Lies, Damn Lies

There she is

2009-12-14T04:29:00.000-08:00

I may have linked to these series videos in the past, but the series is finally completed. It starts off being nothing but fun then goes to a slightly more serious place for the conclusion. Enjoy

Moving house

2009-12-14T03:49:00.000-08:00

So we moved house this weekend, from shiny flat to worn flat, from expensive flat to cheaper flat, from terrible shower to amazing shower. I'm willing to forgive our new flat a lot of ills (including INSECTS IN THE FRIDGE) thanks to the lovely shower, in which I can finally cover myself in water, rather than desperately pray for the morsels of water that the old shower used to dribble out.

The moving went rather well, thanks to the able assistance of several friends, apart from an unfortunate moment when we discovered that our able van driver's car had been clamped. Oh well, I had set aside 100 pounds for damage to the van, and instead spent it on a declamping.

The old flat is now clean and splendid, and all that is needed is to empty the million boxes sitting in our new flat. Incidentally, for anyone ever thinking of moving in December... for the love of god, don't do it!

Cheating as the gm

2009-12-11T01:34:00.000-08:00

Depending on how you look at it, the gm cannot really cheat in a roleplaying game. Its their world, after all. However, its clear there are lines gms should not cross. Generally speaking it shouldn't be the gm's role to tell players how they act, unless said players are clearly using knowledge their character simply would have. Also, while some dice fudging might be allowed, the rules he's using should be the same as applied to the players. Or, if not, the rules are consistent (asymmetric rules between players and gms are not unheard of, but these do need to be clearly defined.)

What kind of dice fudging should be permitted? Ideally it should be avoided as much as possible, but I think sometimes should be allowed. While preventing your players from ever dying is not fun, its quite easy to accidentally throw an overwhelming encounter at your players by accident. In those circumstances it might be worth ignoring a couple of things. I've done this once or twice, but it is best to avoid, becuase players can't have accomplishments if you're holding their hands. Its also best to avoid fudging for anything other than the players favour, no matter what happens. If, for example, your swarm of unstoppable nurglings get taken down in two rounds of combat, then you just have to live with that, however implausible (between them the npcs rolled 4 ulrics furies....).

Cheating

2009-12-09T04:44:00.000-08:00

Another order of the stick forums related rant, its draw is inoxerable.

Cheating in competitive games is quite clearly wrong. You are basically playing a game according to a different rule set to everyone else. You are far more likely to win, and while this might be fun for you, you are setting out to take away the fun from everyone else. Strangely though, people will even cheat in roleplaying games.

Roleplaying games are largely co-operative games, yet it is fairly easy to cheat. I've seen some arguments around that this even might be ok. After all, no-one is competing. True, but when someone always suceeds, it becomes frustrating. A co-operative game isn't very good if one person is always doing better. I enjoy my characters having amusing epic failures, but this is less entertaining if another player is just doing all the work. I can live with random chance, and indeed want to it enliven the game I' playing- if I wanted to play without dice I'd do so. Without the possibility of failure, success becomes kind of pointless.

Science and morality

2009-12-09T01:53:00.000-08:00

A while back the government fired a scientific advisor. The reason? He was rightly suggesting the governments decision to move cannabis back to class B was ridiculous. Cannabis is a less dangerous drug than alcohol and cigarettes (arguably, this is also true of Ecstasy), and is not chemically addictive. Being at class C has not dramatically altered the usage, or led to a plague of schizophrenia. There is no justification for this other than to look tough. This is a clear case where the politic ans over rode scientific sense to appeal to tabloid sensibilities. There are certain issues that we refuse to look at sanely, and this is one of them.

So, can science inform morality? I believe so, yes. It cannot decide what is or isn't moral necessarily, but if we have a list of things we believe to be moral or moral, science may be able to decide what is. For example, we might consider it to be the governments responsibility to protect citizens, and in that case items which are shown to be dangerous with little benefit might be prohibited. The danger and benefits they present can be measured using science. For example, we know that wearing seat belts dramatically increases ones chance of walking away from a car wreck, and also can prevent you from killing someone else in the car.

