Science seems very misunderstood by the general public. Usually when portrayed in media "scientists" are dogmatic priests of the religion of science. "That's not scientifically possible" is the antithesis of scientist with solid observations.
Science is a very simple process: Observe - Conjecture - Predict - Test
Observation
Observation seems straightforward however the key aspects are precision and repetition. Seeing something, say a spaceship once from hundreds of miles away in a fog is a much less trustworthy observation than seeing your spouse next to you everyday.
Conjecture
Conjecture is a guess at why the observation occurred.
Predict
Prediction is essentially that if this theory is accurate what else, untested, will be true. One of the most impresive examples of this comes from Dmitri Mendeleev who used his periodic table to predict many of the qualities of germanium, gallium and scandium which had yet to be discovered.
Test
Evolution happens to be one of the strongest theories in science stronger than Newtons Laws of Gravity. Quantum mechanics were needed to replace gravity in the realm of the very small. In addition many of the smartest minds in the world have been trying for over 100 years to specifically to disprove evolution. In a proper scientific environment other people who often disagree with you will try to actively disprove your results.
This is why string theory is not really scientific, it's just not currently testable. The math is beautiful but without a way to test it is pretty much just beautiful math and philosophy. This is part of the reason why so many proponents are big on supercolliders. They need the evidence.
Now within that framework there a a few generally accepted goals:
Parsimonious: simplest explanation. eg gravity being a bunch of strings between every object in the universe and each other
Predictive: This serves as the most powerful evidence of a theory. If it can predict what will happen in other untested thing and is accurate it indicates the theory is robust
Testable: This is why science and religion grind on each other. The divine is specifically non-testable. Ah well, what sort of divine being is cruel enough to give us a way to interpret a world consistently and then expect us to ignore that ability.
Provisional: No science is proper if it cannot be updated in the face of new evidence.
Science does make some assumptions. Mainly that reality is a cohesive place in which observations can be consistent and the physical laws of reality don't change randomly.
Sunday, December 20, 2009
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
Spiderman the Video Game
Spiderman the Video Game 1993 Sega
Genre: Brawler/Platformer
Spiderman the Video Game calls upon some of the more obscure Marvel super heroes. Remember SubMariner, Black Cat and Hawkeye? Yeah, me neither. Despite having plenty of villains from the Marvel Universe your generic enemies look like they should be fighting Power Rangers. Spiderman the Video Game tries to do two things and does them both with mediocrity. It tries to intersperse brawling sections with platforming. And I have to admit the transitions between them are pretty good. However both forms are quite generic. The aesthetics, sound and graphics, are distinctly average but functional. The difficulty is fairly low except for a fairly tricky Green Goblin. In fact its so easy that you have a health timer to ensure you die from time to time. All in all a very mediocre game that just tried to do too much rather than one thing well.
Genre: Brawler/Platformer
Spiderman the Video Game calls upon some of the more obscure Marvel super heroes. Remember SubMariner, Black Cat and Hawkeye? Yeah, me neither. Despite having plenty of villains from the Marvel Universe your generic enemies look like they should be fighting Power Rangers. Spiderman the Video Game tries to do two things and does them both with mediocrity. It tries to intersperse brawling sections with platforming. And I have to admit the transitions between them are pretty good. However both forms are quite generic. The aesthetics, sound and graphics, are distinctly average but functional. The difficulty is fairly low except for a fairly tricky Green Goblin. In fact its so easy that you have a health timer to ensure you die from time to time. All in all a very mediocre game that just tried to do too much rather than one thing well.
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Lost Gaming Gems: Command HQ
One of more recent ancestors of the RTS genre, Microprose's Command HQ (circa 1991) tries to receate the great global wars in a pseudo real time environment. Everything happens on a turn basis but the turns passed on a player controlled timer. Structurally it has the 3 World Wars (#3 being 1970-80s Nato vs Warsaw Pact) and 2 random wars one with pre-placed cities and another with random cities.
The best part about the game and something I still love is the elegance of the units. They're all useful and to the point. Ocean units consists of the rock paper scissors trinity of gunships, subs and carriers, land has simply infantry and armor.
HQ has an excellent interface point and click complete with a what might be a decent path-finding algorithm. Although I think it may just use a lot of real-world trade routes. And if the wars are fought sequentially serve as an excellent tutorial as more complicated stuff like aircraft and satellites are available in more modern conflicts.
Of course the music, graphic, and sound effects while decent for the time show their age today.
The best part about the game and something I still love is the elegance of the units. They're all useful and to the point. Ocean units consists of the rock paper scissors trinity of gunships, subs and carriers, land has simply infantry and armor.
