mgroves

Archive for February, 2008

Spoilers: beware.

I’m calling it right now: this is the best episode of Lost to date.

Around the office, we call revealing moments in Lost, “nuggets”. In this episode, “The Constant”, Lost didn’t deliver nuggets. It delivered a massive golden payload of goodness.

Episodes featuring Desmond to date have been among the best episodes, almost without exception. So when it was revealed early that this was to be a “Desmond episode”, I cheered.

The only thing, and it’s a minor, minor thing, that bothered me was all the sciency talk about frequencies and radiation and what not, but then talking about the unsciency idea of “a constant” that somehow anchors one’s time/space traveling. Maybe that makes me a fool who is enslaved to time and space. I dunno.

Mike Nelson from RiffTrax takes on political advertising! Is nothing sacred to this man?!

This is a commercial that was aired in Iowa that was supposed to help people figure out how to caucus, and specifically, how to caucus for Hillary Clinton. I’m not sure it does either of those things.

By the way, the last time I was in Iowa, I actually did visit the Field of Dreams field, which is really there, surrounded by corn.

A true renaissance man and a personal hero of mine, William F. Buckley, Jr. died today at the age of 82.

“I will not cede more power to the state. I will not willingly cede more power to anyone, not to the state, not to General Motors, not to the CIO. I will hoard my power like a miser, resisting every effort to drain it away from me. I will then use my power, as I see fit. I mean to live my life an obedient man, but obedient to God, subservient to the wisdom of my ancestors; never to the authority of political truths arived at yesterday at the voting booth. That is a program of sorts, is it not? It is certainly program enough to keep conservatives busy, and Liberals at bay. And the nation free.”

I was fortunate to see Buckley in person as an undergrad at Ohio University during the Kennedy lecture series, and I will never forget the incredible command he had on the English language and the ability to answer questions so thoroughly, and yet so concisely. You can listen to a recording of a similar lecture here.

I can only hope to obtain a hundredth of the brilliance, eloquence, and intelligence of Bill Buckley in my lifetime. I can only pray that the flower of the conservative movement of which he planted and watered does not wither.

Missed the last Tuesday Tube? Head over to the tag search for ‘tuesday tube’ and browse through the archives.

Sorry there hasn’t been a new Tube in a while.

The “Steven Spielburg” Wii game will be called Boom Blox. It’s a type of physics puzzle game that looks to be a cross between Jenga and Elebits.

Grandma is drunk again…

The wind in Denmark is ridiculous.

Here’s a prototype for the new ride at Cedar Point, The Homicide 3000.

That’s it, thanks for watching.

Ah, Chrono Trigger. One of the finest RPG’s of all time, and perhaps my favorite.

The story is this: Crono and friends accidentally discover time portal(s) and get flung into a post-apocalyptic future caused by Lavos, a giant parasite created and summoned by an evil mystic named Magus.

When Crono and his party are first flung into the future, they enter one of the ravaged cities known as “Arris Dome”. They find a few disheveled survivors who are able to (painfully) survive without food through the use of an enertron. Supposedly there is a huge store of food in the lower levels of the Arris Dome, but it’s being guarded by robots, and the last man who tried to get past them never returned.

Crono and his team are able to defeat the robots, only to find that the refrigeration has failed and all the food has spoiled.

They do find the body of the last man who tried to retrieve the food. He is clutching seeds that could be used to grow food, thus giving the survivors a glimmer of hope for their devastated world.

But did you know that a real Arris Dome has been created right here on Earth in an Arctic mountain near the North Pole?

That’s right. When the Day of Lavos comes to Earth, we’ll have a sample of seeds from more than 1400 seed banks from which to help us survive.

But wait, what if the refrigeration fails?

“The seeds of wheat, maize, oats and other crops will be stored at a constant temperature of minus 18 degrees Celsius, and even if the freezer system fails the permafrost will ensure that temperatures never rise above 3.5 degrees Celsius below freezing.”

Phew, good. Now all we have to worry about is the guardian robots.

Bring it on, Lavos, you overgrown porcupine!

Speedlinking is yet another tool of the lazy blogger. Basically I smash together a bunch of interesting links that I collect every so often, and write a sentence or two about them.

This week’s Speedlinking is being brought to you courtesy of the useful Instapaper website, which I’ve been using to temporarily bookmark the below links.

• The secret to life, the universe, and everything is…not 42. It’s 10¹²², or 10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000.
• “During the space race, NASA spent millions to develop a pen that would write in space, whereas the Soviet cosmonauts used a pencil.” Well, it turns out that’s not really the case. So stop telling that story and acting clever.
• Which makes more sense incrementally, investing or paying down principle on your mortgage?
• There are over a half-a-dozen different models of time travel in fiction. My favorite is the time loop, as seen in Groundhog Day and…maybe…Lost.

Super Mario Galaxy for SNES? No, it’s not an actual game, just a silly concept. However, from watching this video, I think it would be really fun.

Really Mode-7′s up the place, doesn’t it?

I’ve been calling Portal “Game of the Year” ever since I played it. I certainly would give it mgroves.com Game of the Year if I was the type of guy to give out awards that the winner would never hear about.

However, the Game Developers Choice Awards certainly showered Portal.

• 2007 Best Game Design
• 2007 Innovation award
• 2007 Game of the Year

Congratulations to one of the best games from 2007, and one of my favorites: Portal.

I want to thank Kevin Murphy for mentioning me and my efforts at pointing out who Kevin Murphy looks like.

All I actually did was use the MyHeritage Celebrity Face Recognition software and post a link to the image.

No link from Kevin in the blog post. That would have been nice, but you can’t always get what you want, I suppose. After I slaved over a hot web-browser for literally minutes!

Fungible: A description applied to items of which each unit is identical to every other unit, such as in the case of grain, oil, or flour.

Fungibility is why the phrase “foreign oil” makes no sense. Yet even though it’s right there in the dictionary, many people still don’t seem to get it.

Take, for instance, the AP when talking about Chavez’s latest nonsense about cutting off oil to Exxon. It’s bologna:

• Venezuela will still sell their oil
• Supply will remain the same
• Price will remain the same
• If anything, Venezuela would be screwed, because their oil needs special refineries which don’t really exist outside the U.S.

And yet, the first line of the AP article says: “President Hugo Chavez sent a soothing message to American motorists on Sunday, saying that Venezuela is not preparing to cut off oil shipments to the United States.” Why is it soothing? It was all either empty threats or cut-off-the-nose rhetoric from a lunatic dictator, neither of which would have hurt “American motorists” (I guess any company involved with plastics doesn’t matter) enough that any soothing would be required.

It’s simple economics. Equilibrium price will change if supply shifts or demand shifts (see above diagram). That is, Demand goes from D to D’ or Supply goes from S to S’.

Oil is a global market with a fungible product. So just do a simple analysis about Chavez’s threat. Would he stop selling oil to everyone? No–he likes taking oil profits to fund his totalitarian, socialist programs. So the supply wouldn’t increase or decrease. Would the demand for oil change because of this? Nope. Therefore, the equilibrium price will remain the same.

Similarly, anytime someone says that they want to “reduce dependence on foreign oil”, the same analysis applies. Foreign oil doesn’t make any sense. Reducing the demand for all oil would shift D to the left, reducing the price.

For a much more detailed overview, I recommend reading Oil Econ 101.