Providing Data for a world that makes decisions based on beer can labels
Reimagined and Revamped. Fighting the spread of nonsense often feels like a Sisyphean task. However, the joy is in making the information available, not the hope of conversion.
Well, one of the things that lead me to my last post, was the fact that its killing me to waste so much freaking gas just to get my lazy ass to and from work, or to and from home depot, or to and from the supermarket.
It now costs me 50 bucks to fill my Ford Escape Hybrid. We got it because we wanted good mileage but also really needed an SUV (daughter, 2 dogs, schlepping lots of stuff while we renovate buildings). but a good 90% of my driving is to and from work, supermarket, or home depot.
I'll probably need the car for when I get big stuff, but often I need just one more copper fitting, or just one half gallon of milk Its so stupid to take a car for this.
So, I dropped 2000 bucks and got an electric bike.
So while I plan on benefiting from this coal use, I see good things on the horizon. Solar thermal and windpower is starting to make its way into our energy market. Nuclear is clean too. I'd take a switch to nuclear, before continuing to increase our reliance on coal.
Anyway, back to my bike. It will cost me 1 penny per mile. Its pretty fun to ride (even if the top speed is about 40 on flat road). We'll see how the rest of the summer goes with it. I looked at three bikes. The Zapino, the EVT, and the XM-3000. They are all made in china and they all are expected to have some issues as these are relatively new devices.
I found this site and forum very helpful in choosing the one I wanted. All the bikes come with Sealed Lead Acid Batteries (SLA), but some of them can be upgraded to Lithium ion for extended range.
I ordered my bike form Revolution EV LLC. The owner John Harding is very nice, knowledgable, and helpful. He has been riding his e-scooter for over 2000 miles. After reading about tons of failures in the EVT, and the newness of the Zapino, I chose to go with XM-3000 as they seemed to have the best record with regard to reliability (the 3000 is new, it was the 2000 that seemed to have pretty good reliability).
The XM-3000 has a big motor in the rear wheel. Its a 3000 watt motor, which brings the horsepower of the bike to 4HP. It also has regenerative braking, to help keep up battery life. The rest of the specs are here. If you have the dough and a motorcycle license, you can also get the XM-3500. Its more powerful, higher range, and looks different. But I thought I'd start out with the less expensive (about 1/2 price) bike that just got me around.
Shipping was only an additional 50 dollars (how can that be? it weighs over 300 pounds). But I was unsure what to expect when it arrived. Would I have to assemble big portions of it? Would I have to charge the batteries before I use it? Would I have to wire the thing up? I had no idea. but I have to say I was pleasantly surprised.
It arrived on a shipping truck in a large cardboard box (eek!). But, happily, it was inside a metal frame. There was some plastic to remove, and then I had to take off the middle struts. Once that was done, the frame comes apart in half. Once you remove a few bolts, the top comes off. Then you need to undo the wires that holds the wheels down to the frame. Then, honestly, this is how difficult it was...Flip the circuit breaker under the seat, Lift the front wheel out of its support, and push the bike forward - then you can ride! Of course taking a moment to attach the mirrors is probably a good idea.
In full, between the time it arrived the the time I was riding it, was about 20 minutes. The batteries came fully charged. That circuit breaker is actually part of the security of the bike, the seat opens and you can store some stuff in there, but it locks too. So when you leave the bike you can turn off the power and lock the seat down. The seat hinge is pretty flimsy, though, but once locked down the seat is stable.
I'm not sure if the speedometer is in KPH, but its way off. I quickly figured this out when I had it cranked up and it said I was doing 65 MPH. I had my wife drive next to me, when the bike read 40, i was only doing 20, when it read 55, i was only doing 30.
The motor sounds weird. There is no chain, but the power is pulsed to it, and it sounds like there is a chain. But I gotta say, it was fun to drive, and sure is cheap to fill.
