.the gpb kids.

A Little Post

Posted by Jules - September 7, 2007 at 07:09:23 am

In between Mike’s flurry of posts, I shall write a little note to say that I’m off to the yearly Departmental academic retreat today at Granlibakken Resort at Lake Tahoe. It should be fun, and full of academic presentations, nerdy games and nice scenery. Woowoo~ I shall bring my camera and be back by sunday night.

The Real Rocky

Posted by Mike - September 6, 2007 at 08:09:59 pm

So I just watched Rocky Balboa, the last Rocky movie which was released last year. Frankly, not so great. But as I was watching it I remembered something I had seen on TV while visiting my parents once. A little segment on ESPN or something about the boxer that Rocky was based on, Chuck Wepner.

Against all expectations, Wepner managed to knock down Ali, felling him in the ninth round with a right hand to the ribs. The referee Tony Perez ruled a knockdown; the fight commentator thought that Ali had simply tripped over his own feet, coincidentally timing with Wepner’s punch. In any case, this made Wepner the only boxer to knock down Ali while he was the reigning heavyweight champion of the world. - Wikipedia: Chuck Wepner

And here is the final round of the fight.

The Persistence of Myths

Posted by Mike - September 6, 2007 at 08:09:30 am

Emma shares a lot of cog-sci links that I sometimes peruse. One of them was Infowar: strike early, strike often on Mind Hack which talked about Persistence of Myths Could Alter Public Policy Approach on the Washington Post website which I quoted below.

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently issued a flier to combat myths about the flu vaccine. It recited various commonly held views and labeled them either “true” or “false.” Among those identified as false were statements such as “The side effects are worse than the flu” and “Only older people need flu vaccine.”

When University of Michigan social psychologist Norbert Schwarz had volunteers read the CDC flier, however, he found that within 30 minutes, older people misremembered 28 percent of the false statements as true. Three days later, they remembered 40 percent of the myths as factual.

Younger people did better at first, but three days later they made as many errors as older people did after 30 minutes. Most troubling was that people of all ages now felt that the source of their false beliefs was the respected CDC.

So what does this mean to me? Trust no one.

The Graduate

Posted by Mike - September 4, 2007 at 01:09:37 pm

Jules told me last night that she was assigned a paper to read by one of our old graduate student instructors, Keith Slotkin. Apparently he published a paper in the June 2005 issue of Nature Genetics under the title Heritable transposon silencing initiated by a naturally occurring transposon inverted duplication. And according to Google scholar, it has been cited 12 times since then.

Maybe one day I’ll come up with some kind of crazy HTML, CSS or JavaScript method which people will use. They’ll call it the Horn Method… actually that sounds silly. I’ll have to think of something better.

Violent Video Games

Posted by Mike - September 3, 2007 at 04:09:01 pm

With the new computer setup I’ve been playing a lot of video games. After the late night I previously wrote about, I continued the trend and stayed up again until 2:30am the following night. The night after that I stayed up until 4:30am and last night I think I stayed up until 1 or 2 again. I’ve been focusing on three games mainly, BioShock, World in Conflict and Supreme Commander.

BioShock

I got a bit of a late start with this one. I had to wait for the new PC before I could dive in, but I’m glad I waited. The environments are the best part of this game. A lot of people have been raving about the graphics.

…the environments you find throughout the game look amazing and practically beg to be explored… In addition to a terrific artistic design that ties the visuals together, the game has a very strong technical side, provided you have a machine that’s built enough to handle it. Unreal Engine 3 is under the hood, and all the requisite bells and whistles are along for the ride. - GameSpot Review

The art style, animations, and special effects create an unparalleled sense of mood and believability. - IGN Review

However, it’s the sound that’s really impressed me. After playing the demo on the 360 I started inquiring about surround sound, but I ended up going for the PC version and I don’t have the desire for surround sound in the bedroom.

I still haven’t made it very far through the story yet but geez those big daddy’s are brutal. I went through all of my first aid kits fighting the last one I ran into. It was pretty brutal. I know it doesn’t really matter if you die as there is no penalty, but I still try to avoid it. I’ve also been ‘rescuing’ the little sisters. I would imagine it makes the game slightly harder maybe since you don’t get as much ADAM, but I don’t really know the difference at the this point. I just know it feels good to ‘rescue’ little girls. Their eyes get so big and watery and they say “thank you mister.” Now how can you ‘harvest’ them after seeing that?

World in Conflict

What haven’t I already said about this game? I’ve played it at every stage so far: alpha, beta and now the demo. It looks gorgeous and runs smooth on my system now. Jules asked me if there was anything interesting about the gameplay today over some pizza. I rambled off a bunch of things but I thought I’d highlight the cooperative nature of the multiplayer component.

When you begin a game, you pick a role: infantry, armor, support or air. You get the rock paper scissors thing going with all the units. A tank is weak against helicopters which are weak against anti-air vehicles which are weak against infantry and so on and so forth. With built it VOIP it is easy to communicate with other players when you need assistance from another class. In addition to the VOIP there is a way to indicate on the screen where you need help and what action you need taken. For instance, if I’m playing support, I can see artillary indicators on my screen when my teammates want a building or area barraged.

If you have a decent computer and enjoy RTS games, I strongly urge you to download the demo and try it out yourself.

Supreme Commander

Last but not least is a game that I have been playing off and on since its release back in February. I wanted to try it out again with the boost to my CPU power. It played well before up until I got hundreds of units on the screen all doing their own thing. It seems to be handling the load much better now.

Also exciting is the expansion Forged Alliance (which is where the above image is from) due to come out in Novemeber.

Yahoo!

And for those of you who don’t know, I started working for Yahoo! two weeks ago. I’ll have to write another post soon about how that is.

Reading and Eating

Posted by Jules - September 3, 2007 at 03:09:21 pm

I’ve been reading Anne Rice’s most popular vampire novels in one handy volume- Interview with the Vampire, The Vampire Lestat, and The Queen of the Damned. I actually really enjoyed the first two- I have yet to start on the last.

On other notes, the basil in my planter has been growing rather well, so I decided to take advantage of this and the mozarella and tomatoes I had on hand.

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