Not having written anything here for a couple of months, there is some difficulty in finding a place to begin. However, looking at my own blog title, it occurs to me that I should start with the 'Gaming' part. I will have to gloss over some details, perhaps, but I think I can come up with the big picture items, in some sort of chronological order.
1) Both of my kids have 100% completion in LEGO Batman 2. I can't play any of the LEGO games without nodding off.
2) I still can't find my Gamecube copy of Pikmin. I used to play it before bedtime a lot, particularly the 1-day challenge mode, because I found it relaxing. At some point I will have to just find the Wii Play Control version. (At least it should render correctly on widescreen if necessary.) My replacement small-dose game before bedtime has been Resident Evil 4:Wii Edition in Mercenaries Mode, which is not particularly relaxing for me.
3) I still don't have all the ending movies unlocked in Tekken Tag Tournament 2, partly because there are a lot of characters and partly because I'm not willing to set it to a difficulty easier than 'Normal' and there are a few characters that I can't seem to get the hang of. (Lili, I'm looking at you.) Yes, I know I could just team her with a character that I'm better at and still get her ending movie, but I'm trying to be well-rounded.
4) I picked up the 'Game of The Year' edition of Batman:Arkham City, which includes some Robin and Catwoman missions on top of the hours and hours of Batman missions. I liked it a lot, and there was a lot more of the things I liked in the game, but it didn't scare me or creep me out like the original Arkham Asylum did. There was more emphasis on action in Arkham City, and it seemed like you interacted with civilians a lot less. I have finished the main story on normal, but I have not finished all the side missions.
5) I picked up the rather old (or at least old by PS3 standards) Burnout
Paradise hoping that my younger son would appreciate the
open-world aspect of it. Since he had so much fun running around the
hub in LEGO Batman 2, and found all kinds of fun things to do outside
the dungeons in Zelda:Twilight Princess, I thought he might get some
enjoyment out of driving around at random discovering things, maybe have some fun crashing cars or jumping ramps and learning the layout of the city. However, it turned out to be a total non-thing to him unless he's watching me play.
There are a lot of things to buy in that game and few of them ever
became free or available on a disc, even five years after the game came
out originally. My initial surprise/amusement was that downloading updates for the game took hours and hours and I woke up SuperMonkeyWife when the game rebooted and she was treated to Axl Rose's voice somewhere around midnight. (Somehow I slept through it, but I'm more of a fan of Slash than Axl.)
6) I found out that there is a another version of Street Fighter IV coming out- not that I'm surprised or anything. The four Street Fighter characters (Poison, Hugo, and Rolento from Final Fight and Elena from Street Fighter III) that they made for Street Fighter X Tekken that weren't available in other games will be included, and a new fighter that has not been announced yet will also be added. I can either upgrade my copy of Arcade Edition, or buy the whole thing and finally get all the other costumes. Capcom hasn't exactly spelled out the pricing or release dates yet other than to say it will be available in 2014 for arcades.
7) I picked up a used copy of Darksiders for PS3 for less than $8. (I tried to type this three other times and kept typing 'Darkstalkers' instead.) I was
told that it was rather Zelda-like in terms of level structure, and I
have not been disappointed in that regard. I have been a little
disappointed with the controls, but the games that I'm comparing it to
don't have as many items and functions to deal with.
8) My younger child discovered Soul Calibur V and Tekken Tag Tournament
2. He's not that good at the actual games yet, but he is endlessly
entertained by the Character Creation/Costume Editor module in both
games.
9) Both of my kids are playing the ever-loving daylights out of Minecraft. I have no idea what they are talking about a lot of the time.
10) Pokemon Y came out last weekend and caused my older child to try to
adopt a position at dinner that involved having a fork in one hand and a
stylus in the other hand. Even with this unorthodox approach, he defeated all of the Pokemon League by Wednesday. There are some side missions left, but I think he's already looking for a copy of Pokemon X.
I think that catches me up to now, gaming-wise. Next post: I know what cubes you did this summer.
Saturday, October 19, 2013
Thursday, August 29, 2013
A little diversion
Just a little something for amusement, since I wanted to look at the words a little.
This was made using wordle.net with a hefty dose of Java.
As a side note to this - I always hear from my programmer friends that Java is incredibly dangerous. Is it dangerous because it's inherently and irreparably flawed or is it dangerous because it's a big target?
This was made using wordle.net with a hefty dose of Java.
As a side note to this - I always hear from my programmer friends that Java is incredibly dangerous. Is it dangerous because it's inherently and irreparably flawed or is it dangerous because it's a big target?
Sunday, August 11, 2013
Engineering is about tradeoffs.
Despite the derogatory implications that some might associate with this statement, I present this idea merely as a statement of fact: Most Americans don't fix as many things themselves any more.
I was presented with this idea quite some time ago, as one of the customers where I worked was complaining that replacing the starter on his standby generator seemed incredibly wasetful, since in his day starters were usually rebuilt. He used to work in the auto parts business. The inherent problem with what he was saying didn't even register with him. His maintenance was being done by an electrical contractor that happened to also do generator work. Should the electrical contractor have rebuilt a starter, having little experience doing so, nor having any of the equipment to do it? That's probably not cost effective. Should the contractor have subcontracted a rebuild out to someone who did specialize in rebuilding starters, at a substantial markup? That's probably not time effective or cost effective. On a thing like a backup generator, you just want it to work when you need it, and it doesn't really run that often. Was the guy going to notice if it didn't start on its exercise cycle? How mad would he have been at the contractor if it didn't start when it was supposed to? At a certain level, it comes down to the company that has to warranty the generator, and that's the generator manufacturer. Their recommendations end up outweighing all other concerns, since they're worried about both the reputation of their product and their responsibility to the product warranty. Their recommendation? Replace the starter with a new one that they've sent from the factory, and then the responsibility is back on them where it belongs.
This is somewhat typical to most troubleshooting these days - find the faulty module and replace it. This means that the technicians need to be most familiar with how the equipment is supposed to work normally, and following the path of operation through the system until the first failure is discovered. Once the failure is discovered and addressed, then the system can be re-assessed for proper operation.