There is a break in procedure that I need to follow to optimize my battery life. But lets face facts, I couldn't just sit there and slowly discharge the battery with the lights before trying it out. Maybe on my next set of batteries when the thrill is gone!
Being an engineer I have some mods in mind that I plan on doing:
remove the idiotic decals on the sides and replace with some enviro-conscious stickers, maybe:
I may go slow, but its faster than you if you had no gas
$0.01 per mile
Laughing at you while sipping energy
Install a Batt-EQ. I'll do a post on this device later if I can. It keeps the voltages of the battery equal, this way a single battery doesn't get reversed. It is supposed to extend the life of the stack of 5 SLA batteries.
Replace the SLA batteries with LiFePoS batteries. These should give me extra range and can be recharged up to 2000 times.
Mount the charger right on the bike.
Create some sort of solar shield that I can pull out like wings, so I can charge while not near an outlet. Its just an idea, we'll see. I doubt I can get enough surface area to make a difference.
If anyone has any other ideas on how to mod it, I'd love to hear it.
They are screwing up again. Our politicians listen to scientists a little bit, and then bring in the lobbyists to see how they can screw up perfectly good policies.
There are other processesbeing developed that use non-edible parts of plants to create fuel and energy.
When scientists said, "let's get oil from plants" They didn't mean "Lets see what the lobbyists have to say about that". They meant to endorse the idea of spending money to complete this development and start getting cheap energy again from what is ultimately the sun.
Hybrid technology came into play, and the politicians said "Hey! Let's give tax breaks for people who employ them!". Idiotic! Why should someone gets a tax break for a car that gets 20-30 MPG just because it has a hybrid drive in it, when other people buy ICE cars that get 40 MPG.
No, when the scientists said "Lets endorse high efficiency cars" they didn't mean "Lets give tax breaks for a technology whether or not it gives any efficiency improvement at all"! The tax break should have been simple, the more mileage you get, the more of a tax break you get. Technology independent. Believe it or not, I just heard a similar idea coming from the McCain camp.
"For every automaker who can sell a zero-emissions car, we will commit a 5,000 dollar tax credit for each and every customer who buys that car. For other vehicles, whatever type they may be, the lower the carbon emissions, the higher the tax credit."
Of course it would have been nice if it was actually the consumer who got the tax break and not the car company, but at least there was a little clue in there.
So, what's the latest? Again they are focusing on the specific technology, not the goal. Its idiotic. Instead of actually getting people to recognize their immediate costs regardless of technology, they figure that if gallons per mile was what was specified, people would be more aware of the differences between one car and another (because the numbers would appear farther apart).
STOP FOCUSING ON GAS!
I have a better plan: how about simply mentioning dollars/mile. Now the car can be electric, air, gas or diesel driven and all the cars will have the same standard. I realize that electricity, gas, and diesel cost differently around the country. Also the value of a dollar changes with time. So what? Choose a standard and apply it to all of them. Choose the dollar value of the year 2000, or use the most recent year, for all I care. Choose average electric costs, choose average gas or diesel prices. It doesn't matter, just choose one and compare them all the same way. Its really not that hard.
I'll even help them out to start.
Ignoring maintenance costs, using average nationwide electricity costs, average gas price, and reported mileage per tank/charge:
Look at that! If you choose to drive an electric car you could reduce to driving costs by an order of magnitude!
The calculation is easy, you can do it for your car. Simple divide your average local price of gas by your miles per gallon (from the government fuel economy site).
For electric vehicles its a bit harder. You need to find the total Watt hours your battery can hold (total stack voltage times the amp-hours of one of the batteries). Multiply this number by the cost of electricity in your area. Then divide this number by the estimated range for your battery pack. This will give you $/mile.
There is one more thing the Government could help people out with. Make it mandatory to install MPG gauges in all cars. These gauges should not be able to be be turned off. Everyone could improve the mileage they are getting in their cars if they have something that could help them learn to drive it efficiently. If its out of sight, its out of mind. They would see temperature effects, effects of driving 70 MPH, effects of acceleration and so forth.