A mistake, and one that has been made in this century, is to conflate scientific theories into moral codes. I'm thinking in particular of social Darwinism, which was considered by not only the Nazi party at the start of the century. It was an extension of Darwin's theories, but taken out of context. The fittest, as defined by natural selection, are merely those most fit to survive, but it was decided that humans could judge who this might be. The conclusions of such a program are disturbing, as it places disturbing amounts of power in the hands of the few. The notion that we are able to judge who is worthy of life and death is obviously incorrect.

The primary issue with social Darwinism is it is a strange conflation of ideas. It seems to be making the naturalistic fallacy, in believing that whatever happens in nature is what should happen, and then be happy to alter nature itself. Its such a disturbingly flawed concept, its quite surprising quite how many planned to do it.

We have the ability to perform such social darwinism even more efficiently these days, with the ability to look for genetic flaws, both in potential parents and children. There is a genuine question of whether we should employ this at all- there are congenital genetic defects that can cause massive suffering that it might be better to eliminate, but the question as to where we draw the line is a tough one. Science can help us here,to an extent, by quantifying how long someone with a particular illness might live, and how good their quality of life would be. Ultimately this is a question we do need to answer, although I'm not entirely sure how. I'd be tempted to err in favour of preserving life, because going too far in the other direction would have massive consequences. Once again, of course, once you start trying to eliminate these illneesses, you are leaving the judgment of human life in human hands.

Anatole Demidov

2009-12-08T01:54:00.001-08:00

Ah, my dream has come true. About a month ago, I made some childish edits to this page. As of now, it is still in this state. Sadly, this page is not well read, so my evil genius is going under appreciated. Until I noticed that someone had fixed my section on Anatole Demidov... to fix a typo! I don't know whether she is in on the joke or not, but it is probably time to confess my most recent edit to wikipedia.

One day I might even make a constructive change...

Packing

2009-12-07T01:21:00.000-08:00

So we are moving house next week, and packing must be done. My methods are... somewhat more haphazard than my wife's, which can lead to consernation. I tend to assume that a box is firmly taped when that is nowhere near the case, which would undoubtedly lead to a box collapsing and maximum tragedy. I also like to fill boxes then realise I've put nothing but books in them and they are insanely heavy, to the point where I almost put my back out a week before moving by a foolish lift.

Of course, this is where Alice and I compliment each other. She is good at the practical things, and I'm good at making sarcastic comments and irritating people...

A bit of background(WFRP)

2009-12-04T04:25:00.000-08:00

Mortis Venteri had always resented his father. The stinking alchohic had ruined his family's fortunes, and would continue to do so if nothing was done. Most would resort to simple murder, and perhaps thats what Mortis would have done if he had not found a book in the Sentis family library. Hidden from obvious sight, it detailed the.. darker histories of the family. Speaking of a snake demon that had brought the family to power.

Mortis became obsessed with this creature, and found out everything he could. In a stroke of fortune (and a considerable expenditure of the family's remaning wealth), he was able to piece together the daemon's true name. With that in his posession, he was able to bind the serpent into the plane, and make it do his will. The daemon was mostly powerless, and, of course, hated it. It got worse when the plague came, and Mortis used a nasty piece of magic to fight off the plague. Doing so robbed the daemon of most of its power, as it was forced to spend it protecting the hapless nobles of the Grafsmund.

It bided its time, knowing Mortis would eventually slip. Sure enough, no mortal was perfect, and the daemon's name was long, and hard to pronounce, so that mistakes slipped in. Not enough for the daemon to out right disobey Mortis, but enough to scheme. It had gathered much information, and saw a way to twist the fates enough such that it could be freed from the mortal plane. All it needed was some stooges...

Friends

2009-12-04T01:46:00.000-08:00

Alice and I have watched a lot of Friends in our time. Its on E4 more than big brother, and we even have the boxset. There are few episodes I haven't seen more than twice. I'm not entirely sure why. Its by no means the greatest sitcom of all time, its writing can often be weak, too soap operaish, and frequently redefines its characters to squeeze out a joke. So what does save it?

I think theres a comfortable nature to this show that draws me in, and a familiarity in the performances. As the show went on all the actors settled into the characters, and the writers got used to creating for them. While the writers would quite happily warp characters if necessary, they were usually relatively faithful. It was usually fun to watch them.

