While in Costa Rica, I had a brief discussion (with a poker website employee) about the likelihood that a computer will eventually be able to beat any human player (at which point it’s pretty much useless to play poker on websites; you can be assured that everyone there will be an unbeatable computer player). That came to mind when I read this:

100 trillion brain cells and most of us can’t reliably multiply a pair of two digit numbers. If computers had invented humans as part of a BI program (biological intelligence), humans would have been tossed aside as barely having achieved perfect game play at Tic-Tac-Toe. What use is 100 trillion brain cells that can’t reliably compute a 15% tip after a heavy lunch? Many computers would like to know.

From Poker Program Battles Humans In Vegas on SlashDot.

As a rule, the quality of a movie is inversely correlated with how long it takes to explain the entire plot. That’s why I stay away from movies with titles like Volcano, Inferno, Titanic, and Snakes on a Plane.

From Dilbert Blog.

I’m trying to think of counterexamples and thusfar can’t. Perhaps some of my more movie-centric friends can find an example.

Update: Haha, one of Adams’ posters points out that that should be directly correlated, not inversely correlated. -1 to Adams for writing it and -1 to me for posting it.

Twelve years ago, Homer Simpson said:

I got kicked out [of the audio-visual club] ’cause of my views of Vietnam. Also, I was stealing projectors.

Ben Stein and the intelligent design movement are also trying to “steal some projectors” with their new movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. Besides trying to promote the validity of intelligent design / creationism over evolution and tie Darwinism to the Holocaust, it also claims that the mainstream scientific community has persecuted those who do not believe in evolution — including firing various academics for publicly making anti-evolution statements.

Depending on your exact definition of “persecute”, part of that last statement may well be true. The major problem is that the cases that the movie cites as examples are basically exaggerated or otherwise misrepresented.

It’s important to see Expelled for what it is: a propaganda piece intended to win converts in order to gain power (and probably not a little bit of money). The evidence for this lies not only in analysis of the movie’s content but in analysis of the marketing campaign for the movie:

“Expelled” is spending millions to succeed, huge for a documentary. It’s hired four PR firms. It’s running a sweepstakes for church groups, offering a cash prize to the one that sells the most tickets. It’s paying up to 10 Grand for schools to send their students. The movie even staged a songwriting competition.

SONG: If you challenge evolution, you get expelled!

Oh, and Ben Stein traveled across the country on a bright red bus for “Expelled, the Road Show.” This is mostly the work of Motive Marketing’s Paul Lauer. He’s the guy who made “Passion” [ed: "of the Christ", the Mel Gibson movie about Jesus] into a phenomenon by harnessing the power of this country’s 160 million Christians.

PAUL LAUER: How do you get this big amoeba to flex its muscle? When it flexes, it’s enormous. The challenge has always been, How do you get those people to activate.

Expelled’s message is that the scientific community is using indoctrination, obfuscation, and coercion to push it’s agenda. The irony (hypocrisy?) is that, in reality, those are the very tactics being employed by Expelled and the rest of the intelligent design movement. Skepticism and rebuttal are the ways to counteract this, and those are the goals of the scientific community — not its opponents.

Laura and I and our friend Marco saw an advance screening of The Golden Compass last saturday. Overall, it was pretty good. I pretty much as agree with everything Marco says in his analysis so I’ll refer you to his post rather than reiterate most of it… but I would like to add a few points of my own.

Over the past few years I’ve been looking for fantasy movies that were more adult-oriented (ie: deeper than a typical kids movie) and done well (ie: not the mess that was Dungeons & Dragons). Lord of the Rings is the poster child for this, but there’s few other candidates. The Harry Potter movies have always left me yearning for something more (disclaimer: I haven’t read any of the books nor yet seen Order of the Phoenix). Narnia was too childish (any fantasy movie featuring Santa Claus is pretty much disqualified despite its other merits). Note that I don’t consider these to be “bad” movies (their box office and fan base obviously prove me wrong) but they’re fundamentally not what I’m looking for.

Golden Compass suffers from the same affliction: it’s focused on being a movie for kids. It’s not a matter of source material: LOTR (but much moreso The Hobbit) was considered a children’s story but was adapted into a movie that fully engaged me. Golden Compass is a step better than Harry Potter and two better than Narnia; it’s helped along by some more adult themes:

1. Questioning of authority
2. Abuse of power
3. Conspiracy to retain power / crush dissent
4. Destruction of the soul / will

The storytelling itself is fine, although definitely rushed. Had they given the movie another hour (it’s currently less than 2) I think they could have fleshed it out more. Again, this points towards a child focus: kids won’t sit still for 3 hours, so the moviemakers made sacrifices that cater to a different audience. However, it’s never cringe-inducing; it may not be polished but there are no sharp edges. Also: if the anti-religious message is toned down for the movie, then I’d be impressed by that in the book; it’s far more blatant than the counter-themes in Narnia.

The CGI is great, mostly because it’s enabling yet not intrusive. There’s a jaw-dropping (snicker) fight between two very large polar bears, and they look & move exactly like I would expect bears would in real life (at least when they’re not anthropomorphosizing). The landscapes are beautiful & believable as well. The moviemakers fortunately did not try to add in any rendered- human characters; Beowulf tried this and failed (though it did better than previous movies). Instead, GC got some big-name actors to put in good-to-great performances (the child star did quite well).