I'm not a long time reader of Pharyngula, but I do enjoy his posts. He is prolific, entertaining, on some occasions his writing style would be the envy of any modern day Shakespeare. Every once in a while he posts truly fascinating dissertations on biology. On other occasion he posts good answers to honest questions from people who do not fully understand evolutionary mechanisms or evolution as a whole.
He is also a raving atheist. Its not my style of helping the world understand, but it is entertaining, thoughtful (for the most part), and invigorating.
But a recent post got me thinking on a subject I had thought about posting on. Basically. in (very) short, Sheldrake claims that telepathy is possible and even common. He even has a few articles on it. He claims that in his experiments people are able to have telepathic abilities, and that it is not an extraordinary ability, but instead is an ordinary one. More on that later.
PZ problem with it is that Sheldrake doesnt hypothesize a mechanism for this ability.
You can't just simply carry out a Fortean exercise in collecting odd anecdotes and unexplained phenomena. You have to propose mechanisms — you need to make hypotheses that can be used to guide tests of the idea. What is the mechanism behind the claimed ability of people to sense who is calling them on the telephone?
Its true, no mechanism is put forth by Sheldrake to explain this ability. But this is one of those cases where PZ is wrong. You don't need a mechanism to make a claim that something happens. The plethora of commenters pointed this out.
Newton didn't know why masses are attracted to each other. But he empirically came up with a formula to describe this. Newton didnt have to run experiment to create a Unified Field Theory to explain the mechanism behind gravity. He just explained that it was the masses that pull towards each other. The claim itself doesn't require a mechnism, it simply requires evidence of its truth.
But, let me propose one based on some recent articles. Here it is:
It doesn't seem a hard step to think that we may be able to use these pores to receive some sort of information about people.
What about transmit? We know that muscle contract based on a signal from the brain out towards the muscles. Is it truly so hard to imagine that we may have signals the come from the brain that excite these antenna?
As some of the commenters mention, the existence of this mechanism would provide a huge evolutionary advantage and would quickly become common to the entire species. In fact this is exactly what Sheldrake is saying. His claim is that everyone does in fact have this ability to some extent or another. But the fallacy in this line of thinking form these commentors is that there is nothing to say that this minor ability (no one is claiming that the 'biological telepathy' is as clear as talking on the phone) as as strong as advantage as say vision, or opposable thumbs. Those traits may be for more useful than this ability, which may bring nothing to us that a small sense of empathy, or laughably the bizzare ability to have caller ID without paying for it.
There is of course one little problem with this hypothesis. As far as I can tell, there is no good evidence to suggest that this ability exists in the first place. Every time a psychic ability is actually tested for as people claim, it falls flat on its face. Often simple statistics or confirmation bias explains the 'paranormal' phenomenon better than some Theory of Woo.
But what about Sheldrake? He wrote articles. He performed scientific studies. His claim in the article is that Dawkins was unwilling to even look at the evidence that he has gathered. But other people have looked at other claims of his. For example, his claims about staring were examined. His claims about morphic resonance (telepathic group effort).
The scientific step that Sheldrake is suffering from is verification. So while he seems to be performing tests that delineate the effects he is claiming, they are not double blind, they can't be verified and it leaves us with a glaring lack of support for his many claims. Pulling out one study at random we see:
Non Blinded Study: "one of us (P.S.) served as participant and the other (R.S.) as experimenter" Participants who are already biased :"Our advertisements read: “Do you know who is ringing before you pick up the phone?" Having participants design the test : "most were unable to find four people to whom they thought they might respond telepathically and who were also able and willing to take part" The ability for participant to change answers: "A few minutes after the tests, the experimenter rang the participant to ask what his or her guess had been" (this pretty much makes any statistics and conclusions irrelevant) Oh cripes, gimme a break: "one of them would be selected at random by the throw of a die. For the throw of the die, we used high-quality casino dice and a ribbed casino-style dice cup, purchased in Las Vegas." Poor interpretation of statistics: "Out of these 9 participants, all but one made more than 25% correct guesses. The p values for each participant’s results are shown in Table 2." (none of the p value show statistic significance).