Are we in any position, as laypeople, to accumulate this knowledge for every piece of equipment in our daily lives? Phones, computers, printers, cameras, cars, coffee makers, media players of all sorts, air conditioners, electrical equipment, radios, televisions, and the like?
I picked on radios and televisions last there because it wasn't that long ago that people took vacuum tubes (thermionic valves) to the drug store or the hardware store to check them and replace tubes themselves. You plugged the suspicious tube into one of 70 or 80 different sockets in the tester, and the machine told you if it failed on anything obvious, like if it had a short in it or something. Those testers probably could check several thousand different vacuum tubes. With vacuum tubes having been replaced by transistors, I can't imagine how large the tester at the drugstore would have to be to accommodate the hundreds of thousands of different devices, nor can I figure out how most people could unsolder a single transistor to check it. So, to use our oversimplified examples - two of the big reasons that we don't fix as many things ourselves is 1) we can't easily amass enough knowledge to fix all of the things that we might need to fix and 2) the things themselves are more complex than they used to be, so individual components are harder to extract. There was a small resurgence of fixing things ourselves when PC's hit the market, mostly due to the modular nature of the PC itself. Individual cards, having failed, are relatively simple to remove and replace. Certainly, nobody is going to be rebuilding modems these days.
I had a problem with one of my bass guitars that I put up with for a long time. A couple of the bridge saddles would collapse down to the face of the instrument periodically, allowing the string to whack against the pickup covers where it's not supposed to be. I was daunted by the idea of replacing the bridge, especially when I couldn't find an identical replacement. I put up with its failure for a long time, and eventually stopped taking the instrument in question to gigs. Just recently, I had the horrible "The disc cannot be read" failure on my Wii game console for what I think is the third time. So, I decided to take matters into my own hands on both accounts. I figured that if my Wii didn't work after I tried to fix it, I would be no worse off than I was. I felt the same way about the bass I wasn't using. After a few minutes looking around on the internet, I discovered that the laser module in the Wii's optical drive was the usual thing that failed, and if I recall correctly it was one of the things that Nintendo had previously fixed for me under warranty. The only thing that I would need besides a replacement laser module was something called a tri-wing screwdriver. On the bass side, I was able to find a different bass bridge than the stock one for my bass that had the same string spacing. The height might have changed, but at least it wouldn't be too low. If I didn't manage to get it to work, I could just put the old bridge back on.
The new bridge arrived first, and it took me a while to round up the right tools and courage to get it installed. My biggest concern was putting it on crooked and not being able to ensure good intonation, but I got it lined up correctly on the second try and everything went just fine. It would have gone fine the first time, but one of the holes I drilled was a little problematic because of how the bit walked around on the finish. I actually think that the intonation is better now that it was, even though the strings are a teeny bit higher.
The advantage I had on replacing the laser on the Wii over working on my bass is that there are plenty of tutorial videos on youtube for getting the Wii apart and changing the laser. The one thing I couldn't really understand was what the point was in making me purchase a tri-wing screwdriver. It was pretty easy to find replacement laser modules and tri-wing screwdrivers on Amazon, and the screwdriver was less than $3. It did take a really long time to get here, but that wasn't much of a deterrent either. Is it illegal for me to own a tri-wing screwdriver? Is it some sort of obscure DMCA violation?
I guess the question I really want to ask has to do with our title - "Engineering is about tradeoffs". With the bass bridge, it's a job that not everyone is willing to do, and many times will get contracted out to luthiers because they have the correct skill set for the job. All the hardware on the bass bridge is either Philips head or some size of hex key (and the new bridge even came with the two required hex keys). With the Wii, you needed two different sizes of Philips in addition to the tri-wing screwdriver to get the case open and replace components. In my mind, using a non-standard fastener comes with a significant extra cost, but maybe it's only a few cents per console. But even at a few cents per console, the Wii has sold over 100 million units. What, if anything, was gained by using a non-standard screw to secure the case of the console? Even if piracy was the concern, the most famous modification for the Wii allowing non-approved software to run doesn't require you to take your system apart, as hackers were able to discover a method via software. If the Wii had all standard screws - how many more people would have taken them apart? I'm guessing not many - especially in light of what we were talking about above - since not that many people are fixing their own stuff these days. Imagine what Nintendo could have done if those resources were spent on making a more secure and stable OS (not that the Wii OS is bad, just pointing out that it was hacked) or developing a few more games.
If any of you really do want to take your Wii apart and the screwdriver was stopping you, here's the link for buying one on Amazon.
I was presented with this idea quite some time ago, as one of the customers where I worked was complaining that replacing the starter on his standby generator seemed incredibly wasetful, since in his day starters were usually rebuilt. He used to work in the auto parts business. The inherent problem with what he was saying didn't even register with him. His maintenance was being done by an electrical contractor that happened to also do generator work. Should the electrical contractor have rebuilt a starter, having little experience doing so, nor having any of the equipment to do it? That's probably not cost effective. Should the contractor have subcontracted a rebuild out to someone who did specialize in rebuilding starters, at a substantial markup? That's probably not time effective or cost effective. On a thing like a backup generator, you just want it to work when you need it, and it doesn't really run that often. Was the guy going to notice if it didn't start on its exercise cycle? How mad would he have been at the contractor if it didn't start when it was supposed to? At a certain level, it comes down to the company that has to warranty the generator, and that's the generator manufacturer. Their recommendations end up outweighing all other concerns, since they're worried about both the reputation of their product and their responsibility to the product warranty. Their recommendation? Replace the starter with a new one that they've sent from the factory, and then the responsibility is back on them where it belongs.
This is somewhat typical to most troubleshooting these days - find the faulty module and replace it. This means that the technicians need to be most familiar with how the equipment is supposed to work normally, and following the path of operation through the system until the first failure is discovered. Once the failure is discovered and addressed, then the system can be re-assessed for proper operation.
Are we in any position, as laypeople, to accumulate this knowledge for every piece of equipment in our daily lives? Phones, computers, printers, cameras, cars, coffee makers, media players of all sorts, air conditioners, electrical equipment, radios, televisions, and the like?
