spin the cat

Sending the Message

2012-01-27T11:19:00.002-05:00

Student suspended after taking photo of sleeping substitute teacher. Yes, phones are not allowed to be used in class but this seems more to be punishment for embarrassing the school then about using the phone in class. so the message is this: do not embarrass those in authority above you. [Link]

A school faculty member saw the photograph on a social media website and alerted the principal at Mustang Mid-High School, a Mustang School District spokeswoman said. School officials met Friday about the matter.

The photograph shows a closed-eyed man reclining behind a classroom desk. He was apparently substituting for a biology teacher at the school. It's not clear if the photograph was taken during class time.

Cellphones are allowed on school grounds, but cannot be used during class, school officials said.

“We understand the importance of having these devices,” Mustang School District spokeswoman Mary Leaver said. “But we have to maintain a learning environment.”

Family members of the suspended student confirmed the suspension, but declined comment.

Officials wouldn't disclose the names of students they think might be involved in taking the picture and posting it on the Internet. They declined to provide further information on the substitute teacher.

Leaver said administrators are investigating the actions of the substitute and would not comment further, calling it a personnel issue. Leaver said disciplinary action against students is at the discretion of the principal and not discussed publicly.

Mini protesters a big problem in Siberia

2012-01-27T10:47:00.001-05:00

Toys as protest. [Link]

Russian police don't take kindly to opposition protesters – even if they're 5cm high and made of plastic.

Police in the Siberian city of Barnaul have asked prosecutors to investigate the legality of a recent protest that saw dozens of small dolls – teddy bears, Lego men, South Park figurines – arranged to mimic a protest, complete with signs reading: "I'm for clean elections" and "A thief should sit in jail, not in the Kremlin".

"Political opposition forces are using new technologies to carry out public events – using toys with placards at mini-protests," Andrei Mulintsev, the city's deputy police chief, said at a press conference this week, according to local media. "In our opinion, this is still an unsanctioned public event."

Activists set up the display after authorities repeatedly rejected their request to hold a sanctioned demonstration of the kind held in Moscow to protest disputed parliamentary elections results and Vladimir Putin's expected return to the presidency in a March vote.

Passersby admired the display with giggles, but police took it more seriously, examining its details and writing down each placard.

"The authorities' attempt to limit citizens' rights to express their position has become absurd," said Lyudmila Alexandrova, a 26-year-old graduate student and protest organiser. "We wanted to hyperbolise this attempt and show the absurdity and farce of officials' struggle with their own people."

Reasons for long term habitation of the Moon

2012-01-26T20:26:00.001-05:00

181 reasons from NASA. [Link PDF]

Create a strategy for permanently transferring government lunar assets, such as physical facilities, associated infrastructure, and the
related operational considerations (physical, logistical, legal transfer), to the private sector. As these assets are transferred, there will
need to be sufficient commercial or scientific reasons for living on Moon, such that it remains an attractive destination for private
firms to utilize the government assets and invest further.

Crazy Numbers

2012-01-25T15:59:00.002-05:00

Comparing Apple's quarterly numbers. [Link]

Simply looking over the numbers, it might be hard to wrap your head around what Apple just announced for their Q1 2012 results. A company this big is not supposed to be able to nearly double revenue year-to-year. Nor are they supposed to more than double profit. But Apple did both. The numbers are so big that they almost seem like they should be typos — especially coming after a quarter that was a “miss” (though we can now clearly see what a joke that “miss” was). So perhaps it’s best to point out some bigger numbers and to frame some of them in ways to make them easier to understand. That’s what all of Twitter seemed to be doing anyway during the earnings call this afternoon.

Apple’s profit of $13.1 billion was equal to theirrevenue in Q4 2010, as Jordan Golson notes. To be clear, that was just a year and a quarter ago. That’s how quickly Apple is growing.

Apple added $38 billion in cash to its reserves just in the past year alone, as Horace Dediu points out. They now have $97.6 billion in cash and equivalents. $64 billion of that is offshore, Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer stated during the call — meaning, it would cost money (taxes) to bring it back into the U.S.

Apple’s cash hoard alone is worth more than all but 52 companies on Earth, as Dennis Bermannotes.

Apple earned more money last quarter than the entire company was worth (in terms of market cap) just eight years ago, as Mathew Ingram relays from Eddy Elfenbein.

Apple likely sold three times as many iPads as Amazon sold Kindle Fires. At twice the price. And at a profit, as Jon Fortt notes. When asked about the impact of the lower-cost tablets, Apple CEO Tim Cook specifically mentioned the Kindle Fire and noted that when looking over Apple’s numbers, they didn’t seem to see any impact (positive or negative) from the Kindle Fire being on the market.