That is just a small sampling from one single 'study'. Someone needs some help.
Its this same shoddy science that leads to mass delusions *. When Wakefield produces a crappy study linking MMR to autism, the whole world wants to believe it. Then we spend decades and millions of dollars trying to eliminate misconception. Same goes the global warming deniers trying to come up with evidence-weak cosmic ray theories, or sun spot theories, or what not.
At this point, the very least that Sheldrake can do, is to A) learn to run double blind tests and B) perform these studies with skeptic. Get Dawkins to run a series of studies with you! Don't show him unverified papers! Or perform a study with me! I'll help you.
Its all well and good to have an open minded attitude. Sure "Why Not?" is a good way to go about things. But if you are going to actually put actions towards one of your "Why Nots" lets make sure the evidence for the claim exists first.
* Yes, I yanked three links directly form PZ post. But I wanted to describe the mechanism for the belief in this stuff. Maybe I was just lazy.
I'm not sure my writing has improved since I started blogging. I hope so. I hope today that I can write eloquent enough and with the same zest and enthusiasm that I actually feel for the subject. Today I am writing about how amazing people are.
Some people are perhaps more simple than I am and only require a single target for what they are thankful for. Its so much easier to point your gratefulness at one thing than to spread it around effectively. Today I hope to spread it around effectively, even though none, save one, of these things have happened to me.
Some people may get into an airplane crash and survive...and thank god. If I survived a plane crash, I would thank aeronautical engineers, mechanical engineers, members of the national transportation safety board, who have literally worked decades to make air safety as incredible as it is. But it isn't just these folks is it? They have people who are directly helping them, with leadership, with amenities like food and health, they have people writing software and building computer hardware to help them do their job better and more effectively. They have installed programs to produce better quality parts, test subcomponents and get a great understanding of failure modes and create maintenance schedules. There is another layer, people who educated these people, people who raised the engineers and leaders and food service people. Then there is even a further layer, people who opened up the fields they work in, the Wright Brothers, Newton, Moore. The reason those people survived that plane crash is because thousands of people have put in millions of man hours to make planes as good and safe as they are now.
Some people survive a car accident.... and thank god If I got into a car accident and survived I would thank the engineers and safety experts that designed the car. I'd thank the quality control experts that check that all the part going into the car meet the correct specifications. I would thank the vendors to the car manufacturers for making sure that their parts meet specs before they ship them. I would thank the safety experts at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration for testing that cars and challenging car companies to creating better and safer cars. I would thank various political administrations for creating these safety bodies and enforce their recommendations. But then I would also thank the software engineers that developed the FEA software that allows engineers to create thousands of hours of simulations to get the right design for parts that meet stringent safety standards while trimming costs and weight. But there are more people to thank. For example the scientists the derived the laws by which the simulations could be done and the calculations and rules by which the engineers follow. There are the parents and educators that brought these engineers, scientists, safety experts, technical support and health and liveliness to the people who make cars safer and more robust every year. The reason those people survive a car crash is because thousands of people have put in millions of man hours to make planes as good and safe as they are now.
If I required surgery and lived though it without major impairment (or even with major impairment) I would first thank the EMTs who were trained and got me to the hospital. I would thank the incredible surgeons who fixed me in my time of great peril. I would thank the hospital staff and donors for making a facility that allows this incredible work to go on, work that has had tremendous effects on our lifespan. I would thank the medical pioneers who and the people who agreed to be test subject to advance medicine to a point where we can stop and start a heart, and replace it. We can fix problems in the brain due to millenia of trial and error. I would thank the medical institutions that teach new doctors to not only learn the tried and true methods but teaches them to be creative and improve on them and notice when something is wrong. I would thank Doctors who propose hypothesis that are not well accepted and then back up their claims with so much evidence that concensus must change. I would thank the parents and educators of these doctors and technician and administrators. I would thank the politicians who require oversight of healthcare workers. The reason those people survive dramatic surgery and disease is because thousands of people have put in millions of man hours to make surgery as good and safe as they are now.
