Friday 23 June 2006 at 12:55 am
Star Trek has fallen by the wayside. Enterprise seven year run was cut down to four by poor ratings. The idealistic future brought about by deus ex machina grounded Star Trek to the point where it became more of the same. Stories can be driven by various means, be it character or plot driven, but ultimately stories entertain us by conflict and the choices made as a result of the conflict (pure testosterone action flicks are exempted from this). Interesting enough this parallels a major game design philosophy: fun games are the ones that present the player with interesting choices. In passive entertainment we watch the choices made by others. Choosing to solve a problem by using the deflector dish is NOT an interesting choice. There are other problems that plague the franchise as well, but this post isn't meant to go into detail about that as we will be arguing for days. Something we all can agree on is that something needs to change. Someone proposed just that.
In 2004
Bryce Zabel and
j. michael straczynski wrote a
12 page proposal to Paramount on the potential next series that would not just inject new life into the universe, but give it a full blown reboot. It is a proposal so amazing and so daring that it deserves its own line.
Remaking the Original Series.
Wednesday 21 June 2006 at 9:17 pm
In the event you could not tell, I broke the css of my site. I wanted to bring the left boxes so both side columns would be on the right as a setup for an upcoming face lift. Obviously it ain't working well.
[Edit]I would very much like the thank
Gingerbread Man for his help and a solution that seems so obvious I felt stupid for not trying it. I owe him cookies[/Edit]
Wednesday 21 June 2006 at 12:59 am
I am done.
I am a Graduate.
David Robert Radford, Bachelor of Science in Science with an emphasis in Natural Science and Education.
4.0 GPA for the Spring 2006 term.
Final Score:
Undergraduate Summary
| |
| Current Term: |
12.000 |
12.000 |
12.000 |
48.00 |
4.00 |
| Cumulative: |
137.000 |
137.000 |
135.000 |
479.95 |
3.55 |
| Transfer: |
64.000 |
60.000 |
64.000 |
178.66 |
2.79 |
| Overall: |
201.000 |
197.000 |
199.000 |
658.61 |
3.30 |
Game Over. User Wins.
5 points to the first who can name that reference.
Thursday 15 June 2006 at 07:23 am
PLEASE cut your plastic rings. Bloody a people it isn't that hard or takes that long. If anything I find it theraputic. I also find soriting my recycling theraputic and have become somewhat irritated now that they only have generic bins now.
Wednesday 14 June 2006 at 9:14 pm
http://historyofscientology.ytmnd.com/
Wednesday 14 June 2006 at 3:57 pm
The Rewards of Being Shy
The Rewards of Being Shy
By Michael Hochman
ScienceNOW Daily News
13 June 2006
Shy people may be quiet, but there's a lot going on in their heads. When they encounter a frightening or unfamiliar situation--meeting someone new, for example--a brain region responsible for negative emotions goes into overdrive. But new research indicates that shy people may be more sensitive to all sorts of stimuli, not just frightening ones.
The findings come courtesy of brain scans of 13 extremely shy adolescents and 19 outgoing ones. Researchers, led by Amanda Guyer, a development psychologist at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, placed each child in a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine and had them play games in which they could win or lose money. The study subjects--who were classified as either shy or outgoing based on psychological testing--were instructed to press a button as quickly as possible after being shown a signal. If they pressed the button in time, they won money, or at least prevented themselves from losing it.
Both groups performed similarly, and there was no difference in the activity of their amygdalas--the brain region that governs fear. Shy children, however, showed two to three times more activity in their striatum, which is associated with reward, than outgoing children, the team reports in the 14 June issue of the Journal of Neuroscience. "Up until now, people thought that [shyness] was mostly related to avoidance of social situations," says co-author and child psychiatrist Monique Ernst. "Here we showed that shy children have increased activity in the reward system of the brain as well."
