How The Game Is Played

Old heresies never die....

So lately The DaVinci code has caught the popular imagination. I'm going to make a few decidedly un-religious comments or observations.

First, the fact that people are treating this as some great new insight just goes to show the lack of education across the united states these days. When I was in college there was a book published called "Holy Grail, Holy Blood." Thats 25 years ago. Holy Grail, Holy Blood is the origin of the whole "the holy grail is Jesus's child" line of reasoning. Noentheless its the first or second thing I hear anyone talk about when mentioning the DaVinci code.

Almost as enduring as heresies are secret society myths. I was thus not terribly surprised to hear that Knights Templar and the Masons mentioned in the next breath. The Knights Templar secret-scoeity-conspiracy-theory is about a old as conspiracy theories get and has always been tied to holy-grail stuff. The poor masons get almost as much attention.

My father-in-law was a Socttish rite mason, another good and dear friend of mine was a mason as well, and in fact at one point in my life I came the closest to being recruited that they can do (they aren't allowed to recruit, you have to ask to join. I was told I was a "fine young man" and they'd be happy to talk to me if I was ever interested.) Let me just put it this way: If these are the height of international conspirators then the biggest threat we have is maybe being philosophized to death :)

It doesn't surprise me that these are all recycled in the latest religous conspiracy theory book. What does surprise me is how many people don't seem to know they are being recycled for the umpteenth time.

I can't leave the subject without commenting on this whole 'code' business and what total nonsense it is. Information theory understands the existence of something called a stochastic systyem. A stochastic system is a random noise generator coupled to a rule-set to pick interesting patterns out of the randomness. Stochastic systems create information. The information is not in the random noise but created through the selection process.

This code business is a classic stochastic system . The random noise field is a large text of characters and a random selection of a starting place and a skip-length. Give it enough time and it will produce rocgnizable patterns-- in this case words and sentance fragments we pick out. But in picking out those all we are really doing is ignoring the whole rest of the random field which, mathematically, has no more or less significance then the part we've chosen to focus on.

If you want a practical example of a stochastic system in action, go to your TV and tune to snow. Stare at it. The entire visual system of the human animal (and arguably our entire thinking process) is a large pattern matcher. If you stare at the snow you will see patterns emerge and disappear. But the fact of the matter is that the snow on the TV is just about the most perfectly gaussian-distributed random field of visual data you can get. The patterns are, literally, all in your head,

And the same is true for this code business.

Much more intersting, to my mind, is how and why our thinking systems are stochastic systems. For that I'd recommend a really good book, Gregory Bateson's "Mind and Nature." It gets deeply philosophical at times and is certainly not as easy to read as this Davinci Code nonsense, but I promise you that if you have a decent intellect and a strong intellectual curiosity, it will be a lot more rewardng in the long run.

Posted at 03:58PM Apr 11, 2005 by gameguy in General  |  Comments[1]

Dr. Who and the BitTorrent of Doom

For anyone not aware of it, BBC Wales has started producing new episodes of Dr. Who again. NOw call me an uber-geek but I was really bummed at the thought that it might take years for them to reach the US.

Enter technology. My helpful considerate co-geeks in the UK have been capturing excellent quality AVIs of the episodes and making them available on BitTorrent.

For anyone not familiar with BitTorrent, it's a true distributed peer-to-peer file sharing network. In return for getting access to files you also become a server at the same time and help others receive the files. Its all controlled by index-files called .torrent files. The .torrent files for all the Dr. Who episodes have been appearing on ww.TorrentSpy.com and the result is that I have been able to watch all three of the current new Dr. Whos.

I'd feel slightly guilty about this, as it is no doubt a copyright violation, if (1) they were available any other way in the US and (2) the BBC hadn't actually started it be releasing the first AVI themselves. (The AVIs are so high quality I'm not sure they haven't been releasing all of them, but I have no information on any but the first.)

Which brings up an interesting question. Technologies like BitTorrent are not going to go away. How do you continue to run a media business in an era of such media transportability? FWIW BBC Wales seems to have decided that letting these new Dr. Whos be torrented serves as good advertising for their eventual sale for TV release in this country. It will be interesting to see how that works for them.

On the subject of Media, I just got and watched the director's cuts of Pitch Black and Chronicles of Riddick. I can see why CoR didn't do well in the theatres. As a sequel its an odd movie. It retains three characters (though recasts two of them) but its a completely different kind of movie. Pitch Black was a low budget action/horror/survival film. CoR is best described as Star Wars meets Conan, with a lavish visual style and sensability. About the only thing it has in common with its predecessor is the Vin Deisel Riddick character, a certai namoutn of action/violence, and a bit of a dark edge.

Nonetheless I found myself very much preferring CoR. My take is that this movie is likely to do an "Alien." It died in the theatres because it wasn't what Pitch Black fans expected and the studio didn't know how to market it. It has all the right ingredients however for a "cult-classic." Strong interesting characters, strong visual sense of style, a plot thats not too hard for just about anyone to follow, and of course the aforementioned edge. I suspect it will see a re-birth over the next few years in DVD release and may even come back to life as a series. (Lets hope if it does its better then the Alien series which became pretty worthless after the second movie.)

As long as I'm talking about movies, I can't leave the subject without mentioning one of the last toys I bought-- a pair of IoMagic 5.1 headphones. They arent the most comfortable headphones I've ever owned, but amazingly they really DO work. They have a cute little vibration they substitute for the rumble of a sub-woofer but outside of that I'd have to say the experience is very movie-theatre-ish. I have found myself preferrentially watching DVDs on my PC just because of the surround sound from these headphones. They also produce decent sounding music. If they had just made the ear pads a bit bigger so they didnt pinch my ears, they'd be about perfect.

Work-wise I'm still in Game Server documentation hell, preparing for a time when we might actually get more hands to help bring this beast to fully implemented status.

Posted at 03:01PM Apr 11, 2005 by gameguy in General  |  Comments[0]