Ok, it took me the better part of two weeks, but I've finally finished the transcript of my presentation.
If you have half an hour to kill and want to learn more about Star Trek technology, cruise along to the Dauntless website and take a look. I haven't included any of the visual aids I used in the original presentation... if you think I need to put those in (some of the concepts I cover are pretty complex), lemme know.
Enjoy!
Thursday, June 29, 2006
Friday, June 23, 2006
Xmen: The Last Stand - Ultra-condensed version
Ian McKellan
The humans have developed a weapon against us. We will have a WAR.
Morlocks
Yeah!
(There is a WAR and it is AWESOME)
(There is a WAR and it is AWESOME)
THE END
Monday, June 19, 2006
Trek Minicon report
Well, the con went pretty well.
The gamer hordes who were supposed to show up for our CCG tournament and Role-Playing afterwards didn’t pitch… leaving my associate Tournament Director alone in the gaming hall for most of the day and leaving myself and my associate Role Playing Narrator with a bunch of newbies for the RPG session that evening.
Also the quiz questions I had devised were not used, for some reason… the quiz was cancelled.
Other than that, it was frikken cool.
My presentation was well received and I was inundated with questions about it for the rest of the day (as usual). The other speaker also delivered some fascinating insights, as I knew he would. I just hope his (somewhat obscure) episode references weren’t lost on everyone else… even I battled to keep up with him sometimes.
I even walked away with some free stuff… a pair of SFSA tumblers (to add to my collection of SFSA tumblers); a fantasy novel of intimidating length that I might get up the courage to read someday; and a gift from one of the local gaming retailers: a t-shirt, rules disk and demo-decks for the new Battlestar Galactica card game – a thinly veiled gesture designed to lure me into becoming a volunteer representative for the game which, since I have yet to see a single episode of the new BG series, is unlikely.
All in all it was a good day. I got to feel like an expert in something important for a day, and my uniform was much admired… it always goes down well at these things. Hopefully next year they’ll be less indecisive about the arrangements and I’ll have enough time to make a real effort in marketing the event.
For those of you who missed my talk and are waiting for the transcript, you’ll have to be patient. It took me a few days to write up the last one, so you can expect this one to take just as long. I’ll try to have it up on the Dauntless website by the end of the week, but no promises.
The gamer hordes who were supposed to show up for our CCG tournament and Role-Playing afterwards didn’t pitch… leaving my associate Tournament Director alone in the gaming hall for most of the day and leaving myself and my associate Role Playing Narrator with a bunch of newbies for the RPG session that evening.
Also the quiz questions I had devised were not used, for some reason… the quiz was cancelled.
Other than that, it was frikken cool.
My presentation was well received and I was inundated with questions about it for the rest of the day (as usual). The other speaker also delivered some fascinating insights, as I knew he would. I just hope his (somewhat obscure) episode references weren’t lost on everyone else… even I battled to keep up with him sometimes.
I even walked away with some free stuff… a pair of SFSA tumblers (to add to my collection of SFSA tumblers); a fantasy novel of intimidating length that I might get up the courage to read someday; and a gift from one of the local gaming retailers: a t-shirt, rules disk and demo-decks for the new Battlestar Galactica card game – a thinly veiled gesture designed to lure me into becoming a volunteer representative for the game which, since I have yet to see a single episode of the new BG series, is unlikely.
All in all it was a good day. I got to feel like an expert in something important for a day, and my uniform was much admired… it always goes down well at these things. Hopefully next year they’ll be less indecisive about the arrangements and I’ll have enough time to make a real effort in marketing the event.
For those of you who missed my talk and are waiting for the transcript, you’ll have to be patient. It took me a few days to write up the last one, so you can expect this one to take just as long. I’ll try to have it up on the Dauntless website by the end of the week, but no promises.
Thursday, June 08, 2006
The Dilbert Blog: Relativity
The Dilbert Blog: Relativity
I'm becoming more and more of a Scott Adams fan.
I still disagree with a lot of what he has to say (and he says a lot of things with the express intent that people like me will disagree with him), but he seems to have an uncanny knack of expressing extremely complicated scientific and philosophical concepts in very clear and manageable ways.
I'm becoming more and more of a Scott Adams fan.
