fit. And in this model, time itself begins at the Big Bang. It is not easy to picture the model in its full four dimensions, but if for visualization we can replace the three dimensions of space with a simple one dimensional circle, then we can picture spacetime in only two dimensions. But this two dimensional spacetime is not flat, like a plane. It is curved, like (at least a part of) a sphere. At any one instant in time, space is like a parallel of latitude on the sphere; and time flows south along meridians of longitude. The instant of the Big Bang is like the north pole. At the north pole, space has zero size, everywhere is together at one point, and time begins. As time moves forward, space expands. That is an explanation of how time can have a beginning. It is the currently orthodox scientific theory of the early history of the universe, not some hypothetical example I just cooked up. Current scientific consensus is that time itself is only about 15 billion years old. The earth is not eternal, but it is roughly a third as old as time. What was there before time began? In what sense could anyone or anything cause the beginning of time, when causality as we know it is about succession in time? These may be philosophical or theological questions, but they are also physical questions. We don't know how to answer them, but there is nothing wrong with them as questions except that they are hard. Theoretical physicists have been happy to make models and speculate. Theologians are entitled to do the same. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Educational Segregation in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Monday, August 27 2007 11:24
Profile
It's important to realize that in the United States there is formally only one type of high school and one high school diploma, regardless of what work or further study one pursues thereafter. In Germany, in contrast, there are three different streams of secondary school, which take different numbers of years to complete and provide different qualifications. Students who attend a 'Gymnasium' generally take until age 19 to obtain the 'Abitur' that qualifies them for university; Hauptschule and Realschule students finish by ages 15 and 16, respectively, and are not usually eligible for university. In Britain there are 'A levels' and 'O levels', with 'A levels' required for admission to university. In the Canadian province of Ontario, up until fifteen years or so ago, there was a Grade 12 diploma that could be taken to end high school, but university entrance required a further Grade 13 diploma. Now I understand there is some sort of 'voluntary grade 13' or something in Ontario; most of the rest of Canada has just had 12 grades of high school as in the US. In Quebec high school runs until grade 11 only, but then one can take the two years of CEGEP (Collège d'enseignement général et professionnel), which is needed to qualify for university entrance. I'm curious how the Russian system works now, and how the Soviet system used to work. The American system is a one-size-fits-all high school diploma. So the minimum requirements to obtain it are comparatively low. The maximum amount of education that one can obtain in an American high school is considerably higher. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Educational Segregation in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Monday, August 27 2007 10:41
Profile
Of course it can't be just funding, or burying cash in the playground would save the school. You do also have to spend it in the right places. And in general I think you must need permanent funding, not just aid for a few years which might get cut off at any time. Few talented professionals are going to stake their careers on that. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| A5 Questions in Avernum 4 | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Monday, August 27 2007 10:25
Profile
What about the breathtaking Swiss fjords, then? -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Educational Segregation in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Monday, August 27 2007 07:42
Profile
Yes, in practice US public education must be bought for your children, when you buy your house. A district with high housing prices gets high local taxes, because these are generally based on market value. It can therefore afford good schools. Good local schools then dramatically boost local housing prices. It's all good ol' local democracy and the free market, but its consequences approach a caste system. To a Canadian this seems like another clear case where a little tyranny is called for — though I'm not sure the situation is as much better in Canada as it should be. Y'all need some taxation without representation, here. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Educational Segregation in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Sunday, August 26 2007 22:04
Profile
I'm with JS on this one: decent education needs a lot more money than it has been getting. At one point in my academic career, I considered bailing out of research and teaching high school. The alarming cut in salary that this would have meant scared me away. Public school teachers are paid really poorly in the US, and I doubt Canada or the UK is much better. The reasons must be historical: teachers were paid in respect and some security, teaching was thought to be a sort of sacred calling in which materialism had no role, it was one of the few professions open to women, and so on. In the Great Depression, schoolteaching was probably the largest sector of public employees, so although schoolteachers weren't paid well, they were among the lucky few who could count on getting paid at all, and I bet the idea that teachers were getting quite enough persisted long. I should find out how teachers are paid here in Germany. But school buildings and facilities are rather sharper than I recall seeing in North America (like most public facilities in Europe). Segregation by academic ability used to be called 'streaming', since segregation meant racial segregation in the US, and it has gone in and out of fashion for forty years or more. I think I'm basically for it, although having a few enriched or advanced placement courses may be enough streaming, at least in most cases, and complete segregation may not be necessary. Nobody likes being bored. How many people here would like to be cooped up for hours of every day being forced to go through trivial drills in basic arithmetic and phonics? If we did that sort of thing to murderers in prison, there would be supreme court cases. Yet there are brilliant kids in elementary grades who have already mastered these things as well as any adult, and who are just as agonizingly bored by the exercises as any adult would be. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| The Sky Is Falling...? in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Sunday, August 26 2007 21:13
Profile
quote:Indeed. The reason we have faith in induction is that it has always worked so far. The scientific epistemology that I like is that of Otto Neurath: we are building a ship at sea. We stand on the parts that float best at any moment, and try to improve the leakiest bit. There is no dry-dock, no firm foundation on which to construct systematically a stable structure. Epistemology is Waterworld. Neurath's metaphor may seem excessively gradualistic, not allowing for true scientific revolutions; but I would say that a revolution is just the extreme where only a small part of the ship is still seaworthy, and most of the hull gets reshaped around it. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Romans are wimps in Nethergate | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Sunday, August 26 2007 11:35
