How to cut a bagel into interlocking pieces

  11:36pm  •  Science & Technology  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

Starcraft 2 rant

I have purchased every one of Blizzard’s PC games, and this is the first one from Blizzard I’ve played where I feel they’ve made a major misstep. Actually, multiple missteps. Following hot on the heels of the Real ID debacle (from which they sheepishly backed down), the net is steadily filling with complaints about Starcraft 2. Coming a decade after SC1, SC2 has been many years in the making. The game is essentially SC1 with better graphics. The feel of gameplay, the hotkeys, the tactics, all of it were instantly familiar to me, and it’s been over 5 years since I last played SC1. If that was all it was, that would still be okay. It would be an outstanding game.

But SC2 has two very significant shortcomings – all of which imply that Blizzard is becoming increasingly focused on making money, rather than being nice to their up-to-now very loyal fanbase.

The first issue is the single player campaign. It’s 26 missions long (including 1 hidden bonus mission), and starts off with Raynor going after Mengsk while the Zerg invade again. The campaign is played almost entirely as Terran, with a few Protoss missions thrown in. Unfortunately, the plot is lack-lustre. It’s disjointed, lacks much emotional involvement, and is incomplete. It’s obviously setting up for expansion packs, but this storyline is so incomplete that it seems they’re not even trying to hide the fact that they’re trying to commercialize the shit out of the franchise. When you put it next to a game like Mass Effect, which has an epic storyline, the lack of quality is even more stark (not to mention the similarities between the Zerg/Rachni Xel’naga/Reaper storylines).

The second and biggest issue is battle.net. Truth be told, the single player side of SC2 is merely a sideshow. When the Koreans got a hold of SC1, they effectively turned it into a multiplayer game. However, Blizzard removed four things from multiplayer mode that used to be in SC1: LAN support, chatrooms, the ability to play without an internet connection, and worst of all, the ability to play with anyone around the world.

I can live without LAN support, although it baffles me why that was removed. I have no idea why they removed chatrooms – if you want to chat with people after a match, there’s no easy way to find them. If you’re going to run and control the online multiplayer community – then why are you taking the communal aspects out of it?!

The worst thing they did was to region-lock the game. WHY? Blizzard claims that it’s to ensure that people get the best multiplayer experience, and the only way to do that is to play people in the same region as you so as to minimize lag. This is ridiculously patriarchal. And to add insult to injury, their official line is: if you’re in America and want to play Asians, you need to buy a second copy of the game. What the hell. So now I have absolutely no way to play SC2 with my friends in Australia without forking over another $60.

  2:18pm  •  Computing  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

Teaching Koreans some swear words

This is gold:

  9:53pm  •  Culture  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

Night owls

A study by a psychologist observes that night owls tend to have higher IQs, and appears to postulate that “we must now rely on general intelligence to override our early-to-bed instincts. So those with more of it stay up later.” This is a bit bizarre. Might it be that people with higher IQs simply tend to be in professions which demand longer working hours, so they get used to sleeping later?

Night Lights
Bedtimes and wake-up times for Americans in their 20s by IQ.

Very Dull (IQ < 75)
Weekday: 11:41 P.M.-7:20 A.M.
Weekend: 12:35 A.M.-10:09 A.M.

Normal (90 < IQ < 110)
Weekday: 12:10 A.M.-7:32 A.M.
Weekend: 1:13 A.M.-10:14 A.M.

Very Bright (IQ > 125)
Weekday: 12:29 A.M.-7:52 A.M.
Weekend: 1:44 A.M.-11:07 A.M.

  5:42pm  •  Culture  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

The art of dying

I encourage you to read this New Yorker article by Atul Gawande. It’s very long and covers a depressing topic, but it explores some interesting and important issues regarding end-of-life decisions. It challenges the notion that hoping and fighting for survival, at whatever physical, emotional and financial cost, may not actually be the best way forward – something which is counterintuitive to patients, their families and their health care providers.

Like many people, I had believed that hospice care hastens death, because patients forgo hospital treatments and are allowed high-dose narcotics to combat pain. But studies suggest otherwise. In one, researchers followed 4,493 Medicare patients with either terminal cancer or congestive heart failure. They found no difference in survival time between hospice and non-hospice patients with breast cancer, prostate cancer, and colon cancer. Curiously, hospice care seemed to extend survival for some patients; those with pancreatic cancer gained an average of three weeks, those with lung cancer gained six weeks, and those with congestive heart failure gained three months. The lesson seems almost Zen: you live longer only when you stop trying to live longer. When Cox was transferred to hospice care, her doctors thought that she wouldn’t live much longer than a few weeks. With the supportive hospice therapy she received, she had already lived for a year.

Also:

Ten years ago, her seventy-four-year-old father, Jack Block, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley, was admitted to a San Francisco hospital with symptoms from what proved to be a mass growing in the spinal cord of his neck. She flew out to see him. The neurosurgeon said that the procedure to remove the mass carried a twenty-per-cent chance of leaving him quadriplegic, paralyzed from the neck down. But without it he had a hundred-per-cent chance of becoming quadriplegic.

The evening before surgery, father and daughter chatted about friends and family, trying to keep their minds off what was to come, and then she left for the night. Halfway across the Bay Bridge, she recalled, “I realized, ‘Oh, my God, I don’t know what he really wants.’ ” He’d made her his health-care proxy, but they had talked about such situations only superficially. So she turned the car around.
Going back in “was really uncomfortable,” she said. It made no difference that she was an expert in end-of-life discussions. “I just felt awful having the conversation with my dad.” But she went through her list. She told him, “ ‘I need to understand how much you’re willing to go through to have a shot at being alive and what level of being alive is tolerable to you.’ We had this quite agonizing conversation where he said—and this totally shocked me—‘Well, if I’m able to eat chocolate ice cream and watch football on TV, then I’m willing to stay alive. I’m willing to go through a lot of pain if I have a shot at that.’

“I would never have expected him to say that,” Block went on. “I mean, he’s a professor emeritus. He’s never watched a football game in my conscious memory. The whole picture—it wasn’t the guy I thought I knew.” But the conversation proved critical, because after surgery he developed bleeding in the spinal cord. The surgeons told her that, in order to save his life, they would need to go back in. But he had already become nearly quadriplegic and would remain severely disabled for many months and possibly forever. What did she want to do?

“I had three minutes to make this decision, and, I realized, he had already made the decision.” She asked the surgeons whether, if her father survived, he would still be able to eat chocolate ice cream and watch football on TV. Yes, they said. She gave the O.K. to take him back to the operating room.
“If I had not had that conversation with him,” she told me, “my instinct would have been to let him go at that moment, because it just seemed so awful. And I would have beaten myself up. Did I let him go too soon?” Or she might have gone ahead and sent him to surgery, only to find—as occurred—that he survived only to go through what proved to be a year of “very horrible rehab” and disability. “I would have felt so guilty that I condemned him to that,” she said. “But there was no decision for me to make.” He had decided.

  4:10pm  •  General Media  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  •