Ron Paul and the media

First of all, watch this video.

For the best commentary I've yet seen on why that happens, read this text from one of the Economist's bloggers.

I think Mr Paul's influence on the ideological cast of American conservatism has been underestimated and underreported, but to take even his influence, if not his candidacy, more seriously would require the talking haircuts and the newspaper typing corps to wrestle with a charged set of geopolitical and economic topics they would rather continue helping Americans not understand.

Over the last decade, I've been more and more disturbed by the direction politics is taking on both sides of the Atlantic. All our polities seem to be less and less willing to engage in any debate on real issues, and instead all major political parties and the media seem dedicated to confining political debates to symbolic non-issues. A perfect Finnish example is the current fixation on immigration policies, which, frankly, are the least of our problems right now. But none of the big systemic problems with the Finnish economy are even mentioned in the media, or were the subject of any real discussion during the parliamentary elections. Instead, candidates tilted at windmills of their choosing, which gave an impression of politics without any actual content.

Pretty much the same thing is happening in the US, where Ron Paul seems to be one of the only candidates who even brings up real political issues. And for that, he gets resoundingly ignored by the media.

Our representative democracies are mostly shams. The whole representative political system is a theater, constructed to deceive us into thinking that we have some input into the political decision-making process that goes on in our countries. In the meanwhile, the real political elite, which in Finland consists of the party bosses, senior civil servants and others, make the real political decisions, which includes deciding what non-issues the plebes will be allowed to "debate". Real issues will be kept off the media radar.

It'll be interesting to see what non-issues the coming US presidential election will be fought over. Rest assured that no big questions on America's future will be addressed, because that way lies the kind of treatment Ron Paul gets.

**

As a postscript, I add a word of caution, in the form of a New York Times op-ed, to anyone who thinks the Tea Party is a positive force in US politics.

And while the public image of the Tea Party focuses on a desire to shrink government, concern over big government is hardly the only or even the most important predictor of Tea Party support among voters.

So what do Tea Partiers have in common? They are overwhelmingly white, but even compared to other white Republicans, they had a low regard for immigrants and blacks long before Barack Obama was president, and they still do.

More important, they were disproportionately social conservatives in 2006 — opposing abortion, for example — and still are today. Next to being a Republican, the strongest predictor of being a Tea Party supporter today was a desire, back in 2006, to see religion play a prominent role in politics. The Tea Party’s generals may say their overriding concern is a smaller government, but not their rank and file, who are more concerned about putting God in government.

You know, if the fact that Bachmann seems to be nuts didn't tip you off.

Happy birthday Rebecca Ramos!

Today is Rebecca Ramos's birthday. Back in 2003, she was Playboy's Miss January.

At 35, she was the oldest woman to ever appear as a Playboy Playmate. I think that's kinda awesome.

Happy birthday!

Finland is irreligious

According to a large study conducted in Finland and reported in Uusi Suomi, Finns are much more critical of religion than most other nationalities. As many as four out of five (4/5) Finns consider strongly religious people intolerant, and 60% believe that religion causes conflicts rather than promotes peace.

Only 20% of Finns unqualifiedly believe in God, while 10% don't believe at all. Eight percent define themselves as strongly religious, while less than a fifth don't define themselves at religous at all. When it comes to the public practice of religion, Finns are among the most passive countries in Europe.

This is actually quite impressive for a country where not belonging to a church was only decriminalized in 1923, there are still two state churches, religious teaching is still given in public schools and blasphemy remains a crime. I wrote more on the same topic last year, when over 15,000 people left the Finnish Lutheran church in the wake of a controversial debate on gay marriage.

Other events that have probably had an effect included a widespread child abuse scandal in the Finnish pentecostal movement. The abuse had been going on for years, with the knowledge of church "elders", who had even permitted convicted child abusers to be taken on as priests, because they felt that God had forgiven them (YLE).

In 2003, a Finnish free thinkers' organization set up an internet service titled eroakirkosta.fi ("leavethechurch.fi"), which allows members of the Finnish state churches to resign their membership with an electronic form. In 2004, they processed 10,000 applications; in 2010, it was 79,000.

In 2010, 19,2% of Finns didn't belong to any religious denomination recognized as such by the state (Tilastokeskus). A 2005 study estimated that 28-60% of Finland's population are atheists, agnostics or non-believers.

