The Moral Excuse For Shooting a Mutant in the Face

Jacob's Knowledge Bombs,

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Do you like video games? OMG, me too!

What would you say if I told you that playing video games would actually make you a more morally well-rounded person?

Blasphemy! Jack Thompson has clearly shown that video games do nothing more than teach otherwise good children how to steal cars, kill grandmothers, and eat babies.

Puh-leez, no one is going to miss a few babies and grandma’s…

In all seriousness though, there is legitimate philosophical background to justify video games as tools to develop moral decision making.  It has been discussed here, in a decently well-written paper by Marcus Schulzke in the journal “Game Studies”, and today I’d like to give you a quick summary of the arguments made in the study, and why I agree with them.

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Randomness

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You’re on a road trip with your buddies and your iPod is the one churning out the tunes, when a Captain and Tenille song comes on.  The guy riding shot gun shoots you a look and skips to the next song.  After that one finishes, there they are again, “Do that to Me One More Time” is killing the good vibes in the car. Skip.  Then, of all things, “Muskrat Love” comes on? “Dude, how much Captain and Tennille do you have on your iPod?”  Turns out you only have a greatest hits album and you have something like 8 days worth of other music on that Jobsian box.  Clearly the iPod can’t generate a random playlist worth a damn.

Noise, chance, whatever you want to call it.  Often times people misunderstand what randomness actually is.   Randomness is a sequence of things such that there is no intelligible pattern or combination.  The problem is we expect that random means that things will be equally spaced out or that there will be “no coincidences.”    In fact, one of the ways you know your are looking at randomness is that there will be repetition or related items in the list.
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A Buncha Links from the Paleopals

Friday Link Roundup

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Friday is a day of possibility, at least once you’re off work. So until you’re off work maybe you can enjoy some of the things on the internet that have kept the Paleopals working for the weekend. Enjoy!

Patrick:

Terrible? yes. Funny? yes. Good? Not in the traditional sense of the word. Bad? In the best way possible.

Charlie:

This is awesome because the sun ate a comet and also we watched it. Which was pretty hard to do, technically. Comet Dives Into Sun: STEREO, SOHO Spacecraft Catch Craft

Ryan:

I FOUND this t-shirt and I thought it went well with my article this week. Wear it and look sexy.

Found

Ben:

Hey look it’s an interview with the father of the modern zombie! And he talks about academics who waste time doing zombie-math. He doesn’t say anything about ending your name with a question mark though.

George A. Romero: “Who says zombies eat brains?”

Jacob:

This is an official military specification on how to make cookies and brownies for military rations. The story has been making rounds around some of the major news outlets this week, but this is the actual, official document that I pulled from our direct link to the government spec database. IT’S LEGIT.

Funny enough, it actually references another mil spec on how to make all forms of hard and soft candies as well. It’s pretty awesome.

MilSpec-Brownies.pdf

How the Mayor Will Save You in a Zombie Apocalypse (by reminding you to stay at work)

bennnnn, , ,

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Hello everyone. Welcome to my first blog post. Today is a silly day, and since it is still zombie awareness month , I’ve decided to present some of my own silly fiction-science research on zombies. Specifically, zombie epidemic mathematics.

Thanks, google image search!

Epidemic Mathematics
Okay, so there are real people out there studying real epidemics using mathematics; and as it happens, modeling an epidemic can be fairly straightforward (you know, like assembling a sky scraper, or running a factory). Let me do a thought experiment with you do demonstrate how it can be done.

Suppose that there are four people moving about randomly (once an hour) inside of a four room house, and one of them has the flu. The odds that a healthy person will meet the sick dude are 1/4. Suppose that, should you get stuck in the same room with the sick dude, the odds of contracting the flu are 1/7. Then the overall odds of catching the flu (by getting caught in the sick room, and then contracting the illness) are 1/(7*4)=1/28. Thus, the number of people who will get sick each hour will be 3/28. Alternatively, I could say that it will take about 10 hours for ONE PERSON to contract the flu. After that, there will be two sick people and two healthy people wandering through the claustrophobic little house.

