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Oblarg

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Posts posted by Oblarg

    News: Japan's Earthquake

    in Way Off-Topic

    Posted · Edited by Oblarg

    I'm not going to suggest this is some massive personal failure on your part, but you've not understood the nature of resilience. Obviously you can't proof against force X hitting a system at above z value in one dimension. That's why you have response plans, and redundant systems designed to tackle the failures associated with the primary system.

     

    The failure here, as I say is that the multiplicity of damage was not just foreseeable in terms of a very large earthquake/tsunami combination. But that - more importantly - there was a professional/public awareness that disasters should be viewed as multi-dimensional failures. hence to a degree one can excuse the planners for Katrina, but not here.

     

    Or are you seriously telling me that you've never heard anyone say "the modern world is increasingly complex and interconnected". If so, ,where have you been for the last five years? Swinging gleefully from the tail of a burmese pony?

     

    Stop it with the nonsequiturs - A plant got hit by a quake which it was not designed to withstand. That's all that happened. It's not unreasonable, either - it was an old plant, and it's almost impossible to design things to be able to withstand an 8.9 quake.

     

    Or are you really naive enough to think that crisis response is logistically trivial, especially given the huge destruction of infrastructure following a disaster such as this?

    News: Japan's Earthquake

    in Way Off-Topic

    Posted

    A further explosion, with serious levels of radiation now being relased at the site.

     

    I understand from the BBC that contingency planning accepted the possibility of earthquake but failed to grasp the way natural disasters hit several points at once. The diesel gennies weren't able to cope with a (to me entirely obvious) tsunami, and the backup system (the batteries) presupposed that the roads and other facilities would be available for use. Whereas in reality of course anything which smacks point A hard enough to necessitate point B will also hurt B and C.

     

    This is not mere hindsight. If you read any journal to do with disaster response, or insurance underwiting from the period post Hurricane Katrina you will see this criticism underpinning the failure of both 'industries'. I would then regard it as inexcusable that disaster response was not re-examined elsewhere in light of that.

     

    It may be understandable, in light of human social and organisational pressure to fail to red flag something which means a big overhaul and shakeup - and disatser planning usually does - but that does not excuse.

     

    This reactor wasn't horribly designed - it was never built to cope with an earthquake of this magnitude. It was built to withstand a magnitude 8.2 earthquake - that's a factor of 7 smaller than the one which hit it. The fact that they were able to contain the problems in reactors 1 and 3 is impressive enough. You can't failsafe against every possible calamity. Standard practice, I believe, is to plan for the worst single possible problem you can cope with, and design the system to be able to withstand that plus one other failure. The amount of things that went wrong was unprecedented and not easily foreseeable. This was not some huge ****up on the part of the Japanese, this was simply a horrible natural disaster.

    Dragon Age 2

    in Computer and Console

    Posted

    There are too many to count, some borderline illiterate others a wall of text. But they're uniform enough and numerous enough for it to be obvious that the game has many serious flaws.

     

    The point was that the responses are beyond the usual small camps of fanboys and haters with satisfied drones in between. Rougly 2/3 are negative responses, which for a Bioware game is overwhelming negativity.

    The problem is that /v/ raided the site. If you notice, DA II has 1355 reviews while ME 2 has 710 reviews despite being a year older.

     

    Nonsense - /v/ would never do an "organized" raid of a game's ratings, of all things, especially a game they really don't give a **** about.

     

    And if there had been some sort of conspiracy to drown it in negative user reviews, you'd see way more than that.

    Schools of the future?

    in Way Off-Topic

    Posted

    To a degree, yes. I mean it's great on a small scale when the kids learn that way, but when you have to consider just how many kids you're talking about in this situation you're gonna need to broaden your learning necessities.

     

    It's important to remember that this is only for elementary school and that this is not meant for the higher educations.. I don't think we are quite ready for this in high school/college or universities yet. :)

     

    Oh yeah, I taught at one of these schools my first two years in education. I actually had sections on my formal review for Happy Thinking and Friends of the Earth curriculum. Don't get me wrong, it was a great experience, it motivated me to get my teaching credential. But there was some pretty silly stuff going on there.

     

    The Danish variety isn't that hippie.. I've met a few of the students (a 6 year old and a 14 year old) and they were both years ahead of kids their age - so articulate, critical thinking and literally brimming with excitement about almost all subjects. I could really feel that knowledge was something that was important and very alive for them. I was downright scared at their ability for lateral thinking - it was beyond anything I had seen in normal public schools..

     

    And these kids weren't from super homes - their parents were normal 9-5 workers. The 14 year old was even from a single parent home, where the mother had to work 2 jobs.. so it's not like they have more resources at home.

     

    So, it's a glorified day care?

     

    Honestly, structured curricula exist for a reason.

     

    It exists for a reason in high school, college and university - but why in elementary school? Kids are amazing at learning when we give them the freedom to do it .. I think it's quite interesting that a kid has no problems learning 5 languages if they are spoken in their home, but have trouble learning 2 languages that are taught at school.