Apart, of course, for one character. Ross Gellar becomes more hateful with each episode. His performance becomes stupid, the writing becomes idiotic, and frankly when he suggested he might leave all the Friends in season 4 you find yourself rooting for it. He is a hideous, inhuman creation, who is not particularly well played by David Schwimmer. Of course when you have to suffer plots where you have whitened your teeth and apparently are unable to admit it, then thats whats going to happen. Add to that that the writers felt the need to keep the whole Ross and Rachel thing going for an insane amount of time, chickening out of pairing Rachel and Joey, a pairing that made more sense than that hateful couple.

The absurdity of the Ross and Rachel relationship was that they were together for a shorter period than some of the extras who joined the show, and yet we were meant to care about them. The final episode proclaimed that they were together finally, but really gave no evidence that this one would last, as the reasons for their break ups in the past was always something impressively stupid. Along the way the writers had accidentally sweetly partnered Chandler and Monica, who became far more interesting than the supposed cental relationship of the show.

Saints Row 2

2009-12-03T02:21:00.000-08:00

Saints Row is a barely concealed rip off of GTA. Set in a large world, its based around following missions where you commit criminal activities, and if you get bored you can rampage round the open city. The difference is definitely in approaches. GTA, especially 4, has become more focused on story telling, and, for the most part, succeeded very well in telling a story about a character we cared about. There was some mild moral dissonance where you got the feeling that not all the writers always talked to you, but it was a fairly gripping story. Along with this came a system that was a lot more realistic, with defined characters, more real physics and a combat system that punished the gung ho attitude of former games.

Saints Row 2, however, is not going for realism at all. Its going for insane, over the top grandeur. Its going for a ridiculous plot, and a main character who is able to do ridiculous thing. You are able to sustain massive amounts of injuries in Saints Row, and you even regenerate your health. The cars fly around like toys, and the weapons selection is amazing. Its awesome fun, and feels like a massive improvement on GTA:San Andreas, taking many of the ideas from that and making them much better. For example, in San Andreas you could capture territory, but the mechanism was terrible- effectively you started shooting people then had to kill a gigantic army by yourself (who would usually run at you up the street from either side). It was more than a little stupid. Saints Row has the same idea, but makes the territory capturing into missions, rather than randomly generated bad guys. You still have to kill lots of enemies, but usually in environments that make sense, with clear objectives that make it feel a lot more purposeful.

You can also buy property, which is mercifully cheap, unlike San Andreas where you could only think about doing it much later in the game. The only flaw here is that the idea from Andreas, where money has to be collected, is re-iterated, and adds a tiresome part of repition to the game that doesn't feel necessary. At least all the money is in one place, rather than outside the property you purchased!

Is Saints Row 2 better than GTA4? I don't know, they're both terrific games, but each celebrate something different. I'm not convinced that SR2's open world is more fun than GTA4's, just different. The missions are certainly more interesting in SR2, and the number of distractions are astonishing, but the reality of GTA4 add an extra verve to the game. I suspect that if you like one, you'll like the other.

Dollhouse- it gets better

2009-12-01T01:12:00.000-08:00

If I watched the first season of Buffy now I imagine I wouldn't like it. It was hokey, the acting was a little poor, and the plot was uninteresting. So Joss Whedon has form (although the pilot two episodes are still excellent). It seems Dollhouse suffers from this. Having watched only three episodes so far, I am watching based mainly on potential.

While Target was generally thrilling, last night we watched Stage Fright, which was generally awful. The issue for me at the moment is who to root for. We can root for Echo, but she is passive (currently, there is evidence this will change), a creation of a rather nasty corporation. We can perhaps empathise with her handler a little, but he is, after all, a willing participant in an utterly abominable project. There is no gray here, it is pretty clear that the dollhouse is a hideous program, run by fairly hideous people with no respect for the lives they create and destroy. To be fair, the program acknowledges it. Its at its best when it does so- seeing the creepiness and the investigation is fun. Watching someone do what they are programmed to do.. less fun.