I picked on radios and televisions last there because it wasn't that long ago that people took vacuum tubes (thermionic valves) to the drug store or the hardware store to check them and replace tubes themselves. You plugged the suspicious tube into one of 70 or 80 different sockets in the tester, and the machine told you if it failed on anything obvious, like if it had a short in it or something. Those testers probably could check several thousand different vacuum tubes. With vacuum tubes having been replaced by transistors, I can't imagine how large the tester at the drugstore would have to be to accommodate the hundreds of thousands of different devices, nor can I figure out how most people could unsolder a single transistor to check it. So, to use our oversimplified examples - two of the big reasons that we don't fix as many things ourselves is 1) we can't easily amass enough knowledge to fix all of the things that we might need to fix and 2) the things themselves are more complex than they used to be, so individual components are harder to extract. There was a small resurgence of fixing things ourselves when PC's hit the market, mostly due to the modular nature of the PC itself. Individual cards, having failed, are relatively simple to remove and replace. Certainly, nobody is going to be rebuilding modems these days.
I had a problem with one of my bass guitars that I put up with for a long time. A couple of the bridge saddles would collapse down to the face of the instrument periodically, allowing the string to whack against the pickup covers where it's not supposed to be. I was daunted by the idea of replacing the bridge, especially when I couldn't find an identical replacement. I put up with its failure for a long time, and eventually stopped taking the instrument in question to gigs. Just recently, I had the horrible "The disc cannot be read" failure on my Wii game console for what I think is the third time. So, I decided to take matters into my own hands on both accounts. I figured that if my Wii didn't work after I tried to fix it, I would be no worse off than I was. I felt the same way about the bass I wasn't using. After a few minutes looking around on the internet, I discovered that the laser module in the Wii's optical drive was the usual thing that failed, and if I recall correctly it was one of the things that Nintendo had previously fixed for me under warranty. The only thing that I would need besides a replacement laser module was something called a tri-wing screwdriver. On the bass side, I was able to find a different bass bridge than the stock one for my bass that had the same string spacing. The height might have changed, but at least it wouldn't be too low. If I didn't manage to get it to work, I could just put the old bridge back on.
The new bridge arrived first, and it took me a while to round up the right tools and courage to get it installed. My biggest concern was putting it on crooked and not being able to ensure good intonation, but I got it lined up correctly on the second try and everything went just fine. It would have gone fine the first time, but one of the holes I drilled was a little problematic because of how the bit walked around on the finish. I actually think that the intonation is better now that it was, even though the strings are a teeny bit higher.
The advantage I had on replacing the laser on the Wii over working on my bass is that there are plenty of tutorial videos on youtube for getting the Wii apart and changing the laser. The one thing I couldn't really understand was what the point was in making me purchase a tri-wing screwdriver. It was pretty easy to find replacement laser modules and tri-wing screwdrivers on Amazon, and the screwdriver was less than $3. It did take a really long time to get here, but that wasn't much of a deterrent either. Is it illegal for me to own a tri-wing screwdriver? Is it some sort of obscure DMCA violation?
I guess the question I really want to ask has to do with our title - "Engineering is about tradeoffs". With the bass bridge, it's a job that not everyone is willing to do, and many times will get contracted out to luthiers because they have the correct skill set for the job. All the hardware on the bass bridge is either Philips head or some size of hex key (and the new bridge even came with the two required hex keys). With the Wii, you needed two different sizes of Philips in addition to the tri-wing screwdriver to get the case open and replace components. In my mind, using a non-standard fastener comes with a significant extra cost, but maybe it's only a few cents per console. But even at a few cents per console, the Wii has sold over 100 million units. What, if anything, was gained by using a non-standard screw to secure the case of the console? Even if piracy was the concern, the most famous modification for the Wii allowing non-approved software to run doesn't require you to take your system apart, as hackers were able to discover a method via software. If the Wii had all standard screws - how many more people would have taken them apart? I'm guessing not many - especially in light of what we were talking about above - since not that many people are fixing their own stuff these days. Imagine what Nintendo could have done if those resources were spent on making a more secure and stable OS (not that the Wii OS is bad, just pointing out that it was hacked) or developing a few more games.
If any of you really do want to take your Wii apart and the screwdriver was stopping you, here's the link for buying one on Amazon.
Monday, August 5, 2013
It's never too soon to talk to your kids about microtransations.
When I started playing Candy Crush on facebook, I was an anomaly. If you play into the stereotypes, it's a cutesy girl's game that looks like you ate too much stuff at Sloan's and daintily regurgitated it into gel-filled ice cube trays. I tried it because it was a lot like Bejeweled Blitz in function, but it's not on a timer so I can use the regular mouse instead of having to play lefty with a stylus to keep up with my right-handed and touchscreen-playing friends. At first, I was the only guy amongst dozens of girls. I presume that this is a microcosm of the rest of the groups playing the game, although perhaps my age plays into this somewhat. Since I can only see scores of people on my friends list, I can only see how the demographic that I'm in changes, but there are now a reasonable number of guys playing the game now as compared to before. I did find it funny a couple of times at work talking to tradespeople where they were evasive about a game that they were playing on their smartphone but I was still able to guess when they were talking about Candy Crush. Part of the reason they even mentioned it was frustration over some of the levels, and since I don't hide my affection for games in conversation, certainly they can feel like I am a person to ask about a thing like that.
The biggest frustration that I have seen is that some of the levels appear to be rather difficult without buying extra moves, but I haven't bought any extra moves yet and don't plan to anytime soon. This would appear to be a great plan on King's part (King is the company that makes Candy Crush) since typically most people tend not to buy stuff in free games. The last statistic that I had heard (and quite a number of years ago, prior to the big surge of facebook games) was that typically less that 10% of the players were responsible for over 90% of the in-game purchases in a free-to-play game. With the space a little more cutthroat and competitive, I doubt we would have access to those figures now, but I now hear about more people buying extra lives and moves in Candy Crush that I used to hear about people buying premium features in free-to-play games before. Sure, there were a few reports of kids racking up wagonloads of Smurfberries a couple of years ago, but we can't count the under-12 crowd as a real demographic for making informed purchases.
