Holy crap, it’s cold outside. The wind is also helping none.

Today’s selection concerns one of my father’s greatest heroes, Norman Borlaug:

The large role he has played in both increasing crop yields and promoting this view has led to this methodology being called by agricultural economists the “Borlaug hypothesis”, namely that increasing the productivity of agriculture on the best farmland can help control deforestation by reducing the demand for new farmland. According to this view, assuming that global food demand is on the rise, restricting crop usage to traditional low-yield methods such as organic farming would also require at least one of the following: the world population to decrease, either voluntarily or as a result of mass starvations; or the conversion of forest land into crop land.

He’s the only guy I’ve ever heard of to be credited with saving a billion lives. And make sure to read his response to his critics.

Spring break keeps a rollin’, and today brings us George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language”:

I think the following rules will cover most cases:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Rule 1 is one I always try to take to heart, but I often discard the second in favor of more beautiful prose. Ideally, I aim for something of a balance between Lovecraft and Holkins:

My mother had purchased a copy of Bratz for one of her grandkids, and was enraged (well, maybe just displeased) with the game’s insipid gameplay and lack of visual prowess. She’s unhappy with my progress in Zelda, which I thought was a radical new avenue of maternal complaint. I don’t know who this woman is.

Midterms this week, spring break next. So I’m taking an extended spring break from writing. Hopefully, see you guys in two weeks.

Until then, I’ll try to keep some juicy links coming to give you something to read. Today, How To Become a Hacker:

The Hacker Attitude

1. The world is full of fascinating problems waiting to be solved.
2. No problem should ever have to be solved twice.
3. Boredom and drudgery are evil.
4. Freedom is good.
5. Attitude is no substitute for competence.

Shut Up and Teach: A Review of Indoctrinate U

“Instead of restricting free speech, let’s say we’re ‘ending harassment’.”

When I was considering universities to attend, there were a number of criteria I used to identify the optimal choice: quality of the computer science program, location, and cost were the big three. But in the back of my mind, there was always a small bit of consideration given to the political climate on campus, after I had heard tell of the free speech of students being abridged on college campuses. There was no terribly effective way to research this, and it stayed in the back of my mind until after I made the choice and came to my current school.

And, sure enough, I lucked out and managed to find a school that doesn’t have teachers who give political lectures in their Romance Languages course, and I’ve yet to hear of any actions taken against students over reasonably protected speech.

But that left me pretty curious: what was going on at these schools where such things were common place? How do the students manage? Thinking similar things, Evan Coyne Maloney and his On The Fence Films production team set out to document just that in their film Indoctrinate U.

This is a film with a broad scope, which sets out not only to document infringements on protected free speech, but also investigate its root causes, as well as indict the entire system of political correctness that has produced college students who will scream to military recruiters “Get out of our country!” while waving a flag of Palestine.

For example, Maloney tells the story of Steve Hinkle, a Cal Poly student who was punished and bullied by administrators after posting “literature of an offensive racial nature.” The posting? A flier announcing a speech being given by author Mason Weaver. The “offensive” speech? The title of Mason Weaver’s book, “It’s Okay To Leave the Plantation”. After all was said and done, some months later, Hinkle had nearly been thrown out of school for a flier that had been construed, under some nebulous definition, as “hate speech.”

But this documentary isn’t just talking to college students in their dorms, because all of this discussion of serious matters is interleaved with lighthearted “confrontations”, such as Maloney inquiring at some dozen universities where he can find their Men’s Center — “Is it near the Women’s Center?”

However, where these sections detail a narrative, there is another story told when the film just cools its heels and lets the fruits of this politically correct college mono-culture run wild. Incidents like a college student shouting the nonsensical jeer “The blood is on your shoulders, man!” and a college bureaucrat attempting to waflle and weasel his way out of whether he did or did not approve fliers that compare a student to Hitler and suicide bombers.

But since anecdotal evidence by itself can never be taken with proof, Maloney makes sure to dig up the numbers to bear up his claims, as well as interview college professors from across the political spectrum. Unfortunately and inexplicably, however, not a single college administrator contacted agreed to interview on camera.

But in all of this, I’m sort of predisposed to like the film, since it exposes something I disagree while using enough journalistic integrity that it can’t be dismissed out of hand as a smear job. But while I was watching the documentary in my dorm, my roommate came along and was instantly drawn in. Not only was he impressed by the film, he was entirely unaware of the events it documented. He and I are both lucky that we go to such a tolerant university, although I’ll admit he echoed my thoughts by muttering, “Oh, wow,” when Maloney made a passing reference to an incident where the ROTC office right here on campus was vandalized.

This film is whirlwind tour of political correctness on college campuses that wraps up with a stirring call to arms, as it were, to push for a new campus free speech movement, one that will tolerate views that may offend you. After all, as the film reinforces, nobody really has a right to not be offended. Summing up this wish for free speech on campus, Maloney punctuates his film with a protester’s own words:

“No justice, no peace.”

I always thought “Discrete Math” was doing your homework in another class

I managed to snag a review copy of Indoctrinate U, and have many things to say about it. The review was going to appear here, but it’s 4am, and I still have to write proof that log(n!) runs in O(nlogn) time. Expect it Friday.

