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« February 2015 | Main | April 2015 » March 31, 2015Ethics in Video Games I thought this was actually pretty kewl. "Depending on what kind of ethics you base your arguments on, there are no evil decisions in 'The Walking Dead,'" says Staaby. "Rather, are you making decisions [to create] the best consequences or making sure that the action itself is a good deed?" Dr. Praveen R. Kambam, a psychiatrist who consults with the media analysis group Broadcast Thought, says this tendency to be influenced by social feedback is what's known as a conformity bias. "In other words, [people] tend to look to the actions of others in deciding how they should behave," said Kambam. "This bias is stronger when faced with questions that do not have absolute answers, like moral questions." The layered nature of identity in video games can complicate matters as well, since players make different decisions depending on whether or not they're role-playing the characters they inhabit. This gets particularly complicated in the second season of "The Walking Dead," where you play as an 11-year-old girl named Clementine. When you're faced with horrifying situations, will you make the decisions that you would make, or the ones you think she would make? (I confess i keep reading the teacher's name as "Stabby" and then mentally giggling a little.) I think it's interesting that Telltale games are trying to make people see beyond the usual "I need to blow all this stuff up so that i can get to the boss" strategy of gaming. The comparison between your decisions and those made by other players after every chapter must help keep it on the players' minds, too. I know that when we play D&D, it's sometimes too easy to forget that hacking through a bunch of opponents just to get through the dungeon isn't always the best solution nor the one you should be making if you are truly role-playing your character. It's certainly easy to forget when you have party members with different moral compasses. These are your companions. You guys fight trolls together. Ofc you want to support their decisions. But wait - you just condoned a cold-blooded killing of an unarmed opponent who posed no threat. And you're supposed to be playing a lawful good character! So, yeah, conformity bias. Now, how do i play these games without actually playing them, because, as we all know, i get nauseous sometimes playing 2-D scrolling games. And it's only been two years since i've been able to just sit in the same room as fnord while he was playing a first-person shooter without getting a splitting headache. Actually, you know what? I take it back. I don't want to play these sorts of games because i'd constantly be worried that i made the "wrong" choice. I've been conditioned to expect questions to have "right" and "wrong" answers and my brain would prolly explode if i tried to make it understand there was no such thing in this case. I'd end up anxious and whiny and nobody wants to see that. By min | March 31, 2015, 8:17 AM | Video Games| Link
It's all Michael Douglas Ever Wanted By min | March 30, 2015, 1:03 PM | Movies | Comments (1) | Link
Time to Get Squatting Update: Fnord tells me that weight lifting is considered "muscle-strengthening" and not "weight-bearing" and that what i'd actually have to do is jump and run. It's entirely possible that i responded with something highly uncomplimentary. Anyhoo, back to bone health. The bad news (for me, obliviously. i don't know what you do): i hate running, jumping, and push-ups. I'm also a HUGE fan of doing nothing. The good news: i don't hate weight lifting (except split squats. split squats are the devil, i tell you. The. Devil.). What about supplements, you say. Well, like most vitamin supplements, Stupid expensive pee. At this point, fnord and i can only work on maintaining the bone density we have. There's no way to increase it. That ship has sailed, my friend. [emphasis mine] I guess now's the time to thank my mom for forcing me to take ballet for 9 years. Take that, osteoporosis! By min | March 28, 2015, 12:36 PM | Science | Comments (2) | Link
Super Terrible Kindle Covers I can't...*gasp*...stop...*wheeze*...laughing...OMG! He's a horse! And a MAN! *SNORT* Today might be the greatest day ever. By min | March 27, 2015, 1:19 PM | Boooooks & Ummm... Other? | Comments (6) | Link Never Forget to Take Your Fiber Supplements Or microbes will eat out your stomach lining. Or something like that. In a recent study presented at the Keystone meeting, Eric Martens of the University of Michigan Medical School, postdoctoral researcher Mahesh Desai and their colleagues found that this fuel switch had striking consequences in rodents. A group of mice fed a high-fiber diet had healthy gut lining, but for mice on a fiber-free diet, "the mucus layer becomes dramatically diminished," he explained at the meeting. This shift might sometimes have severe health