So, about the Old Testament
2010-09-16
The Infamous Brad – Christians in the Hand of an Angry God (part 3)
And when a group of Pharisees caught an adulterous couple, they figured they had the perfect trap for Jesus. You see, the holiness code very specifically prescribes the death penalty for adultery (Leviticus 20:10). However, Roman law said that only the Roman governor could prescribe the death penalty. So by bringing him the woman caught in adultery, they figured that they could force him to choose between offending the Jews (and losing his followers) or offending the Romans (and being put to death). Instead of answering, Jesus just crouched down and wrote on the ground with His finger for a while, then stood up and said, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” The Pharisees slunk away in cowardice and shame, which raises the interesting unanswerable question, what the heck was Jesus writing? My theology professors’ favorite speculation was that it was a list of other death penalty offenses that the Pharisees might reasonably suspect Jesus of somehow knowing they were guilty of, daring them to start a stone-throwing festival that would have left the hypocrites as dead as the adulteress. Nonetheless, as fun as this story is, let’s not miss part of the point here. Jesus was specifically asked whether or not we as human beings should continue to enforce the holiness code in the Law of Moses, and Jesus very specifically said no. (John 8:1-11)
via Metafilter
Yep.
2010-09-01
Counting cards on The Price is Right
2010-07-13
TV’s Crowning Moment of Awesome
“She says, ‘He got it right on the nose.’
” ‘Has that ever happened?’
“And she says, ‘No.’
“I said, ‘Holy shit.’ ”
And then [Drew] Carey remembers what happened next: “Everybody thought someone had cheated. We’d just fired Roger Dobkowitz, and all the fan groups were upset about it. I thought, Fuck, they just fucking fucked us over. Somebody fucked us over. I remember asking, ‘Are we ever going to air this?’ And nobody could see how we could. So I thought the show was never going to air. I thought somebody had cheated us, and I thought the whole show was over. I thought they were going to shut us down, and I thought I was going to be out of a job.”
And just over there, just on the other side of that curtain, was twice-perfect Terry Kniess, still dancing to the music. “I was like, Fuck this guy,” Carey says. “When it came time to announce the winner, I thought, It’s not airing anyway. So fuck him.”
Derivatives
2010-07-09
Johann Hari – How Goldman Sachs gambled with the world’s poor – and won
There are some smaller explanations that account for some of the price rise, but not all. It’s true the growing demand for biofuels was gobbling up much-needed agricultural land – but that was a gradual process that wouldn’t explain a violent spike. It’s true that oil prices increased, driving up the cost of growing and distributing food – but the evidence increasingly shows that wasn’t the biggest factor.
[…]
Then, through the 1990s, Goldman Sachs and others lobbied hard and the regulations were abolished. Suddenly, these contracts were turned into ‘derivatives’ that could be bought and sold among traders who had nothing to do with agriculture. A market in “food speculation” was born.
Metafilter discussion
Treasure Island
2010-05-25
Treasure Island: How TV serials achieved the status of art
This is the final season of Lost, and while new dramas will continue to find both enthusiastic fans and critical acclaim, it is hard to avoid the feeling that something important is winding down. After all, the great dramas of the last decade are great precisely because they found certain limits of the form, because they figured out what it was possible to do with the available tools. That leaves future shows with few places to go, even when they are excellent (Breaking Bad) or promising (Treme). There just isn’t much new ground available.
Wait till they get a majority
2010-05-20
Abortion vote ‘inevitable,’ MP says – Toronto Star
Meanwhile, the anti-abortion caucus continues to work for that day, with monthly meetings over dinner on Parliament Hill. They fly so far under the radar it’s not clear how they divvy up the cost of their researcher from their parliamentary budgets or even who they count as members. According to Szabo, “It’s under a hundred.”
New horizons in bullshitting
2010-05-20
Ex-Harvard student accused of living a lie – The Boston Globe
“I was just knocked silly by this,’’ said one Harvard professor, speaking on condition of anonymity, who likened Wheeler’s fabrications to a scenario from the film “The Talented Mr. Ripley.’’ “There’s something that’s pathological there. And it’s something that seems to me that needs care and clinical treatment, rather than incarceration.’’
