SuBBrilliant Blog

I’ve posted a three part audio series of Robert Ecksteen, a.k.a. BobX, the undead mage from World of Warcraft. Some of you may say, “How sad and pathetic are you Tom, that you created a fake three-part recording of the memoirs for a World of Warcraft character, complete with bad WoW jokes and the theme from Undercity?” To which I can only reply, “very.” And then hit you with a frost bolt, cast mirror and take you down like a level 30 Murloc. How you feel now, snide dead WoW-mocker?

Ahem.

The three part series.

Part one: Birth to scourge invasion.

Part two: Life as a ghoul.

Part three: Reborn as undead.

I have to drop three players before opening day. But I am free to pick up other free agents. Not that there’s much to chose from.

Active Batters
C - Pierzynski, A.J. C CHW
1B - Youkilis, Kevin 1B, 3B BOS
2B - Sanchez, Freddy 2B PIT
3B - Atkins, Garrett 3B, 1B COL
SS - Tulowitzki, Troy SS COL
OF - Bruce, Jay RF CIN
OF - Crawford, Carl LF TB
OF - Young, Delmon LF MIN
U - Lee, Derrek 1B CHC

Active Pitchers
Arroyo, Bronson SP CIN
Carmona, Fausto SP CLE
Jurrjens, Jair SP ATL
Liriano, Francisco SP MIN
Sonnanstine, Andy SP TB
Hudson, Orlando 2B LA
Active Relievers
Lindstrom, Matt RP FLA
Okajima, Hideki RP BOS
Street, Huston RP COL

Reserve Batters
Shoppach, Kelly C CLE
Butler, Billy 1B KC
Smoak, Justin 1B TEX

Harris, Brendan 2B, 3B, SS MIN
Moustakas, Michael 3B KC
Drew, J.D. RF BOS
Schumaker, Skip CF STL
Reserve Pitchers
Cahill, Trevor SP OAK

Minor Leagues
McCutchen, Andrew OF PIT

Some Free Agents:
Mora Melvin 3B BAL- Rodriguez, Ivan C NYY - Fukudome, Kosuke OF CHC- Mussina, Mike SP NYY- Griffey, Ken OF SEA -Torres, Salomon RP MIL - Martinez, Pedro SP NYM-Anderson, Garret LF ATL -Moyer, Jamie SP PHI-Wigginton, Ty 3B BAL- DeJesus, David LF KC-Church, Ryan RF NYM - Marcum, Shaun SP TOR-Willingham, Josh LF WAS-Sheffield, Gary DH DET -Perkins, Glen SP MIN -Giles, Brian RF SD-Looper, Braden SP MIL- Maddux, Greg SP LA -Wakefield, Tim SP BOS -Scott, Luke LF BAL-Byrd, Paul SP BOS, - Duncan, Chris 1B STL -Baker, John C FLA - Johnson, Chris 3B HOU -Sanchez, Anibal SP FLA -Reyes, Anthony SP CLE - Purcey, David SP TOR + 15.84% 63 372

I have a question, can anyone help?

You left out an important detail. Please provide it.

Oh sorry, here is half of what you asked for.

Yes, but that’s still not all of the important details I asked for.

Oh sorry. Here’s the rest, but with a serious misunderstanding.

Let me clarify. I need this exactly.

Oh OK. Here you go.

Hi I just discovered the thread and instead of being helpful I’m going to explain to you why you would never want to do what you’re asking.

Hi I just discovered this thread and would like to point out how you could Google this yourself but I also will not actually provide any help.

I just jumped in to call you a n00b and make an ironic joke.

Hi I’m the original responder and I have a solution you can try.

I tried your solution but it didn’t work.

Can you explain more why it didn’t work?

Well let me give you half an explanation leaving out several important details.

I guess I’ll need to ask for the rest of the details then.

Oh sorry, here are the rest of the details including a very important detail that I left out of the original problem that you could never have guessed.

Well I will have to take a slightly exasperated tone and say that you should have told me that in the beginning. So now let me propose a different solution.

I want to jump back in and point out that I can’t see any earthly reason why you’d want to do what you’re asking, but at the same time provide no real useful help to the thread.

I just want to make another ironic joke.

I the original poster must now ask a question that was actually answered in the latest proposed solution.

I will politely refrain from pointing out that if you read my last post more carefully you would see I answered that, but instead just repeat that part verbatim without further commentary.

