Omega Point

EA/Maxis releases nerdy Spore prototypes; Catherine overcome with excitement

A few weeks back, I had the oppor­tu­nity to hear Sim­C­ity cre­ator Will Wright speak as part of my employer’s con­tri­bu­tion to the Van­cou­ver Art Gallery’s KRAZY! exhibit. Later, I wrote on the Mas­ters of Dig­i­tal Media group blog about my fas­ci­na­tion with Wright’s visual aids, a vari­ety of cel­lu­lar automata and grav­ity sim­u­la­tions, pro­to­types for dif­fer­ent kinds of inter­ac­tions in EA/Maxis’ upcom­ing “every­thing sim­u­la­tor” Spore.

Yes­ter­day, Slash­dot noted that EA had released a cou­ple of the pro­grams Wright demoed as free down­loads and appar­ently, more are on the way. So that’s pretty awesome.

Down­load BIOME and Par­ti­cle­Man from Spore.com.

LOLcat art show? I am definitely going to this.

Read­ers, I ask you: how many times have each of us stared wist­fully out into space, lost in thought, hop­ing against hope that one day, some­how, there would be a local exhi­bi­tion of pen-and-ink LOLcat-inspired art? I know that I myself have lost too many hours to count. Finally, just when things seemed at their bleak­est, with moral­ist crack­downs on LOL­cat macro images tak­ing place across the globe, the day has come at last!

Van­cou­verites, LOL­cat con­nois­seurs and art enthu­si­asts rejoice!

This Mon­day, July 21st, Clack­Clack Empire in Vancouver’s Chi­na­town hosts the open­ing recep­tion for I can’t believe we both got cats: LOL­cat art, fea­tur­ing works by Seattle-based artist Mar­i­anne Goldin! Sweet!

For details, check out the list­ing on Upcom­ing, or con­sult the artist’s state­ment. I liked this part:

LOL­cats can take on a mer­i­to­cratic tone, since not all cats are made equal — an ideal model oozes with pathos and pho­to­gene­ity. There are even Weber­ian “ideal types” to be found — styles and fam­i­lies of LOL­cat: the terse Zen koan, the Invis­i­ble (fill in the blank), and the var­i­ous motifs of Ceil­ing Cat. Many instances use cats to alle­go­rize human frus­tra­tions with technology.

You should def­i­nitely come. It’s free! Also, LOL­cat art.

Attention Catherine’s Neighbours:

Please do not mow your lawn in Van­cou­ver in July. It’s dead. You’re just spray­ing dust into my kitchen window.

I CAN HAS HYPOTHESIS?

Just recently, I was lament­ing the fact that there are likely orders of mag­ni­tude more peo­ple who under­stand the “turn it off and then on again” method of trou­bleshoot­ing than the sci­en­tific method.

To back up my the­ory, this month’s Wired Mag­a­zine sees edi­tor Chris Ander­son con­fi­dently stroll into Crazy­land with his essay The End of The­ory, assert­ing that the age of the sci­en­tific method is over, replac­ing hypoth­e­sis and test­ing with sta­tis­ti­cal number-crunching of mas­sive databases.

Need­less to say, there exist a vari­ety of reac­tions to this idea, most of which can be sum­ma­rized by “Wait, what now?”

The Daily Galaxy’s cri­tique of Anderson’s arti­cle was par­tic­u­larly effec­tive, point­ing out that recog­ni­tion of cor­re­la­tion is not the goal of sci­ence; rather, it pro­vides a start­ing point for sci­ence to begin from:

Notic­ing a cor­re­la­tion between fac­tors is the START of sci­ence, not the end.  When you see that two things affect each other and ask “Why?”, you’re a sci­en­tist.  When you just record a mil­lion tri­als you’re an accoun­tant.  When you say “It hap­pens because that’s the way things are” you’re either a mother answer­ing a five-year-old’s for­ti­eth ques­tion in a row, or unin­ter­ested, or pos­si­bly religious.

The “you are not qual­i­fied to make this asser­tion” style of crit­i­cism tends to bug me, but in this case, it seems par­tic­u­larly accurate:

This com­bines with his sec­ond error: Belief that the Inter­net is the entire world.  This is an easy mis­take for some­body like a Wired edi­tor to make, but the fact remains that if you walked down a street shout­ing “LOLCAT” most peo­ple wouldn’t know what the hell you were talk­ing about.  This is impor­tant.  In fact, a species where every­body knows about LOLCATS is one whose via­bil­ity needs severe re-evaluation.