Truth in economics
2010-05-10
John Williams: Believe Him or Not
His thesis is both simple and surprisingly complex: over the course of thirty years, Washington politicians have pressured federal economists to tweak the methods by which they assess key metrics of the economy, to inflate the numbers and protect the incumbents from voters who would surely rise up in anger, if only they knew the truth.
[…]
Take February, for example. What does Williams think was the true state of the [US] economy? The official unemployment rate was listed at 9.7 percent, but according to Williams’ models, the real number, including part-time employees and workers who have just given up in despair, is closer to a staggering 21.6 percent. The official February inflation rate was 2.1 percent; Williams argues that it’s really around 5.5 percent. And GDP for the fourth quarter of 2009 was not 5.9 percent, as the government claims, but 2.9 percent.
i realized unemployment rate figures and the government definition of unemployment were bogus years ago. The rest… is interesting.
Finding dungeons
2010-04-27
So, i’ve taken up WoW again. This is the fourth extended stint i’ve had in the game in its over five years of existence. Checking one day, i found that i’d been awarded a free week’s game time during an anniversary promotion. Tried a whole new character, found that the leveling pace had become very quick, and then found the Dungeon Finder.
The Dungeon Finder is a new and improved system for finding groups for the more difficult and more lucrative encounters in the game. Because of expansions and the nature of RPG leveling, the lower level group encounters (aka “instances”) have been a wasteland. Most players have at least one avatar that’s advanced to maximum level, are not motivated to create more characters and have no need to revisit lower level instances, even though many of them are still entertaining for characters of appropriate levels. (The current expansion in development plans to address this overall problem by redesigning early play zones, which will probably work, at least for a while.) What the Dungeon Finder does is facilitate the formation of balanced groups, but moreover, it draws from a wider population to form the groups. The architecture of the game separates the player base into servers, and there is normally no contact between players on different servers, but recent innovations have allowed multi-server grouping for instances. So the 1% of the population who want to run a low-level dungeon on your server is combined with the 1% on all the other servers and now it’s just a queue of up to a half-hour.
So the Dungeon Finder, having restored the fun of leveling a character for me, has essentially kept me playing through this stint. It’s starting to wear on me now, though. i have kind of a love-hate relationship with WoW; while playing MMOs has filled gaps in my life, especially in the rougher periods, it often frustrates me. This is the problem: in theory the MMORPG, along with the gameplay, presents a means of social interaction. In practice, said social interaction is chiefly with 14 year old ADD sufferers, or it just seems that way; gamer culture seems to have evolved to encourage this mindset among players of all ages. In the context of instance running, they do things like try to boss the whole group around, rush through instances at a break-neck pace without giving the other members adequate prep time, try stupid shortcuts that too often fail and put the group in danger, use boring tactics just because they require no thought and they happen to work, skip bosses because it’s too tedious to get to them and the individual feels the reward inadequate for themselves. Most of all, though, they yell and bitch at each other for the slightest perceived shortcoming or most minor of failures.
i’ve had a history of having to deal with group dynamics in the game, especially for the really big undertakings that required cooperation of up to 40 players at once. For the most part, in my own dealings i tried to maintain some standard of conduct, ethics, mutual respect. Not being raised up in the culture that found rude behaviour commonplace, i came down pretty hard on people who refused to meet my standards and that just got me in trouble more often than not. Because of the server population limitation, there were consequences to not getting along with people; some notion of reputation applied. In the present experience, though, all that’s out the window, as there is no consequence to being rude in a Dungeon Finder group. In this system, you’re likely never to see the same people again, so to the kind of sociopaths i’m thinking of, it doesn’t matter.
i had an old friend from engineering school who had a theory that anyone who depended on the internet as a means of human contact, as opposed to face-to-face activity, could be depended on to be essentially damaged. i would be interested to see if he still holds this opinion, 12 years later, but my continuing experience has mostly borne it out. Except for the dilemma – i keep coming back to MMOs, even though i have to take shit from little kids. How damaged am i, really?
Some relevant articles. (mostly from WoW.com)
Escaping the Vortex of Suck
I’m so sick of people whing about bad PUGs
Know Where You’re Going: How LFD Killed Navigational Awareness
Using the LFD to level
How the Dungeon Finder beat Gearscore
Dungeon Finder – Becoming Part of the Problem
World of Warcraft’s new dungeon finder just made life worth living again