So, how are we supposed to feel as gamers about this sort of stuff? Let's look at Candy Crush and see how it stacks up to other games.
Arcade shooters, Gauntlet, Gauntlet II, Smash TV, fighting games, brawlers, and arcade sports games - $0.25 to play, $0.25 to continue, but buy the home version and never have to worry about quarters again. The arcade versions of Gauntlet and Gauntlet II had 4-player cabinets and ever-decreasing health. Playing through with a group of friends could cost $20 without too much trouble, and was probably a lot more than that. I picked $20 as a reference since you can pick up the console version for PS3 or XBox for that much and it includes dozens of other Midway classics. The X-Men brawler had a 6-player cabinet with a double sized display and could suck down quarters even faster. I don't recall that there was ever a good home version of the X-Men brawler on consoles but apparently you can get it for your iPhone for $2.99 now. (5 friends not included.)
Current generation console action and fighting games - $20 to $60 to play (not counting the original console purchase), add-on characters, maps, and levels cost anywhere from free (extra Portal 2 Co-Op levels) to $5 (MvC3 Jill or Shuma Gorath, each - unless you preordered the premium version) to $9 (DmC add-on Vergil levels unless you pre-ordered the original game) to $20 (Street Fighter X Tekken 12-character pack, regardless of preorder status) to $30 (Borderlands Add-On Pack). I didn't even count costumes - the character costume packs don't affect gameplay, but they can be rather expensive. Separately, there are over $40 in costumes available for Street Fighter IV, although there's a pack on Steam for the PC version that's only $14.99 for all of them.
Candy Crush - Free to play, facebook. Free to play the first batch of levels, iPad version. Can't buy the whole game at all. Five extra moves, $1. (Fine, $0.99, whatever.) Extra lives if you don't want to wait 30 minutes for one to regenerate, $0.99. Three lollipop hammers, $1.99.
Honestly, this would be like if you could buy three potions or keys in Gauntlet for $0.50 - which no one at the time would have done. They would have just slogged away at the enemies like normal. So I am going to just take my time and chip away at the game bit by bit like I'm doing. Maybe I'll call it Candy Chisel now.
The biggest frustration that I have seen is that some of the levels appear to be rather difficult without buying extra moves, but I haven't bought any extra moves yet and don't plan to anytime soon. This would appear to be a great plan on King's part (King is the company that makes Candy Crush) since typically most people tend not to buy stuff in free games. The last statistic that I had heard (and quite a number of years ago, prior to the big surge of facebook games) was that typically less that 10% of the players were responsible for over 90% of the in-game purchases in a free-to-play game. With the space a little more cutthroat and competitive, I doubt we would have access to those figures now, but I now hear about more people buying extra lives and moves in Candy Crush that I used to hear about people buying premium features in free-to-play games before. Sure, there were a few reports of kids racking up wagonloads of Smurfberries a couple of years ago, but we can't count the under-12 crowd as a real demographic for making informed purchases.
So, how are we supposed to feel as gamers about this sort of stuff? Let's look at Candy Crush and see how it stacks up to other games.
Arcade shooters, Gauntlet, Gauntlet II, Smash TV, fighting games, brawlers, and arcade sports games - $0.25 to play, $0.25 to continue, but buy the home version and never have to worry about quarters again. The arcade versions of Gauntlet and Gauntlet II had 4-player cabinets and ever-decreasing health. Playing through with a group of friends could cost $20 without too much trouble, and was probably a lot more than that. I picked $20 as a reference since you can pick up the console version for PS3 or XBox for that much and it includes dozens of other Midway classics. The X-Men brawler had a 6-player cabinet with a double sized display and could suck down quarters even faster. I don't recall that there was ever a good home version of the X-Men brawler on consoles but apparently you can get it for your iPhone for $2.99 now. (5 friends not included.)
Current generation console action and fighting games - $20 to $60 to play (not counting the original console purchase), add-on characters, maps, and levels cost anywhere from free (extra Portal 2 Co-Op levels) to $5 (MvC3 Jill or Shuma Gorath, each - unless you preordered the premium version) to $9 (DmC add-on Vergil levels unless you pre-ordered the original game) to $20 (Street Fighter X Tekken 12-character pack, regardless of preorder status) to $30 (Borderlands Add-On Pack). I didn't even count costumes - the character costume packs don't affect gameplay, but they can be rather expensive. Separately, there are over $40 in costumes available for Street Fighter IV, although there's a pack on Steam for the PC version that's only $14.99 for all of them.
Candy Crush - Free to play, facebook. Free to play the first batch of levels, iPad version. Can't buy the whole game at all. Five extra moves, $1. (Fine, $0.99, whatever.) Extra lives if you don't want to wait 30 minutes for one to regenerate, $0.99. Three lollipop hammers, $1.99.
Honestly, this would be like if you could buy three potions or keys in Gauntlet for $0.50 - which no one at the time would have done. They would have just slogged away at the enemies like normal. So I am going to just take my time and chip away at the game bit by bit like I'm doing. Maybe I'll call it Candy Chisel now.
Monday, July 22, 2013
Practice makes... more practice.
I was picking up my new pair of glasses the other day, and ended up explaining my take on the cube to the tech that did the final fit and one of the waiting customers there. I had done the same with the woman that scheduled the optometrists' appointments the previous weekend, and both times I was feeling really on the mark, like delivering good comedy or a convincing musical performance. I was wishing a little bit that I could get somebody else to film me doing this, just because I've never actually seen it, and I'm not entirely convinced I could just fire up a camera on a tripod and run through my schtick for nobody. Part of the reason that it's a little bit different every time is that I usually tend to tailor my responses to the initial questions, and then steer the presentation in to my standard bit when it seems right to do so. I'm not even thinking about that when I'm doing it, it just seems to go that way on its own.
At lunch the subsequent Friday, feeling confident with my new glasses, I got the "how long does it take you/what's your fastest time" questions and I started feeling a little disappointed that that number hadn't really changed much. I answered the rest of their questions and went to eat my lunch. While I ate, reflecting on my good performances the previous day, it occurred to me that it is pretty rare that I work on my speed specifically. What I tend to work on is exactly what I'm doing - explaining the Rubik's cube to people while I'm solving it. If I were using a faster solution method, I wouldn't have enough time to explain it while I was doing it. I also wouldn't have enough spare processing ability to be able to talk while I did some of the more complicated moves, especially at first when I would still be learning them.