Oh, got it, I will try that. I will then not respond for several weeks.

Hey, it worked. Thanks for all the help everyone!

First, let’s be clear. I blame Len for this. He hit Veronica Belmont who in turn hit me.

I’m talking about something called the ‘Sixth Photo Meme’.

“It works like this: if you use Flickr, go to the sixth page of your photostream and pick the sixth picture there, then post it to your blog.”

So here you go. They asked for it.

Yep. A shot of the Strong Bad Email Netflix sleeve from when I was watching it back in April. Now that’s photography.

And now for the evil part. You are also, chain-letter style, supposed to hit six more people. Between Len and Veronica my blogger contact list runneth low. But not empty.

So Eileen Rivera, Kristin Rivera, Molly Wood, Jason Howell, Andrew Mager and … oh heck… Josh Lawrence. Consider yourselves memed. Fail to respond at your peril.

Last week on CNET’s The Real Deal podcast, I realized that a lot of my favorite podcasts have no topic. In fact I do a podcast called East Meets West that intentionally has no stated topic. So I’ve decided, without their approval, to start a trade group for these podcasts called Podcasts without Portfolio. Here are the charter members, whether they like it or not.

You Look Nice Today
Had the idea for this trade group while listening to the latest episode. While ostensibly about emotional hygiene, it’s really about saying funny things.

No Agenda
Was this podcast with John Dvorak and the Podfather, Adam Curry cerated created as an homage to East Meets West? Only history can judge.

Tangential Convergence
Smart Canadians talk about smart things while usually drinking.

Jawbone Radio
I never knew that life living near Cleveland could uncover so many universal truths.

Honorary Membership: Extra Life Radio
It’s a gaming podcast, but really it’s much much more.

This year was special. I’ll admit that I am a fan of elections. I love to watch the race and see how things play out. And I tried throughout to hold my feelings in check. I tried to keep my perspective and my skepticism. Many previous Presidential candidates have promised much.

But in the end, I think this year was different. We saw the first viable female candidate who almost won the nomination. She was only trumped by another historic first African-American nominee. We saw a man wronged by dirty campaigning and lies in 2000 rise above his party’s pettiness and extremism to seize the nomination. We even saw our second female Vice Presidential candidate.

Our two presidential candidate were both unique. Both sincere men. John McCain is someone who truly has gone his own way, defying his party when he felt they were wrong. He is a man of conscience and integrity as shown many times when his own party tried to get dirty about his opponent, even right up to his concession speech. Barack Obama is a competent, intelligent man who can inspire in a way few since Reagan have been able to.

With President-elect Obama’s victory, my feeling is one of hope. Hope that he can fulfill the expectations of a man who can truly bring the country together and bring it forward. That he can capitalize on the goodwill the world has immediately shown us on his selection. These are huge expectations to meet. I hope and pray they will be met. Our country needs this. Our world needs this.

Two days before the election, I call upon the media to dump the polls. Forget the discussions of the Bradley effect or the reverse Bradley effect and go to something that while not infallible, has proven much more reliable than polls. Look at the predictive markets!

Predictive Markets allow people to put real money on the outcome of the election. The two most popular are the Iowa Predictive Markets and Intrade.

I am going to review two markets from the Iowa Predictive Market over the past two Presidential elections. One is called vote share, where market participants attempt to nail what share of the vote the candidates will get. The other is called Winner Take All. this is simplest, where you put your money on who you think will win.

Two days before the 2000 election

Vote Share Prediction
Al Gore - 49.6%
George Bush - 49.4%

Winner Take All
Al Gore - 27.3%
George Bush - 74.9%

This market had it almost dead right. Al Gore got 48.4%, George Bush 47.9% but Bush won.

Two days before the 2004 election

Vote Share Prediction
George Bush - 51.7%
John Kerry - 48%

Winner Take All
George Bush - 55.2%
John Kerry - 45.3%

Again very close on the vote count which ended up with George Bush getting 50.7% and John Kerry pulling down 48.3%

So where does the current election sit in the predictive market two days before the 2008 election? As of this writing here are the figures.

Vote Share Prediction
John McCain - 47%
Barack Obama - 53.5%

Winner Take All
John McCain - 11.2%
Barack Obama - 88.3%

Remember that the markets only predict what is likely to happen if the vote were taken at that moment. So the day of the election is the day to watch. Of course, it’s possible that the predictive market could suffer it’s first major error. If not, it looks right now, as if Barack Obama will be the next President.