Apple’s revenues, while massive, are nothing compared to a company like Walmart, which reported$109.5 billion in revenue last quarter. BUT that $109.5 billion only turned into $3.3 billion of actual income for the quarter. In other words, Walmart has more than double the revenues of Apple, but Apple has more than four times the profits of Walmart. That’s remarkable.

Apple’s profits place them on this exclusive list of the most profitable quarters among corporations. You’ll note that Apple is the only company on the list that’s not an oil and gas company. And they’re a “mere” $3.2 billion from the top spot.

Lowered Expectations

2012-01-20T14:41:00.001-05:00

Simply doing your job, and demanding that others do so as well is now heroic. [Link]

Italian social networks on the Internet are singing the praises of De Falco, who tirelessly coordinated the rescue effort.

The tragedy had made De Falco "burst into tears with anger," his commanding officer told the Rome-based daily La Repubblica.

"Yes, I’m crying," the port authority chief was quoted as saying. "But I don’t think I’m being weak. Compassion is not weakness."

His attitude is in stark contrast to that of the captain now being blamed for the disaster and whom Italian prosecutors are seeking to indict.

Unable to conceal his anger on the night of the accident, De Falco told Schettino: "Go aboard and tell me how many people are on board - whether there are women and children and people in need."

A volley of expletives and threats followed as the port authority chief tried to get the captain to follow his orders.

The Internet community began hailing De Falco as a hero even while he was still coordinating the rescue effort. Headlines appeared on Twitter such as, "De Falco for president" and "Santo subito" ("Saint now!"), to the amazement of his wife.

"People who simply live up to their everyday responsibilities are suddenly becoming idols, personalities and heroes in this country," she commented with some concern.

SOPA tone deafness by Democrats

2012-01-19T10:05:00.000-05:00

Chortle. Probably the only time I will ever link to Kos. [Link]

Look at who is dropping support for SOPA.

"I'm withdrawing my co-sponsorship for the Protect IP Act," said Sen. Roy Blunt, a Missouri Republican.

Sen. John Boozman, an Arkansas Republican, "will be withdrawing his name as a co-sponsor" of Protect IP, a spokesman told CNET today. Fellow Protect IP co-sponsor Sen. James Risch, an Idaho Republican, said today that he wants "more time to re-examine the legislation before going to a vote" and has asked staff for a detailed briefing, a spokesman said.

And Sen. Orrin Hatch, the Utah Republican who has long been a close ally of Hollywood on copyright and is up for re-election this year, said on Twitter that "I will not only vote against moving the bill forward next week but also remove my co-sponsorship of the bill." [...]

Rep. John Carter, a Texas Republican who is listed as a SOPA sponsor, "reserves judgment on the final bill," a spokesman told CNET today. "He's certainly not saying pass the bill as-is -- there are legitimate concerns in this bill." SOPA sponsor Tim Griffin, an Arkansas Republican, now says: "I will not support a bill unless my constituents are comfortable with it."

If you keep reading that story, the Democrats listed all remain adamant that they'll remain co-sponsors of the legislation but work to "fix it".

Bullshit.

It's been a while since we've seen Democrats this tone deaf, this oblivious to political reality.

You have an entire wired generation focused on this issue like a laser, fighting like hell to protect their online freedoms, and it's FUCKING REPUBLICANS who are playing the heroes by dropping support?

Achievement Unlocked!

2012-01-19T08:51:00.001-05:00

Video game style achievements for developers. [Link]

Visual Studio Achievements, a Visual Studio plug-in, enables developers to unlock badges and compete against one another for a place on a leader board based on the code they write, its level of sophistication, and the Visual Studio capabilities they use to do so. Developers finally have the ability to actually show their friends, colleagues, project managers, spouses and customers how good they are at what they do all day and sometimes into the night.

Visual Studio Achievements is both playful and pragmatic. Built on ideas from the developers themselves, it is intended to be a humorous community-building game as well as a path to the many, and, to some, unknown features offered in Visual Studio. This is one of several initiatives Microsoft is undertaking to recognize developers for their tireless and indispensable work.

The three dominant factors shaping development in the industry today are how developers build apps, how they make money, and how they uniquely solve hard problems with new scenarios. The development environments, as well as the tools, need to be geared around how to make it easier and more enjoyable for Microsoft developers to do these three things. When you add in the prediction that by 2015, more than 50 percent of organizations will gamify their innovation processes, Achievements is a small but important element in delivering on that commitment.