consequences. Research by a Swedish team, published last year in the journal Gut, showed a link between bacteria penetrating the mucus layer and ulcerative colitis, a painful chronic bowel disease. A third group of mice received high-fiber chow and fiber-free chow on alternating days--"like what we would do if we were being bad and eating McDonald's one day and eating our whole grains the next," Martens joked. Even the part-time high-fiber diet was not enough to keep guts healthy: these mice had a mucus layer about half the thickness of mice on the consistently high-fiber diet. If we can extend these results to humans, he said, it "tells us that even eating your whole fiber foods every other day is still not enough to protect you. You need to eat a high-fiber diet every day to keep a healthy gut." Along the same lines, Swanson's group found that the gut microbiomes of his adult subjects reverted back to initial profiles as soon as the high-fiber bars were discontinued. I guess pandas never suffer from ulcerative colitis, what with all that bamboo they can't actually digest. *shakes fist* Pandas!! By min | March 27, 2015, 1:09 PM | Science| Link Marvel Sales January. New writer with a slightly different approach to the analysis. By fnord12 | March 27, 2015, 12:25 PM | Comics| Link
Recap 65 Did You Notice All Those Albino Alligators Were Left-Handed? By min | March 26, 2015, 9:52 PM | D&D| Link That's you, bro I love when Windows Update demands a reboot (always at the most opportune time) and i begrudgingly tell it to go ahead, and then it complains that Windows Update needs to shut down before i can reboot. Like, seriously, dude? Should i really be trusting you to update my computer? By fnord12 | March 26, 2015, 9:43 AM | My stupid life | Comments (1) | Link
Who Doesn't Like a Little Measles with Their Ebola? Keeps things interesting not knowing which horrible disease will kill everyone you know. Link By min | March 25, 2015, 11:03 AM | Science| Link The Surveillance Act That Wouldn't Die They didn't get CISPA to pass. Now they're trying again with CISA (Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act). Even with the changed language, it's still unclear what restrictions exist on "defensive measures." Since the definition of "information system" is inclusive of files and software, can a company that has a file stolen from them launch "defensive measures" against the thief's computer? What's worse, the bill may allow such actions as long as they don't cause "substantial" harm. The bill leaves the term "substantial" undefined. If true, the countermeasures "defensive measures" clause could increasingly encourage computer exfiltration attacks on the Internet--a prospect that may appeal to some "active defense" (aka offensive) cybersecurity companies, but does not favor the everyday user. Second, the bill adds a new authority for companies to monitor information systems to protect an entity's hardware or software. Here again, the broad definitions could be used in conjunction with the monitoring clause to spy on users engaged in potentially innocuous activity. Once collected, companies can then share the information, which is also called "cyber threat indicators," freely with government agencies like the NSA. When i read "defensive measures", i picture the goon squad in Brazil that breaks into your house to arrest you for not filling out the proper forms. By min | March 25, 2015, 10:57 AM | Liberal Outrage | Comments (1) | Link Where Are the Women? From FiveThirtyEight: I recently started diving into the OpusData database, which tracks film releases, box office performance and -- most interestingly -- screen credits. For instance, you can look up every role since 19951 that was credited as "bartender." There have been 145 such roles with gender data, and about 85 percent of the time the performer playing that bartender was a man. I pulled that data for a couple dozen careers, some considered prestigious, others specifically gendered. The vast majority of these are supporting roles -- the scientist in the background as the protagonist discovers the deadly disease has mutated, the emergency room nurse holding the respirator as our hero is wheeled into surgery on a gurney, and so on. But they represent Hollywood's background, the fabric you may take for granted but that can strongly influence perceptions about gender. If every engineer on screen is a dude, that sends a message about who can be an an engineer. Even in fields with a large gender gap in real life, what we see on-screen is even worse. Yeah, medicine and law skew male, but not as much as in the movies. In 2005, 30 percent of lawyers were women, but in this data set, only 11 percent of lawyers or attorneys were played by women. And according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, about 32 percent of doctors were women in September 2014, but on screen, only 10 percent were women. This isn't really new. It's a message that Geena Davis has been putting out there for a while now. Here is an interview with her in a recent issue of the Guardian (emphasis mine): [The Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media] commissioned the largest piece of research ever on gender depictions in media. Spanning a 20-year period, it proved what Davis had feared: in family rated films and children's television, for every one female speaking character there are three males, while female characters make up just 17% of crowd scenes. 