This is the first in what I hope to be a monthly feature. The idea is to take that month’s Scientific American and use the ideas presented in the magazine as the basis for a Science Fiction Story. The story is presented as a summary. That’s as far as I plan to take the stories at this point. Just plot summaries. I’m publishing them under a Creative Commons attribution-share-alike license. Feel free to take them and turn them into longer stories, novels, spin-offs, movies, whatever you wish.

Listen to this story in MP3 form - http://www.archive.org/download/TomMerrittSciAmSciFi-October2008/SciAmscifi001.mp3

Marlin doesn’t have the genes to be a scientist. He knows that and the academic world he wants to break into very much knows it. While the law prevents them from outwardly discriminating and stopping him from trying, they certainly are far from encouraging. But Marlin won’t give up. He’s hit upon an amazing discovery that he thinks can solidify his position, genetic pre-disposition or no. In his research, he’s determined that the bell curve nature of space-time time could mean that existence bounces back and forth between identical mirror universes. Is the second time really farce? Marlin thinks he can prove it. But he’s been protecting a secret. He’s been using a precision brain helmet to aid his work. The helmet is outlawed altogether in many countries and only legal for medical diagnosis in others. Worse, someone is out to blackmail him and prevent him publishing his findings.

Meanwhile his ex-wife Margeruite works on the coast of the young Afarian ocean, cataloging insects. It’s a tedious job of scanning, searching a database and either cataloging or rejecting each specimen then moving on to the next candidate. She’s found over 40,000 new species but not the escape she hoped for. At least it was better than her last assignment in the dead zone. She lost her arm in a boating accident with Marlin three years ago, and part of her still blames him. She spends her evenings modding her open-source artificial arm and trawling message boards for newer cooler designs and occasionally contributing an idea or two.

Marlin makes a frantic call for help to Margeruite. He’s found some clues about his blackmailers he thinks can free him from their clutches. She agrees to help and calls her long-time friend Abe in Tokyo. His knowledge of Web science has always helped her with her mods and would be invaluable in tracking down the information Marlin needs.

The hunt leads Abe and Margeruite to a strange Icelandic research station, deep inside a glacier. Nowakian experiments creating self-replicating molecules in hundreds of beakers are littered throughout the lab. Like a million protean Earths. A smaller section aims to replicate the perchlorate-based conditions found on Mars. The Research director, Gertrude has been vague about the information but indicates some odd items left by some visiting investors may prove helpful. While in a storage room looking for the evidence, the light burns out. LED light bulbs were never supposed to burn out. Were they? The storage room door slams shut, locking them in. Abe, Gertrude and Margeruite are trapped with around 48 hours of air unless they can get a researcher working the weekend to hear their cries for help.

Marlin is supposed to meet them in Reykjavik. He looks for a place to eat while he waits. Outside a promising looking restaurant he holds up his phone. It comes alive, and a dancing Panda explains the menu for him. Distracted he never sees the shooter and all goes black. Thank god for his Eel-armour. Still, his chest would most likely be sore for days. He leaves the hospital and locates the others and rescues them from the storage room.

Finally after picking up more clues, Abe, Margeruite and Marlin are led to a lonely outpost where Margeruite’s estranged Father, Bob, conducts forest sound research, in an attempt to identify species identity and health. Margeruite and her father argue over the methodology of bar-code scanning vs. the more nuanced art of audio identification. Still, Bob’s gene therapy seems to be working. He doesn’t look like the 75-year-olds from the old movies Margeruite loves. He looks just like he did the last time she saw him 20 years ago. It urns out he holds the key to the mystery through his connections in the music industry.

Using the information obtained from Bob, Marlin is able to stop the blackmailers who were looking to get stricter genetic profession laws passed in order to tighten their control on the entertainment industry. If Marlin were to publish his paper it would have stood as an excellent case against stricter laws. It turns out the brain helmet he’s been using was a fake provided by the blackmailers in order to have leverage over him. A friend of Abe’s is a doctor at the Mayo Clinic. He proves the fakery by comparing scans from a legitimate brain helmet and Marlin’s. Turns out that despite his lack of genetic markers, Marlin has unusual cortex activity that has allowed him to make his discoveries. The doctor suspects the placebo effect of the fake brain helmet allowed him to unlock the talent. With the blackmailers exposed, Marlin publishes his paper and takes tenured position at Oxford. Margeruite leaves open the possibility she may visit him on her next break from the Afarian expedition.