The Visual Studio Achievements plug-in analyzes a background thread each time code is compiled, as well as listens for particular events and actions from Visual Studio. When certain criteria or actions are detected, the plug-in triggers a pop-up alert and awards a new badge, which is then displayed on the public leaderboard and the developer’s Channel 9 profile.

Augmented reality contact lenses almost here

2012-01-17T22:45:00.001-05:00

This seems really awesome. [Link]

Our eyes are just not built for the future. It sucks, but it's true. We can't physically focus on things that are very close to us, which is why we're not all rocking high-resolution immersive virtual reality displays built into our eyeglasses. How do we fix this problem? Simple: we upgrade our eyeballs.

We've posted about head-mounted VR displays a lot around here, but there's always a compromise going on: you can have a small, slick system that projects a little image with a narrow field of view, or you can have a gigantic bulky system that projects a big image with a wide field of view. The reason that you can't have the best of both worlds (a big projected display in a small system) is that our eyes simply cannot focus on images displayed at the distance of a pair of glasses. We can sort of fake it by fooling our eyes into thinking that the image is actually farther away, but doing this takes a lot of clunky optics, especially if you're going for something that looks halfway decent.

The obvious solution, then, is to modify our eyes to enable them to focus on objects that are much, much closer. It's not very hard to do this: you just need contact lenses. The hard part is creating a contact lens that keeps the rest of the world in focus while allowing you to view extremely close-up displays at the same time, but this is what a company called Innovega has managed to do.

Google's "Don't be evil" in Kenya

2012-01-13T08:54:00.000-05:00

If this is true, it is difficult to see how this is not evil. [Link]

So Mocality laid a trap: when that IP range next visited the Mocality site, they fed it fake phone numbers that went to Mocality's own call center, where a Mocality operator pretended to be a business-owner and recorded the conversation. In that conversation, the caller identified himself as a Google employee, calling about a joint Google-Mocality venture, and asking the business to pay Google for a Kenya Business Online website with its own domain on that basis. This was, of course, absolutely fraudulent. There was and is no Google-Mocality joint venture.

Shortly after, that IP range stopped visiting Mocality's servers, but another range, this one registered to Google's Mountain View headquarters [edit: this address has previously been used to conduct official Google business in India], began to query its database. Again, Mocality served a fake result with its own call-center number, and an hour later, they received a call from someone identifying herself as working on Google's behalf, asking for money for a joint Google-Mocality product.

The conclusion is hard to escape: Google -- or people working on its behalf, with its knowledge and cooperation -- took the numbers of tens of thousands of Kenyan businesses from Mocality's database, then fraudulently solicited money from them by claiming to be in a joint venture with Mocality. This seems to me to be outright criminal activity, and Google has a lot of explaining to do.

UPDATE [Link] (Emphasis added)

Google gave paidContent this statement from its Europe and emerging markets product and engineering VP Nelson Mattos:

“We were mortified to learn that a team of people working on a Google project improperly used Mocality’s data and misrepresented our relationship with Mocality to encourage customers to create new websites.

“We’ve already unreservedly apologised to Mocality. We’re still investigating exactly how this happened, and as soon as we have all the facts, we’ll be taking the appropriate action with the people involved.”

"A team of people working on a Google project" is "Google employees".
Also, we're mortified that we got caught.

Head Start never did

2012-01-12T15:53:00.000-05:00

It doesn't work. [Link]

You take the million or so poorest 3- and 4-year-old children and give them a leg up on socialization and education by providing preschool for them; if it works, it saves money in the long run by producing fewer criminals and welfare recipients — and more productive citizens. Indeed, Head Start did work well in several pilot programs carefully run by professionals in the 1960s. And so it was "taken to scale," as the wonks say, as part of Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty.

It is now 45 years later. We spend more than $7 billion providing Head Start to nearly 1 million children each year. And finally there is indisputable evidence about the program's effectiveness, provided by the Department of Health and Human Services: Head Start simply does not work.

According to the Head Start Impact Study, which was quite comprehensive, the positive effects of the program were minimal and vanished by the end of first grade. Head Start graduates performed about the same as students of similar income and social status who were not part of the program. These results were so shocking that the HHS team sat on them for several years, according to Russ Whitehurst of the Brookings Institution, who said, "I guess they were trying to rerun the data to see if they could come up with anything positive. They couldn't."