I still disagree with a lot of what he has to say (and he says a lot of things with the express intent that people like me will disagree with him), but he seems to have an uncanny knack of expressing extremely complicated scientific and philosophical concepts in very clear and manageable ways.
Monday, May 29, 2006
Tim McGraw - I'm amazed by you
Every Time Our Eyes Meet,
There Is A Feelin Inside Me
It’s Almost More Than I Can Take
Baby When You Touch Me
I Can Feel How Much You Love Me
And It Just Blows Me Away
I’ve Never Been This Close To Anyone
Or Anything
I Can Hear your Thoughts, I Can See Your Dreams
I Dunno How You Do What You Do
I’m So In Love With You
It Just Keeps Getting Better
I Wanna Spend The Rest Of My life
With You By My Side
For Ever and Ever
Every Little Thing That You Do
Baby I’m Amazed By You
The Smell Of Your Skin
The Taste of your kiss
The Way You Whisper In The Dark
You’re Hair All Around Me
Baby You Surround Me
You Touch Every Place In My Heart
Oh..It Feels Like The First Time, Every Time
I Wanna Spend The Whole Night..In Your Eyes
I Dunno How You Do What You Do
I’m So In Love With You
It Just Keeps Getting Better
I Wanna Spend The Rest Of My life
With You By My Side
For Ever and Ever
Every Little Thing That You Do
Baby I’m Amazed By You
Every Little Thing That You Do
I’m So In Love With You
And It Just Keeps Getting Better
I Wanna Spend The Rest Of My Life
With You By My Side
For Ever And Ever
Every Little Thing That You Do
Every Little Thing That You Do
Baby I’m Amazed By You…
There Is A Feelin Inside Me
It’s Almost More Than I Can Take
Baby When You Touch Me
I Can Feel How Much You Love Me
And It Just Blows Me Away
I’ve Never Been This Close To Anyone
Or Anything
I Can Hear your Thoughts, I Can See Your Dreams
I Dunno How You Do What You Do
I’m So In Love With You
It Just Keeps Getting Better
I Wanna Spend The Rest Of My life
With You By My Side
For Ever and Ever
Every Little Thing That You Do
Baby I’m Amazed By You
The Smell Of Your Skin
The Taste of your kiss
The Way You Whisper In The Dark
You’re Hair All Around Me
Baby You Surround Me
You Touch Every Place In My Heart
Oh..It Feels Like The First Time, Every Time
I Wanna Spend The Whole Night..In Your Eyes
I Dunno How You Do What You Do
I’m So In Love With You
It Just Keeps Getting Better
I Wanna Spend The Rest Of My life
With You By My Side
For Ever and Ever
Every Little Thing That You Do
Baby I’m Amazed By You
Every Little Thing That You Do
I’m So In Love With You
And It Just Keeps Getting Better
I Wanna Spend The Rest Of My Life
With You By My Side
For Ever And Ever
Every Little Thing That You Do
Every Little Thing That You Do
Baby I’m Amazed By You…
Friday, May 26, 2006
New Scientist Tech - Breaking News - Physicists draw up plans for real 'cloaking device'
New Scientist Tech - Breaking News - Physicists draw up plans for real 'cloaking device'
It's not quite the cloaking technology in Star Trek. This makes use of optical properties of special materials, wheras the Klingons and their friends tightly packed and modulated energy fields to achieve a similar result.
I think the closest thing to this in Trek is the genetically enhanced agents of the Suliban Cabal. Their colour-changing skin and biomimetic garments are not sophisticated enough to produce the kinds of effects we see in the show... but some crazy optical properties would do the trick.
It's not quite the cloaking technology in Star Trek. This makes use of optical properties of special materials, wheras the Klingons and their friends tightly packed and modulated energy fields to achieve a similar result.
I think the closest thing to this in Trek is the genetically enhanced agents of the Suliban Cabal. Their colour-changing skin and biomimetic garments are not sophisticated enough to produce the kinds of effects we see in the show... but some crazy optical properties would do the trick.
Tuesday, May 23, 2006
Sure you did...
It amazes me how some people will try to get away with things.
We have one user who is a habitual offender… she is, to put it bluntly, incompetent. I know this because it took four of us a week and a half to train her on how to use the system. It’s a badly designed and unnecessarily complicated user interface, and very different to what she was accustomed to, but everyone else had cottoned onto the basics after 2 days. Even the stupid ones.