There is a serious issue currently with the rather traditional tones. After all, Echo is being protected by a man, and the FBI agent searching for her is a man, and Alpha is, as far as we know, a man! It wouldn't have been hard to make the FBI agent a woman. Stage Fright only makes this worse, an episode that appears to have been written to get women to wear little clothing and then sing. Its not helped by an insufferable lead for that episode. I really didn't care at all about anything that happened during that episode.

So I'll keep watching, but it better get better soon...

Plants vs Zombies

2009-11-30T08:34:00.000-08:00

(a review for the none of you who haven't played this yet)

Popcap have managed to create quite a reputation for themselves as being the creators of the most fantastic casual games in existence. Their titles so far have proven wildly succesful, and hugely fun. Well crafted, simple to play, they really are a gem to point at. Most of them, however, have been a tiny bit simplistic. Peggle is fun, but is basically shooting balls at stuff, and then watchig and taking credit for whats happening...

Plants vs Zombies is, perhaps, their first title to have a little more of an appeal to traditional gamer. Its a tower defence game, which involve the player placing towers to prevent a horde of enemies from reaching a certain point. Traditionally, tower defence games tend to have two elements: mazing (placing towers in such a way to force the enemies to take maximum damage), and economy(efficiently buying towers that compliment each other). This game introduces a new element instead of mazing- the zombies will directly attack your towers to get to the house. This is actually unusual among tower defence games.

The game, is bright, colourful, and easy to follow. It guides you carefully through the elements of its game, introducing new zombies and the plants to combat you. It teaches you the necessity of sun flowers, and the numbers required, while introducing more and more elements. Its not particularly hard, and I didn't have to redo a single level of the campaign, but there were some enjoyable close calls= it does make you work for victory. In addition to a campaign modes there are numberous mini-games which have fun takes on the concept, and survival modes that pit you against endless waves of the undead.

Are there flaws? The upgrade system is a little frustrating- theres a lot to buy, and not enough to buy it with, so there are plants you won't get until you've completed the entire game, rather defeating the point- but this seems to happen in most games anyway. It might be seen as too easy, but, again, the survival endelss mode really does provide a LOT of challenge. Also, while collecting sun is initially important to sustain interest, its a shame there couldn't be a sun collecter plant as a reward for getting further in the game, as it can be a little hard work to do so sometimes.

Argh

2009-11-29T06:46:00.000-08:00

So this article mentions a law I hoped would vanish. That is, its a criminal offence for posession of a cartoon sexual image of a child. That is, if you draw a picture with a child having sex in any context, or keep such a picture, you are breaking the law.

Urgh? Now obviously these kind of pictures are quite offensive to view. They portray images of acts that are repellent. But murder is illegal, as is rape. There exist many graphic novels which portray such things. I understand that paedophilia plays to our most basic fears, but we can't punish people purely for their thoughts. Paedophiles are attracted to children, but this isn't inherently illegal. They want to do something that is forbidden by law, but it isn't until they actually bloody do it.

In the case of photos of actual children, you are in possession of images of acts that have broken the law, and by doing so you are supporting such acts. Thats fine, although a little slippery slopey. Where does it end? If someone was to write something about a child being abused in such a way, should they be punished? Or do we need evidence that they are enjoying such a story?

Laws like this are designed to appeal to the most tabloid feelings some have, and do not deserve to be on our statute. Its a sign that democracy is broken when laws that just do not make sense manage to pass through both houses with no problems.

Away we go

2009-11-27T02:15:00.000-08:00

This is a film that I've been processing for a while. It, at its heart, is a funny, mostly sweet film, about a couple looking for a home for their child to be. The lead performances are charming and sweet, and entertain through most of the film.

The film plays as an oddessey. As an awful review by Toby Young pointed out (I will not give it the dignity of a link), it does not follow normal film telling rules. It meanders from story to story, presenting different styles of parenting, each one some kind of caricature. For the most part, when these are comedic, this works, but the film is.. a little surprising.