So although Sweden is the poster boy for atheist social democracy in American political polemics, maybe it should be us?

Watch the grass grow

You remember my underground garden? It's coming along nicely:

The problem is, though, that trees growing on plain dirt don't look very foresty. I'll need grass, but here's the catch: while grass is generated whenever a new chunk is generated, apart from that, the only way to get grass is by making it spread from one tile to another. In other words:

And before long:

Until finally:

Did it take long? Yes.

Musical Voight-Kampff test

Go listen to some Blast Surf on Grooveshark. It's music by a friend of mine; Finnish readers can read his "press release" here.

In our opinion, this album would work perfectly as a musical Voight-Kampff test. If the first song doesn't make you smile, there's a very good chance that you're a replicant.

Enjoy.

Wireless panic

I'd write about the moral panic taking over Britain's pundits, but I don't have to, because the Economist already did, brilliantly.

What I will make a note of, however, is the disturbing notion that public disorder gives Western countries an excuse to crack down on social networks and mobile communications. British PM David Cameron called for stopping "suspected rioters spreading online messages". As Canada's CBC News put it in a very disjointed article:

When social media helped protesters organize and overthrow corrupt regimes in the Arab world earlier this year, while also providing citizen journalism when mainstream media was shut out, it was lauded as a tool of democracy.

However, when the same methods are used in a scenario like Britain, they are seen as disturbing, says Megan Boler, a media studies professor in Toronto.

More to the point, when social media are used for dissent in the West, we want to censor them, and worse. In an astonishing decision, two UK men were given four-year prison terms for inciting violence via the social media, even though it couldn't actually be proved that anything they posted had had any effect on anyone (CNN).

Social media censorship is already upon us, however. Remember a while back when I wrote about San Francisco's BART police shooting a man? They recently did it again, and when people gathered to protest, BART shut down cell phone service at their stations.

So when the Egyptian government, or the Iranians, censor Twitter to stop popular protests against the regime, we abhor it as horrible censorship and a human rights violation. When California or the UK does it, we, um.

Although to be fair, this double standard is a bit more complicated than that. After all, when Iran blocks Internet use, they're mostly doing it using technology we sold them.

Having said that, it's all still a little ironic.

Masuimi Max

Words cannot adequately describe.

Website.

Twitter.

Hot.

♥

Mojang Milestone

The Swedish indie developer Mojang recently sold the three millionth copy of their flagship product, the block placing game Minecraft. Congratulations, guys! Not bad for a game still in beta.



Minecraft was initially a one-man project by game developer Markus Persson, based on Infiniminer by indie developer Zachtronics Industries.



Here's a picture of Markus, also known by his nickname, Notch.



The success of Minecraft has allowed Markus to found his own game development company, Mojang AB.



While much of the work at Mojang is put in the ongoing development of Minecraft, Mojang has a second team working on a separate game, Scrolls.



As more and more people have become familiar with Minecraft, many people have become curious about the company's unusual name. I, too, wondered what it meant, but luckily my online detective skills allowed me to find the answer.

It turns out that "mojang" is Sundanese for "girl".



It's often used in a phrase "mojang Bandung", literally "girl from Bandung". Figuratively it means a pretty girl, Bandung having a reputation for beautiful girls.



Now that we've cleared the mystery of their name, let's have a look at what's going on at Mojang's offices.

The patent system is broken

Here's some reading on patents.

The Economist: Patents against prosperity

At a time when our future affluence depends so heavily on innovation, we have drifted toward a patent regime that not only fails to fulfil its justifying function, to incentivise innovation, but actively impedes innovation. We rarely directly confront the effects of this immense waste of resources and brainpower and the attendant retardation of the pace of discovery, but it affect us all the same. It makes us all poorer and helps keep us stuck in the great stagnation.

Huffington Post: The Spoilsmen: How Congress Corrupted Patent Reform

When legislators first introduced a patent bill in 2005, they designed it to lower the costs of lawsuits burdening Internet and software companies. Lured by the big, juicy settlements to be won by suing huge companies for intellectual property theft, an entire industry had emerged around patent chasing alone. These so-called "patent trolls" don't produce any goods. Instead, they secure unclaimed patents for ideas in use and try to cash out in court.