One of the problems with our system, although some people see it as a selling point, is that it is not at all forgiving of user error. One slip of the finger can easily, and frequently does, undo hours of work. All the rest of the users have come to terms with this, and have become far more meticulous and disciplined in their work – which is why it was a selling point.
Sure, they all make mistakes from time to time, but they’re all (but one) fully prepared to admit their error when it happens, and, albeit reluctantly, will redo their work. They mumble and groan, and log unnecessary support calls to deal with their frustration, but they deal with it.
But this user is something else.
Even though we are able to track her every action on the system, and are able to see precisely what she has done, and when she did it, she remains adamant that she does nothing wrong. She concocts elaborate fantasies about other users usurping her login details and sabotaging her work. (I wouldn’t blame them if they did, but the system’s logs clearly show that nothing of the sort happened).
She frequently (on a daily basis) comes to my desk (as opposed to following the proper support call logging procedure) with issues that have arisen. She is unable to do something… and upon investigation, I can see that she has already done it, but incorrectly – user error.
Upon seeing the activity logs on my screen, the rest of the users will sigh and shuffle off to their desks to go and make up for their stupid, but perfectly normal, mistake. But not Mrs. B.
“I did not do it!” she will demand.
“I aborted, I did not confirm. Are you saying that if I abort it will happen anyway?” she will continue to argue.
This is usually followed by a detailed explanation of the correct process, accompanied by a demonstration in the test environment. She will always insist that she followed the process precisely, despite the fact that I can prove otherwise.
Why, when confronted by irrefutable evidence, will deluded people and liars refuse to deviate from their positions? Is their cognitive bias so overpowering that they would sacrifice dignity and the respect of their peers rather than admit their fault?
It's not as if she has anything to gain by denying it. She won't get into trouble for a simple error. No matter how upset she gets, there's nothing we can do to fix it. Why expend all that energy and waste all that time?
Mystifying.
We have one user who is a habitual offender… she is, to put it bluntly, incompetent. I know this because it took four of us a week and a half to train her on how to use the system. It’s a badly designed and unnecessarily complicated user interface, and very different to what she was accustomed to, but everyone else had cottoned onto the basics after 2 days. Even the stupid ones.
One of the problems with our system, although some people see it as a selling point, is that it is not at all forgiving of user error. One slip of the finger can easily, and frequently does, undo hours of work. All the rest of the users have come to terms with this, and have become far more meticulous and disciplined in their work – which is why it was a selling point.
Sure, they all make mistakes from time to time, but they’re all (but one) fully prepared to admit their error when it happens, and, albeit reluctantly, will redo their work. They mumble and groan, and log unnecessary support calls to deal with their frustration, but they deal with it.
But this user is something else.
Even though we are able to track her every action on the system, and are able to see precisely what she has done, and when she did it, she remains adamant that she does nothing wrong. She concocts elaborate fantasies about other users usurping her login details and sabotaging her work. (I wouldn’t blame them if they did, but the system’s logs clearly show that nothing of the sort happened).
She frequently (on a daily basis) comes to my desk (as opposed to following the proper support call logging procedure) with issues that have arisen. She is unable to do something… and upon investigation, I can see that she has already done it, but incorrectly – user error.
Upon seeing the activity logs on my screen, the rest of the users will sigh and shuffle off to their desks to go and make up for their stupid, but perfectly normal, mistake. But not Mrs. B.
“I did not do it!” she will demand.
“I aborted, I did not confirm. Are you saying that if I abort it will happen anyway?” she will continue to argue.
This is usually followed by a detailed explanation of the correct process, accompanied by a demonstration in the test environment. She will always insist that she followed the process precisely, despite the fact that I can prove otherwise.
Why, when confronted by irrefutable evidence, will deluded people and liars refuse to deviate from their positions? Is their cognitive bias so overpowering that they would sacrifice dignity and the respect of their peers rather than admit their fault?
It's not as if she has anything to gain by denying it. She won't get into trouble for a simple error. No matter how upset she gets, there's nothing we can do to fix it. Why expend all that energy and waste all that time?
Mystifying.
Monday, May 22, 2006
Probability
This weekend, while doing something completely unrelated, something sank in: a way of looking at science I hadn't seen before. I had been aware of it at a logical level, but I didn't really grasp it until now.
