Humodour

Sweeeeet!

HOTU was awesome. Good old-school RPG fun with a touch of the exotic strangeness that made games like PS:T more intriguing. Beats the pants of the NWN OC.

I never said they will be generated and will consume earth, I said there's a non-negligible chance of that. Why do you think the chance is non-negligible (i.e. significant)? What informs that judgement?

I don't think that's called for. WoD is discovering new things about science (as are we all) and he just acknowledged that. Is continued vitriol necessary? It's not like this is a thread about politics - there's no need for an us vs them attitude. Nobody has been harmed - it seems pointless to hold a grudge or seek 'revenge'. Edit: Or did I misread and WoD is still arguing black holes are going to be generated by the LHC and consume earth?

I worry about this sometimes, too, but then you sometimes get hints from leaks or white papers that there's a LOT going on behind closed doors we don't know about. You just have to know where to look. I mean US intelligence isn't one central entity. It's distributed amongst like one or two dozen departments, has had about a century of practice, has intelligence gathering capabilities all over the planet, has strong ties with the intelligence agencies of its allies, has the largest budget of any country in the world, has some of the brightest minds working within it - and that's a key point. Bright people don't like to sit around being idle. They like to think up new things, work on new projects, change the world, improve processes. Especially hackers and scientists. Just take a look at the stuff DARPA (technology) and NSA (IT) work on. Of course, the worrying thing is many of these points would also apply to China and Chinese intelligence forces.

I guess I really should post this... China isn't the only country capable of information warfare and anybody who thinks the US (and NATO more generally) wouldn't be able to mount a vigourous defence and counterattack is probably very incorrect. I doubt the CIA, NSA, FBI, NASA, DARPA, etc have sat on their laurels thinking "gee, I hope nobody learns how to hack on a global scale - that might not be good!" for 20 years. We don't know who did the following (a vigilante hacker?), if it was even a country or what (Israel or US?), but here is an example of a botnet being designed and controlled to interfere with Iran's nuclear weapons production: http://it.slashdot.org/story/10/11/16/0347...chment?from=rss And American departments are known to publish white papers on controlling botnets and hijacking existing botnets for the country's defence. And if China can do this with net traffic than it's safe to assume the US can do so with even more impact - they still basically own and control the infrastructure of the Internet and run things like ECHELON. And of that I am glad. If it has to be a case of lesser of two evils, I'd very much rather the US spying on me than China.

Yes I know, and completely agree with you. I used the word 'repress' where you use 'control' because I wished to denote the negative implications of shoving emotions under the carpet. It is a necessary skill to get on in human society, but by the same token it's good to be very consciously aware you're doing it so you can revisit the issue later and resolve it, if only in your own head.

Cheers Rosbjerg - Portugal or Spain or both? Looks cool:

In terms of shady stuff the Chinese government IS involved in - they're generally known have a cyber warfare wing in their army which loves to play with botnets. It doesn't help that the Chinese people generally stubbornly refuse to upgrade away from IE 6 - a bigger gift to cyber criminals (and hence the Chinese government) there never has been. Wouldn't be surprised if most of the botnets on Chinese computers are sate-run, as both a tool to spy on Chinese citizens as well as a reserve force to muster in the event they decide to launch a cyber attack on some target.

Happiness is something real - it's an achievable mental state with you can clearly distinguish from being unhappy or emotionally neutral. You can measure it subjectively by stating how your feel, and you can measure it objectively by examining electrical activity at certain brain locations (which is just a fancy way of measuring neurotransmitter activity). You can even manipulate this electrical activity to profoundly manipulate mood (through drugs, implanted chips, or doing things you know will change levels of a neurotransmitter), so yes, happiness most certainly is something real.