The Head Start situation is a classic among government-run social programs. Why do so many succeed as pilots and fail when taken to scale? In this case, the answer is not particularly difficult to unravel. It begins with a question: Why is Head Start an HHS program and not run by the Department of Education? The answer: Because it is a last vestige of Johnson's War on Poverty, which was run out of the old Department of Health, Education and Welfare. The War on Poverty attempted to rebuild poor communities from the bottom up, using local agencies called community action programs. These outfits soon proved slovenly; often they were little more than patronage troughs for local Democratic Party honchos — and, remarkably, to this day, they remain the primary dispensers of Head Start funds. As such, they are far more adept at dispensing make-work jobs than mastering the subtle nuances of early education. "The argument that Head Start opponents make is that it is a jobs program," a senior Obama Administration official told me, "and sadly, there is something to that."

This is criminal, every bit as outrageous as tax breaks for oil companies — perhaps even more outrageous, since we are talking about the lives of children. Happily, the Administration is taking steps to clean up the mess and channel money to the local programs that work most effectively, but a more complete overhaul will undoubtedly be needed. There are those who argue that this is a fool's errand, that the federal government simply can't run an effective local education program. They are called conservatives, and they have a point. Then there are those who say that even if Head Start isn't working so well, at least it's funneling money to poor neighborhoods that need it. They are called liberals, and they have a point too.

Both are wrong: in these straitened times, we need world-class education programs, from infancy on up. But we can no longer afford to be sloppy about dispensing cash — whether it's subsidies for oil companies or Head Start — to programs that do not produce a return.

And here is why the news media is not trusted or respected

2012-01-12T12:53:00.002-05:00

New York Times editor asking, unironically, should the Times point out when people lie in statements to the press. To be, in his words a 'Truth Vigilante'. [Link]

I’m looking for reader input on whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge “facts” that are asserted by newsmakers they write about.

One example mentioned recently by a reader: As cited in an Adam Liptak article on the Supreme Court, a court spokeswoman said Clarence Thomas had “misunderstood” a financial disclosure form when he failed to report his wife’s earnings from the Heritage Foundation. The reader thought it not likely that Mr. Thomas “misunderstood,” and instead that he simply chose not to report the information.

Another example: on the campaign trail, Mitt Romney often says President Obama has made speeches “apologizing for America,” a phrase to which Paul Krugman objected in a December 23 column arguing that politics has advanced to the “post-truth” stage.

As an Op-Ed columnist, Mr. Krugman clearly has the freedom to call out what he thinks is a lie. My question for readers is: should news reporters do the same?

If so, then perhaps the next time Mr. Romney says the president has a habit of apologizing for his country, the reporter should insert a paragraph saying, more or less:

“The president has never used the word ‘apologize’ in a speech about U.S. policy or history. Any assertion that he has apologized for U.S. actions rests on a misleading interpretation of the president’s words.”

Yes, tell us when someone is playing fast and loose with the facts. Yes, even those people I agree with. The media is there to keep everyone honest.

Give us facts, not a narrative. Let us determine what it means, but give us the tools to make informed decisions.

Why it is important to turn your ringer off at the Philharmonic

2012-01-12T10:16:00.002-05:00

It might make the conductor stop the symphony. [Link]

The New York Philharmonic's Tuesday performance of Mahler's Ninth symphony was halted by an unwelcomed sound: someone's ringing iPhone (using the marimba ringtone). It rang repeatedly in the fourth movement of Mahler's final completed symphony. From Super-Conductor:

According to an eyewitness, the offending phone owner was in the front rows of Avery Fisher Hall when his phone went off. (A post by Michael Jo on the classical music blog thousandfoldecho.com specifies that the interruption happened just 13 bars before the last page of the score.) In other words, in the final moments of a 25-minute movement, that ends a 90-minute symphony.

"Mr. Gilbert was visibly annoyed by the persistent ring-tone, so much that he quietly cut the orchestra," the concert-goer, music student Kyra Sims, reports. She related how the orchestra's music director turned on the podium towards the offender. The pause lasted a good "three or four minutes. It might have been two. It seemed long."

Window Display

2012-01-11T20:13:00.000-05:00

When can I get one?

How Wizards of the Coast is dropping the ball in engagement

2012-01-11T13:56:00.000-05:00

Press releases do not a community make. [Link]

I think you have accepted that you have made some mistakes. So I am not going to rake you over the coals. I'm not going to make demands of you that are in my self-interest or that seek to bolster some position I have. I am not going to pretend to help you, but really not care about your situation. I am going to take you at your word and give you my honest opinion.

You want to unite the clans. UNITE THEM! I can appreciate that. I can get behind that. So this advice that I give you is truly from the heart. You are an old friend that has, in my view, lost their way. I want to help you. You seem open to it. So here it is...

Live the D&D life

I don't mean that flippantly. Live the D&D life. Stop marketing. Stop pushing your product on people, start caring about people, and they will buy your product without the push. Care about D&D. Advocate for D&D. Be everywhere, talking about D&D. Know the community, know the people. Feel their pain, know their problems, give them help, and care.