HQ has an excellent interface point and click complete with a what might be a decent path-finding algorithm. Although I think it may just use a lot of real-world trade routes. And if the wars are fought sequentially serve as an excellent tutorial as more complicated stuff like aircraft and satellites are available in more modern conflicts.
Of course the music, graphic, and sound effects while decent for the time show their age today.
Saturday, February 14, 2009
Who pays for the stimulius?
With so much in the news about the stimulus in I find myself asking who's paying for it. The money is not coming from tax increases. Nor have there been increased savings inflows from abroad. That the dollars are coming from the printing press fails to identify who is paying. Historically printing currency means inflation. Inflation means the value is coming from the devaluation of assets and savings.
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Item Ideas
I recently came across a site full of creative ideas for cursed and interesting items and to a lesser extent characters. The SCP Foundation is a site dedicated to collection all the creepy ideas in the vein of X-files. It even has a really neat report format. Heck with a rules set this site could be a setting.
Check it out!
http://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/main
Check it out!
http://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/main
Sunday, January 11, 2009
d20 Casters
A lot of ink was split over how overpowered the arcane casters were in d20. Being a veteran of the older AD&D format I found the class became significantly more powerful than earlier editions especially in comparison to other classes. I believe the aggregation of the desire to simplify the game and standardize the the classes incompletely without reducing the class to match.
Originally the class was the expert class. It required levels of play as a near useless character, was always levels behind most of the party, had a random array of weak to powerful spells, and was physically laughable in melee.
First the drawbacks to the spells themselves became much lighter; haste does not take a year of your life every use; teleportion has a risk of killing you outright, polymorph requires continual saves not to lose you mind, ect. These drawbacks made mages much less willing to use the overpowered spells. In the move to make the game more accessible at the end of 2nd edition and truly break from original D&D mechanics the designers made a lot of changes in order to make the game "better" and more accessible. A lot of these decisions conflicted with the basic design philosophy of arcane casters and were not jettisoned resulting in overpowered arcane casters, divine too but that is another article.
Then the decision to allow spell selection caused all sorts of trouble. Now mages who had to depend on finding/buying good spells could cherry-pick the best spells on each level. Critically this meant that rare & more powerful spells became the standard which made all of the other nifty but weaker spells suck.
The standardization of experience was a huge advantage for the casters as they now leveled at a much faster rate than previously where they were always levels behind their non casting allies. As a result access to higher level spells changed. Older editions tended to end by level 15 with the mages a level or two behind. As a result mages rarely got access to the higher 6th-7th level spells. 8th and 9th level spells were essentially never meant to be in PC's daily spell selection except in extremely high powered campaigns. They were the domain of spell-failure prone scrolls and the villains. As a result high powered spells with their penalties clipped were dropped into lower level campaigns creating enormous imbalances
Casts per day were vastly increased especially at low levels the addition of high intelligence allowing for many more casts per day again increased the power level a bit. This was not in itself the main problem. Combining it with the decreased encounters per day created one of the most problematic issues in d20. A culture where the caster was expected to be constantly casting. This created we adventure until the caster is out of spells mentality that trapped designers and player into excessive casting that eroded the value of endurance characters like the classic fighter who's hp was the old limiter.
Arcane casters maintained the increase of additional dice every caster level combined with faster level accumulation compared to the rest of the party led to increased damage production.
The mechanics of spell resistance and saves changed both in ways to make the casters more powerful. Certain high-level foes had 95% spell resistance; no feats or leveling to reduce that number also saves became much more sure for everyone since the save mechanic was roll an x or higher on d20 with rare spells that have a -2 to -4 on the saves. As a result casters usually had their high damage curve reduced by steadily improving saves for reduced effect. Conversely at lower levels the characters the few spells the mage had were very likely to work as foes had maybe a 15%-20% save rate. The creation of spells to get around golems and foes specifically there to keep casters in check yet again increases their power.
Another change was spell failure. In earlier editions spells could be disrupted by 1 hp of damage and required the caster to do nothing else at all that turn and long casting times for high level spells. The creation of concentration and defensive casting allowed casters much more impunity with their spells.
I my initial goal was to illustrate the why the partial changes between editions led to wild imbalances in d20 environment. Something I suspect designers did not want. They clearly learned from this and decided not to keep old stuff except for names in 4th edition. As a result they seem to of successfully addressed these power imbalance issues creating, with fanatical zeal, a level playing field for all the characters classes. The sated goal of making the game more accessible in 4th is a success. Perhaps that why it's so uninspiring for me. I liked the challenge of an elite class with a heavy price. It was tough going early on. You never got the really good stuff unless the DM was nice. It was a class filled with the power gamers, who worked hard for that power. All those difficulties kept the munchkin(1) population down. I do admit that biggest problem was you had to have a year long or more campaign for the rewards of a mage to truly kick in.
