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Games With a(n Evil) Purpose?

Bob Wyman points to a very fascinating video of Luis von Ahn speaking about "human computation". Very basically, through fun games, humans can do some things that those employed to do the task might do more slowly or that computers either can't do or will take a longer time to do. Though stalled, I've been reading about similar topics in The Lifebox, The Seashell, and the Soul by Rudy Rucker: that many things around us, not just machines that we typically call computers, and including what we do, are computations.

I recently linked to Homeless: it's no game, which is indeed a game designed to help the players empathize with those on the margins (particularly those in in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver). Water Cooler Games is a good resource of games like that.

Neither Bob Wyman nor Luis von Ahn really address the games with a purpose that might be unethical. In an answer to a question at the end of the video, we hear that the games demonstrated (which he divides into two categories, asymmetric verification games and symmetric verification games) don't involve trickery, but what about games that do? Throughout the video, I thought of Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card. (For those that haven't read and don't mind reading spoilers, read the book's Wikipedia page for plot details.) What are the implications of makers of fun games not telling us what the true purpose of those games might be?

Three Concerts (And a Play!) In the Span of a Month

In the span of about a month, I'll be attending a play and three concerts: DJ Shadow, Junior Boys, and TV on the Radio. Will I see you there?

It's too bad that the Junior Boys are playing at the Plaza Club, which has awful acoustics, at least when I saw Lyrics Born play there. They redeem themselves by printing, on the ticket, not only when the show starts (8:00 PM) but when it ends (10:30 PM). And this is on a Saturday.

Speaking of Lyrics Born, he'll be performing at Richard's on Richards on October 24th, which is when I'm flying in from Toronto. Or not, depending on a decision I have yet to make. If I don't attend, please, someone, go in my place: it's a great venue and if you're at all a fan of hiphop, he's one of the better live performers I've seen.

The three concerts I mentioned above? That doesn't include Iceland Airwaves.

What We Share Reflects Back Upon Our Identity

Fred Stutzman: “When we use social software, we often employ the software to share. I employ this blog to share my knowledge and try to sound smart. You may share your last.fm playlist to show people that you are a connoisseur of good music. Someone else may share a particular set of bookmarked links in del.icio.us so that their fans can be kept informed of information. Yet another person might join a pool in flickr to share photos that they think are of interest to that particular community. The common thread in all of these examples, and almost all examples in social software, is that what we share reflects back upon our identity.”

This article reconciles for me a lot of the issues I was having with social software and, separately, online communities. Social software, for the most part, is about sharing, and Fred makes a distinction between consumptive and productive activities, and argues that we can turn the latter into the former by sharing what we consume. I'm not so sure that we achieve balance between the two by sharing, but at least it puts to rest, in my mind, at least a little, the belief that these consumptive activities are purely consumptive.

Nowhere to Put Your Bags on Public Transit Buses Serving the Vancouver International Airport

This year, I've been travelling to Toronto often, to visit my girlfriend, and I noticed what Hirosan pointed out with his three photos on Flickr: when going from (or even to) the airport on public transit you don't have anywhere to put your bags. From the airport, the regular bus does not have any space for baggage, nor does the 98 B-line as you can see in an overhead shot. This is in contrast to the much more expensive Airporter (which does not stop between downtown and the airport) and the express bus from downtown Vancouver to the Horseshoe Bay ferry terminal, which has shelves where people can put their suitcases and other heavy things they don't want clogging the aisles. I'll be interested to see how the Canada Line, which goes directly to the airport from downtown, handles this problem, as this will likely replace both the Airport-to-Airport Station bus as well as the Richmond-to-Vancouver express bus.

[Cross-posted from Urban Vancouver.]

A Mound of Them Naked on Top of a Star Trek Figure

Rudy Rucker: SF fans are a strange lot of people. They like cons as they’re then unfettered by ordinary life. I have a theory that the fans have huge sexual orgies, that they get it on much more than the pros do. A mound of them naked on top of a Star Trek figure, like the South African 'erdmaennchen' or “meerkats” who live in great heaps.”

Mobile

There's been some talk on prominent weblogs about the value of having a mobile version of your weblog, so, ever the follower, I introduce a not yet perfect mobile version of Just a Gwai Lo. I'm on the hook for other how-I-did-this-in-Drupal articles, so we'll just add this one to the pile. Let's just say that this took longer than the 10 minutes it took to think I had it right.

I have some questions, though, part out of ignorance of how big the mobile market is in North America (to say nothing of other markets like Europe and Asia and Africa), and part out of befuddlement, because some of this seems like extra work. Note that I'm priced out of the mobile Internet market, and couldn't get connecting my Nokia N70 to my Powerbook's Internet connection via Bluetooth to work, so I literally don't know what the fuss is all about.

  • shouldn't there be a hosted service that just does this, using RSS feeds, through the browser on your mobile device?
  • shouldn't your existing site degrade gracefully for phones, PDAs and various whatnots? I've seen this site in Opera Mini, and it looks really great. I heard a friend reads this site on his hiptop while commuting to work, without complaint.
  • if it can't degrade gracefully, can't we hack something together with browser-sniffing or setting cookies, so that people don't have to bookmark separate domains. (To the people who have "mobile" as the subdomian, you know how much extra typing that is, right?) I have the mobile version of my site set to NOINDEX and NOFOLLOW because it just doesn't seem right to duplicate my own content on a separate domain. And yes, I've already thought of the objection that justagwailo.com is technically a different [sub]domain than www.justagwailo.com.