I know you might think you are doing that now. You aren't. You are trapped in the past. The future is digital and it is passing you by.

Your website is poorly designed and hard to navigate. I don't want to spend time there. I'm looking at it today, you know what I don't see? A headline that tells me 5th edition is announced. Just a link to SIGN UP and be a part of gamer history. You know what my first thought is reading that? "Sign Up" is a code word for: Let me market to you . Sign up for my newsletter. It doesn't scream out that you are making a new edition. It doesn't make me care and it doesn't make me click. Your "D&D next" group page is bland and boring. I could go on, but I have no desire to ridicule you about your web design.

You have a twitter feed and a Facebook page. Both are boring. It looks like you are trying to sell me something.

You are talking in marketing speak. You need to stop. Now.

Let me give you some hard advice on how to do that, not just impressions and vague directives.

And a comment by Fred Hicks.

The problem is not people not wanting to be marketed to. Generally they do, but they want the marketing to dress up as (better: be ) a buddy, a peer, a fellow fanboy, a gamer who's "in the life". Why? Because people want to be marketed to by someone who is one of them. Someone who shares their enthusiasm, and can communicate that enthusiasm -- infectiously -- to them in a way that gets them buying in. Because that's an invitation to an awesome party by a cool guy, right? Folks like being invited. What they don't like is that being a big put-on, a phony sales pitch by some slickster who wouldn't know a d4 if he got it stuck caltrop-like in his foot. And it doesn't matter if the person is actually a fan -- if they're coming off as a slickster, that perception check rules the day.

This right here is why word of mouth is the most effective. Because it's authentic and genuine. Any marketing or sales effort that isn't word of mouth has to figure out how to make up the authenticity gap. It is not easy.

The wizards site could continue to suck navigationally, etc, if it just managed to be authentic and genuine more than not. But that's not a signal that's shouting out over the noise these days.

Iran scarier than thought

2012-01-10T15:10:00.001-05:00

They have UFO technology! [Link]

Meet Mehran Tavakoli Keshe, who purports to be the father of the RQ-170 abduction. In a recent post to his eponymous foundation’s online forums, Keshe claims the Iranians used “advanced space technology” that he pioneered. “The craft has been air-picked-up and been put down on its belly through the use of field forces,” Keshe writes — by which he means force fields. It’s feeling a lot like Tinfoil Tuesday, our weekly round-up of the planet’s most insane conspiracy theories.

‘The Defense Secretary would like his lightsaber back.’

The U.S. has yet to confirm that the drone Iran claims to have is actually the stealthy “Beast of Kandahar,” and the yellow model that Iran has peddled out looks like it’s made out of fondant, like a drone-shaped cake constructed for an episode of Food Network Challenge. Keshe claims that the drone looks as smooth and clean as it does in Iran’s propaganda photos because his force fields intercepted the RQ-170, like a tractor beam would, and deposited it gently to Iranian soil. As summarized by Pure Energy Systems News, Keshe’s technology, part of an “Iranian [flying] saucer program,” harnesses “a fusion reaction that manipulates dark matter, regular matter, and antimatter.”

“We have no comment on this individual’s claims,” George Little, the Pentagon’s chief spokesman, tells Danger Room, “but tell him the Secretary would like his lightsaber back.”

Luckily, we have Jedi - or Sith on our side, depending on your political views.

School Cops

2012-01-10T11:58:00.000-05:00

Moronic. I am actually embarrassed for the schools and the teachers that they are so incompetent at maintaining control of students that they have to call the cops in for such trivial reasons. [Link]

The charge on the police docket was "disrupting class". But that's not how 12-year-old Sarah Bustamantes saw her arrest for spraying two bursts of perfume on her neck in class because other children were bullying her with taunts of "you smell".

"I'm weird. Other kids don't like me," said Sarah, who has been diagnosed with attention-deficit and bipolar disorders and who is conscious of being overweight. "They were saying a lot of rude things to me. Just picking on me. So I sprayed myself with perfume. Then they said: 'Put that away, that's the most terrible smell I've ever smelled.' Then the teacher called the police."

The policeman didn't have far to come. He patrols the corridors of Sarah's school, Fulmore Middle in Austin, Texas. Like hundreds of schools in the state, and across large parts of the rest of the US, Fulmore Middle has its own police force with officers in uniform who carry guns to keep order in the canteens, playgrounds and lessons. Sarah was taken from class, charged with a criminal misdemeanour and ordered to appear in court.