So that got me thinking - what we practice is what we do is what we practice. Ok, so that's not worded well. Let's think about this in terms of music for a moment. If you spend all your time practicing by yourself, you can develop considerable technique but you are surrounded by a mostly comfortable situation - your roof, your room, your, idiosyncrasies, your accompaniment (if any), and your lack of an audience. You run the risk of not absorbing new input, and the challenges you face are fairly small and usually self-imposed. This is why for most players there is much value in both teaching and public performance.
The value in teaching others comes from many things. First, it forces us to strengthen our foundation of knowledge on the subject, purely by repetition. Second, we are presented with students that are approaching these ideas with (hopefully) a new mind. Sometimes the fresh perspective is invigorating to the teacher, allowing them to re-approach ideas with a new mind themselves. Sometimes the fresh perspective just helps us re-verify the ideas while we teach them to our students. Sometimes the fresh perspective makes us reevaluate some ideas and throw out some ideas entirely, but this is usually more difficult to do. Third, now we have a reason to communicate ideas back and forth. In our musical example, this would usually be some sort of musical notation. (In the cubing world, I might communicate an idea like R'D'RD'R'D2R'.) In dealing with other persons, both as students and as audience members, we are presented with the concept of hazard. Sometimes there are mistakes, and it is a necessary part of the interaction.
This brings us to the value of performance. In our musical example, we are strengthened by our interactions with other musicians, and it gives us more reason to communicate musical ideas although usually this happens in a more informal way. Instead of using strict musical notation, the ideas may be as simple as a set of lyrics and some chords to go with them. (In the cubing world, talking to other cubers at a competition, I might say, what moves do you use for the Sune and the Y permutation?) The level that the communication takes place at is usually raised by the level of skill of the participants. We are influenced by the different styles, methods, and presentations of our fellow participants, both in other groups and our own group. The outside influences add dimensions to our own ideas that we would not have had in isolation. We are also presented by more aspects of hazard. Will the microphones shock us if it starts raining? Can anybody in the back of the room hear the acoustic guitar? Are we going to remember the new ending that we just rehearsed last month the one time? Is the movie theater going to call and say we're playing too loud? (Cuber example: If I use my faster, looser cube to gain speed do I run the risk of having a piece pop out during a solve?) The best things that we learn from performance are usually not how to avoid hazard, but how to skillfully deal with it.
We must practice so that many things are second nature and we do not have to give those things our attention. We must practice so that when hazard appears we can give it our attention to minimize it. If this is not what we do, if we do not place ourselves in hazard's way, then we are ill-equipped when it finally occurs.
So, for me, for now, that means that I stick with my performance art/comedy bit/one-on-one cubing presentations, since I have a bit that's only designed for a small group of people.
While I'm thinking of it, for those of you that need to read more about the inherent hazards of musical performance, please go read my friend Nikki's blog at http://nyohshootilostmypassport.blogspot.com/.
At lunch the subsequent Friday, feeling confident with my new glasses, I got the "how long does it take you/what's your fastest time" questions and I started feeling a little disappointed that that number hadn't really changed much. I answered the rest of their questions and went to eat my lunch. While I ate, reflecting on my good performances the previous day, it occurred to me that it is pretty rare that I work on my speed specifically. What I tend to work on is exactly what I'm doing - explaining the Rubik's cube to people while I'm solving it. If I were using a faster solution method, I wouldn't have enough time to explain it while I was doing it. I also wouldn't have enough spare processing ability to be able to talk while I did some of the more complicated moves, especially at first when I would still be learning them.
So that got me thinking - what we practice is what we do is what we practice. Ok, so that's not worded well. Let's think about this in terms of music for a moment. If you spend all your time practicing by yourself, you can develop considerable technique but you are surrounded by a mostly comfortable situation - your roof, your room, your, idiosyncrasies, your accompaniment (if any), and your lack of an audience. You run the risk of not absorbing new input, and the challenges you face are fairly small and usually self-imposed. This is why for most players there is much value in both teaching and public performance.
The value in teaching others comes from many things. First, it forces us to strengthen our foundation of knowledge on the subject, purely by repetition. Second, we are presented with students that are approaching these ideas with (hopefully) a new mind. Sometimes the fresh perspective is invigorating to the teacher, allowing them to re-approach ideas with a new mind themselves. Sometimes the fresh perspective just helps us re-verify the ideas while we teach them to our students. Sometimes the fresh perspective makes us reevaluate some ideas and throw out some ideas entirely, but this is usually more difficult to do. Third, now we have a reason to communicate ideas back and forth. In our musical example, this would usually be some sort of musical notation. (In the cubing world, I might communicate an idea like R'D'RD'R'D2R'.) In dealing with other persons, both as students and as audience members, we are presented with the concept of hazard. Sometimes there are mistakes, and it is a necessary part of the interaction.
This brings us to the value of performance. In our musical example, we are strengthened by our interactions with other musicians, and it gives us more reason to communicate musical ideas although usually this happens in a more informal way. Instead of using strict musical notation, the ideas may be as simple as a set of lyrics and some chords to go with them. (In the cubing world, talking to other cubers at a competition, I might say, what moves do you use for the Sune and the Y permutation?) The level that the communication takes place at is usually raised by the level of skill of the participants. We are influenced by the different styles, methods, and presentations of our fellow participants, both in other groups and our own group. The outside influences add dimensions to our own ideas that we would not have had in isolation. We are also presented by more aspects of hazard. Will the microphones shock us if it starts raining? Can anybody in the back of the room hear the acoustic guitar? Are we going to remember the new ending that we just rehearsed last month the one time? Is the movie theater going to call and say we're playing too loud? (Cuber example: If I use my faster, looser cube to gain speed do I run the risk of having a piece pop out during a solve?) The best things that we learn from performance are usually not how to avoid hazard, but how to skillfully deal with it.