Again, I'm priced out of the market, so as legitimately I have these questions, having a mobile version of your site won't do me or very many other people any practical good until there's flat rate, around $50/month, reliable-if-slow mobile Internet for the masses.

Still Loving Bookmarks

Ian McKenzie points to 6 ways to fall in love with bookmarks again. Except that I've been in love with them since day one, still. Now, with RSS, "store the daily visits" is kind of pointless, but I use bookmarks for reasons other than mentioned in the articles. Below is a partial screenshot of the main categories of bookmarks.

my folders in Firefox's Bookmarks menu

I wish I could remember the section it was from, but I remember starting the folder names with "Staging:" because of something in Getting Things Done which recommended collecting materials to read later on. "Articles to Read" is pretty straightforward: these are longer essays that I have for time when there isn't anything to read. "Software to Try Out" are tools that don't necessarily solve problems today, but tools for which I can see might solve problems later on. "To Watch or Listen To" are mostly podcasts I can put on while ironing. "Blogs to Syndicate" are weblogs I need to put into an online aggregator, almost all of them French-language weblogs writing about China. "Blogs to evaluate" are weblogs I'm on the fence about subscribing to. There's likely a better way to organize my bookmarks, but I use bookmarks still and almost exclusively for stuff that doesn't need my attention now but is there for when my attention needs something, anything.

Come to think of it, someone could potentially write a very good article on when your attention needs something, anything.

Like Ian, I use my bookmarks toolbar for frequently-accessed almost-entirely-work-related links that either don't have RSS feeds, are reference material, or "do something", such as the link that creates a randomly-generated, 6-letter password with no numbers.

Winds Through the Grotesque Peaks Exactly Like a Blue Silk Ribbon

Lee and Sachi Lefever have been travelling the world and documenting it on their excellent site, The World Is Not Flat. (Disclosure, I had a hand in helping setting up the site, and it's hosted by my employer, Bryght, for which I do technical support.) As a guilty admission, I've only recently started following the site, mainly because early on I subscribed to their 'china' tag and only now are they writing extensively about their travels there. Check out their great articles about Hong Kong's modern efficiency, unidentifiable meat in Guangzhou and the gorgeous photos of Guilin (I always heard it was beautiful, and here's confirmation). The phrase “winds through the grotesque peaks exactly like a blue silk ribbon” is funny, partially because it reminds me of when I was in China, the Internet cafe I frequented asked me to help with the English on their sign. Let's just say some words on the sign did not exist at all in the language. They leave China in September, so it sounds like there's more to come about their adventures in the Middle Kingdom.

The Lifebox, The Seashell, and the Soul by Rudy Rucker: Chapter 1: Computation Everywhere

In the first chapter of The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul: What Gnarly Computation Taught Me About Ultimate Reality, the Meaning of Life, and How to Be Happy, Rudy Rucker, science fiction writer and computer scientist sets out his argument, which, handily, is the title of the chapter, "Computation Everywhere". The chapter is part organizing—in which he lays out the structure of the rest of the book—and part introductory, defining computations as “a process that obeys finitely describable rules” and classifies them at least two ways, on feasibility and unpredictable lines, as well as how the computations go about. Along the first, computaions can be:

  • feasible and predictable
  • fessible and unpredictable
  • unfeasible and predictable
  • unfeasible and unpredictable

and the second, they can be classified “four main behaviors for arbitrary computations that are left running for a period of time”:

  1. enter a constant state
  2. generate a repetitive or nested pattern
  3. produce messy, random-looking crud
  4. produce gnarly, interacting, nonrepeating patterns

He then goes on to define terms such as the Principle of Computational Equivalence, the Principle of Computational Unpredictability and universal computations, moving on to analytical machines. The word "machine" in Turing Machine tricked my non-theoretical non-computer science into thinking it was necessarily a physical thing rather than a mathematical or algorithmic concept. Emulation—and that any computer can, theoretically, emulate another—is a concept I have a fairly easy time grasping, if not so much later concepts such as cellular automaton (this time the word cellular tricking my brain into thinking about biological—i.e. existing in physical form—cells), and I'd probably have to see the cellular automaton rules play out in an animation, if maybe sped up.

In subsequent chapters Rucker applies computations to biology and physics, the latter I did well enough in high school to be able to follow along and the former I have about zero knowledge of. The book is so far well-written enough that I can plod through and jump back or pause to research more detailed explanations, though, so plod on I will.

29th

29th Avenue Station

Yesterday during SkyTrain's weekend maintenance, I went on a walking tour of the area around 29th Avenue Station as described in SkyTrain Explorer by John Atkin. It was actually a two-part tour, but the weather was nice and I had lots of water (and didn't feel like coming back to the same area to do the second part later on) which takes the reader on both two sides of the station. I posted photos in the 29th Avenue Station section of my SkyTrain Explorer page. Some of the more interesting sights on the tour were the Renfrew Ravine Labyrinth and John Norquay Elementary School (which wasn't technically on the tour, but on the detour I took on the way back to the SkyTrain station). The photos of the houses at 3140 Kings St. and 4598 Moss St. have some longer quotes from the book about the houses in question. Wally's Burgers wasn't where Atkin said it was, or, more likely, I didn't look hard enough after being tired from 2 hours of walking in the sun with no hat. I'll seek it out later, since just the name Deluxe Chuck Wagon Burger sounds delicious.

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