There are four encounters in total. The first two involve awful, and amusing people. The very first encounter is excellent, and hilarious. The second involves a little bit of a tired encounter, with Maggie Gyllenhaal playing a ludicrous earth mother style woman. Strangely, despite her being a gigantic ludicrous caricature, when the normally placid man finally snaps and shouts at them, I ended up feeling for Gyllenhaal rather than our leads.... She is a little patronising, but is hardly utterly awful. Oh well.

Next stop they go to a family which has literally escaped from the catalogue of wonderful families. This is an utterly surreal scene after the previous two, to the point where you assume the parents are going to show themselves to be awful. Instead you discover the reason they have adopted is because of their failure to give birth naturally. In the previous scene the leads declare that they are going to live in this city, but on discovering that their friend's lives are not utterly perfect (and they are pretty absurdly good), they bugger off. Lovely...

Finally we go to see a character who's wife has walked out in him on his own, leaving him to look after this child. Tonally again, its quite the shift. Its more underplayed than the previous encounter, and as such works a bit better, but still makes the film feel a little clunky.

This is a strange little film, that feels like it might have worked much better as a play. Its certainly funny in places, but doesn't always succeed when it attempts to be more dramatic.

No Russian

2009-11-26T01:56:00.000-08:00

I feel like posting about this, despite having read articles that express what I'm about to say far more eloquently. Rock paper shotgun had the best so far, I think.

So, a brief recap of what I'm talking about for those who are unaware of it. Call of Duty modern warfare 2 has a level in which you play a secret agent who has penetrated a terrorist organisation. To gain their trust you must participate in an attack on civillians at an airport. You can watch it here.

You know what I felt, watching this level? Very little. I've seen this before. In Grand theft auto you can maim, cause havoc and destruction, and frequently do. Usually you will mow down innocents simply so you can inspire the police to chase you. Of course, the point is, you, as the player, know these aren't human beings. You realise they are sprites, little moving targets with no connection to reality whatsoever. Its a game. Call of Duty is trying something more.

It sort of always has. There is a mission in the first game in which you play out the assault on stalingrad (or was it leningrad. Name fail). You are issued ammo, and no gun. The beginning is blisteringly hard, and it helps underline to you the true costs of that war, as you fight and others fight beside you. You are playing out a real event, and as such, during the many death scences you will encounter, you realise that not everyone gets to respawn.

This, however, is trying to evoke... what exactly? That the murder of innocents is bad? We already knew that, and you could just show us the murder of innocents, not make us a participant in it. So us being a participant must matter, but I can't really see how. It could be talking about agency and choice, but the choices you make in this scence really make very little difference. The other terrorists ignore you no matter what you choose to do, leaving the choice to join in to mow down civillians one based on how real you feel the scene is (it isn't, by the way... almost all airports have guards with submachine guns. Walking very slowly shooting through an airport will get you killed in short order).

There is no chance to empathise with the terrorists here. They are murderers, with no real agenda on display, nothing to humanise them there. With that possibility drained, this is just a pointless exercise. You don't even know who exactly you are meant to be getting close to- what atrocity you are trying to prevent that is worse than the one you are partaking in. As the rps article says, this could possibly be a statement about the foolishness of blindly following orders, but its simply not smart enough for that.

I guess its just a failed experiment then. Expecting more out of such a popcorn game may have been asking a bit too much...

The Birds

2009-11-25T02:18:00.000-08:00

Film critics love Alfred Hitchcock. Which is understandable- the fellow was a master of film after all. Yet this sometimes allows them to ignore its flaws. Every time I head The Birds mentioned in the same level of reverence as Psycho, I sigh. Yes, there is some lovely direction in terms of the camera, but when you have

-a hokey plot
-incredibly dated special effects
-awful acting

what you get is a BAD film, no matter who is behind the camera....

Star Wars updates

2009-11-25T01:59:00.001-08:00

Funny stuff

A bit of radicalism

2009-11-24T02:26:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure what the government thinks it has to lose. Throughout its time in power, new Labour has been timid about social redistribution. It has done it, certainly, but has hidden its moves, and been afraid, always afraid, of raising taxes. Labour has made friends with those in power, has become complicit in their structures. This has worked well for them.