We must practice so that many things are second nature and we do not have to give those things our attention. We must practice so that when hazard appears we can give it our attention to minimize it. If this is not what we do, if we do not place ourselves in hazard's way, then we are ill-equipped when it finally occurs.
So, for me, for now, that means that I stick with my performance art/comedy bit/one-on-one cubing presentations, since I have a bit that's only designed for a small group of people.
While I'm thinking of it, for those of you that need to read more about the inherent hazards of musical performance, please go read my friend Nikki's blog at http://nyohshootilostmypassport.blogspot.com/.
Sunday, July 14, 2013
A missing news tidbit, or, Data is easier to locate when it's codified.
When some guy on YouTube is juggling Rubik's cubes, it seems that I get told about it nearly immediately. I was even reminded about it the other day when I got my oil changed. Somebody saw me with my cube and told me about it - just in case I hadn't seen it. (I blogged about it here.) To be honest - it's kind of amazing to me that it only took a day or two for me to find out about it because in every minute of every day, 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube. It's a little bit amazing that people can find things there at all, but it's made much easier by the fact that when someone posts a video, there's usually a title, and most of the time there are keywords added and a category attached so that people that might be looking for a certain thing can find it.
So, when Edward Snowden made himself a fugitive last month, nobody told me the really important part of the story and I didn't find out about it until I caught up on episodes of NPR's "Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!". I had to find out the really important part when Faith Salie mentioned it. Snowden took four computers, some clothes, and a Rubik's cube with him.
In his defense, if I had to become a fugitive it would be hard for me not to take a cube with me. Faced with hiding out in public parks and hotel room lobbies and warehouses and who knows where else, at least a cube wouldn't be traceable, wouldn't need batteries, and fits in your pocket (sort of). In the article they mention that he used it as an identifying trait for people he was going to meet that hadn't seen him before. This may mean that I will have to stop telling people at work that if they can't remember my name to "just ask for the guy with the cube".
So why didn't I hear about this until Faith mentioned it? Well, part of it may be that that particular facet of the story wasn't revealed at first, so maybe nobody was aware of it until a month ago, and it's my fault that I didn't listen to that episode of "Wait Wait" until this week. Why didn't I hear about it from anybody in person? It's way down in any of the stories about Snowden, not part of the sound bites, and unless you start reading the part where he meets up with the journalist from the Guardian via an elaborate scheme, perhaps you wouldn't have noticed.
It was easy enough to find in a web search - that's how I found the right part of the transcript from "Wait Wait" to link here, and it's how I found the right spot in the article from the Guardian. Once you've turned speech into text, or just have text in the first place, then you have something to work with. That gets me thinking about the part of the Snowden incident that is more likely to have the rest of you concerned but we'll have to start with a thought experiment first.
Go in a store, or some other public place, and look around. Or, think about your workplace during the day. How many people are there, and how many of them are on the phone at any give moment? One in ten? More? Less? Perhaps that's an exaggeration, so we'll aim low, and also to include people that are at home not on the phone and to correct a little for the lower phone activity at night. Let's say that at any given moment, only one person in a thousand is on the phone. (If that number seems low, give me a minute here.) So that means if the population of the United States is 316 million or so, then 316,000 people would be on the phone at any given moment. Since we're going to make the radical assumption that most of these people are calling each other and not outside the country, we're going to divide that number in half. That means that for every minute, if this haphazard model is correct, there are 158,000 minutes of telephone audio generated. That's over 2600 hours every minute - more than 26 times the amount of media uploaded to YouTube. Since it's just audio, it doesn't take up nearly as much space. With some reasonable compression, if the phone companies wanted to store every phone conversation being made, they probably could - but they would need server capacity on par with YouTube.
Even if you think I estimated low, I still I think it's safe to say that there are hundreds and hundreds of hours of phone conversations taking place every minute of every day. What could someone do with all this data? That totally depends on their ability to search it. Right now, speech-to-text programs are adequate for some things, especially under good audio conditions, so I'm sure it's relatively easy to have a computer do the first draft of the transcript for a well-engineered radio show. Under typical audio conditions, most speech-to-text programs would prefer a little bit of training. Once it gets worse than that, could a computer decipher the dropped packets and field noise of a poorly routed cell phone call or would they have to put a human on it? Yes, I realize that they can do profiling from the CallerID information and decide what to look at and what not to look at and narrow this down to who they really need to listen in on. However, you still have the disadvantage of not having keyword tags and a title like a YouTube video does. If someone thought they were being listened in on, they could start calling from other numbers, or start making a lot of mundane calls about nothing, or start including highly searched keywords in every phone call. Penn Jillette references the early days of email being searched and what to do about it when he breaches this topic on his podcast. (See episode 69, "Frank and father's got nothin' to hide".) George Carlin refrences a friend of his in one of his routines who always initiated a phone call by swearing at J. Edgar Hoover since it was assumed that the FBI was listening in. (See the bit "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television" from the album "Class Clown".)
But my point, and I seem to not have exactly made it so far, is that even if the government is technically listening in on everything I think there's a practical limit to how much they're able to pay attention to. Otherwise, somebody would have called me sooner to let me know about this Rubik's cube thing.
(Thanks, Faith.)
So, when Edward Snowden made himself a fugitive last month, nobody told me the really important part of the story and I didn't find out about it until I caught up on episodes of NPR's "Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!". I had to find out the really important part when Faith Salie mentioned it. Snowden took four computers, some clothes, and a Rubik's cube with him.
In his defense, if I had to become a fugitive it would be hard for me not to take a cube with me. Faced with hiding out in public parks and hotel room lobbies and warehouses and who knows where else, at least a cube wouldn't be traceable, wouldn't need batteries, and fits in your pocket (sort of). In the article they mention that he used it as an identifying trait for people he was going to meet that hadn't seen him before. This may mean that I will have to stop telling people at work that if they can't remember my name to "just ask for the guy with the cube".
So why didn't I hear about this until Faith mentioned it? Well, part of it may be that that particular facet of the story wasn't revealed at first, so maybe nobody was aware of it until a month ago, and it's my fault that I didn't listen to that episode of "Wait Wait" until this week. Why didn't I hear about it from anybody in person? It's way down in any of the stories about Snowden, not part of the sound bites, and unless you start reading the part where he meets up with the journalist from the Guardian via an elaborate scheme, perhaps you wouldn't have noticed.