SciAm SciFi Summary: October 2008 by Tom Merritt is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Every Presidential election year brings out the hypocrisy in everyone. Otherwise we wouldn’t have fantastic sites like Factcheck.org or . All candidates try to put one over on the people in some measure. Some through outright lies, some through innuendo and some through cleverly marshalled facts.

I think the dilemma comes down to the nature of decision-making. Research indicates that emotions play a large part in our decision-making process. Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio studied people with brain damage that affected their ability to generate emotions and found their ability to make decisions seriously impaired. Research at the University of Iowa found that lesions of the amygdala disrupted emotional conditioning, and lesions to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex caused diffculty with conflict situations. In both cases subjectes had seriously impaired decision-making abilities.

This is why we struggle so much at election time. This is why so much negative campaigning and lying and spreading of fear works in helping candidates win. Happiness seems much harder to inspire than fear, so the negative campaigning intends to prey on our emotions and sway us. Lying is handy in setting up a candidate as a perfect embodiment of the friend or neighbour we trust.

The key then, is not to try to take the emotions out of the equation, but to understand our own emotions. Are they inspired by a substantial grounded reason, or have we been manipulated by clever turns of phrase, lies, music, appearance, etc. Once you recognise that emotion is going to sway your decision no matter what you do, you can prevent yourself from being manipulated, or at least manipulated easily.

The people of the US aren’t dumb. They’re just not taking into account the reality behind what’s swaying their decisions. I think a key to changing how elections are conducted and eliminating some of the things we all agree are counterproductive to a democracy, lie in teaching people to be more critical of how they are being led. If we as a people learn to look through the fog and identify our own feelings, we have a chance at clearing up many, certainly not all, but many of the tactics that ave lead to a deeply divided electorate, that seems subject to shallow almost immature ploys of influence.

On a personal note this is why I join no party and identify myself as nothing politically. For me, politics is not a sports team. I will not give undying allegiance to any group or organisation. I hesitate to even call myself an Independent as many make claims to represent that and turn it into a party of its own. I will do my best to educate myself on what the candidates say they believe, what they have done, and how they attempt to manipulate me. I hope you will too.

I have decried in this space before the new disrespect for the citizenry displayed by the US government. The need to tap the phones of our own citizens in order to protect them, echoes the arguments of tyrants down the ages. The government knows better how to protect you. Trust the government. If you’re not doing anything wrong you have nothing to worry about. Would you rather be safe, or free? I find the casualness in which we ignore the law (a specific 1978 law that says even the president, wartime or not, needs to show that he’s not spying on innocent people, and that the subjects are in fact foreign agents) disheartening. This extends not just from the administration’s position but the corporations tat aided in the wiretappig as well.

However I was given new hope by our presidential candidates. Both John McCain and Barack Obama stood for liberty. Obama was the more vitriolic in his rhetoric, raging against the illegal wiretaps. McCain simply stated the reasonable fact that the President must obey the law. Now they both have changed their minds

Senator Obama has decided to vote for a Senate bill that expands the somewhat dictatorial power of the monarch we still call President. He explained that it is a compromise. That before this bill the President had no oversight and at least this bill delivers some. However, the President was not following the law before, why should we expect future presidents to follow the law either? We have effectively said the President can do as he sees fit, and we’ll patch up the law afterwards to fit the actions.

Senator McCain has also expressed support for the bill. His campaign has feverishly explained that while McCain said the President must always follow the law, that was not meant to imply the current President had broken it. While not as big of an about-face as Obama this still comes off as back-sliding.

Whether Obama or McCain takes office in January either will be able to spy on any foreign transmission he wants for whatever reason he wants with only a yearly bulk judicial review for oversight. Any spurious wiretapping can be easily hidden int hat kind of system. If the President wants to tap the NRAs or the ACLUs calls overseas, he’ll be able to and nobody can stop him.

I would plead with our Congress to change their minds, and I do. But I feel its useless. The same bull-mindedness that led us into Iraq is now leading us into the foothills of tyranny. So instead I beg the citizens to speak out. If you value your liberty, speak out. If you prefer the safety of a dictator to protect you from your enemies, stay quiet. This is a ral choice that is actually happening right now.