Each day, hundreds of schoolchildren appear before courts in Texas charged with offences such as swearing, misbehaving on the school bus or getting in to a punch-up in the playground. Children have been arrested for possessing cigarettes, wearing "inappropriate" clothes and being late for school.

In 2010, the police gave close to 300,000 "Class C misdemeanour" tickets to children as young as six in Texas for offences in and out of school, which result in fines, community service and even prison time. What was once handled with a telling-off by the teacher or a call to parents can now result in arrest and a record that may cost a young person a place in college or a job years later.

"We've taken childhood behaviour and made it criminal," said Kady Simpkins, a lawyer who represented Sarah Bustamantes. "They're kids. Disruption of class? Every time I look at this law I think: good lord, I never would have made it in school in the US. I grew up in Australia and it's just rowdy there. I don't know how these kids do it, how they go to school every day without breaking these laws."

The British government is studying the American experience in dealing with gangs, unruly young people and juvenile justice in the wake of the riots in England. The UK's justice minister, Crispin Blunt, visited Texas last September to study juvenile courts and prisons, youth gangs and police outreach in schools, among other things. But his trip came at a time when Texas is reassessing its own reaction to fears of feral youth that critics say has created a "school-to-prison pipeline". The Texas supreme court chief justice, Wallace Jefferson, has warned that "charging kids with criminal offences for low-level behavioural issues" is helping to drive many of them to a life in jail.

New Carbon Dioxide Scrubbing Material

2012-01-10T10:35:00.002-05:00

Much more efficient and usable under real world conditions as well as reusable. Nice. [Link]

If cleaning carbon dioxide from the atmosphere was easy, we’d already be doing it. But carbon capture has proven to be a tough technology to feasibly roll out on a grand scale, and that means all the things we do that produce carbon dioxide emissions--which seems to be just about everything these days--are still roughly as bad for the planet as they were several years ago. That’s a problem in a warming world, and one that a team of researchers may have just found a solution for via an inexpensive polymeric material.

Reporting their findings in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, the team (which includes a Nobel laureate in chemistry) descirbes a new solid material based on polyethylenimine that can be used to capture carbon dioxide at the source--be that an industrial smokestack or a car’s exhaust pipe--under real-world conditions where the air contains moisture.

Dungeons and Dragons Fifth Edition

2012-01-09T10:49:00.000-05:00

Save vs. GURPS. New edition to be a "universal rule set". [Link]

“We’re focusing on what gets people excited about D&D, and making sure we have a game that encompasses all different styles,” says Mike Mearls, group manager for the D&D research and development team. “Even if you haven’t played in 20 years, we want you to be able to sit down and say, ‘this is D&D.’”

In its current form, Dungeons & Dragons isn’t a single game that everyone plays the same way; it’s more like several different games descended from a common ancestor. Over its four decade history, the game’s designers frequently changed the rules and republished them; sometimes they did so to fix problems, sometimes just to sell new rule books.

As a result, the fanbase is fractured to the point of making it difficult to play the game, isolating players that don’t know or enjoy particular versions. More worrying, if you’re Wizards of the Coast: A devoted player of 1977′s “Advanced Dungeons & Dragons” rules might play your game every single week —even though they haven’t spent any money on it in 35 years.

To solve this problem, Wizards has been looking back at each edition of the game going back to 1974, and identifying core rules that make the game work best. They’re also soliciting suggestions from players via weekly columns on their web site, and through community discussion threads. And in coming months, they’ll host several rounds of playtesting, allowing fans to try out new rules before they’re finalized, and identify what does and doesn’t work.

When completed, that collective wisdom will be used to craft a new engine that will serve as as a sort of “best of” edition —and which should be familiar and fun whether you’re green or a grayhair.

Of course, bringing all kinds of players under one tent isn’t easy when they want different things. To address that, Mearls says the new edition is being conceived of as a modular, flexible system, easily customized to individual preferences.

“Just like a player makes his character, the Dungeon Master can make his ruleset,” says Mearls. “He might say ‘I’m going to run a military campaign, it’s going to be a lot of fighting’… so he’d use the combat chapter, drop in miniatures rules, and include the martial arts optional rules.”

“You can have as little or as much customization as you want,” he says. “It’s about letting people find their own way to play.”

I am more than a little worried this will be less than the sum of it's parts.