Verdict: it’s worth a watch, especially if you’re taking a 12-year-old out for a show.

I got the Half-Life 2 Orange Box this week. I haven’t played it much (I don’t have much time for gaming these days) but I did beat Portal in a day. I’ve also played a bit of Team Fortress 2, and it’s a pretty good visual upgrade to Classic (but still the same game). I’m saving Episode 2 until Laura gets back into town, as she enjoys watching me play. I was slightly annoyed at having to re-buy Half-Life 2 and Episode 1 over again, but I’ve forgiven Valve as I’ve come to understand that they were mostly pressured into it by the brick-and-mortar retailers. Valve did the right thing by allowing (and in fact promoting) the transfer of extra licenses/activation keys to other people. By the way, if you’d like my keys for HL2 and Ep1, let me know.

If the Gravity Gun was a big step forward in gameplay evolution, then the Portal Gun is a flying leap. (The fact that they’re both born from the same series should tell you something). It’s definitely the most flexible and enjoyable game weapon I’ve seen yet. It’s a teleporter, lock pick, jet pack, grappling hook, cloaking device, and grenade launcher all rolled into one. The best part is that it’s not overbalanced at any of those things, so you have to be clever to get the most out of it.

The big problem is that it’s way to easy to be too clever, and so the map designers had to design in heavy restrictions to keep it from becoming too unbalanced. Thus, you can only use the Portal Gun where they allow you to use it, via the mechanism of walls that don’t allow portals. At times the restrictions are stifling, but it’s completely forgivable once you consider:

• The game is designed and marketed as a puzzle game, not a more freeform adventure.
• They worked the restrictions into the storyline very well: the protagonist is supposed to be advancing through a testing facility, not running around free.
• It’s clear that the entire Portal project was a proof-of-concept for future Half-Life games. It’s going to get better from here. I pity the level designers though.

Also: I’ve often said that Fallout 2 has the best intro movie of any computer game; I think Portal gets the prize for best end game movie (though it loses some of the effect if you haven’t played it all the way through).

I am not planing on seeing Transformers in the theaters, and I probably won’t bother with the DVD either. What sealed it for me was the complete lack of robot dialog in the trailers… despite there being plenty of speaking clips from the humans. The Transformers of the 80s wasn’t just about robots and explosions; there were actual characters involved.

So, Transformers is on my not-worth-the-bother list… however this quote was good enough that I figured I’d post.

The robots had the predictable and tiresome “but humans are so violent” philosophical debate. At this point we’re pretty much used to sanctimonious aliens showing up and tut-tutting at us in movies, although it was pretty irritating to hear it coming from a bunch of robots who’d had a war that destroyed their entire homeworld, to the point of making it uninhabitable for robots.

That pretty much sums it up. From everything I’ve heard so far Transformers is just more Bay/Bruckheimer silliness. I’ll catch the South Park parody instead.

Spider-Sense does not work on:

• Spitballs
• Vengeful sons
• Symbiotic doppelgangers

Who knew?

My aunt and Laura and I went to see The Yeomen of the Guard at the Pumphouse Theatre last night. For a small community-theatreish production, it was performed really well, and we all enjoyed it.

A bit of humor occurred during the intermission, when a member of the theatre group announced that the next production the group was doing was the play No Sex Please, We’re British… to which he embarrassingly added “and, uh, we’ll leave that one right there”.

I snickered. “No Sex Talk Please, We’re Canadian.”

Laura and I are watching To Serve and Protect, the Canadian version of COPS. When compared against its southern counterpart, it’s comically dull. There’s no wrestling, tasering, or footchases. It’s basically just cops (in mustaches) picking up drunks and pot smokers. And everyone (the busted and the busters) is polite with each other.

PS3 Supply Exceeds Demand

I saw this firsthand at Best Buy in Connecticut while I was there. Two days after Christmas, they had perhaps 2 dozen PS3s stacked up against the wall behind the customer service desk. I asked the clerk if those were the real deal or just empty promotional boxes; she replied that they were legit, and had been sitting there for a while.
I then asked about their Wiis; those were still selling out immediately. Laura and I have been trying to get one since they launched, and had no success (granted we’re not fanatic about it; we just ask every time we happen to be in a store).
I think this is a very bad portent for Sony. A lot of people have been talking about how the PS3 has become a make-or-break product for Sony; gaming is now a large portion of Sony’s overall revenues, and the Blu-Ray player was an important strategic move for the movie division. The fact that the PS3 has gotten such a “meh” response in comparision to the Wii (and to a lesser extent, the XBox 360) I think is very telling.

Still, there’s Japan to consider (they’re a major Sony stronghold), and of course the units may start selling faster once a major software title comes out (Final Fantasy is the poster boy for that). On the other hand, Sony is already losing money on the units, and so if they’re forced to cut prices to compete with the less-expensive Wii and Xbox, then they’ll be in murky waters, even if they can get the production prices down.

So, time to short Sony stock?

I definitely think so. Unfortunately the amount of money I’d be willing to put on a bet like that is so small that I don’t think it’s worth the effort/fees… so I’ll keep my investment virtual for now ($47.69/share on January 12 2007).