People thank God for all sorts of things. They thank God for not being in an earthquake or typhoon that thousands of other people died in or are suffering from. They thank god for their children, for their opportunities and even their suffering. But its all people who are involved on both ends of all of these instances. Our love for each other, our desire to help each other our quest for understanding of the things around us, our awe and respect for powerful forces. Its all people.
I even find myself using the term "Thank God". Clearly for me its just a useful phrase that is meant to thank all the things I have mentioned. So I want to propose a new term, something that encompasses the unbelievable contributions man has made to allow us to be as capable, as magnificent, and as awe inspiring we are.
It has to be short. It has to roll off the tongue. It has to imply the contributions to the amazing event that billions of people for thousands of years have contributed to. So here we go, tell me if you like it.
Back in April (man I have a lot of posts backlogged!) I read this article in the Wall Street Journal Online. Its by Patrick Michaels, a member of the Cato Institute. I have not really paid much attention to what they put out. I am also not against libertarian ideology as long as it is data oriented and not faith based like so much of politics these days. However, Mr. Micheals opinion truly does not seem very valuable as he blunders through many red herrings, strawmen and causation/correlation fallacies.
Lets take this slowly.
President George W. Bush has just announced his goal to stabilize greenhouse-gas emissions by 2025. To get there, he proposes new fuel-economy standards for autos, and lower emissions from power plants built in the next 10 to 15 years.
OK, so this is about Global Warming.
Pending legislation in the Senate from Joe Lieberman and John Warner would cut emissions even further – by 66% by 2050. No one has a clue how to do this. Because there is no substitute technology to achieve these massive reductions, we'll just have to get by with less energy.
Three problems here. First off, we know many ways to achieve these new standards, we have for years, and we haven't really bothered to try to push ourselves. Second, taking on a challenge rarely means that you know how to accomplish it. When we decided to go to the moon, was the answer obvious? Does this mean that if you were in charge we wouldn't take on challenges that we do not yet know the answer for? Shall we not try to cure AIDS or Cancer? Should we try not to extend lifespans? decrease poverty?
But what is really wrong with that paragraph (and we just started) is that developing (as Gore promoted back in 2000 when we voted for the Oil Candidate) new and renewable energy sources will make is so that we don't have to use less energy. If we do it right, and are successful,we could use more!
Compared to a year ago, gasoline consumption has dropped only 0.5% at current prices. So imagine how expensive it would be to reduce overall emissions by 66%.
Ahhh. An argument from incredulity. Wonderful tactics. You are really on your game there Mr. Micheals. He then goes into a short diatribe about how 0.31 degrees per decade rise isn't really anything to worry about, its "paltry". Then:
For years, records from surface thermometers showed a global warming trend beginning in the late 1970s. But temperatures sensed by satellites and weather balloons displayed no concurrent warming.
As I have mentioned before, why arent you aware of corrections made in satellite imaging or that there is a difference between expected stratosphere and troposphere temperature changes? (stratosphere is and is supposed to actually cool).
These records have been revised a number of times, and I examined the two major revisions of these three records....The two revisions of the IPCC surface record each successively lowered temperatures in the 1950s and the 1960s. The result? Obviously more warming – from largely the same data.
Does someone not understand how science works? Folks, if everything stays the same, its dogma. You get dogma in astrology, homeopathy and religion. Science on the other hand, accepts change with new data. Recently I found this article. Scientists accept observation and try very hard to explain inconsistencies. So when satellite data doesn't match expectations you have to check both the model used and the data acquisition devices. Same goes for each and every blip.