Here’s a quick preview: if you’re a conservative college student who’s concerned about free speech on campus, you’ll enjoy this film about defending (mostly) conservative free speech on campus.

As I will doubtlessly point out again, it’s not that the protectors seek out conservative speech to protect, it is simply that it comes under attack far more often.

Raph Koster and the future of gaming

Raph Koster has recently emerged into prominence in my mind as a man who knows a lot about what he is talking about. He’s a long-time game developer with a concentration on massively multiplayer online (MMO) games, games with hundreds of people interacting at once such as World of Warcraft or Everquest.

Raph first burst into my awareness when Tycho of Penny Arcade (coiner of the word “lexiconnoisseur”) asked him to come up with some way to make a massively multiplayer online game, or MMO, about construction. As in “making buildings.” The challenge wasn’t coming up with a way to make the game, it was a way to make the game fun.

The whole article is rather fascinating, a look into the tricky world of game design. But the thing that made the whole thing stick out in my mind was that Raph eloquently summed up something that I was gradually coming to understand on a non-verbal and conceptual level. He said, “Games are made out of smaller games – turtles all the way down, until you hit the game that is so trivial and stupid it isn’t deserving of the name.”

Playing Mario, for example, can be boiled down to pressing the “jump” button at the correct precise moment. When it is phrased this way, I can only think of those crappy Flash “reflex tests” which require you to play almost exactly the same game. In the art of video game alchemy, the “jump”, the “shoot”, the “move” are among the atomic elements from which all games are wrought. But the good game abstracts and nests these atoms so deep that it feels like something completely singular.

At any rate, the point of taking these elements and combining them in a way that makes working with a hundred people you don’t know, over the internet, to win a contract for and construct a building to be an enjoyable experience. This ends up taxing almost all of his genius, which results in something that sounds, on a general level, at least passingly interesting. He does not, however, find a way to write the whole design doc, as he admits at one point, “I have no idea what makes for a fun drywall subgame, sorry.”

But of late, Raph has been working on a product called Metaplace. It is, essentially, a toolkit to be used to build your own MMO, as a web-browser game. A game master, for lack of a better term, begins creating his world, specifying all the elements of the game and opening it up for the world to enter.

When [Web 2.0] started becoming common currency for everybody what we saw happening with everything from literature to video was that it became democratised. But it wasn’t happening for games. I was attending all these “how the web works” conferences and seeing how these things worked, and it all clicked into place. Here was this opportunity to harness this energy and get the same kind of results from the web that we’ve seen with thriving indie musicians, or all these other creative people who were previously gated by infrastructure. It’s all been coming out. It made me want to do that for games. I’d been developing a bunch of small games at the weekend, and said to myself “this is easy for me because I’m a game developer, but for most people it’s hard”. I want to fix that. For most people the tools aren’t there, the infrastructure isn’t there, and in particular for MMOs. I mean, if you want to make your own MMO, just forget it. It’s an insurmountable barrier.

As someone who is both a lover of MMO games and a weekend game programmer, this excites me greatly. We really are living in the future.

Pixels, we got pixels

YouTube is a household term these days, and DivX is getting there, but what’s still off the radar for almost everyone is DivX’s take on web video, which they call Stage6. The big difference? 1080p.

Their official FAQ claims that there is “currently is no limit to the number or total size of videos”, only that they be under 2 gigabytes, which is quite a lot with a compact format like DivX. With beautiful full-screen enlargement, which is night and day to YouTube’s horrifying quality at high resolutions, it is what I would say is the future of internet streaming video.

The catch? You have to download their web player software. YouTube runs “natively” in most browsers because its based on Flash, which has its limitations. I suspect that there is also a concern for compatibility, as not every computer can render 720p at 30 frames per second. But you don’t write papers in Notepad, and nor should web video be stuck in Flash.

So what do you get for your install? well, the most impressive videos are usually high-res movie trailers. Let see, we have the new Indy movie, Iron Man (which also comes in stupidly high res), and the second Narnia. All of them look utterly appealing and they’re all coming out in mid-May. Bastards.

But what really caught my eye over at Stage6 is the support for making a web series. The three episode-based web shows that I have paid attention to (RedVsBlue, The Scene, and Pure Pwnage) never made any attempt to host their content on the likes of YouTube because it just wasn’t practical. Their only option was to host the videos on their own servers and let people come and consume their bandwidth. Obviously, this makes the start-up costs for such an endeavor somewhat higher.

As evidence, I offer up “./shutdown” a web series that takes some help desk employees who work at MorboCorp and answer to a bureaucrat who insists on being called “Gunny” and who often descend into Nerf battles, and just runs with them. They go everywhere from the comic shop to Comic-Con, and all of it at Stage6, in honest-to-god 720p. They have actually not even bothered to host the videos on their own servers for download, preferring to mirror them at various video download sites.

And honestly, why would you? When you can host high quality videos for free online, why would you shell out clams for your own server? Damned if I know.