It was easy enough to find in a web search - that's how I found the right part of the transcript from "Wait Wait" to link here, and it's how I found the right spot in the article from the Guardian. Once you've turned speech into text, or just have text in the first place, then you have something to work with. That gets me thinking about the part of the Snowden incident that is more likely to have the rest of you concerned but we'll have to start with a thought experiment first.
Go in a store, or some other public place, and look around. Or, think about your workplace during the day. How many people are there, and how many of them are on the phone at any give moment? One in ten? More? Less? Perhaps that's an exaggeration, so we'll aim low, and also to include people that are at home not on the phone and to correct a little for the lower phone activity at night. Let's say that at any given moment, only one person in a thousand is on the phone. (If that number seems low, give me a minute here.) So that means if the population of the United States is 316 million or so, then 316,000 people would be on the phone at any given moment. Since we're going to make the radical assumption that most of these people are calling each other and not outside the country, we're going to divide that number in half. That means that for every minute, if this haphazard model is correct, there are 158,000 minutes of telephone audio generated. That's over 2600 hours every minute - more than 26 times the amount of media uploaded to YouTube. Since it's just audio, it doesn't take up nearly as much space. With some reasonable compression, if the phone companies wanted to store every phone conversation being made, they probably could - but they would need server capacity on par with YouTube.
Even if you think I estimated low, I still I think it's safe to say that there are hundreds and hundreds of hours of phone conversations taking place every minute of every day. What could someone do with all this data? That totally depends on their ability to search it. Right now, speech-to-text programs are adequate for some things, especially under good audio conditions, so I'm sure it's relatively easy to have a computer do the first draft of the transcript for a well-engineered radio show. Under typical audio conditions, most speech-to-text programs would prefer a little bit of training. Once it gets worse than that, could a computer decipher the dropped packets and field noise of a poorly routed cell phone call or would they have to put a human on it? Yes, I realize that they can do profiling from the CallerID information and decide what to look at and what not to look at and narrow this down to who they really need to listen in on. However, you still have the disadvantage of not having keyword tags and a title like a YouTube video does. If someone thought they were being listened in on, they could start calling from other numbers, or start making a lot of mundane calls about nothing, or start including highly searched keywords in every phone call. Penn Jillette references the early days of email being searched and what to do about it when he breaches this topic on his podcast. (See episode 69, "Frank and father's got nothin' to hide".) George Carlin refrences a friend of his in one of his routines who always initiated a phone call by swearing at J. Edgar Hoover since it was assumed that the FBI was listening in. (See the bit "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television" from the album "Class Clown".)
But my point, and I seem to not have exactly made it so far, is that even if the government is technically listening in on everything I think there's a practical limit to how much they're able to pay attention to. Otherwise, somebody would have called me sooner to let me know about this Rubik's cube thing.
(Thanks, Faith.)
Thursday, July 4, 2013
Cubing in Public, Federal Holiday Edition
I suspected something was up when SuperMonkeyWife got ready in the kid's bathroom instead of ours, although I did not discover that there was a broken shower head in our bathroom until later.
My first though was that I should peruse the local drugstores. At least they're open on the 4th, and I didn't really want to go to Walmart and stand in line behind all the people getting beer and sparklers. Since I tend not to spend more than $20 on a shower head and I didn't really need anything fancy other than having the detachable head, whatever might be at the drugstore would likely be acceptable. (If you're wondering, the part that fails on the plastic ones is the piece that you hang the detachable head on. The repeated stress of hanging the shower head back on it eventually cracks it in its weakest point. I am not convinced that buying a more expensive shower head will prolong this failure long enough to make up for the additional expense.) I asked the clerk at CVS where a shower head might be, and he walked to the aisle I already perused. Plungers, yes. Sink stoppers, yes. Fluorescent light bulbs, for sure. No shower heads.
As we're walking back towards the aisle, he noticed me twiddling the cube in my hand and suggested that he could fix it for me. I asked him how fast he was, sincerely hoping that I've found a real cuber at last, and he wasn't sure how to answer the question right away. Without waiting for him to try to formulate an answer, I told him that I average just under 40 seconds and he seemed impressed. Then I had to lay on him the heavy news that 40 seconds wouldn't even get me in the senior division and that there are kids in California that are averaging under 15 seconds. I showed him a typical solve, and then I did a second one for his coworker up front. His coworker made the "the best I ever did was three sides" comment that I've already complained about in a previous Holiday Cubing post. However, they seemed like nice guys and I didn't feel like calling him out on the three sides thing. While I was talking to them, and they were still capably handling customers, one of their customers took interest in what I'm doing and commented about how he used to be able to do it, but he can't now. (I'm surprised that I haven't complained about that particular thing in a previous post.) He asked if I can explain it, and I went through my usual bit about the centers not moving relative to each other, and about how there's a one-to-one correspondence between the pieces and their eventual locations, and it seemed unsatisfying. He wants to know if there's like, a thing I can just tell him that will subsequently allow him to solve the cube. I tried to make clear that there isn't and explained that it took a couple of weekends for Will Smith to learn how to solve a cube for "The Pursuit of Happyness". He asked me for the cube, so he could show me that he could do a side - except that he fell victim to the classic blunder of getting involved in a land war in Asia.
No, that wasn't it.
His classic blunder was that he completed a side, but not the layer. For someone who had a) claimed to have previously solved the cube and b) had just watched me explain the bit about the centers and how they determine what goes where, I didn't expect him to revert to working without any of that information. He was also a bit shaky, having put himself on the spot, and I know firsthand that that doesn't lead to efficient cubing. As soon as he finished the side he asked about solving the rest of the cube from there, and I had to take it back from him and re-complete the side so that it was a complete layer and explained again why that had to be that way. I showed him the move to insert edges into the middle layer three times, more slowly each time and then walked him through the move the fourth time. I rushed through the remainder of the cube, eager to get out and see if the other drugstore on that corner had a shower head. No dice.
