Month: August 2006

Transparent face mask?

OK, this one just baffles me. Over at the Modern Mechanix blog, there is an old advertisement for a transparent face mask from the March 1940 issue of Popular Science magazine. Looking at the ad, all I can see is a plastic bag which someone put on a chicks head. Haven’t we spent our entire lives being told not to put plastic bags on our heads due to danger of suffocation? And isn’t putting a plastic bag over a woman’s head something more likely to be done by a serial murderer? And why is this woman smiling?

Transparent Face Mask
Slipped over the head, a bag of cellulose tissue designed for use in skiing and other outdoor sports offers protection for the face without interfering with vision. The transparent mask can also be used as a shower cap, an apron, a tray cover, and a turban, the makers say.

[tags]Modern Mechanix, Transparent face mask?[/tags]

Worrying about the baby

I posted this image once before, on a version of this site hosted with another provider.  It’s gone now, since the host went away and I wasn’t smart enough to maintain backups at that time.  Since this has recently been getting mention again elsewhere on the web, I thought I’d post it again.  And this time, I do keep backups of my site, so I’m not worried about losing it this time.

A good write-up on the article and a check on whether or not it is real can be found at Snopes.

[tags]Jackhammer noise bad for baby, Is it the noise that she should worry about?[/tags]

Hey, you got your Pac-Man in my Qix field!

(via Blue’s News)

This is really cool.  Someone had the bright idea to take the Pac-Man(TM) characters and put them on a Qix field, giving us a game called Pac-Xon.  Your goal is to rope off parts of the playing field which get filled in.  Hit 75% filled and you advance a level.  It’s really your standard Qix game, but the field is more course-grained, and the power ups are pretty cool.  Plus, some of the extra opponents do more than just bounce around the field forcing you to avoid them.

pac-xon.jpg

[tags]Pac-Man, Qix, Pac-Xon[/tags]

The latest casualty in the war on terror

(via boingboing)

The terrorists continue to win in the war that isn’t really a war. The latest casualty is liquids. Well, liquids and common sense. I get that this is a real threat. I get that terrorism is a real problem. But this liquid explosive thing was done over 10 years ago. So for over 10 years the governments of the US and the UK have not felt the need to protect citizens on airplanes from the potential threat. Now the British police arrest a score or so folks who planned on trying the liquid explosive thing again. Only they tracked the suspects for nearly a year. So at the very least, the British government has known since December (and quite possibly longer) about this but felt no need to protect the British flying population (nor tourists, I suppose, for that matter)? And of course, there’s the constant kicker that the attack had not even been attempted yet, nor was it supposed to occur on the day of the arrests.

So we have a foiled attack using a threat over a decade old that was known about for somewhere around a year in advance and that was disrupted before any attempts at attacking were made, and we have to stop bringing liquids and gels on board? And the end result of these kinds of failed attacks result in people getting grilled for accidentally dropping any electronic devices they are carrying?

I’m just tired of hearing all these restrictions going on everywhere. In the end, they do little to protect us (some say they do nothing), but they certainly inconvenience us, and make people everywhere scared. Oddly enough, that’s all the terrorists are trying to do. Body count doesn’t actually matter – fear does. So our government is feeding the fear, giving more victories to the terrorists, and in return we get reduced freedoms and greater intrusions into our lives. I just want someone who will fight the war on terrorism, not feed it. I’m tired of saying this over and over and knowing no one will listen to me because I’m a nobody, so I’ll let Bruce Schneier say his peace, which is the same as mine:

Hours-long waits in the security line. Ridiculous prohibitions on what you can carry onboard. Last week’s foiling of a major terrorist plot and the subsequent airport security graphically illustrates the difference between effective security and security theater.

None of the airplane security measures implemented because of 9/11 — no-fly lists, secondary screening, prohibitions against pocket knives and corkscrews — had anything to do with last week’s arrests. And they wouldn’t have prevented the planned attacks, had the terrorists not been arrested. A national ID card wouldn’t have made a difference, either.

Instead, the arrests are a victory for old-fashioned intelligence and investigation. Details are still secret, but police in at least two countries were watching the terrorists for a long time. They followed leads, figured out who was talking to whom, and slowly pieced together both the network and the plot.

The new airplane security measures focus on that plot, because authorities believe they have not captured everyone involved. It’s reasonable to assume that a few lone plotters, knowing their compatriots are in jail and fearing their own arrest, would try to finish the job on their own. The authorities are not being public with the details — much of the “explosive liquid” story doesn’t hang together — but the excessive security measures seem prudent.

But only temporarily. Banning box cutters since 9/11, or taking off our shoes since Richard Reid, has not made us any safer. And a long-term prohibition against liquid carry-ons won’t make us safer, either. It’s not just that there are ways around the rules, it’s that focusing on tactics is a losing proposition.