17%??!! I think we can all agree that women make up more than 17% of the population, so why aren't movies accurately portraying that? We're talking background crowd scenes here. Not major roles. You just need to be a warm body that can move and yet, even in this women are underrepresented. By min | March 25, 2015, 10:22 AM | Liberal Outrage | Comments (3) | Link
Double Boiler Eight people, three cabbages, five pounds of potatoes. That's a two pot-er. The biggest we have, please. By fnord12 | March 22, 2015, 12:20 PM | My stupid life| Link
Hopefully, you and me could now split some infinitives The Grammar Nazi vs. Grammar Libertarian Wars continue. By fnord12 | March 20, 2015, 7:55 AM | Ummm... Other? | Comments (1) | Link
SuperMegaSpeed Reviews MINOR SPOILERS BELOW, but i'm probably the last person besides Min to be reading this issue in realtime so it'll probably be ok. Ms. Marvel #13 - For the last two issues, i was like "Yeah, this is good, BUT...", but for this issue i'm unequivocal. As promised in a previous lettercol, we're seeing a few different threads getting juggled: Kamala adjusting to her Inhumanity, a love interest introduced, and a return to the focus on Kamala's family, which had been a bit lacking as the Inventor story was in full steam. So all of that plus a (local) super-villain fight. The one thing that i do find a little annoying is that it all gets tied back to the Inhumans thread: the super-villain and the love interest both turn out to also be Inhumans. I get that the idea is to show that there can be Inhumans that are bad or otherwise not affiliated with Medusa, but it's a big Marvel universe and i don't want this to turn into an Inhumans franchise book. But that's a minor point. One other thing i found a little weird, and it's really just a confirmation of last issue, is that Kamala is unfamiliar with Loki. I could see her not recognizing Kid Loki as the real Loki, but in this issue she talks about Loki like she's never heard of him, period. And she's supposed to be a huge Avengers fan-nerd. I'm fairly certain that the Avengers' origin, which was instigated by Loki, is public knowledge. Or at least i would have thought that someone like her that has delved deep into Avengers trivia would know about him. Oh well, another minor point. This was a fun issue, and i really, really liked the guest art by Takeshi Miyazawa. Tonally similar to Adrian Alphona but a little more grounded and less stylized. Interestingly, Miyazawa was the alternate artist for Alphona on the early Runaways issues, too. I actually like Miyazawa better and would love to see to see him as the regular artist. But maybe "regular artist" isn't an applicable concept at this point; the lettercol this issue says that Alphona will return "with issue 16 in the very special Ms. Marvel Last Days storyline" which i guess leads into Secret Wars and a reboot? By fnord12 | March 18, 2015, 7:39 AM | Comics | Comments (2) | Link
Who funds Riftwar? There's something weird about the group, though: No one in the Washington, D.C., progressive community seems to have ever heard of them before By fnord12 | March 13, 2015, 7:48 AM | Liberal Outrage| Link
Babies Come Pre-Polluted And it's all because your grandparents were exposed to DDT.
The presence of these chemicals in the womb, in itself, does not mean they will cause any harm. Animal research, however, suggests that many of these substances may cause serious, long-term consequences. For example, tributyltin, an endocrine disruptor found in water pipes and used in plastics, increases fat mass, reprograms stem cells and produces more fat cells in mice across multiple generations, according to a study published in 2013. Meanwhile, when pregnant rats were exposed to pollutants including common plastics, agricultural chemicals and jet fuel, their great-grandchildren were more likely to be obese or have other disorders, according to research from Washington State University biologist Michael Skinner. As Skinner noted in the August Scientific American, "Some part of the increases in obesity, diabetes and other fast-rising diseases among baby boomers and more recent generations might have originated with their parents' and grandparents' exposure to pollutants such as DDT and dioxin." Some of this trend may be due to alterations that occur in sex cell DNA that are then passed on through affected sperm but more studies need to firm up that relationship.
