I have yet to find a single medical symptom, however common, that cannot be attributed to some dire disease, usually cancer.
Are there any innocuous symptoms?
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Category Archives: General
This is a good year to buy things…
Retailers everywhere are getting very desperate this year. And it’s all leading up to the mother of all Black Friday sales. If you’ve made smart investing decisions and avoided losses throughout this year, it would be a good time to buy things you’ve been waiting to buy.
Wow
I met with the provost of Temple University a few months ago, as part of an interview of Temple’s graduate students to assess their experience with the graduate school and its programs.
At the time, I was fairly convinced that nothing would come out of it. But whether influenced by the interviews or already planned, seeing this gave me a bit of hope. At the least, the interviews were an attempt to gather information before acting, which is generally a sign of competent decision making. Maybe the new graduate school will even start allowing some interdisciplinarity into the mix?
Wow, TV/Movie Fantasy has become stupid.
I was watching the premiere of a fantasy series based on one of my favorite books today. I’ll do my readers a favor and not bother naming it, because what I saw was a two hour train wreck. I honestly do not understand how the producers of this show managed to obtain the author’s approval of their screenplay.
The show took many liberties with the text. This is understandable to an extent, as the medium and audience are very different, but every deviation from the text was executed very poorly. Now that I think about it, what little TV fiction I’ve watched recently has also exhibited the same general characteristics as this show:
The world is portrayed in absolutes: there is Good and there is Evil. The job of Evil is to take over the world. No motive for this is given, and it’s never because the Evil person wants to make the world a better place. The job of Good is to stop Evil, and thus Save The World.
It’s always personal: This originally begins as a personal vendetta after Evil lashes out at the protagonist, but this is quickly subsumed into a sense of duty to Save The World by killing the minions of evil, usually in elaborate, drawn-out battle scenes. Nevertheless, as Good Triumphs Over Evil, a protagonist will invariably make some remark about having given meaning to those who have fallen or having achieved his revenge.
All motivations are exogenous, most caused by Evil: if someone on the side of Good is a traitor, it is because he was bribed or coerced by Evil. If a character is attacked by wild animals, it was somehow Evil’s fault. If it rains and a character gets wet, it must be the Wetness of An Evil Storm.
Morality Determines Causality: Just as most motivations are Evil, most of the plot consists of Evil’s machinations. Nothing can happen independently; it must all be the result of the actions of the protagonists or antagonists. There is literally no setting; it has become an extension of the characters.
No patience for unknowns: This is a bit more specific to the show I was watching. There was an aspect of the main character’s identity that the book kept the reader guessing at for at least 100 pages. I was shocked when the show merely blurted it out, as if it were known all along. And everyone picked it up and acted as if it were perfectly normal once it was revealed!
Violence solves everything: This book had several instances where the characters talked their way out of problems and used their wits. Part of the idea was to avoid unnecessary violence, which is always a smart thing to do. On TV, if one character so much as breathed too near another, out came the swords.
What Philosophy?: Finally, the motivation of Good is to Save the World simply because the Good Guys are Just Plain Nice. They don’t have those pesky attributes of real morality, like a set of personal values or decisions that require them to really think about these values. This makes the characters come off as completely inauthentic. It’s as if an average person were to suddenly become a hero, yet retained the morality of an average person rather than anything that could be construed as heroic. The deeds are heroic, but why are the characters performing them? Think Superman.
That’s my rant for today.
Three Minor Linguistic/Conceptual Observations and Conjectures in Greek Mythology
Zeus’ thunderbolts are made on Hephaestus’ forge -> cumulonimboids, which frequently have anvil-shaped peaks, herald thunderstorms.
“Charis” is the root of “charisma” and “charity”.
The Latin term for God, “deus”, probably came from “Zeus”.
An observation on market volatility in times of panic…
When there’s a general spirit of panic, the markets tend to fall by punctuated equilibrium. They’ll remain steady over months and then suddenly drop a great deal over a short period of time without warning.
It happened during the depression, and it’s also happening now. The decline has been fairly steady, but there have been days recently where the DJIA dropped 400+ points.
Still nothing on the scale of Black Tuesday. It would have to lose 20% of its value in a single day to exceed that.