     

    Here's the thing (and I realize this is anecdotal, but it's also true):

     

    I had a childhood friend who went to a "school" that functioned on this very principle. I distinctly remember some time around third or fourth grade, when it really became apparent that he simply didn't grow up at the rate of people going to public school - He couldn't consistently read or write (something any decent school system teaches in first grade), and socially he hadn't really developed nearly as much as any of my other friends. He stood out, and it was awkward - it was easy to tell, even at that age.

     

    I have no faith in this sort of system. I consider myself to be a pretty smart guy, but if I had the choice back when I was a kid I certainly would have rather wasted my time on fun and games than learning the necessary skills needed to learn more difficult concepts later in life. The fact is, as much as people running these schools don't want to admit it, kids don't know what's best for them in the long run.

    Dragon Age 2

    in Computer and Console

    Posted

    "There is a lovely bug where the game gives up letting you access the menu's. The GUI becomes unresponsive, and even the keystrokes won't help you. Thankfully you can still quick save and restart the program. *grumbles*"

     

    I love 360. If you can get past RROD, bugs are very minimal.

     

    Consoles seemed to be the focus for the release, I intend to pick it up on 360 at some point, but the PC version has this bug, and my g/f has witnessed a nasty bug where she got caught in the collision mesh, thankfully she is an obsessive when its comes to saving.

     

    DA:O must have done really well on console, I know this much though... I'm prefering DA 2 to DA:O.

     

    Console DA2 plays just like DA:O, except you press the A button multiple times per second.

     

    There's no auto-attack.

    Music

    in Way Off-Topic

    Posted · Edited by Oblarg

     

    Man, Carl Albert was ****ing awesome. Possibly my favorite heavy metal vocalist (excluding John Arch, of course, who is on a higher plane of existence).

    Dragon Age 2

    in Computer and Console

    Posted · Edited by Oblarg

    Do you accept that the distribution of intelligence in a given sample follows a gaussian distribution?

    Sure.

     

     

    Actually, there's no reason to believe this. It certainly would look normal-ish, but it's not a sampling distribution and thus there's absolutely no reason to believe it actually is a normal distribution - while you can approximate many things fairly well as a normal distribution, there is no magical property of nature that causes all these natural systems to adhere to it - there are simply a lot of distributions which closely resemble a normal distribution.

    Dragon Age 2

    in Computer and Console

    Posted · Edited by Oblarg

    "You are wrong because I say so. Also, my dad can beat up your dad."

     

    Thanks man. Everything is clear now. Next.

     

    Except it's quite relevant - I have a direct source of authority on the subject. You don't - you have speculation.

     

    But good job on looking like a prick.

     

    A good way to look at chess is that it's similar to poker - a level of memorization is needed to predict the outcomes of various moves in various situations, but that's more of a prerequisite which is required to play effectively. The real skill is not in the memorization, and what determines the winner when there are not vast skill gaps involved is not who has memorized more - in poker, you do not get better by memorizing more odds. It's the same in chess - you do not simply improve by memorizing more positions.

    Dragon Age 2

    in Computer and Console

    Posted

    Sorry, that's a load of ****. While a large part of it is memorization (largely the openings), to say chess is "not a game of skill" is silly and ignorant.
    Chess is essentially pattern recognition. You can perhaps recognize a pattern if you haven't seen it before, but having played a gazillon games and being familiar with the most common patterns is what distinguishes top-ranked players from amateurs. In high-level games, reasoning and branch pruning heuristics may play a bigger role as players go out of their way to seek less analyzed scenarios, but other than that, yeah, it's memory.

     

    My brother's a Fide Master. I'm sure he'd be willing to attest to the fact that it's not mostly memory.

     

    You're wrong here - it's as simple as that. Admit it and move on.

    Dragon Age 2

    in Computer and Console

    Posted

    Chess is a game where a small number of simple rules can produce a huge variety of situations - that's a degree of complexity that's absent from modern day games. At any rate, chess can take a lifetime to master because it's essentially a memory game, not one of skill. Masters memorize thousands of structures and how the game will develop depending on the move so they can play two or three turns ahead of the game, that's how they can play n games simultaneously against lower-ranked opponents and beat them relatively effortlessly. So, I'm going to say, not terribly relevant.

     

    Sorry, that's a load of ****. While a large part of it is memorization (largely the openings), to say chess is "not a game of skill" is silly and ignorant.

    Dragon Age 2

    in Computer and Console

    Posted

    Just played through the demo - pretty ****ing dull. The dialogue wasn't especially bad by BioWare standards, but nothing particularly great, either. The framing story is as cheese-packed and cliche as they come ("HE'S THE ONLY ONE THAT CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE!"). Tactics amounted to little more than right clicking on a target and hitting abilities when they came up - stamina/mana management was *never* an issue. Graphics were OK, I guess. The camera blows, though, and makes targetting a pain.

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