Economy of scale

Anyone [1] who hadn't already heard of Spore will after reading today's XKCD. "It looks brilliant," reports a self-identified addict of sandbox games. Coincidentally, the increasedly-having-been-misnamed [2] Sim City series of games already spanned many such orders of magnitude [3]; IIRC, one of the sequels expanded from cities to interconnected cities. There was an early knockoff called "Sim Earth", and a miniature version in "Sim Ant"? Furthermore, I've long suggested that an MMG consisting of many Sims, a few Sim Cities all within a giant game of Civilization would make for a good time. The thousands of players removed from the game when Vladivostok gets knocked off the map by a top-level schmuck arbitrarily razing cities for a few more civilization points at the end of the game will offer an instructive allegory to our often tacit support of our presumed representatives' warmongering ways.

If the moral remains translucent, we could try Nuclear War instead of Civ.

Anyway, I hope Spore sells like hotcakes, so someone I know tires of it and passes it along. After I graduate, of course.

[1] Always defined as the set S of people who are likely to read this post; Pr([Reads XKCD]S)~=1.
[2] Ouch. How do I quote Douglas Adams' description of The Trilogy, in the past tense?
[3] Ah, I see now that Will Wright is behind all of this. And, according to Wikipedia, it all sprung from his map generator for Raid on Bungling Bay. Will Wright for Hegemon!

Spam

In today's snail mail, an RNC/McSellOut fundraising letter.

I need individuals like you, [...] who have done so much to help our Party in the past...

Whoa. I've been paying pretty close attention since I came of voting age, and I'm pretty sure I've never lifted a finger to help that particular party. On the other hand, I can't imagine that the McCain campaign would outright lie, so maybe I'm mistaken.

We've all seen the Democrats' massive rallies, record-setting voter turnout and colossal fundraising efforts. It is obvious they are pulling out all the stops to win.

Fascinating. It must be bad when people get so excited about politics that they show up and vote. Instead, why don't we just stick a ballot box right at the entrance to church, then scare everyone else away with lies, lies and more lies about taxes, sex and, yes, the bridge. No comment yet on whether the 'other' Ohio is drinking the cool-aid, or just enjoying the post-drooling-mainstream-media-coverage-of-the convention bounce.

Friday fun

Whoops; I missed Friday. I've been a bit behind lately, as it is. I didn't hear until recently about the GOP (grandpa's oligarchy?) anointment for VP, and let me tell you, I'm thrilled. We now have a win-win election: either a palatable pair of intelligent experts [1] who might deviate just enough from business-as-usual to inject a bit of deference to the proletariate and respect for the bourgeoisie, or a spooky sell-out accompanied by a lumberjack.

What, not that Palin? Crap. Even so, once taken over by GOP 'handlers', M. Palin would probably end up more like his character in Brazil. Anyway, that's not the funny part; there's nothing funny about my baseline blood pressure being 20 points higher for the next two months as I'm reminded by poll after poll that an enormous number of Americans either don't see the world like I do or are too stupid to know the difference. *sigh*

Furthermore, why hasn't the phrase "hope-smoking hippie" come into the common lexicon? [2] I'm not sure what side it would help more, were it to; but, I hereby proactively reclaim it, just in case.

I may have posted a while ago about the XKCD geohashing comic. Brilliant. And now, posted to the associated blog a few days ago, this description of a bicycle-kayak trip to find the day's location. Again, brilliant. I wish the internet had been invented back in my school days, so I could have done cool things too.

Finally, kudos to the professor teaching a stochastic modeling class (read: math of random things) I'm taking, who's policy for late work reads

Homework that is n weeks late will be accepted, but its total score will be multiplied by p^n, where p is a random variable drawn from the uniform distribution on the interval [0,1].

[1] How have I heard eight thousand recent pop-media discussions about Obama's level of experience without a single mention of the fact that he has a J.D. and taught no small amount of law at a little school in Illinois? I drool at the prospect of hiring someone who understands law to enforce our laws.

[2] Props to Jason for the turn of phrase, which as far as I can tell was original when written in this post.