Science Skeptics

Got involved in a forum discussion today about Climate Change that really depressed me.

It wasn't just that no one else follows the scientific consensus of human-caused global climate change. What frustrated and depressed me was how thoroughly they misunderstand the very nature of science, let alone the science of the Earth's climate.

One poster even claimed there was plenty of room for "his science" and "my science." He may have thought he was being nice, but he couldn't have been more wrong.

There is no "your science" or "my science." There's only Science. You either believe in the expansion of human knowledge through repeatable experiments or you don't. Science is based on consensus, not opinion.

How can these "skeptics" undermine faith in the scientific method using technology only possible because of that method?

Help me out here. Am I way out of line to come down hard on them? Should I just let it go? Or have I stumbled onto a nest of irrationality that must be confronted?

Freebird

I've switched. Not from PC to Mac, but from Mac to Linux.

That's right. I'm a card-carrying geek.

But I've switched to the friendliest Linux flavor I could find: Ubuntu. It's free, it's open source, and it's MINE.
Mine, because everyone that uses Ubuntu owns Ubuntu. Everything is customizable, from the Desktop background down to the very kernel the operating system runs on. I can even use entirely different desktop environments if I want, kind of like being able to run a Mac OS 9-style interface on Mac OS X's code. Unlike a Mac, I can change the code anyway I want, and no one'll come after me with a lawyer.

In fact, if I make it better, they'll thank me. That's how I get tech support now: from other users, who have tweaked and poked and written code and twisted things to work just how they want, then published how-to's online. Check out the Ubuntu Forums for some examples.

So yeah, I've gotta use a command-line interface a little more now than before. And yeah, I've gotta spend time testing and tweaking some things to get them to work. But I *can* get them work, and I didn't have to pay a dime for them.

Oh, and did I mention I can get Windows games to run, in Linux, without booting up Windows? Check out the Wine project. That's the power of open source, folks.

First New Post!

A bit of doggerel to start us off:
(best recited with a thick brogue)

"Yer man's head took a piss
When he went for a hit 'n miss;
Now his name's on the list
Of them that got no wits!"

Fable: First Impressions

Bought, installed, and played Fable for the first time yesterday. I know, I'm behind the times, but for the past six years I've only had access to Mac games. I've heard a lot about this game, though, so I picked it up and installed it on the one Windows box I could get my hands on.

At first blush, the game's a bit of a letdown.

First of all, the environments look 3D, but it's deceptive: you can't jump in game, which means I might as well be playing a game that looks 2D instead of one that tricks me into thinking I'm playing a 3D game. The graphics looked great until I realized my avatar can't do something as simple as jump over a fence. It's the fracking 21st century, and we're still putting out games without 3D interaction?

Second, there are way too many cutscenes. I can understand a cutscene at the beginning to set the mood, and maybe one near the end to wrap things up, but one every five minutes of gameplay? Do I really need a cutscene to tell me I've got to rush down to meet the GuildMaster for the day's lessons? Couldn't they have just had a character conversation tell me what to do, or even a simple note? Worse still, do I have to spend 30 seconds running in game just to go from one cutscene to another? In Fable, every piece of story or gameplay information is conveyed to the player through cutscenes, even if it's the most inefficient way to do it.

Third, the main character looks like the worst kind of hick. I'm from Texas, I've seen his kind. Never imagined I'd be playing one.

Fourth, the cutscenes keep making choices for my avatar (and thus me, the player). For instance, the cutscene I mentioned above that started by telling me I'd overslept and had to run to meet the Guildmaster. Of course, I run down to where the Guildmaster is only to be griped out for being late. "Wait a minute!" I thought. "I'm not late--I've been playing this game since it started!" This kind of thing made me stop playing the game; my frustration level was too high (it didn't help that these cutscenes are so frequent, I never feel like I'm getting to actually play my character much).

All that said, though there were some great moments in the game. The bow gameplay is awesome, combining greater realism with a better experience. And I like the way you get awarded experience based on what weapons/skills you've been using; it makes sense and is easy to grasp.

I'll keep playing, if only to see if the cutscenes calm down and I can figure out some of the emoticons they provide (no thanks to the game manual, which doesn't say which emoticon does what).

Early Morning Post

Took the Magic: the Gathering 'What color are You?' test on a whim (since I don't play Magic), and it came out surprisingly accurate:




Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.

Game Tutorials

Tutorials should teach you how to actually play the game, not just how to use the controls.

I didn't think there was much of a difference between the two until this morning, when I spent an hour wading through one game's tutorial, only to come out the other end & realize I still didn't know how to play the game.

Fly my starship? Sure. Shoot my weapons? Yep. Do anything useful or fun? Nope.

This ties right into something I learned at Austin GDC: all players of your game start out as casual players. If you don't give them a reason to keep playing (like making the game fun & interesting from the beginning) they'll quit long before they become hardcore players (who might be more forgiving of a punishing tutorial).

Objectivity and Truth

Just watched an episode of the Colbert Report where the guest spoke of needing "objective journalists" to give us culture & truth. He said he loathed Wikipedia, because it relies too much on amateurs to give us accurate information.

Someone needs to tell this guy that there is no such thing as objectivity from a single source. No one person can ever be objective on their own; we have to sum up the subjective experiences of many, many people to approach an objective point of view.

That's what science does: it sums up the subjective thoughts & experiments of lots of people, all over the world, to arrive facts about the universe.

That's the idea behind Wikipedia, too: that millions of people, all contributing knowledge to a single database, will eventually create a storehouse of facts.

And that's the democratic ideal, as well: that by summing up the political views of everyone, we'll come up with the best policies.

To believe that only one person, or only a small group of people, can hold the keys to truth is not only undemocratic, it's unrealistic. As our history of scientific progress shows, the most solid truths are those that everyone can agree on.