It’s easy to defend against what the terrorists planned last time, but it’s shortsighted. If we spend billions fielding liquid-analysis machines in airports and the terrorists use solid explosives, we’ve wasted our money. If they target shopping malls, we’ve wasted our money. Focusing on tactics simply forces the terrorists to make a minor modification in their plans. There are too many targets — stadiums, schools, theaters, churches, the long line of densely packed people before airport security — and too many ways to kill people.

Security measures that require us to guess correctly don’t work, because invariably we will guess wrong. It’s not security, it’s security theater: measures designed to make us feel safer but not actually safer.

[tags]The latest casualty in the war on terror, Our government’s ongoing feeding of the fear the terrorists are trying to spread[/tags]

Is that a bear pumping gas?

Well, I somehow doubt that it was actually necessary to put in the caption that this isn’t a real bear, but here’s a Modern Mechanix short from the December 1931 issue of Modern Mechanix magazine.

Bear Skin Garb Boosts Gas Sales
TO ADD to the scenic effects of his gas emporium, a garage owner in Thurin-gia, Germany, has bedecked himself in a bear skin. Thus he is able to provide his customers with both amusement and engine juice, to say nothing of the extra remuneration which accrues to himself in the deal.

[tags]Modern Mechanix, A bear pumping gas?, Ideas for drumming up business[/tags]

Nicola’s mamelife blog

I never knew this existed, but the original programmer of MAME has a blog hosted at Blogspot.  If you have somehow existed in the computing world and played games, but don’t know about MAME, then read up on it at Wikipedia or on the official MAME site.  The latest post right now on Nicola’s blog is some details on how the developers have perfected the emulation for Bubble Bobble by getting an original ROM, disassembling it, reading the ROM visually, and then decoding it all.  He also explains some apparent bugs they have found and how the bugs impacted game play.

[tags]MAME, Nicola’s blog, Gaming[/tags]

Worst games ever

(via Kotaku)

Every once in a while, some gaming site or magazine does a worst games list, usually to compliment the best games list just published there or elsewhere. But now Wikipedia is getting in to the list business, with the Wikipedia list of computer and video games considered to be the worst ever. This list appears to be updated according to group discussions on the topic, which at least attempts to make it less vendetta oriented.

Here are just a few of the many bad games on the list.

  • Aquaman: Battle for Atlantis (2003, GameCube/PlayStation 2) This game inspired the golden mullet awards on G4‘s X-play, and X-Play also named it the worst GameCube game ever
  • Burning Desire (1982, Atari 2600) is a pornographic video game with crude graphics and boring, simplistic gameplay. It was considered to have one of the worst premises ever and the game had an explicit ending scene after each level.
  • Extreme Paintbrawl (1998, PC): Horrible physics, abysmal graphics, and a bad team A.I. gave this game the “honor” of being the worst video game ever reviewed by IGN (although, score-wise, it has been beaten out by Olympic Hockey Nagano ’98, which got a 0.0/10 on IGN, although the actual game was not reviewed. IGN went on to review as many games carrying the “Extreme” title as they could and bashed them for being so “extreme.” The game was lampooned for knowingly being shipped without any AI programming whatsoever; that section of the code had not even been implemented. PC Gamer US awarded the game one of its lowest scores ever, a 6%, advising gamers, “Avoid at all costs.” At the time, this was the lowest score ever “awarded” by PC Gamer US, and remained so for many years until it was eclipsed by “Skydive!” which was rated 5%.
  • Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon (1993, CD-i) is widely considered to be the worst Zelda game ever created. As part of the termination of a contract from Nintendo, Philips gained the license to produce three Zelda games. All three received overwhelmingly negative feedback and are referred to in some circles as the “Unholy Triforce.” They were notorious for bad animation, scripting, and voice acting, but The Wand of Gamelon was roundly condemned by all Zelda fans and is #6 on EGM’s 20 worst games list. Filter also ranked it #1 on their “Top 10 Worst Games of All Time” list.

I remember the Extreme Paintbrawl debacle. Shortly after PC Gamer wrote the horrible review of the game, one of the programmers for the program wrote in. I don’t remember the exact details, but I think he said the game was shipped early over the protests of the programmers because the company had to make a deadline. I believe he also said there was a patch that fixed the AI and made a number of improvements to the program and that perhaps the magazine should look at reviewing the patched version. The editor responded that they only reviewed shipped versions of games, so as to prevent exactly the problems seen with Extreme Paintbrawl. Too bad not enough companies learned the needed lesson that games should be relatively finished when shipped. I think most consumers don’t mind patches for odd minor bugs and omissions here and there, but to not even include AI and add that in a later patch? Well, no other company has been that bad that I know of, but a lot of companies have shipped incomplete games with plans to patch them later (I’m singling out Dungeon Lords as an example of this problem).

[tags]Worst games ever, The problem with incomplete games[/tags]