corollary

My complete failure to write web-log entries last week stems from the fact that Monday and Tuesday were public holidays, and while at work on the remaining three days of the week, I was very busy with the administrivia required in releasing HOL. Though it has yet to be announced, you can download exciting theorem-proving files now from SourceForge. I offer a similar excuse for my failure to write on the previous Friday.

But in all this time, I have accumulated a few good links that I feel compelled to share.

This, for example, is a pretty cool research project from MIT that aims to find out what's hot on the web by doing frequent scans of sites that identify themselves as web-logs, and seeing what they link to. To wax poetic, it's a window on the communal web-logger's soul. More usefully, you can see what the web's current best jokes are, and what its current neuroses are as well. (Good jokes aren't necessarily guffaw-inducing either. I particularly liked the gentle humour and style of this extract from a new book by Paul Robinson.)

There's also this neat Java demonstration of the scale of the universe through over 30 orders of magnitude. Of these, I'd estimate that the human mind can easily cope with about 10 of them.

Of course, the incomprehensible is easy to find on the Internet itself. In this case, the more you look at, the wackier it seems.

I should have written yesterday, but I was caught up in the University Bumps. I was coxing a graduate boat from St. Catharine's, the men's 4th boat. This is a “grad boat”, and I’m subbing for their regular cox, who will be coxing today and on Saturday. You can see us at position 88 on this chart. We rowed over, and it was really quite exciting.

In computer game news, I really should put in a good word for the latest craze to hit the home PC: Morrowind. This is definitely a very slick game. It induced all sorts of angst as we installed a new graphics card for our PC. (On setting it up 2 years ago, we were confident that we wouldn’t need anything in the way of 3D acceleration, because We don't play that sort of game. Heh. Things don’t need to be first-person shooters to make very impressive use of 3D acceleration.) But once the card was in place, and DirectX 8.1 correctly installed too, it all worked, and there was much rejoicing.

Reviews at:

• GamesDomain
• IGN

And now the news:

• The Catz boat bumped yesterday, so I will rejoin them in fine form I'm sure. Around us, it's curious that (looking at the chart should make this clear), Jesus VI are now in position to bump Churchill IV again, after bumping them once already (on Wednesday).
• NZ is going to have an election soon. Helen Clark announced that it would be two months earlier than expected, on 27 July.

• In the UK, the world's concerns seem to be almost taking a back seat to a ridiculous story about whether or not Tony Blair tried to lean on the officiating bods at the Queen Mother's lying-in-state so as to get himself a more prominent place in the public's eye. The media reported this story, and the PM's office made a complaint to the Press Complaints people, claiming it was all a horrible lie. But then, it seemed that they couldn’t prove it wasn’t, and the Press Complaints lot dismissed the complaint. For a government supposedly suffused with spin-doctors, they seem pretty good at cocking up their press relations on a regular basis.

  But then, as a junior minister called Douglas Alexander (and he sounded Scottish too) sensibly pointed out on the Today programme, there are rather more important things going on. The politicians blame the media, and the media blame the politicians, but I really do think that they, and the consumers (i.e., the public) too, have to share the blame for the supposed trivialisation of public discourse.

England are out of the World Cup after losing to Brazil 2-1. The US is playing Germany, and currently down 1-0. The game this morning was quite exciting, and I think this not even having seen any of the goals. I came in on it just before Brazil had their man sent off. They seemed to play quite well to keep England's chances to a minimum.

I thought this preview article was quite fascinating. The US Army is going to develop and release a free first-person shooter computer game as part of its recruitment efforts. They are going to try to be quite realistic in their depiction of military combat. This is clearly the future for recruitment everywhere: Fancy a job with us? Here, first play this game to give a virtual reality sample of what it's like. Of course, with my job, they'd just need to sit the potential recruit down in front of a screen and leave them there.

Some perceptive comments about the Harry Potter books.

Good things about Morrowind:

• It looks very nice. Wandering the country-side at night, with stars to look at; admiring the massive pyramid-like architecture in the city of Vivec; the haze of dawn mists. The first-person perspective heightens the sense of immersion.
• It really does seem open-ended and free-form. The thrust of the “main” story-line is far from clear, and there’s still lots of interesting stuff to do on the fringes. On a couple of occasions I have just taken my character on wanders through the back-country, testing my archery skills on wild animals, and poking my nose into various ancestral tombs that you occasionally bump into.
• Related to this, the guild/faction structures are nicely done. Yes, they have “quests” for you to do, even in the Imperial Legion (joining the latter gets lots of comments from guards along the lines of Why aren't you at your post?, but you're not forced into barracks for months at a time); but these are all pretty well varied, and seem to admit multiple methods of solution. My character has joined the Fighters’ Guild, the Thieves’ Guild, the Imperial Cult and the Imperial Legion. I'm aware of seven others that could be joined (though some of them are mutually exclusive), making for lots of different ways to play the game.
• The underlying game system is refreshing. Though there are player levels, these govern just health and magic-point totals. The system is primarily skill-based, and though there are sample classes provided (with their skill-sets already chosen), you can design your own. A class picks 5 major skills and 5 minor skills that start off at higher levels, while all of the game's other skills start low. But the system is that all skills improve if used successfully. If and when D&D makes it to a 6th edition, it might have evolved to a system as nice as this.
• It continues to engross me, many hours after first starting.

Things that could be better (for the next version):

• NPCs are static; they don't move around except within very constrained patrol routines for some guards. This breaks the illusion a little because they obviously have no lives of their own.
• Relatedly, there is no real day/night cycle in the towns: it might be the middle of the night when you arrive in Balmora, but everyone is still up and about and will have exactly the same conversations with you. They should all be in bed!
• There is no scope for the multiple character adventuring. When you are occasionally lumbered with an escort duty, the escorted person follows you around like a stupid pet, and you can't wait to get rid of them.
• There are occasional graphical glitches that look peculiar but have no real effect on the game.
• Monsters will occasionally get stuck when they should be charging at you (a pathfinding failure this), making it possible to pick them off with bow and arrow.
• There are too few people in the towns. This really is a difficult one for any game designer to solve: how do you invent a complete village? Either you make all the people the same, which is boring and worse than not having them, or you spend an incredibly long time inventing hundreds (thousands) of lives, most of which the PC will never interact with. Morrowind actually does a fabulous job on this front, so I'm really being impossibly (?) perfectionist.

Some links:

• A cool article about eavesdropping on a conference audience's web-surfing.
• A profile of Tony Bennett (as in Music to watch girls by).
• Links (Star-Wars-better, response, readers'-letters, Star-Wars-TV-special) from Salon about Star Wars, and The Lord of the Rings, and their respective merits.