He then goes into other places where sensing systems were filtered out of the data due to high variance or poor performance (where he divuldges that he does in fact know about the warming satellite errors) and ends with this exclaimation
There have been six major revisions in the warming figures in recent years, all in the same direction.
Want to hear something worse Mr. Michaels? Even with all of this upward revisions, we are still too conservative in our predictions of temperature rise. Now I realize he is trying to suggest conspiracy, that the data is being massaged to match the prediction. But there are no reports of the satellites being uncalibrated. Plus he is simply dead wrong about the data always being massaged upwards. Here is another like minded conspiracy theorist. This data was combined and the average temperature data was adjusted lower, by the .01 degrees that it imposed (0.15C for the US alone).
The fact is its great that these folks are finding errors and inconsistencies. All in all this makes the global warming data stronger and stronger. In fact Mr. Michaels seems to fall for every mistaken assumption listed here. Many of his complaints have been addressed ad nauseum, like here.
He then goes into talking about the poor data from africa and the temperature monitoring stations there. He rightly points out that these stations may experience heightened decay. Then he jumps to this:
After adjusting for such effects, as much as half of the warming in the U.N.'s land-based record vanishes. Because about 70% of earth's surface is water, this could mean a reduction of as much as 15% in the global warming trend.
What? Adjusting how? where did you mention how many stations the UN had relative to all the station being used? What calculation was done to get the 15%?
The frequency of very warm months is lowered, to the point at which it matches the satellite data, which show fewer very hot months.
Wait didnt you just imply that the satellite data was massaged to meet the AGW theory? And your data matches the satellite data? Great! So your data also matches up with the AGW theory.
and then the whine...
At any rate, our findings have not been incorporated into the IPCC's history, and they probably never will be.
but alas, he must have already knew that his points were addressed 5 months earlier. Instead of actually modifying his discourse to include these criticisms he just repeated them to an audience that probably has not read the rebuttal. Sneaky.
He then goes into discussing Greenland. As most people know, the idea of losing both the land based ice in the antarctic along with greenland ice loss is alarming. I don't think that is disputed, what is disputed is whether or not that will happen. No one is predicting Noah's Flood like the 'skeptic's' like to imply. But any sea level rise is bound to cause suffering because much of the worlds population is based near the ocean.
He then talks about "warming island" and mentions that Greenland has seen its coldest period since the 19th century during the time from 1970 to 1995. I can't understand the point he is trying to make. Fine if we accept this, then it is warmer now in the last decade then during that period, so ice is now receding. Further, no one says that rising average temperatures doesn't allow for colder localities. so, I have no idea what his point is there. The worry is that as global temperatures rise, then this ice may get lost. He does nothing to dispute this claim.
The mechanism for the Greenland disaster is that summer warming creates rivers, called moulins, that descend into the ice cap, lubricating a rapid collapse and raising sea levels by 20 feet in the next 90 years. In Al Gore's book, "An Inconvenient Truth," there's a wonderful picture of a moulin on page 193, with the text stating "These photographs from Greenland illustrate some of the dramatic changes now happening on the ice there."
Really? There's a photograph in the journal "Arctic," published in 1953 by R.H. Katz, captioned "River disappearing in 40-foot deep gorge," on Greenland's Adolf Hoels Glacier. It's all there in the open literature, but apparently that's too inconvenient to bring up. Greenland didn't shed its ice then. There was no acceleration of the rise in sea level.
First off, I can't find that picture anywhere on the internet. You'd think the Cato institute would post it for reference. Second, no one said that a single river will drain greenland of all its ice, its a multitude of the rivers, and increasing number or size of them that we are expecting. They were showing the mechanism by which the ice could leave. Explaining that there was a single river on Greenland when it was warm 50 years ago hardly qualifies as contradictory evidence.
Finally, no one seems to want to discuss that for millennia after the end of the last ice age, the Eurasian arctic was several degrees warmer in summer (when ice melts) than it is now. We know this because trees are buried in areas that are now too cold to support them. Back then, the forest extended all the way to the Arctic Ocean, which is now completely surrounded by tundra. If it was warmer for such a long period, why didn't Greenland shed its ice?