Until now. They are heading towards a loss in the next election, and their former allies are disconnected them. Whats more, public anger at bankers and the rich has never been larger. So now would be a brilliant time, to, you know, be radical. Lets put the tax burden on the top 10%. Lets raise taxes, lets redistribute wealth. Lets destroy those harmful havens. Lets recognise that these people aren't creating wealth, they're leeching it. Lets make society a little bit more fair. What would be brilliant about this is that it would completely throw the conservative party. The conservative party, for all their big words, are about as ready to shake the status quo as, well, a conservative. The conservatives are truly as reactionary as they ever have been, but they don't really need to provide alternatives, because the answers that this government give are insipid and anemic.

Lets put fire in the bellies of those who want to vote for Labour, and actually make a change. Please?

Railroading in rpgs

2009-11-23T08:43:00.000-08:00

So my players recently acquired the macguffin they needed, only to have it snatched from their hands. Stepping outside they were confronted with a force they could not defeat, and were tied up and their object stolen. Now the question is, was this railroading?

I suspect some of my players might argue that it was, but I disagree. First of all, there were very good reasons for the people to be there (that my players are currently unaware of)- they didn't magically appear, although it did seem like they did. Second of all, the players weren't actually forced to do something. There were several ways they could react. I admit, I wanted them to react by giving up the macguffin, as it leads to a fun little arc that'll tie us up for christmas, but if they hadn't, they might have escaped. They didn't try in the end, and it would have taken some ingenuity, but I probably would have allowed it. (if they had done so I probably would end the session to plot out how that might go instead, as we were near the end anywhere). They also had the option of charging into a fight. I had made it very clear that the odds were unbeatable, but one of the advantages of WFRP is that if the players do do something quite so stupid, you can just deduct a fate point each and keep on playing, while in other systems the mechanic isn't quite there.

A short note

2009-11-23T01:55:00.000-08:00

This one goes out to certain D&D optmisers out there.

-No its not roleplaying
-No theres not a great deal of difference betwen you and munchkins
-So help me, if you call it "kung fu" again, I will end you.

... I may have spent too much time on the order of the stick forums of late.

The Brothers Bloom

2009-11-20T05:40:00.001-08:00

I did have a rather good selection of films on my journey back and to America. This is another film reviewed on a plane that I would have prefered to have seen on the ground. Directed by Ryan Johnson, the director of Brick, this is a con movie that is less about the con than the people (although isn't that always the way?). There was a lot of talk about similarities to Wes Anderson, and while some reviewers have distanced themselves from this notion, I can sort of see it. However, where Johnson succeeds and Anderson does not is in making his characters relatable.

This film can be very funny, with the strong female cast of Rachel Weisz as Penelope, who I don't think I've ever failed to enjoy watching on screen, and Rinko Kikuchi as the consistently hilarious Bang Bang. The tale follows our characters living out a fantasy. While the film is set in the modern world, its easy to forget it at some points, as the characters find themselves in trains that have escaped from the 30s.

There are flaws though. The cons that happen are a little too twisty for me: the ending is meant to have an emotional twist, and yet thanks to all thats come before you end up wondering if the assumptions the characters make are correct. The main flaw for me, though, is that I found Adrien Brody's character rather unrelatable. Brody plays a con man who has become disaffected, but I get the feeling he always was. I never got the feeling that he was a great con man, who was crying on the inside, because he spent most of the film listless and complaining. He always seemed utterly reluctant, which made it unclear as to why he kept going along with his brother's schemes.

Still, an enjoyable fantasy, with some great performances. I would happily see this one again. I suspect that without a weight of expectation I might find the experience more agreeable (and I probably won't be on a plane at the time!)

Experimental design

2009-11-19T04:38:00.000-08:00

I enjoy making long blog posts about subjects which no-one will understand. So for your(lack of) entertainment, heres a mini-post on experimental design, the field of my research:

Most scientists, at some point, will need to perform experiments. Typically the process they are looking at will not be devoid of error. That is, when you measure someones height, you are unlikely to a-get the same answer each time and b-get the correct answer (most people would round up to 1cm at least, which imposes inaccuracies in your measurements). Such errors mean that even if you are certain as to what causes the process, your predictions would be out by some amount.

