Alienssssss

Since its release in 1986 there have been no shortage of video games based on the film Aliens, although one could certainly make the case that there have been a shortage of good video games. Most of those games were released closer to the franchise's heyday, so that in recent years the selection has been a little barren. Still, the idea of another video game based on the Aliens property with Aliens: Colonial Marines finally nearing release isn't entirely welcome. Even if games based on Aliens haven't been the most successful, the film has managed to permeate video games nonetheless, to the point that making an Aliens game seems like a retread, as if someone set out to make Videogame: The Video Game. Right off the bat we are assured of a quasi-realistic military shooter draped in a sci-fi aesthetic so often recycled it's become part of the tapestry of generic. Zealous over-use of caution strips? Check. Obligatory turret sequences? Check. Vaguely insectoid enemies that die easy and rush in waves? Triple Check. Climactic showdown in mech suit? Par for the course. At this point it's hard to think of an element, be it weapons, vehicles, even one-liners, that was featured in Aliens that hasn't since been wholesale lifted and re-used in a video game, Aliens related or not.

References:

Aliens. (1986) Directed by James Cameron [Film]. Los Angeles, Calif.: 20th Century Fox.

Gearbox Software (2013). Aliens: Colonial Marines [Video game]. Sega. 

Thoughts On: The Dark Knight Rises

The Dark Knight Rises is a piss-poor movie. It wasn't unexpected. Few franchises have been able to shoulder the weight of a hugely successful predecessor and deliver a film that serves as both satisfying in its own right and as a worthwhile conclusion to a series of films. But it wasn't inevitable either. There exists a wealth of stories in both comic and animated form to draw upon when it comes to Batman and that the final chapter of Christopher Nolan's trilogy should end up so muddled in spite of this is a pity.

Humanity Doesn't Deserve The Cosmos

On November 18, 2011, The Huffington Post reported that renowned astrophysicist Stephen Hawking expressed his views that for the human race to survive, we must reach out to the stars and colonize other worlds, as the spectre of man-made disaster looms ever greater here on earth.

This is not an especially new view, nor is it unique to Professor Hawking or even a select few individuals. Many people support the idea of colonization of other planets as a means of avoiding natural and man-made ecological disasters and effectively not putting all our “eggs in one basket.” It is a survivalist mentality that supports the continued existence of the human race above all other concerns. We must be mindful of our impact on the world, but our own survival comes first. It is perhaps a natural line of thinking, as individual survival is coded into our genes, but simply being natural does not mean it should be taken as the correct line of thinking.

In this essay I will attempt to present the case that colonization of other worlds should not be entertained as an idea to solve the problems of this world, and that if we are to be moral beings we must consider our place within the universe before pushing forever forwards towards a ceaseless and thoughtless expansion.

Evolution Of A Painting: Self Portrait

I thought it would be interesting to try doing a self portrait, since I hadn't done any painting of human faces and my last self-portrait sketch was much further in the past than I would care to admit. I decided to try a couple of things differently with this painting, and figured I would document the process.

I started with an older photo that I had taken of myself, probably to document the growth of my facial hair or depression.

I used PAINT.NET to process the image, using posterization and some filters to simplify the colours into basic regions.

I printed this off and then divided the page up into a grid with light blue pencil. I prepared my canvas by covering it in a few layers of white gesso. I then divided my canvas up into an equivalent grid and copied the lines on the printed page over to the canvas by eye.

Thoughts On: Borderlands Singleplayer

Borderlands does not strike me as a particularly well-conceived or well-crafted game. It is set on a mysterious planet, a planet so mysterious in fact that its only distinguishing features from earth are strange species of cacti and some alien (but not genuinely alien) fauna. A world with a day-night cycle lasting all of ten minutes seemingly designed to ensure that every player, no matter how short his attention span, will notice that there is a day-night cycle and yet serving no plot or game-play purposes (every night and every day is exactly the same). A planet called Pandora, although a more accurate moniker would perhaps be Planet Mad Max.

Towards An Automated Future

Throughout the past century there has been a clear trend towards the automation of tasks previously requiring manual labour. This automation has been accelerated with the advent of computers and the Internet. Such automation is generally seen as being more efficient, and therefore beneficial to the economy. But by its nature, automation displaces jobs, and where do those jobs go?

Fears of job loss are generally assuaged by the assertion that those jobs will give way to better jobs, which is better for everyone. If coffee shops are automated, then people who would be baristas can become nurses and technologists, positions perceived to be of more value to society. However, these “better” positions require more training, typically in the form of extensive schooling, than the jobs they represent an upgrade from. And while it may be admitted that many of these jobs are more “challenging”, what isn’t acknowledged is that such a position is therefore more demanding on the worker. Someone with the talent to be an excellent barista does not necessarily have the talents to be a nurse or lab technician. For the jobs that are just a step above the jobs currently being automated it may very much be the case that the only barrier to the vast majority of the population is a lack of education. But to think it will remain that way is nothing short of naive.