Profile
Romans mostly bash stuff, and pretty much any player can click on enemies to bash them. There's not such a big range in tactical skill for the Romans; if it's doable for the duffers to whom Jeff still wants to sell games, then the experts still have a bit of a challenge. Spellcasting offers a lot more options, and it can take some skill to do so optimally. Jeff wants newbies to be able to beat the Celt game too, so the result is that experts can murder with the Celts. Perhaps something could still be done to equalize the two sides more, but I believe this issue limits how much. Plus, who cares? The sides aren't playing against each other, so it doesn't matter if one is harder than the other. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| G5 Artifacts in Geneforge 4: Rebellion | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Sunday, August 26 2007 10:16
Profile
The EC is quite decent armor, but the main point is that it adds 2 AP. This is basically license to kill, or at least it was under the old AP system — and I think Jeff had already worked out his artifacts for G4 before he decided he had to change the AP rules. Jeff probably removed it from G4 from a feeling that it was a bit overpowered. Or at least, powered enough that it was a must-do item for every player, so that after two games it was becoming monotonous. But I basically found the G4 artifacts a bit disappointing in comparison with the items from previous games. None of them seemed to have the big kick of the EC or the Crystal Shroud from G3. And the ones with the big boost to 'radiance' aren't exactly helped by the fact that nobody has every identified anything that radiance does. Apart from looking fabulous. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Episode 4: Spiderweb Reloaded. Something like that anyway. in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Sunday, August 26 2007 09:46
Profile
I wanna see TM's spirit, channeled by Ephesos. When bad stuff starts happening, the square brackets should fly thick and fast. -------------------- Listen carefully because some of your options may have changed. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Purchase question, Game Review question in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Saturday, August 25 2007 12:50
Profile
You should send this to spidweb@spiderwebsoftware.com. The people who read and post on these boards are the customers of Spiderweb Software; people from the company itself only rarely look here. So we here can't help you get your old games again, but Jeff Vogel may well be able to, if you write to him at the above address. [ Saturday, August 25, 2007 12:53: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| A5 Questions in Avernum 4 | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Saturday, August 25 2007 12:46
Profile
Fighting with a sword and a dagger, or perhaps two daggers, is a lot more doable than fighting with two longswords, which was what I believe the Exile dual wielding was about. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| A5 Beta (testing)? in Avernum 4 | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Saturday, August 25 2007 12:34
Profile
A5 beta testing is underway already, but Jeff has mentioned that he feels a lot of testing will be needed because the game is so complex, so conceivably he may want more testers at some point. It can't hurt to ask. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| A5 Questions in Avernum 4 | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, August 24 2007 07:02
Profile
Dual wielding always seems hokey to me. Ambidexterity means you can use one sword equally well with either hand. Using two swords at once, each as well as a single sword, would seem to require a lot more than just ambidexterity. I mean, a real blow with a sword requires a major lunge or swing with the whole body, not just a flick of the wrist. No matter how ambidextrous you are, doing that with two swords isn't really much easier than doing it twice with one sword, in the same amount of time. Which is as much a matter of balance as of credibility. Ambidexterity sounds like a reasonable positive trait, if you're thinking how useful and common it is in real life. If it were called 'double all my attacks' it would sound broken. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| The Sky Is Falling...? in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, August 23 2007 20:55
Profile
It's not as if Richard Dawkins was ever elected Official Mouthpiece of Science by a majority vote of world scientists. He's just a guy who stepped up on a soapbox. He seems to be a pretty good evolutionary biologist, but I don't think much of him as a philosopher, let alone as a theologian. Criticize him all you want, by all means. But if you assume that he somehow represents science, you've swallowed his biggest hook. I expect this may be exactly why he uses his aggressive rhetoric: he hopes to make everyone he can't convince look ridiculous, by goading them into a foolish crusade against science. I do think that just about everything everyone does is based on irrational induction and humankind is irrevocably lost in the wilderness of the unprovable. But it's a wilderness for which experience and judgement seem to provide decent survival tips. In other words, no, I don't think we can just pretend David Hume never existed. Though I once wrote a short song claiming that. quote: -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| The Sky Is Falling...? in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, August 23 2007 05:54
Profile
This notion that scientists are arrogant fools, far more sure of their conclusions than they should be, seems to be a deeply rooted myth in some quarters. Just where on earth does this notion come from? All the scientists I know, which is probably a much larger sample than that of most people around here, are notably skeptical and tentative, and unusually quick to discern weaknesses in evidence or argument. All human knowledge is uncertain. Scientists haven't forgotten that at all. They take it for granted. But see: beneath the unattainable height of absolute certainty, there's an enormous range of degrees of warranted confidence. There are really good bets, and there are sucker bets, and everything in between. Practical human activities, from getting out of bed in the morning to dodging when the tiger springs, are not in the market for certainty. They're in the market for really good bets. And that's what scientific confidence is about: not a delusion of certainty, but a well-founded confidence in delivering really good bets. If human-caused global warming isn't certain, well gee: welcome to the real world. If it is a really good bet, then clutching at counter-hypothetical straws is not very wise. This is what makes people thump the table; not overweaning certainty. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Do not seek to hide your jealosy behind ridiculous questions! in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, August 23 2007 03:19
Profile
Since the highest post ranks only exist as Drakefyre's instruments for tormenting Alorael, it is up to Drakefyre whether and when Alorael actually reaches the top one. And what title that rank comes with, of course. A man who can replace 'postmaster general' with 'postaroni, pizzabella' is capable of anything. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |