I’ve been kicking the idea of a central way to manage accounts on many social networking apps for a while now. I think it starts to go beyond just managing social-network accounts because what your really doing is managing identity.
I like Strategy games. I get quite addicted quite easily and so I tend to keep wellll away form them. I recently got the itch again, like an ex-smoker and started to look into playing the old ones on my mac via VMWare.
The first thing I found was Master of Orion II, which I played for a night and realised that its actually quite a mundane game, but never the less you find yourself there for hours hitting the “Next turn” button to see if anything you have planned to build has finished, and how much cash you have. Its all virtual and the moment you step away your over it but once your in, your hooked.
I was thinking that this type of addiction would be very handy if you could apply it to more productive tasks like learning. So I’m trying to figure out what the key things are that make strategy games addictive. Continue reading ‘Strategy learning game’
Semantics in regard to HTML markup is a murky water. This is because web pages are usually not an essay style document, which HTML was designed to markup, and contain information that is not actually relevant to what the page is about. Examples would be: menus, shopping cart information, summaries of forum activity, and the other half of HTML design: user/human interfaces. To say or even think that HTML can encapsulate all the “meanings” that human language structures can come up with (which are actually infinite), not to mention the non-language structures found on web systems representing a computer system interface, is naive. It is also an assumption that has never been backed up by any standards body in argument and thats because its simply wrong. The Microformat standard and now POSH process seem to be unwittingly dealing with the problem without understanding it. This is actually an applied philosophy problem!
It then occurred to me that you could then use the SecondLife client code for communicating with the server and glue it to the Quake 3 engine and a kick ass SecondLife client. This might even open the way for regular HTTP connections with this new hybrid client.
After attending a talk on SecondLife at the Transmediale festival (Berlin), I ran into Achime there and we got talking on the way home about 3D on the web. we both agreed that SecondLife’s graphics and preformance were well behind commerical games and wondered why this should be. I also didn’t like the way that you have to buy ‘land’ in order to create anything in SecondLife. Its like a new type of internet, but with only one server that controls it all.
Who said computer games can’t teach you anything? This video demonstrates that computer games are the doorway to advanced learning with young people. I think if you can keep it fun with a pinch of competition then you can teach people anything.
Suppose ‘consciousness’ could be defined as the ability of a ‘being that can learn’ to understand how its self learns. Thus it then has to ‘decide’, a rudimentary idea in our perception of ‘consciousness’.
I think this explains to a degree then our ‘personality’ which we use to direct our experiences in the world and thus our learning. We, in a manner, feed our learning what it likes best: pleasurable experiences.
If this is true, what does it say about the ‘Turing test’ and there for the way forward for AI research.
I saw a band play last night.. they were very good. The singer was confident and would leave the stage to go to the bar in the middle of a song when the band was doing an instrumental. As soon as she left the stage I got the feeling that the act, which I had been quite into, wasn’t as good anymore, even though she wasn’t participation the music when she left the stage.
Is there some thing in us that needs this figure head to always be present? What ramifications does it have for other group processes where there isn’t a need for a leader, a one? Maybe these don’t really exist.
So I’m in Berlin and things are going well. Have a large unfurnished room on the 1st of May with at least one über cool flatmate (the other to be found in the next few weeks) and a broken arm due to my experimenting with “bicycle catapulting”, a new sport I hope to put my name to. I have also made progress on the social front and have meet many super friendly, young Germans, all busy doing their thing and doing it well, as far as I can tell. Also, they have painted the TV tower at Alexander Platz like a giant pink ‘fussball’ (see photo, thanks to bollin @ Flickr). Continue reading ‘Nationalism is so last century’
So I’m in Berlin and things are going well. Have a large unfurnished room on the 1st of May with at least one über cool flatmate (the other to be found in the next few weeks) and a broken arm due to my experimenting with “bicycle catapulting”, a new sport I hope to put my name to. I have also made progress on the social front and have meet many super friendly, young Germans, all busy doing their thing and doing it well, as far as I can tell. Also, they have painted the TV tower at Alexander Platz like a giant pink ‘fussball’ (see photo, thanks to