Book Title Generator

Looking around bookstores and libraries I get probably more amusement than most out of the terribly clichéd and outright cheesy titles so often bestowed to books sitting comfortably in the best-seller racks or among the ranks of genre fiction. In the cases of plodding fantasy epics and conspiracy-laced spy-thrillers, the pattern is so blatant that it could be created by the most rudimentary algorithm. So rudimentary in fact that I decided I would just write it for my own amusement. A fair warning, some of these titles get awfully close to titles of already published books, which only goes to illustrate how close this algorithm is to the true one used by publishers and creatively bankrupt authors the world over. Enjoy :)

Thriller Title Here

Clicking the above generates the title of an exciting new thriller that could have been written by Robert Ludlum, Dan Brown, or Dean Koontz.

Fantasy Title Here

Clicking the above generates the title of an epic fantasy novel in a series of never-ending novels that could have flowed from the pen of George R. R. Martin or Robert Jordan.

Summer Musings

In the artificial hurry of our daily live we have made it abundantly easy to lose sight of any kind of view of our world. Our attentions diverted along a corridor of immediacy, we expend our energies on pursuits that have little to no benefit to our fulfilment. Yet amidst the noise of obligations, entertainment over-saturation, global and local issues that we are supposed to care about, it only takes a moment outside, on a beautiful or terrible day, for the issues of real import to surface in one's mind.

After twenty-four years on this earth one might suppose by now that I find the familiar sight of blue sky turning pale at the horizon, against sun-bleached yellow-green grass to be tiresome, but instead it appeals to me carnally, and every time I see it, I feel a little refreshed. Humans are simple animals who have made their lives progressively more complicated without necessarily always making them better.

I appreciate the closeness with which I can calmly approach a red-breasted robin before he takes off in frightened flight. Later on I will pass another, who, secure in his tree, will take no notice of me as he grooms his chest. My eyes delight in the colour on display in the wingspan of a monarch butterfly, a creature who on close inspection appears not beautiful but alien. I come upon a choir of ducks, whose stunted sing-song is less a quack and more a lip-smacking d-buh!

In the pale blue sky, a few clouds, puffy yet drifting into a wispy non-existence, border the horizon while the moon hangs in her place opposing the sun.

The Universe's Rabbit Hole

Fundamental questions are often questions of scale: What is the smallest sustainable flame? What is the minimum bubble diameter? What is the minimum amount of information necessary to constitute life? What is the smallest constituent of matter? Of energy? What is the furthest extent of the universe? In mathematics and much of our everyday experience, scale seems arbitrary. One could construct a house at 1/5 scale, 1:1 scale, and 2:1 scale without much real difference between them. But once we nudge outside of our comfort zone, we find that scale is very important in our physical world.

If we were divide a one kilogram ingot of gold we could cut it down to size and divide it into tenths, hundredths, thousandths, millionths, billionths, and so on. But we cannot divide the ingot indefinitely, the smallest unit of gold we can have is one atom, and there are approximately 3.057x10^24 atoms of gold in a one kilogram ingot. From that bar we can have no more than around 3 trillion trillion pieces of gold. Divide it any further, and what you have is no longer discernibly gold. Given that the properties of matter and energy and various chemical reactions require certain scales before they can arise (even if those scales seem imperceptibly small), it seems reasonable to assume that there exists a fundamental lower limit on size. At some point we must reach a limit below which there would be no properties at all, since all properties would necessarily arise from the interactions occurring at such a scale. Viewed this way, a fractal theory of the universe seems untenable: how can universes be packed within each other when scale is so important to physical nature? However, it is still possible that beyond the scale that we can currently observe, past the fundamental building blocks of our universe, lay the outer reaches of embedded fractal universes, and these universes have analogous but dissimilar properties that operate on different magnitudes of scale.

Our Lawless Universe

Space is homogeneous: This assumption states that the equations of physics are independent of the frame of reference of the observer, they are time-space invariant. This assumption is necessarily true, a law that only holds locally is not a law but is at best a subset of a more complicated law or very likely a crude approximation of the true law. Behind the idea of a natural law is the assumption that natural phenomena can be reliably described and predicted by such laws. If on the most fundamental level there is no consistency, that is the laws of nature are variable or in flux and there is no larger pattern or law to this variation, then it is impossible to describe the universe using laws. However, that is inconsistent with experience and all logical thinking. It would take significant philosophical acrobatics if not be outright impossible to imagine a lawless universe that manages to resemble our own in our lifetimes. If a law is true, then it is necessarily applicable to the whole universe, not just our local space. However, it is very likely that a law is incomplete, or an approximation, that only agrees with observation so long as we only test within our neck of the woods. Trying to then apply this law to further reaches then breaks down, since we could not say that it is universally applicable, as we then have yet to discover the universally applicable law that applies beyond the local subset or "special case" law that we have found. Space is necessarily homogeneous, but it is entirely possible to derive physical laws that apply only to our local space. Further such subset laws may be able to account for the vast number of observable phenomena beyond our local space, but should breakdown at scales far beyond our local range. Newton's laws of motion represent a set of approximations that break down far outside of our local space, specifically at speeds approaching those of the speed of light. For a law to offer true insight and provide predictive power, it must extend beyond our local space. However, with new laws and knowledge we expand the horizon of our local space, so that we must probe further at the extremes to gain further insight.