Trolls file hundreds of lawsuits a year over "low quality" patents -- lobbyist legal jargon for the questionable or downright bizarre patents routinely granted by the understaffed Patent and Trademark Office. In recent years, patents have been approved for products including a wheeled flower pot (patent No. 7,908,942), the crustless peanut butter and jelly sandwich (patent No. 6,004,596), a decorative box that can be placed in a casket (No. 7,908,942) and an accounting scheme that helps people dodge taxes by moving stock options around (No. 6,567,790). Once approved by the patent office, it's difficult and costly to overturn the patent in courts, which grant significant deference to the office's decisions.

And finally, Mark A. Lemley's paper, The Myth of the Sole Inventor.

The canonical story of the lone genius inventor is largely a myth. Edison didn’t invent the light bulb; he found a bamboo fiber that worked better as a filament in the light bulb developed by Sawyer and Man, who in turn built on lighting work done by others. Bell filed for his telephone patent on the very same day as an independent inventor, Elisha Gray; the case ultimately went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which filled an entire volume of U.S. Reports resolving the question of whether Bell could have a patent despite the fact that he hadn’t actually gotten the invention to work at the time he filed. The Wright Brothers were the first to fly at Kitty Hawk, but their plane didn’t work very well, and was quickly surpassed by aircraft built by Glenn Curtis and others – planes that the Wrights delayed by over a decade with patent lawsuits.

Having read through this stuff, it's actually interesting to speculate where our "sole inventor" myth even comes from in the first place.

Happy birthday Rhona Mitra!

Today is the birthday of one of my favorite actresses, Rhona Mitra.

Not everyone remembers that back before the movies, she was Tomb Raider for a while.

I love that picture.

Happy birthday!

Screw you, EA

Earlier, my co-blogger suggested giving EA games a miss, because of the annoying nonsense with DRM and EA Online. I'm now going to make a firm commitment: I'm no longer buying EA games. If they come out with something fantastic that I absolutely have to have, I'll buy it used, but until that, I'll be boycotting them.

Why? Because this stupid DRM nonsense has gone too far. We recently got a new XBox, and transferred all our stuff over from the old one. It was remarkably easy: take a normal USB "stick", let the XBox format it and use it to move profiles and save games. All the Arcade games and downloadable content you can easily re-download, because anything you've bought from XBox Live you can download again any time you want.

Except, that is, if you bought it from EA.

What we found was that first of all, we were unable to redownload the Dragon Age: Origins DLCs via the game itself. Having then moved them over from the old console, what we now found was that only the person who actually downloaded them can play them. The rest of us get told by the game that the extra content is "corrupt", and we can only access it through an idiotic workaround. All other DLC for other games works just fine. Thanks, EA.

Why on earth can't they just use the XBox Live system for managing downloadable content and user accounts? Why do they persist with this nonsense of separate EA accounts and their own DRM systems? It's damned annoying. In multiplayer games like Army of Two, online multiplayer is only accessible if you have an EA account. Why? What the hell is wrong with my XBox Live gold account? Why do I have to jump through additional hoops? And why can't they use the XBox DRM for downloadable content, which can handle moving from one console to another just fine?

Further, EA and Bioware have known about this problem for as long as it's existed, and haven't bothered to fix it. Also, one of the patches for Dragon Age broke a couple of achievements, which they also know but haven't fixed. Nice after-market support, guys.

This may seem like a small thing, but frankly, it pisses me off. As long as they persist with this stupidity, I'm not buying their games.

Spaced out of Color

The Majesty of Colors is a pixel-horror Flash game by Gregory Weir. It was released in December 2008, but I came across it only recently.



It's brilliant. Go play it now.

Dig and map

I've got a problem. See, I built a lighthouse:

I had to put in cactuses during construction to stop spiders from climbing in over the unfinished walls. Stupid spiders!

Obviously, I want a light on top of the lighthouse; I mean, without a light, it's just a house. That used to be easy, but now that Notch (you know, this guy) fixed fire, it's no longer possible to have a permanent fire using just wood. What I need is netherrack, which will burn infinitely. The problem? You can only get that in hell. And to build a portal to hell, you need either lava or obsidian.

Now, there's lava over at my other tower, but that's far away and besides, the last time I had anything to do with that lava, I died. So I'm sticking to my old digs. And when I say digs, I mean this dig:

My goal is to eventually reach the bottom of the map, for a proper chasm. On the way there, I'll definitely run into some lava, which will let me build a portal to hell. There's all sorts of interesting things you can do with portals, which are intriguing in connection to another project I'm thinking about.