I take it then that you don't follow the Yerkes-Dodson notion of optimal stress, as an inverted U shape? What I do follow is Maslow's hierarchy of needs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs If an individual cannot master the initial needs (e.g. security, physiological needs) then the mind will rarely bother with the higher, more meaningful needs. Yerkes-Dodson says NOTHING about happiness - only performance. But considering the negatives of increased stress, I can't see how a moderate performance increase from dopamine and noradrenaline release would be worth the trade-off to health and happiness, especially for somebody who is already content with their performance. No matter how much you might think you can thrive on a certain level of stress, it's just not that good for you at all: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/nation...article1778188/ We are living in civilised society now, we're not clawing for our survival like those in Africa. I believe happiness is a must have, and why not? Especially considering its interaction with our mental and physical health - science allows us to live so long now, it's important we're still intact towards the end or there's little point extending lifespan. Stress is good for evolutionary fitness, but evolution doesn't give a **** how healthy you are once you reproduce, and that's starkly evident in how stress impacts on our long-term health. Evolution takes care of the first third of our lives, after that we start to rely on human ingenuity more and more to maintain ourselves. Part of that human ingenuity needs to involve mastery of our mood. But the methods of achieving happiness don't really change. Judging by your posts on these forums I'd classify you as an inherently cynical person, Wals, and by the sounds of it you've learnt to be comfortable and content with that - I imagine you like the stability. I'm not content being cynical, unhappy, or just neutral, subsisting from day to day on whatever situations life throws at me to elicit emotions. Many other people out there aren't either, and I bet if you COULD be consistently happy (whilst preserving what currently makes your life enjoyable and worthwhile) you'd choose to be. And if I'm wrong and you are consistently happy then you've no right to question why others would seek to achieve happiness. Mastering how your environment (including your safety, and your interactions with other people) alters your mood is the first step towards that happiness, the next is partial mastery of our own hormone and neurotransmitter release (aka the chemical basis of happiness) - and this can easily be achieved (yes, without drugs - e.g. sleep patterns which allow the full schedule of brain cycles, good nutrition, exercise, seeking out and eliminating your sources of anxiety), so I don't see why we shouldn't do it. For example, here is a layman's guide to endorphin release (not the only happiness agent in the brain) which I posted in another thread which is also relevant here: http://www.ivillage.com/endorphins-101-you...oria/4-a-108211

I just purchased this game on Steam for $40 USD. For a AAA-style action title with an on-the-face-of-it generic high-fantasy IP designed for consoles it has surprisingly strong and satisfied critical reaction from fans and reviewers (both casual and hardcore). Basic premise: You are War, horseman of the apocalypse, and you "embark on an epic quest of revenge and redemption". Compare the Metacritic score for Darksides to that of Halo 1 or Oblivion and you can see the review ratings are justified (for Halo and Oblivion for example, reviewers were clearly paid off, because you can see customers actually gave them both **** ratings - not so for Darksiders): Darksiders: http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/darksiders Halo 1: http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/halo-combat-evolved Oblivion: http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/the-elde...lls-iv-oblivion Without spoiling any plot elements (or you do, use spoiler tags), who here has played it and what did you think? Obviously I've bought it either way but once it's finished downloading I'm going to want to discuss it. As a final note, the PC port is considered superior to the original console version it seems.

It needs a spiritual sequel. End of story. Frankly I don't care if that comes in the form of a literal sequel.

He'll do it you know.

I shall respectfully decline!

If you can identify the root cause of your emotions, controlling them is reasonably easy. If you can't, then the most you can hope for is to repress them until the cause is no longer relevant. The problem with repressing emotions is that they fester in your subconscious causing anxiety and stress which will almost always manifest itself through physical agitation, and if the root cause doesn't dissipate, then those repressed emotions will eventually explode back into your conscious in a rather uncomfortable and unstable way. Anything that releases endorphins helps immensely with achieving the calm, collected, peaceful state of mind necessary to identify and resolve the root causes of strong emotions, I've found. Crying is a good example of this mechanism in action, but that's the body's endorphin-releasing defence mechanism and is difficult to trigger on whim. You can achieve endorphin release in a variety of other ways though, which this article neatly summarises in layman's terms: http://www.ivillage.com/endorphins-101-you...oria/4-a-108211

No one's talking about compression. It's believed that it's possilble that the LHC might produce black holes, that's a fact.] Yeah? CERN official public website: Why would anybody here have any reason to drop this topic besides you? We're defending the integrity of science, and in doing so that happens to place us on the side of the truth. WoD, my desire to inform you and prevent argument is tempered by my desire to prevent you from spreading lies and misinformation that other readers might pick up (because lets face it, this is a public forum with many thousands of viewers).