Science is not, nor could it be, a search for ultimate truth. Truth doesn't exist, all that exists is an infinite number of parallel, but separate, relative perspectives. That which we percieve as "truth" is nothing more than a commonality, a golden thread, that ties those perspectives together and allows each of us to exist in the same space-time with a practically similar conceptualisation of the world around us.
That's old news. This is the new bit.
While I've seen science as a method by which we eliminate the impossible, this was in contrast with my belief in the concept of IDIC (Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations) which basically says that in an infinite universe, all things can, and will, happen.
According to IDIC, nothing is impossible. So how can science be a process of eliminating impossible things if none exist? Here is the crux of my cognitive dissonance.
Then it occurred to me that perhaps I was using too strict a definition for the word 'impossible'. I've always taken it to mean that if something is impossible, it cannot ever, under any circumstances, in this or any other place or time, happen.
Perhaps it's more a case of the probability of something being infanitessimally small... quasistatic.
Let me put it this way: if you draw a line between two points, that line is composed of an infinite number of points, each of zero size. If you were to choose one at random, each point's chances of being chosen would be 1/infinity = 0. However, the chances of a point being chosen is 1/1 = 1. One point will definitely be chosen, even if its chances of being chosen were zero.
So, in an infinite universe, everything will happen at least once, even if it is impossible - by force of sheer probability. And that's the key word: probability.
Science's job is to examine the observable universe and determine the probabilities of things happening. If something has a sufficiently high probability of happening (like an apple falling to the ground, as opposed to flying sideways and spontaneously turning into a salmon) it can be used to determine a "law", like gravity. Those laws aren't absolute, but they're pretty darn close to it.
The probability of an apple flying sideways and turning into a salmon is pretty low... I'd say zero. That's what science would tell us. But, at some point, somewhere in the universe, at least once, an apple will fly sideways and turn into a salmon. It's a probable certainty.
Science is not, nor could it be, a search for ultimate truth. Truth doesn't exist, all that exists is an infinite number of parallel, but separate, relative perspectives. That which we percieve as "truth" is nothing more than a commonality, a golden thread, that ties those perspectives together and allows each of us to exist in the same space-time with a practically similar conceptualisation of the world around us.
That's old news. This is the new bit.
While I've seen science as a method by which we eliminate the impossible, this was in contrast with my belief in the concept of IDIC (Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations) which basically says that in an infinite universe, all things can, and will, happen.
According to IDIC, nothing is impossible. So how can science be a process of eliminating impossible things if none exist? Here is the crux of my cognitive dissonance.
Then it occurred to me that perhaps I was using too strict a definition for the word 'impossible'. I've always taken it to mean that if something is impossible, it cannot ever, under any circumstances, in this or any other place or time, happen.
Perhaps it's more a case of the probability of something being infanitessimally small... quasistatic.
Let me put it this way: if you draw a line between two points, that line is composed of an infinite number of points, each of zero size. If you were to choose one at random, each point's chances of being chosen would be 1/infinity = 0. However, the chances of a point being chosen is 1/1 = 1. One point will definitely be chosen, even if its chances of being chosen were zero.
So, in an infinite universe, everything will happen at least once, even if it is impossible - by force of sheer probability. And that's the key word: probability.
Science's job is to examine the observable universe and determine the probabilities of things happening. If something has a sufficiently high probability of happening (like an apple falling to the ground, as opposed to flying sideways and spontaneously turning into a salmon) it can be used to determine a "law", like gravity. Those laws aren't absolute, but they're pretty darn close to it.
The probability of an apple flying sideways and turning into a salmon is pretty low... I'd say zero. That's what science would tell us. But, at some point, somewhere in the universe, at least once, an apple will fly sideways and turn into a salmon. It's a probable certainty.
Thursday, May 11, 2006
Minicon Watch
For those of you who are interested, this is the site you need to be watching for updates on the Star Trek convention I’m helping to organise.
See you there!
See you there!
Wednesday, May 10, 2006
I'm Doing My Inconsequential Part For The Environment | The Onion - America's Finest News Source
I'm Doing My Inconsequential Part For The Environment | The Onion - America's Finest News Source
Come on everyone! Do your inconsequential part for the environment, and you too can make absolutely no substantive impact!
Come on everyone! Do your inconsequential part for the environment, and you too can make absolutely no substantive impact!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)