Such errors can usually be given a probability distribution, and we want to do our best to minimise these, so our predictions can be as accurate as possible. If we have a model to describe a process, we might know the form, but not the parameters of said model. Lets suppose we have a model for the temperature of a meal. We say that

temperature=a+b*time cooked for. We know age, and we can measure height, but for us to make predictions we need the values of a and b. Well we can run experiments, cooking our items for certain amounts of time, and then measuring the temperature. If there was no error, there would be no need to run more than two experiments, as we could perfectly estimate these parameters. However, we exist in the real world, and experimental error is a fact of existence. So lets suppose our food can be baked for between 10 and 200 minutes. If we had 10 cakes to test this with, a naeive approach might be to take these evenly spaced across time. In fact if you use statistical theory you can do much better, and take 5 observations at 10 minutes, and 5 at 200. Why? Well we only have two things to estimate, a and b, so we only need to take a minimum of two observations as we know. The thing we need to estimate here is the amount of error in our estimations, so repeating our observations at these point helps to minimise it.

This result is counter-intuitive, and important, because it extends. If we had two things we could vary (time cooked and weight of cake), an instinct for many experimenters would be to vary only one thing at a time- so look at changing time, while holding weight fixed, then holding time and varying weight. The best thing to do is to vary both at once, because this allows you to see if weight and time are interacting in any way.

Now this is an extremely simplistic look at the subject, with lots of the subtlties glazed over, but some important things to note are:

Experimental design has been demonstrated to be effective in multiple situations. Given a set of goals the experimenter wants to acheieve, statisticans can almost always find a design that will do better than the experimenter currently use.
Huge amounts of scientists are completely ignorant of this field.

Its an interesting field, with many problems left to solve, and one that most people, including many mathematicians, are entirely ignorant of.

A puzzle wrapped in an enigma

2009-11-18T03:36:00.000-08:00

Ah, my usual dilemma, statistical programming. It seems a large portion of what I do is not to actually consider the theory, but to actually utilise it. The problems I look at tend to be rather complex and spikey, and to apply the theory to them can be a difficult thing to do. As the day continues my attempts become more and more desperate. Inevitably, as always happens, the solution will come when I look away from the problem, let it stew, and come up with a new direction with which to attack it. Sadly it seems this epiphany must be underlined by frustration in the mean time.

Monsters versus Aliens

2009-11-17T02:39:00.000-08:00

I made a terrible mistake the other day. I foolishly suggested watching a non-pixar animated film. Now admittedly it was one that had come well recommended by certain critics, leading me to believe that it would be an enjoyable romp. Sigh....

Lets start with the animation. Apparently dreamworks haven't managed to work out how to animate humans yet, which is a pity as this film is full of them. Failing to hit any kind of style which might make looking at the humans tolerable, instead we are punched in the face with the uncanny valley, as we stare at the character's cold dead eyes.

The film itself is.. odd. I'm not entirely sure who the humour is meant to be pitched at. There is an extremely childish quality to most of the jokes, but often it is given in terms that would go over the head of anyone too young. There are rather blatant film references here, and while occasionally the jokes are clever, they usually go for the easiest gag, draining most situations of humour.

A disappointing film for a promising set up, I'm sure this will appeal to children, but I don't see how theres much for adults here at all.

Sigh ISS, just sigh...

2009-11-16T03:54:00.000-08:00

So I have a laptop provided to me by the university, on which I do work, and... well, blogs, which is all well and good. Of course, thanks to ISS, our tech support, all is not well. I have all ready documented several failings of this laptop before, but the most recent one was quite impressive.

I disconnected from the university connection to work at home, at which point the laptop bleated at me that I had over used my profile space. I found this unlikely, as at the time I was connected to the internet, and my hard drive certainly was not full. This warning means you cannot log off, or even turn off your laptop. So I searched in vain for the offending files.

I finally solved the problem today. While I had tried to use windows search to find the directory I was looking for, the internet told me that apparently it was in my user profile space. Looking there, I still couldn't find the directory... so I made the hidden files visible, and was finally able to delete enough of the sodding things.

Ideally, if you are going to make someone have to watch how much data accrues in a folder, it might be a good idea not to make those files INVISIBLE.....