Now, as anyone who's played Minecraft knows, mining ain't easy. Here's what I stumbled across in my big dig:

Yup, that's me looking down into a cave with a Creeper in it. Turns out, not only is there a Creeper, but there are several skeletons as well. Now, am I going to drop down into that death cave of death to be murderlized by skeletons and creepers? Hell no.

Hey creeper! You think you're going to blow me up?

Think again.

It's really hard to explain how satisfying that is. Especially since creepers aren't nearly as big a problem now as they used to be. Way back when, I have "fond" memories of hunkering down in a barely secure dugout or tiny wooden cabin, listening to the zombies zomb and watching the creepers creep, and then running like crazy in the morning to get away from the fucking exploding cacti before they destroy me and everything I've built. Before I tidied it up a little, the ground in front of my door looked like it had been shelled by Schwerer Gustav. But then this came along:

That's right, beds. Now if you mosey on inside around sunset and bed down before it gets dark enough for monsters to spawn, the game skips the night altogether and lands you safely in next morning, with nary a creeper in sight. So now, while all this is going on, you just sleep:

And wake up to a pristine world without creepers hiding behind corners. Blah. It's all so easy for you young 'uns! Why, when I built my first tower...

When Minecraft makes it to the XBox, blowing up a creeper with TNT has to be an achievement.

**

I have to be honest, though: even with all these explosive shenanigans, mining solid rock isn't really all that interesting in itself. I'm in it for the end result, not so much the process, even if there is a certain meditative quality to it. So every now and then, I take a break from the mining to explore side projects. This time, I've been mapping!

The silver arrow is where I'm at, and it's currently at my first ever base. Just to the right of it is my first tower. Here's a more complete view of the area around my spawn point:

You can actually see my tower and the walkway leading away from it. Oddly, on these maps north is left. Notice some ice at the lower right corner! As you can tell from those two maps, the wooded hill to the left of my tower is where my main base is, and the underground passages I'm digging lead east of there. The lighthouse is a little to the north of the hill.

**

All this is well and good, but how about mapping something a little more epic? Like maybe Epic Island?

It's good to be back!

Maps, however, don't make themselves. You need redstone, iron and paper, and while I've got the first two in quantity from my mining operations, paper is a different beast. Through excellent foresight, by which I mean a lucky accident, I took some reeds with me and planted them next to my tower to get that sweet, sweet paper:

And once that's done, here we go!

The way the map works is simple: as you walk around holding it, it fills in. So the way to map Epic Island is to walk around on it, and as I'm doing so, I'm struck again by how freaking big it really is. Here's some sights from along the way, starting with a very unlikely geological formation:

A nice view from the coast, about directly north of Twin Tower:

And this epic snow-covered mountain, a sure site for a construction project:

That shot also gives you a fair idea of how mapping works. The plains in the middle of the main part of the island are full of sinkholes and caves:

The map actually takes up quite a bit of the screen when you're holding it, and you can't see directly below you, making it amazingly easy to walk right into one of those.

Finally, here's the more or less finished product:

That giant thing is Epic Island. And no, it won't fit on the map. To give you an idea of the sheer scale involved, my Blood Bowl pitch is in the lowermost part of Epic Island, the bit that's connected to the island proper by a sort of isthmus, at the extreme right. Snow Base, on the other hand, is just beyond the ice at the very top right-hand corner, slightly off the map. Twin Tower is just east of the cursor in the middle of the screen and can actually be seen as a tiny brownish-gray dot on the map. The white area at the eastern edge is the snow-covered mountain in the previous picture.

So yeah, it's huge. No wonder I couldn't circumnavigate the damn thing! Still haven't, by the way. The two maps don't quite fit together, but this is a fair approximation:

That's most of the world I've seen so far. I want to venture out and see a lot more of it, but I'm kind of holding back in anticipation of the great adventure update, which is coming at some point. If they're going to be adding loads of new stuff specifically as incentives to go adventuring, then surely there's no point in not waiting? So for the moment, my exploration of my Minecraft world is on hold. There's a lot to do before the great adventure update, though, so I'll be back soon...

In the meantime, if you want more Minecraft-related entertainment, got take a look at Far Lands or Bust; for background, take a look at the Far Lands page on the Minecraft wiki. It's pretty awesome.