Quantile v1.0 is complete.
Over the past few months, I’ve been working on a stock analysis and prediction application called Quantile for a freelance client. It is now finished. The numeric analysis tools are, anyway. Statistical predictors are going to be in v2.0, because teaching has left me too busy to continue work on it at the moment.
This is a bad market to train it on thanks to all of the nonsense going on in the financial industry and rippling through the market, but when/if the market stabilizes (and when I have more time), I am going to begin training it and performing dry runs. It’s a nifty little tool, and if the quantitative trading firms (all of which are foundering in the market right now, which I am getting a kick out of) thought I didn’t have the experience to do this when they contacted me several months ago, they were sadly mistaken. I’ve studied these sorts of algorithms extensively, and the mathematics that they consider difficult do not impress or faze me.
They wanted my work without compensating me for it – but my mind isn’t theirs to control or tap. It is my own, and it is time that people began to realize what that means. It is the asset that will preserve me through any market, for it can never lose its value and it is the source of all the wealth I possess. I could lose it all and build it right back up again, so long as I can think. I can apply this power to anyone I wish – but only in a fair agreement of mutual consent.
This is how capitalism should work. All the financial companies have demonstrated to me recently is how it should not.
Quick reduction of an opponent's homeworld in Spore through reverse terraforming.
I’ve been playing the space stage of Spore recently and one of my planets, which I had been in the process of terraforming, decided to randomly warm up (even though the planet was “stable”), brining the planet from “T2” to “T1”, and eventually to “T0”.
This had the effect of causing everything on the planet to go extinct and destroying all but one of the colonies I had placed there.
After the initial frustration subsided, I realized that this could be used as an excellent offensive weapon against heavily fortified enemy homeworlds. One good turn deserved another, and if the game was going to enforce funny physical rules, it had better enforce them consistently.
It was pretty simple: I bought the cloud vacuum, although any persistent terraforming tool would work. I went to an enemy homeworld, invariably a “T3” planet with 6 or 7 cities.
They attacked me, but my ship was faster. I simply kept flying around their planet and no one could catch me. I probably could not have reduced that planet by military means.
And while they chased me around their planet, I literally sucked the atmosphere out of it. It dropped from T3, to T2, to T1… and when it reached T0, every city but one blew up at once.
This isn’t a strategy if you want to take the planet intact. “Reverse terraforming” a world like that not only destroyed enemy colonies, but also caused all life on the planet to go extinct. Yes, with a cloud vacuum and a little bit of energy, I brought an apocalypse on an enemy world.
Now, I could use the cloud seeder tool to restore the atmosphere (one of the nice things about using one tool to do this is that you only need to use the opposite tool to reverse the effects), but then I’d need to repopulate all of the life on the planet before I could do that.
I thought it was an interesting strategy to use, however. Interesting enough to post about, in any case.
The game isn’t nearly as fun as it sounds. The space stage is probably the most fun (when you’re not fighting entire empires in your one ship or running all over the place trying to prevent your colonies from falling apart on their own), but the rest of the game is an epic fail. As in “supersized creature named fail”.
DRM has become even more invasive.
I just purchased Spore today and have been having great fun with it.
No, not playing the game. Neutering the DRM.
SecuROM has become much more invasive than it used to be. It’s become a pain in the neck to eliminate, partially because it now locks the administrator account out (!) of its registry keys, requiring the use of special software to remove them. Even without the idiotic 3 installation limit, I just don’t want it on my system.
It is proving difficult to eliminate the DRM and keep Spore fully functional, however.
I don’t condone piracy, but I feel bad about giving this company my money for software that essentially relies on the presence of a computer virus for correct operation. I probably should have just pirated the game.
But then where does it end? I wish to compensate the developers and innovators who made this work possible, but not the publisher, who served merely to tarnish that work. I don’t feel it justified to deprive both for the depravity of one.
Spam is changing again.
Why has every spam message that has hit my inbox in the past 2 weeks been about Paris Hilton? Stupid subjects, too: scenarios such as her being abducted by aliens.
Seriously, do people really care so much about her? If so, they need to find something else to talk about. Like how to improve their own lives. As a rule, you should care more about your own affairs than about celebrities’.