A suitable Secret lair

2012-01-08T10:43:00.001-05:00

Yours for 3 million. [Link]

If you have plans to take over the world, you're going to need a secret lair from which you can run your evil plots. But why waste time and money hollowing out a volcano when there's already the perfect place for sale in the real estate listings? The Jamesburg Earth Station was built by NASA in 1968 for receiving transmissions from the Apollo moon landings, then it was used by AT&T for satellite telecommunications. It even played a key role relaying pictures of the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. Now it can be yours for just under $3 million. The fully steerable dish is about 11 stories high and 98 feet across, which should enable you to suck in just about any TV station on Earth. Your purchase includes more than just the dish, as you also get the 20,000 square foot operations building with an indoor basketball court, a helicopter landing pad, a three bedroom house, a barn, and 160 acres of land. The whole thing sits in central California about 20 miles southeast of Monterey, and wannabe Dr Evils and Blofelds will be pleased to learn that the main building was constructed to withstand a 5 Megaton nuclear blast.

Horizontal Killer Applications

2012-01-06T14:24:00.001-05:00

Trello looks pretty cool, but I found this insight very interesting. [Link]

The great horizontal killer applications are actually just fancy data structures.

Spreadsheets are not just tools for doing “what-if” analysis. They provide a specific data structure: a table. Most Excel users never enter a formula. They use Excel when they need a table. The gridlines are the most important feature of Excel, not recalc.

Word processors are not just tools for writing books, reports, and letters. They provide a specific data structure: lines of text which automatically wrap and split into pages.

PowerPoint is not just a tool for making boring meetings. It provides a specific data structure: an array of full-screen images.

Some people saw Trello and said, “oh, it’s Kanban boards. For developing software the agile way.” Yeah, it’s that, but it’s also for planning a wedding, for making a list of potential vacation spots to share with your family, for keeping track of applicants to open job positions, and for a billion other things. In fact Trello is for anything where you want to maintain a list of lists with a group of people.

There are millions of things that need that kind of data structure, and there hasn’t been a great “list-of-list” app before Trello. (There have been outliners, but outlines are, IMHO, one of the great dead ends in UI design: so appealing to programmers, yet so useless to civilians).

Creatures frozen for 32,000 years still alive

2012-01-05T19:47:00.002-05:00

This is the plot of many horror films. Let's all be careful. [Link]

A new type of organism discovered in an Arctic tunnel came to life in the lab after being frozen for 32,000 years.

The deep-freeze bacteria could point to new methods of cryogenics, and they are the sort of biology scientists say might exist on Mars and other planets and moons.

"The existence of microorganisms in these harsh environments suggests — but does not promise -- that we might one day discover similar life forms in the glaciers or permafrost of Mars or in the ice crust and oceans of Jupiter’s moon Europa," said Richard Hoover, an astrobiologist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center.

Other microbes have been discovered in similar frigid environments, sometimes clinging to pockets of liquid water in ice packs. And some microbes survive in ice as spores, but they need to be cultured to bring them to life.

NASA described the newfound critter as "the first fully described, validated species ever found alive in ancient ice."

"They immediately started swimming when the ice melted," Hoover told LiveScience, adding that the cryopreserved bacteria were instantly ready to eat and multiply.

Man tries to enter U.S. using his iPad as a passport (and it works)

2012-01-05T12:01:00.004-05:00

The wonders of technology. [Link]

Recently Canadian Martin Reisch entered the United States by showing the border officers a scanned copy of his passport on his iPad.

At the moment, this isn't exactly legal yet — only passports, enhanced driver's licenses and Nexus passes are supposed to be used at land crossings — but it apparently worked for Reisch when he forgot his passport.

Both ways, mind you: the man wasn't stuck in America for eternity with nothing but an iPad and a good story.

While using digital identification isn't listed as a viable option yet, it may very well become one in the future. Why not? We do everything else digitally, and it does seem a whole lot easier to remember your iPad than you passport.

Our new concerns would be if our batteries are dead rather than if we forgot our passports. And for that, hopefully someone will finally figure out the solar powered cell phone.

Update: For it's part, the Canadian Border Patrol, a U.S. government agency and part of Homeland Security, released a statement saying the story is bogus:
"The assertion that a traveler was admitted into the U.S. using solely a scanned image of his passport on an iPad is categorically false. In this case, the individual had both a driver's license and birth certificate, which the CBP officer used to determine identity and citizenship in order to admit the traveler into the country."

Reisch, in response, tweeted: "uh actually i don't even know where my birth certificate is dude... but i definately didn't use it."

We'll update again if it ever comes to light who is actually telling the truth here.

Yard Signs in New Hampshire

2012-01-05T11:54:00.002-05:00

Looking at the yard signs in Purple neighborhoods. [Link]

In elections, yard signs provide the essential “social proof” to back up the television ads, debate performances, and stump speeches — especially when it comes time to close the deal with relatively apolitical or undecided voters.

But this is a Republican primary. What do January yard signs have to do with Barack Obama?