Follow that?! Then you’ve just taken a baby step toward being able to model an epidemic. Its a helpful and noble field of mathematics. Of course, I’m a physicist, and neither helpful nor noble. So I chose to model a stupid ZOMBIE epidemic.

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LOST: Sci-fi or spiritualism?

Ryan's Ramblings, , , , ,

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*Mild spoilers ahead*

“Any sufficiently defined magic is indistinguishable from science.” – Guy who should have helped write the LOST finale.

I’ve just finished the LOST finale. I was a few days late to the party but a long flight gave me time to give it a good watching. Yes, I watched it on a plane, which seems ironic. I wanted to talk about it, and have a little bit with friends but it’s really only going to be topical for another week or so at best so if I had anything to say I should say it now. I’ve watched the show weekly since season 2, haven’t always enjoyed it but hoped I was along for a ride that was going somewhere. It seems like most people would argue that was a mistake, and that it went nowhere worth going. I think they’re half right. Because there are another contingent of those who argue the finale worked. As the typical scientist, I’m gonna fall back on a spectrum and say that some things did work and others did not.

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Stealth Tech!

Jacob's Knowledge Bombs, ,

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Ahoy PaleoPosse!

Allow me to introduce myself.  My name is Jacob, and I’m here to learn you some science.  READY? GO!

Today I wanna talk to you about Stealth Technology.  And because the word “stealth” can mean anything from “quiet” to “camouflaged” to “reduced radar signature”, let me qualify that by saying that today’s topic will be about aircraft stealth technology.


They mostly come at night… mostly…

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PaleoSchedule

Ryan's Ramblings

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Ok, it’s not actually Paleo at all, since we’re talking about what’s happening in the future. Regardless, we figured y’all might like to know what’s in store for ya each day as you visit our humble Paleocave. We’ve quite the lineup in store and we think you’ll enjoy our varied topics.

Monday:

Patrick or Charlie will write something and post it! It’ll be like a real blog! They’re gonna alternate each week starting next week. And it’s gonna be… probably pretty cool.

Tuesday:

If you listened to Episode 37 you heard us introduce our newest Paleopal Jacob! Tuesday’s Jacob will bringing the engineering in a way no Paleopal before him has or could. Show him your love and support, won’t you?

Wednesday:

Ryan is covering hump day. Probably a bad idea. He’s not really a morning person. Everyone remind him to write these before it gets too late on Tuesday or we’ll see some serious vitriol.

Thursday:

Who better to handle the day dedicated to the mighty Thor than Ben! Physically he is the largest of the Paleopals (we think, he’s never left his ice cave long enough to be measured) and he’ll be bringing his usual brand of silly science to bear here each week.

Friday:

Roundup! Quick, simple and to the point. We’ll each toss up something we think you’d like to know about. A cool story that didn’t make the show, a song we think you’d like, even a funny t-shirt. A few quick clicks and we’ll get you into the weekend going strong.

Something else you’d like to see here on the blog? Let us know! Drop a comment on this post or e-mail us at paleopals@sciencesortof.com

Trailers vs. the Film in the Sleep Deprived Male Brain

Ryan's Ramblings

From the beginning, it's bright by the end.I have returned triumphant… sort of, from the 5th annual Secret Film Festival held at the Del Mar Theater in downtown Santa Cruz. Here’s the format. It starts at midnight on Saturday, and by noon Sunday you’ll have seen six films there’s almost no chance of you having seen before. You don’t know what the movies will be (it’s a secret) and other than the cryptic clue given right before the reel starts, you won’t know until the title screen. Besides the lost day it’s kind of a steal. Paleoposse members know we regularly talk trailers on the show, and so this year I was more prepared than usual to guess the movies as they came. A few of the movies I had seen the trailers for while researching potential previews for the segment, and the rest I often able to recognize just from seeing their poster on the apple trailers site. So in keeping with that theme I’d like to give you a brief run-down of each movie (spoiler-free), whether I’d seen the trailer before or have watched it since, and how the two match up. I may toss in a few words about my level of consciousness during each film just to add context to my increasingly nonsensical ramblings. Alright, let’s dive in!

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