Why this would be the case is still not clear. "One interpretation is that extremely shy children have an increased sensitivity to many types of stimuli--both frightening and rewarding," says Guyer. There are other possibilities as well, says Mauricio Delgado, a psychologist at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey. For example, increased activity in the striatum may help shy children cope with the anxiety of stressful situations, although not enough so to help them overcome their shyness.
These findings are also significant because they may help researchers understand why shy children develop psychiatric problems at an increased rate later in life, says Brian Knutson, a psychologist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. Because shy children appear to be more sensitive to winning and losing, they may experience emotions more strongly than others, putting them at risk for emotional disorders such as anxiety and depression. On the flip side, shy children may experience positive emotions such as success very strongly, helping them succeed, Knutson says.
Wednesday 14 June 2006 at 12:12 pm
A dictatorship would be a heck of a lot easier, there's no question about it.
--George w. Bush
07/27/2001
Although it is true, it is much more easy to get your way as a dictator, which is why I am going to take over the world!
Thursday 08 June 2006 at 8:24 pm
Here is yet another reason to not vote republican. Full text also available in the read more section. In short content providers (such as google and Myspace) that use a great deal of bandwidth will now have to pay the telecoms for such services.
Monday 05 June 2006 at 12:20 am
Fault lines lay across Oregon line a dropped windshield. The disruptive history of the region's past, from the great accretions of land over the past 900 million years that lay the foundations to this part of the continent to the slow and steady northward shove of the Californian subplate, yet are smoothed and hidden by relatively recent floods and volcanism. Being apart of this land for my entire life it only seems a fitting analogy for my immediate future.
(more)
Thursday 01 June 2006 at 11:40 am
David Radford
Complexity and the Universe Part 2
Last Journal
I have issues with
dark matter. It is not that I am racist (although white chocolate, while not a chocolate, is far better in cookies than dark chocolate) or hate dark things in general (even though blue m&m are the best thing since the pizza cutter), it is that I have an issue with ideas or things made up to explain what is going on without trying to use things that have been tested and proven first. I will illustrate some of my beefs with
string theory and hopefully that might make my ideas a bit more clear.
String theory is
science -- I will not argue with that, but the flat earth theory was science too back in the days before an Egyptian measured shadows in a well. Part of the problem with string theory is that we can not test it yet. We do not have the tools or possibly even the energy to do so. Granted string theory allows some important physics equations to materialize a bit more gracefully but I have difficulty accepting a model until we can test it.
The other big issue I have is that in order for the equations to work scientists/mathematicians need to add six or seven more dimensions to the universe. Obviously they are not really adding more dimensions, but they are making the claim that they are there. However, I can not think of any other theory which requires extra dimensions. This seems very
ad hoc, which is very bad science.
Dark matter is not quite as bad. In this case there is observable evidence. Stars at the edges of galaxies are moving around far faster than they should. To explain this many scientists developed a new type of matter which does not interact with light but interacts with normal matter by gravity. Normal matter ideas, such as MACHOS (massive compact halo objects), would seem acceptable as they do not produce enough light to be visible at such distances and are composed of normal matter, but this does not fit with observable evidence as that would be more normal matter than the range the universe produced. There don't seem to be enough WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles) out there either. WIMPs also illustrate the problem raised. They are theoretical particles that have not been discovered yet and no means to really detect them, sans neutrinos which have been detected.
Over the years some interesting alternatives have arisen on popular science magazines and web sites. Some are just as exotic and run into ad hoc again. One of these, also mentioned in the book Timeline, is that an infinite number of universes have weak interactions with each other and the interaction is strong the more similar the universes are. So galaxies would seem like they are much more massive than they are. Yet we have no way to prove this. Another far more interesting theory is that a group of scientists claim that the physics being used to measure the speed of the stars. When they applied what they claimed to be proper relativistic physics the numbers came out perfectly and there is no need for a dark matter. Sadly I have seen nothing further on this theory so it was probably debunked.