Here is a secret: If you want to predict a general election, count the number of Republican yard signs in “purple” neighborhoods.

Take a drive through an upper-middle class community in a swing state. Find the subdivision where there’s a coffee shop on the corner and an organic grocery store not too far away, ideally where the Priuses outnumber the SUV’s… but not by much. Find the block where the adults are academics, professionals, or government employees and where every household has a couple of kids in the public schools. The voter breakdown in the ideal “purple” neighborhood is about a third Republican, a third Democrat, and a third independent.

Welcome to Concord, New Hampshire. Or Fort Collins, Colorado. Or northern Virginia. Or Raleigh, North Carolina. Or the suburbs and exurbs and small cities in swing states around the country.

Now count the Republican yard signs. Signs are not polling data, and they are certainly not election returns, but a yard sign is a definitive measure of three things: Support (obviously); intensity; and – most importantly — a voter’s willingness to make his political opinions known to his neighbors. A yard sign — especially in a “hostile” environment — is a symbol of political courage, a sign of an impending shift in public opinion.

The early returns from the yard sign tallies are in: Voters in New Hampshire want their neighbors to know that they are voting Republican this year.

That is a big deal. If you live in a conservative community in a Republican state, it is hard to understand the open hostility towards Republicans in “purple” neighborhoods. Put up a sign in your yard and prepare to have your neighbors approach (or accost) you at the grocery store. Prepare to have them bring your kids into the discussion. Prepare to have your business boycotted. There is no separation between the personal and the political on the left, so in a swing state a sign in your yard marks you as a target.

We saw this effect in 2006. My postmortem on the 2006 election debacle was titled “Cocktail Parties and Yard Signs.” It focused on the small city of Fort Collins, Colorado, a college town of about 130,000 people. The city leans Democrat, the county leans Republican. The state is a battleground. The thesis was simple: Republicans in Fort Collins were embarrassed — almost afraid — to put Republican signs up in their front yards.

The “cocktail parties” part of the title refers to how fast Republicans will disavow their own nominee in non-political settings. Go to a cocktail party and listen for the telltale phrase “I’m a registered Republican, but…” Even worse, listen to someone who you know to be a staunch conservative Republican describe themselves as an “independent who votes for the person more than the party.”

The “Cocktail Parties and Yard Signs” effect means that the pressure from the left has won. It means that a certain level it is no longer “socially acceptable” to be a Republican. Republican candidates do not have a chance in that climate.

Actually, we all experienced a similar form of pressure in 2008 on Facebook. When I describe Facebook to political clients, I describe it simply as a front porch in a tightly-knit neighborhood. Social media provides limitless opportunity for word-of-mouth campaigning, but like in the real world, when you put a sign out, you are going to hear from your neighbors. On Facebook, the only candidate on the ballot in 2008 was Barack Obama, and we all heard from our friends, relatives, and long-lost high-school buddies about Hope and Change. That’s the dynamic every cycle in “purple” neighborhoods.

Which brings us back to New Hampshire.

Future Histories of our Pasts

2011-12-18T13:23:00.000-05:00

Imagine the far off future of - the 1980's. [Link]

Today, as I write this, it’s December of 2011.

I know. Duh. But think about it for a moment in terms of pop culture.

That means we are thirty-six years past 1975… the date of the end of the world in The Omega Man.

We are thirty-two years past 1979… the date of the suspended-animation experiment that put Dylan Hunt to sleep for 154 years in Genesis II.

1982 was the first year of the Seaview‘s regular patrol of the Pacific Ocean, where Admiral Nelson, Captain Crane, and the rest of the crew averted any number of natural disasters, alien invasions, and supernatural menaces that threatened the existence of the human race.

It was back in 1983 that the sub-orbital passenger ship Spindrift was lost in a space anomaly somewhere in mid-flight between Los Angeles and London…

Speaking of space anomalies, 1987 is when Captain Anthony “Buck” Rogers disappeared into one while piloting the shuttle Ranger III.

Atwoodian tautology considered harmful

2011-12-15T19:37:00.001-05:00

Approving meta statement. [Link]

Considered Harmful

Declarative statement opening blog statement. Back away from declarative statement slightly, pivot then double down with even more controversial declarative statement. Insult beloved programming language and assert newer language's idiomatic aesthetic as superior. Including backing statistics with missing Y-axis labels to prop up weak link-bait including declarative statement. Reference Linus, invoke Dijkstra. Oh, everything looks bad if you remember it.

Biased Benchmarks

Supporting albeit equivocating statement. Weak marginally equivocating statement because I want to be on TechCrunch. Farmville.

The phrase 'Atwoodian tautology' cracks me up.