After the second shopping failure, I relented and went to Walmart. I got a shower head, along with a few other necessities. I also poked my head in Gamestop since I was over that way. At Gamestop, instead of getting to talk to my usual clerk, I got the shift manager instead. Having the cube in my hand gave him some sort of flashback from 1981 where he won $10 from a friend of his for solving the cube. He said it took him 57 minutes and change, and I heard my usual clerk suggesting to the manager that he was just making up numbers. I had a list of games that I was considering, but I couldn't make a clear decision because the manager was too chatty and wasn't making any sense to me (although it's equally possible I didn't make any sense to him). Thinking I needed to worry more about dinner, I leave without getting anything and ponder the idea that someone solved a Rubik's cube in just under an hour.
Assuming one had any sort of a system at all, there are only 20 pieces to solve. Let's get really crazy and suggest that they're only making one turn every 10 seconds, so an average of 6 turns a minute. So, that's a solved cube in 342 moves, or 17 face turns per piece. By comparison, the lower bound is 1 face turn per piece for the 3x3x3 cube if solved by computer. A good speedcuber is using a solution that is somewhere in the neighborhood of 45-60 turns, or 3 face turns per piece. My corners first method might be 70-80 moves, or 4 face turns per piece. The Nourse method would put you somewhere in the neighborhood of 100-120 moves, or 5-6 face turns per piece, unless you're super unlucky. So, with 17 face turns per piece, the solution must be so complicated and esoteric that perhaps it would stand to reason that you would forget it, or it was somehow an example of the Infinite Monkey Theorem, or it was utter baloney.
I will leave the determination of the scenario as an exercise for the reader.
My first though was that I should peruse the local drugstores. At least they're open on the 4th, and I didn't really want to go to Walmart and stand in line behind all the people getting beer and sparklers. Since I tend not to spend more than $20 on a shower head and I didn't really need anything fancy other than having the detachable head, whatever might be at the drugstore would likely be acceptable. (If you're wondering, the part that fails on the plastic ones is the piece that you hang the detachable head on. The repeated stress of hanging the shower head back on it eventually cracks it in its weakest point. I am not convinced that buying a more expensive shower head will prolong this failure long enough to make up for the additional expense.) I asked the clerk at CVS where a shower head might be, and he walked to the aisle I already perused. Plungers, yes. Sink stoppers, yes. Fluorescent light bulbs, for sure. No shower heads.
As we're walking back towards the aisle, he noticed me twiddling the cube in my hand and suggested that he could fix it for me. I asked him how fast he was, sincerely hoping that I've found a real cuber at last, and he wasn't sure how to answer the question right away. Without waiting for him to try to formulate an answer, I told him that I average just under 40 seconds and he seemed impressed. Then I had to lay on him the heavy news that 40 seconds wouldn't even get me in the senior division and that there are kids in California that are averaging under 15 seconds. I showed him a typical solve, and then I did a second one for his coworker up front. His coworker made the "the best I ever did was three sides" comment that I've already complained about in a previous Holiday Cubing post. However, they seemed like nice guys and I didn't feel like calling him out on the three sides thing. While I was talking to them, and they were still capably handling customers, one of their customers took interest in what I'm doing and commented about how he used to be able to do it, but he can't now. (I'm surprised that I haven't complained about that particular thing in a previous post.) He asked if I can explain it, and I went through my usual bit about the centers not moving relative to each other, and about how there's a one-to-one correspondence between the pieces and their eventual locations, and it seemed unsatisfying. He wants to know if there's like, a thing I can just tell him that will subsequently allow him to solve the cube. I tried to make clear that there isn't and explained that it took a couple of weekends for Will Smith to learn how to solve a cube for "The Pursuit of Happyness". He asked me for the cube, so he could show me that he could do a side - except that he fell victim to the classic blunder of getting involved in a land war in Asia.
No, that wasn't it.
His classic blunder was that he completed a side, but not the layer. For someone who had a) claimed to have previously solved the cube and b) had just watched me explain the bit about the centers and how they determine what goes where, I didn't expect him to revert to working without any of that information. He was also a bit shaky, having put himself on the spot, and I know firsthand that that doesn't lead to efficient cubing. As soon as he finished the side he asked about solving the rest of the cube from there, and I had to take it back from him and re-complete the side so that it was a complete layer and explained again why that had to be that way. I showed him the move to insert edges into the middle layer three times, more slowly each time and then walked him through the move the fourth time. I rushed through the remainder of the cube, eager to get out and see if the other drugstore on that corner had a shower head. No dice.
After the second shopping failure, I relented and went to Walmart. I got a shower head, along with a few other necessities. I also poked my head in Gamestop since I was over that way. At Gamestop, instead of getting to talk to my usual clerk, I got the shift manager instead. Having the cube in my hand gave him some sort of flashback from 1981 where he won $10 from a friend of his for solving the cube. He said it took him 57 minutes and change, and I heard my usual clerk suggesting to the manager that he was just making up numbers. I had a list of games that I was considering, but I couldn't make a clear decision because the manager was too chatty and wasn't making any sense to me (although it's equally possible I didn't make any sense to him). Thinking I needed to worry more about dinner, I leave without getting anything and ponder the idea that someone solved a Rubik's cube in just under an hour.
Assuming one had any sort of a system at all, there are only 20 pieces to solve. Let's get really crazy and suggest that they're only making one turn every 10 seconds, so an average of 6 turns a minute. So, that's a solved cube in 342 moves, or 17 face turns per piece. By comparison, the lower bound is 1 face turn per piece for the 3x3x3 cube if solved by computer. A good speedcuber is using a solution that is somewhere in the neighborhood of 45-60 turns, or 3 face turns per piece. My corners first method might be 70-80 moves, or 4 face turns per piece. The Nourse method would put you somewhere in the neighborhood of 100-120 moves, or 5-6 face turns per piece, unless you're super unlucky. So, with 17 face turns per piece, the solution must be so complicated and esoteric that perhaps it would stand to reason that you would forget it, or it was somehow an example of the Infinite Monkey Theorem, or it was utter baloney.
I will leave the determination of the scenario as an exercise for the reader.
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