Really? no one (2002)? Why does he mention two separate localities (greenland and eurasia) as if the must be related, I'm not saying they aren't, I am not a climatologist. But is it abundantly clear that the Eurasian ice did in fact melt. So what is he trying to say?
This prompts the ultimate question: Why is the news on global warming always bad?
First off: Itisn't (hey, I haven't seen ozone hole good news in a while either!), this is a strawman. Second: Global warming is a bad thing. You know this. If the measured effect of the bad thing gets worse (as it does) you expect to see more of the effects of the bad thing itself. What he is asking is like asking: Why the death rate is rising when violent crime is rising?...its an expected result!
But as we face the threat of massive energy taxes – raised by perceptions of increasing rates of warming and the sudden loss of Greenland's ice – we should be talking about reality.
And the AGW skeptics call us alarmists! Mr. Micheals pretty much compiles every GW denier fallacy into one article. Here they are:
Confuse long term data with short term data
Confuse Global measurements with local measurements
Raise the scary spectre of lowered economy (despite the fact that leading in renewables would make our economy stronger)
Ignore recent data (or focus only on short term extremely recent data)
Ignore scientific mechanism of error correction (which he is perhaps unknowingly participating in)
Rely on anecdotal evidence (like I have a picture of a river from 1953!, its very similar to "Wow its freezing this year in Pensacola FL, GW must be wrong!)
ooh, Im sure there is more, but I am getting tired!
As I have mentioned before, I really like video games (I just recently turned 40 if you are interested). I don't play sports games, I hate Mario Bros. type games, I dont even like first person shooters (even though the graphics in those games tend to be spectacular). I enjoy Real Time Strategy games (currently I am playing Warhammer Mark of Chaos), RPG (like the Witcher), and MMORPG games (World of Warcraft). Our baby helped wean me off of a serious World of Warcraft addiction to the point where I only have some slight yearnings to return.
You see, these games create alternate worlds that you can explore, run around in, and meet with real live people (in the case of MMOs) and create stories in. Its like the feeling I got when I read Lord of the Rings or The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. Reading those books took me there, to a magical land. These games to the same thing, but they really take me there!
Anyway, I mention this because I am eagerly awaiting a game called Spore. It just looks like it will be a great game to play. It looks like it combines many of the elements of all these genres that I loke (except the social aspect of MMOs). But the hype for it is driving me nutz! Look at the description:
An epic journey that takes you from the origin and evolution of life through the development of civilization and technology and eventually all the way into the deepest reaches of outer space.
Wait a second. There is a character editor that you can even buy separately! This is not evolution in anyway. This is Intelligent Design. Go ahead, google spore and the media following it, you will see the word evolution everywhere.
I'm not sure who to score one for, science or The pathetic Discovery Institute. It would seem that the DI wins this because the movie at the site starts out with a title screen that says "The science behind spore" and its an intelligent design game. At the same time, there ARE other dynamics in the game that are interesting and certainly there are a lot of sociological, physical, chemical and even biological models employed in the programming to help bring realism to the game.
That said, I still think that the DI can claim a small victory here. Weep.
I'm sorry folks. I have been away from writing because my computer has been down and a whole bunch of other events have prevented me from getting back in my blogging shoes.
Just saw this little list and had to make a snarky comment:
But, happily, it was inside a metal frame. There was some plastic to remove, and then I had to take off the middle struts.
Once that was done, the frame comes apart in half. Once you remove a few bolts, the top comes off.
Then you need to undo the wires that holds the wheels down to the frame.
Then, honestly, this is how difficult it was...Flip the circuit breaker under the seat, Lift the front wheel out of its support, and push the bike forward - then you can ride!
Of course taking a moment to attach the mirrors is probably a good idea.
Something doesnt seem right. Poor dog :(