Researchers need to discover some endocrine un-disruptors so that we can turn on the de-activated gene expressions and pass that on to our offspring. By min | March 10, 2015, 1:16 PM | Science | Comments (1) | Link Not traitors Seeing the NY Daily News front page regarding the Republicans sending the letter opposing the Obama/Iran nuke treaty gave me flashbacks to 2001-2003 when anyone opposing the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions had their patriotism questioned. So i agree with Glenn Greenwald that we should criticize the GOP on the substance, not for 'undermining' the Commander-in-Chief. By fnord12 | March 10, 2015, 1:15 PM | Liberal Outrage | Comments (1) | Link No context picture of the day By fnord12 | March 10, 2015, 10:32 AM | TeeVee & Ummm... Other?| Link Surviving a Zombie Outbreak 2 problems - 1) New Jersey has the lowest survival rate Best places to hide during a zombie apocalypse Alemi believes cities would succumb to the zombie scourge quickly, but the infection rate would slow down significantly in more sparsely populated areas and could take months to reach places like the Northern Rockies and Glacier National Park. "Given the dynamics of the disease, once the zombies invade more sparsely populated areas, the whole outbreak slows down--there are fewer humans to bite, so you start creating zombies at a slower rate," Alemi says. Once you hit Montana and Idaho, you might as well keep heading farther north into the Canadian Rockies and all the way up to Alaska where data analysis shows you're most likely to survive the zombie apocalypse. The state with the lowest survival rate? -- New Jersey. Unfortunately a full scale simulation of an outbreak in the United States shows that for `realistic' parameters, we are largely doomed. I'm also a terrible runner. And have bad eyesight. I think i'm pretty much dead in any apocalypse scenario. By min | March 10, 2015, 8:47 AM | Science| Link Ohhhh, it's Labor Day We just had Daylight Savings here in America (and the SuperMegaHousehold is not handling the mornings very well, i can tell you). So when i saw on my day calendar that yesterday was Eight Hours Day in Australia, my mind leaped to strange conclusions (maybe due to the sleep deprivation). Like, is that how they handle Daylight Savings in Australia? They just have an eight hour day? That's crazy! How does that work?! But of course it turns out that it's just the day that they celebrate the implementation of the eight hour work day. Much less interesting! This is the problem with the internet. You can immediately debunk all your strange and wonderful theories. By fnord12 | March 10, 2015, 8:27 AM | My stupid life| Link
Just once! I have been pretty vocal about my dislike of our senator, Bob Menendez, especially due to his Straight From 1962 approach to foreign policy. So i guess i'd be happy to see him leave office no matter what the reason. But just once i'd like to see a politician from New Jersey not get wrapped up in serious corruption allegations. Rumors and weirdness have been swirling around Menendez for a while, but now the Feds are bringing charges. By fnord12 | March 6, 2015, 3:02 PM | Liberal Outrage | Comments (2) | Link
Marvel Sales By fnord12 | March 5, 2015, 11:55 AM | Comics| Link
SuperMegaSpeed Reviews Daredevil #13 - I can see why Marvel doesn't always announce their cancellations. I'm not dropping this book, but whenever i get an issue my first question is "Oh, is this the last one?" and even if it's not i read it mainly to look for signs of things getting wrapped up. For what it's worth, there aren't any (as far as i can tell), and i should really just relax and enjoy the issue. Which, as usual, is pretty good. Glad to see the continued use the Shroud. As for the attempt at a role-reversal between Daredevil and Kristen McDuffie, i like it in isolation. It was done well, and i'm happy in general for any effort to not treat the female love interests as damsels in distress. But let's face facts: Daredevil is 100% right about what happens to his girlfriends. I don't know what Waid's intentions are with this book, but at some point Kristen is going to end up a suicidal alcoholic porn star junkie with a sai in her chest. Well, i take that back. Maybe Kristen can hold out until Secret Wars, when as far as i'm concerned the Marvel Universe ends, and then she'll be the one that made it. By fnord12 | March 4, 2015, 5:39 PM | Comics| Link Got the bloggers talking, anyway Ed Kilgore gives his take on Yglesias' Parliment/Gridlock article, and also summarizes and links to responses from Dylan Matthews, Ross Douthat, and Jonathan Chait. By fnord12 | March 4, 2015, 2:24 PM | Liberal Outrage| Link
I see the problem now We didn't all pitch in our $2 back in 1995. Of course the Clone Saga had already been running for about a year, but we could have at least kept it from going into 1996. And we would have gotten a whole bunch of junk for our trouble, too: By fnord12 | March 3, 2015, 1:26 PM | Comics | Comments (4) | Link Get ready for 8 more years of nothing Apropos of my post below, here's Hilary Clinton's proposal for ending gridlock: "I'd like to bring people from right, left, red, blue, get them into a nice warm purple space where everybody is talking and where we're actually trying to solve problems," Mrs. Clinton said. As Ezra Klein says, and i'd like delicious calorie-free vegan treats to fall out of the sky whenever i get hungry (ok, Klein's fantasy is about a Google Bus but i've got a better imagination). This is basically the same message that Obama ran on, and so did George W. Bush ("I'm a uniter not a divider"), but it's pure fantasy. People either accept that global warming is real or they don't. They think the economy can be fixed with a stimulus or by cutting taxes and regulation. There's no middle ground. And the only reward for a Republican to cross the aisle and work with Clinton is a Tea Party primary challenger. By fnord12 | March 3, 2015, 10:44 AM | Liberal Outrage | Comments (2) | Link
Doomed Matthew Yglesias has a pretty alarming essay regarding the eventual state of American politics and basically why we need a parliamentary system. By fnord12 | March 2, 2015, 2:02 PM | Liberal Outrage | Comments (4) | Link |