WoD, you're acting like those annoying people who say things like "The Bible would be unscientific if anyone could disprove its claims". **** man, we COULD hang out all day meticulously going through that mis-informed opinion piece you posted, disproving it line-by-line, but why should we bother when it's clear as day what it is and plenty of good scientific work on the topic already exists which you refuse to read? Even if we did, you'd probably just reply with some new, different hack job anyway and tell us to do the same thing all over again. Here, I'm going to post a Wikipedia link detailing why the LHC is safe. I expect you to provide a counterargument to every point mentioned: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safety_of_par...Hadron_Collider And once you've done that I'm going to ignore your post anyway and just post this new link to CERN's safety analysis and ask you to repeat the process: http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/lhc/safety-en.html

Italians are actually the second largest ethnic group in Australia after the inhabitants of the British Isles, so I'm really interested in Italy. France has that historically 'romantic' aspect to it from pop culture, but I must admit there's no real 'pull' factor of interest. And if British food is anything like the cosmopolitan mish-mash of cultures here (which, let's be honest, is directly imported from Britain) then it tastes ****ing fantastic. It's your beer I'm more concerned about, actually. Science, nature, adventure sports (bushwalking, caving, climbing, rafting, skiing), ancient ruins, beautiful things, exotic culture in general, parties and night-life. I definitely place an emphasis on outdoorsy nature stuff but frankly - I'm going to another country... I naturally plan to do crazy stuff and try new things. Ideally between August 2011 and February 2012, because during this period my contract at work will be over and the uni semester won't have started. What're the job prospects for an Aussie living in the UK for a few months? And according to Wikipedia, Australians can stay in the Schengen area of Europe without a visa for 3 months, and the UK for 6 months. But if I wanted to work I'd probably still need one I guess. There is not one part of this post I dislike (Oktoberrrrfest!). Cheers mate! Well Glasgow and London are definitely on my visitation list. Certainly I'd like to visit Europe but not at the expense of visiting the UK properly.

I enjoyed reading his post. EDIT: In the interests of full disclosure, I got the bit about ALPHA being one of the LHC projects wrong. It's a separate project at CERN. http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/research/ALPHA-en.html

You facetious bastard. But here is a question for you: do you usually feel happy, content, joyful, or positive when you feel unsafe or threatened? Feeling unsafe is a stress trigger, and it has all the negative emotional implications associated with stress. Removing that stress trigger removes stress, paving the way for a positive mood (and for many people a positive mood is their baseline state, so removing stress 'produces' happiness).

I just realised that the LHC isn't actually colliding at 3.5 TeV. It's colliding at 7 TeV because the sum energy of the collision is one particle at 3.5 TeV colliding with another particle at 3.5 TeV. So that means that when it is run at max capacity in 2012 the collision energy will be 14 TeV. For anybody interested in what'll happen to the LHC in the future, here is one planned upgrade: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Large_Hadron_Collider And if you think that containing antimatter and generating quark-gluon plasmas are big, rare news items in physics and thus you won't hear back from CERN for a few more years... http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/emerging-tech/...-2011-40090892/ I love science!

Amen. Anyway, I'm going to move onto something far more interesting... ANTIMATTER! During the night my time, it was announced that the LHC has also contained antiatoms (specifically a few dozen antihydrogen atoms, maybe 38 or so) for the first time in human history. Now we all know how bad antimatter is, right? Dan Brown teaches us that it is violently powerful like a nuclear bomb and thus will surely wipe out half of Europe (or perhaps Earth itself!) if the LHC's electromagnetic containment field ever fails! Oh wait, what's that? The scientists deliberately released the containment field so the antimatter would hit the LHC's tunnel walls and annihilate matter? What rogues! And only a few specks of light were produced? Well don't I feel silly now! Sorry WoD, we'll have to stick to the black hole doomsday scenario until it is disproven in 2013 or so, 'cause the antimatter and big bang scenarios have proven quite anticlimactic (haha)! Then again, there's always the possibility we're in a false vacuum state so maybe the "risk" of a potential vacuum metastability event will inject some new life into the doomsday soothsaying (assuming you subscribe to Copenhagen rather than Everett and are able to pretend cosmic rays don't exist).

And what happens when we feel secure? Anxeity is removed. We can focus on other aspects of our lives. We feel happier. Money -> Security -> Happiness. Object away - it was not the core theme of my post, though. In fact, it was one line.

This thread is funny because it's like two parts of my mind arguing with eachother "dude, just list the games you enjoyed" then "But I enjoyed certain games for certain reasons and to list Red Faction or Morrowind alongside Planescape: Torment would almost be a crime! I need a list for unoriginal but immersive/atmospheric games, a list for artistic greats, a list for RPGs, a list for shooters..." response "whatever, you're over-analysing but do what you want"