A Marketplace of Ideas

College is supposed to be the place that you go off and have your mind opened, as all your small-town values are challenged by worldly professors who teach you the way the world really works. (You know, that world they have live in…)

And when I went off on my own University adventure, I was convinced that I wouldn’t sip the Kool-aid and become some Che-loving hippie. And, while that hasn’t happened just yet, I have been having my horizons broadened. The real catch, though? Luckily, it’s not coming from the professors, but from a student organization. No, not the College Democrats — although there is some overlap — it’s the Society of Independent Thought, a sort of newspeaky term for an informal debate club. Every two weeks, they — we — get together and shoot the shit about issues of the day.

For example, a recent meeting was on the topic of abortion. While my stance on the topic wasn’t changed, I certainly gained some clarity on the issue. Every argument I’m aware of on the topic is based one or both of two things: whether the government has the jurisdiction to regulate such things and when exactly a fetus meaningfully becomes a human. Of course, this is a simplification, but it does help to put the matter in perspective.

But last night, I sat across a conference table from five Obama supporters, with my trusty apathetic friend at my side commenting on the chewiness of the gratis cookies as I defended capitalism, unsocialized medicine, and federalism. But it really was quite fascinating. With all the reading I do in the (Conservative) blogosphere, I find I develop an ivory tower mentality that kicks me in the face when I come across people who oppose my views in real life who are not drooling idiots.

They are, however, idealists, it seems to me. I would like just as much as they to find a system where everyone in America could be happily medically insured. But from the evidence I’ve seen, no such system has been found. I would love to be wrong on this, but just wishing I were isn’t an acceptable substitute. (I actually felt this was the strongest point I made during the whole meeting. With a little help from Messrs Hobbes, Lock, and Rousseau, I turned their logical barbs aside with the point that health care is not in the social contract.)

But perhaps the best part of the meetings are the parts afterwards, when we leave the room and stand, usually, within sight of the place of our debate. But it is an unspoken rule the those discussions are left behind, and this is the time for idle chatter and bond-forging. I’m not much of one for pointless blather, but spreading the word about Audiosurf does, in the final analysis, beat getting to use phrases like “I deny your premise” and “the fallacy you are operating under is”.

Tuesday Afternoon Photostream

First: an announcement. Tonight premieres the new season of Jericho. Do not miss it.

A collection of geek paraphernalia that accumulated during a recent Iron Heroes session.

3200 students camping out for 2800 tickets to the basketball game against our rivals. I think they’re loony, but some of them probably think the same about camping out for a Wii.

In case you missed it, one of my favorite pictures I’ve taken.

A 5 on the Illness Communication Exaggeration Curve

“Now, that’s service,” I commented to myself, taking a long pull on my milkshake.

It was really a muttering, forced out by an impression that had struck me as the Sonic waitress skated away on her cute little size 8 roller blades. Maybe it’d just been too long since I’d eaten at Sonic, but something about the entire experience had been downright painless. But as I sat there, slippered feet propped up on a nearby bench (I’d been too lazy to put on real shoes), I tried to suss out why.

It’s probably safe to say that I was primed to enjoy the experience by my nice stroll down the street to get there, since the restaurant was only a minute away on foot. Would have been less if I had decided to cut through my backyard and cross over the border that my house shares with it. The place was built within a few years of our moving into the house, and had caused quite a ruckus. The first month or so, the place was over-flowing. People parked along the streets in my neighborhood and walked, since there was not a single opening at the many bays of the drive-in restaurant. Eventually, this was quashed with some opportunely placed No Parking signs, and I don’t know how people who didn’t live in the area kept up their walk-up business. But somehow, they did.

Of course, that was all years ago. This particular dusky Sunday had a half dozen cars parked for drive-in service, and the dozen tables for walk-ins were deserted. Except, of course, for me and my slippers. It occurred to me that maybe it was the service by a cute girl near my own age that prompted the sense of well-being, but that wasn’t entirely right either.

That brought to mind the nature of the ordering process, which had changed somewhat since the first time I’d ventured to the restaurant as a part of a gang of neighborhood boys. Being adventurous, when we were asked to give initials so that our identity might be tied to our order, some made up three-character strings, while one boy, with a fit of giggles, spelled out A-S-S. The server would have none of this rugrat’s antics and just kept right on going. Somehow, when the orders came around, no call was ever issued for “ass”.

However, in the order placed just minutes ago no initials had been required. It was a step that had not been missed in the process, likely due to my solitude, and served to make the actual lodging of an order somewhat more convenient. What made it more so, however, was the little credit card slider on the microphone used to order that allowed the card to never leave my hands, as had been necessary before they’d installed the contraptions, an event that went wholly unnoticed by myself.

Actually, as I sit here sniffling and hashing this out, it becomes clear that it was probably, quite simply, my illness. Firstly, this particular flavor of the common cold has the interesting effect of making me quite sedentary, so any opportunity to simply sit and be still was a welcome change. But also, the illness was the reason for my visit to Sonic: for one of their excellent milkshakes. My standard self-medication for when my body decides to give the lining of my throat a pink slip as a part of trying to fight an illness, I knew when I woke up that the day would end, one way or another, at Sonic.