(1) Sadly despite how much I like d20 I feel it catered to munchkins more than any other edition.
Originally the class was the expert class. It required levels of play as a near useless character, was always levels behind most of the party, had a random array of weak to powerful spells, and was physically laughable in melee.
First the drawbacks to the spells themselves became much lighter; haste does not take a year of your life every use; teleportion has a risk of killing you outright, polymorph requires continual saves not to lose you mind, ect. These drawbacks made mages much less willing to use the overpowered spells. In the move to make the game more accessible at the end of 2nd edition and truly break from original D&D mechanics the designers made a lot of changes in order to make the game "better" and more accessible. A lot of these decisions conflicted with the basic design philosophy of arcane casters and were not jettisoned resulting in overpowered arcane casters, divine too but that is another article.
Then the decision to allow spell selection caused all sorts of trouble. Now mages who had to depend on finding/buying good spells could cherry-pick the best spells on each level. Critically this meant that rare & more powerful spells became the standard which made all of the other nifty but weaker spells suck.
The standardization of experience was a huge advantage for the casters as they now leveled at a much faster rate than previously where they were always levels behind their non casting allies. As a result access to higher level spells changed. Older editions tended to end by level 15 with the mages a level or two behind. As a result mages rarely got access to the higher 6th-7th level spells. 8th and 9th level spells were essentially never meant to be in PC's daily spell selection except in extremely high powered campaigns. They were the domain of spell-failure prone scrolls and the villains. As a result high powered spells with their penalties clipped were dropped into lower level campaigns creating enormous imbalances
Casts per day were vastly increased especially at low levels the addition of high intelligence allowing for many more casts per day again increased the power level a bit. This was not in itself the main problem. Combining it with the decreased encounters per day created one of the most problematic issues in d20. A culture where the caster was expected to be constantly casting. This created we adventure until the caster is out of spells mentality that trapped designers and player into excessive casting that eroded the value of endurance characters like the classic fighter who's hp was the old limiter.
Arcane casters maintained the increase of additional dice every caster level combined with faster level accumulation compared to the rest of the party led to increased damage production.
The mechanics of spell resistance and saves changed both in ways to make the casters more powerful. Certain high-level foes had 95% spell resistance; no feats or leveling to reduce that number also saves became much more sure for everyone since the save mechanic was roll an x or higher on d20 with rare spells that have a -2 to -4 on the saves. As a result casters usually had their high damage curve reduced by steadily improving saves for reduced effect. Conversely at lower levels the characters the few spells the mage had were very likely to work as foes had maybe a 15%-20% save rate. The creation of spells to get around golems and foes specifically there to keep casters in check yet again increases their power.
Another change was spell failure. In earlier editions spells could be disrupted by 1 hp of damage and required the caster to do nothing else at all that turn and long casting times for high level spells. The creation of concentration and defensive casting allowed casters much more impunity with their spells.
I my initial goal was to illustrate the why the partial changes between editions led to wild imbalances in d20 environment. Something I suspect designers did not want. They clearly learned from this and decided not to keep old stuff except for names in 4th edition. As a result they seem to of successfully addressed these power imbalance issues creating, with fanatical zeal, a level playing field for all the characters classes. The sated goal of making the game more accessible in 4th is a success. Perhaps that why it's so uninspiring for me. I liked the challenge of an elite class with a heavy price. It was tough going early on. You never got the really good stuff unless the DM was nice. It was a class filled with the power gamers, who worked hard for that power. All those difficulties kept the munchkin(1) population down. I do admit that biggest problem was you had to have a year long or more campaign for the rewards of a mage to truly kick in.
(1) Sadly despite how much I like d20 I feel it catered to munchkins more than any other edition.
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
Solar Power Falacy
I decided to find out just how much solar power it would take to power the US. The results were disturbing.
The US uses roughly 3.3 TW a day. The better solar arrays power produce on average 1 GW per sqr/km per day in the US, accounting for cloud cover. So that means that to power the entire nation an area of 3/8ths of contiguous US would need to be a giant solar array. That's essentially everything east of the Mississippi river. (derived from data in Wikipedia)
This means solar power can never be anything more than chump change in US energy policy!
The US uses roughly 3.3 TW a day. The better solar arrays power produce on average 1 GW per sqr/km per day in the US, accounting for cloud cover. So that means that to power the entire nation an area of 3/8ths of contiguous US would need to be a giant solar array. That's essentially everything east of the Mississippi river. (derived from data in Wikipedia)
This means solar power can never be anything more than chump change in US energy policy!
Sunday, January 4, 2009
Introduction
This is my first blog. I'm starting it as a way to improve my writing/typing skills and record/share interesting things to me. Ideally it will eventually gain focus on a specific topic. The primary topics I expect to write about at this point include economics, geopolitics, and D&D.
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