When I pick Elli up from daycare I get to see a real variety of different rulesets conflicting in strange ways. When the children are there without their parents the teachers go by their rules and when the parents have the children in the hallway, outside the classroom, the parents go by their rules. But when the parents are in the classroom with the teachers it isn't at all clear who is in charge and how exactly things should get done and it leads to some interesting situations.
For example, some parents use the technique of 'I will leave you here if you don't come right now!' to get their kids to get out to the area where their outside clothes are stored. I think this technique is a complete disaster but yet it is used time and time again. The parents open the classroom door, talk about how they are going to leave the kid there overnight and the kid ignores them and continues painting, building, or whatever else they are refusing to give up. Sometimes the parents go out into the hallway and stand there hoping the threat of leaving the kid overnight at school will finally work. I just don't see how this is a good plan. The kids know they aren't getting left overnight and they just ignore that threat completely. Once you make a threat that you won't follow through on and you get your bluff called you end up in a really awkward situation where your authority and credibility are both shot - how do you continue to lead from that spot? I watch the teachers try to deal with this sort of thing and they are clearly conflicted between supporting the parents and trying to not be too involved. They clearly aren't allowed to make ridiculous threats and not follow through when they are in charge but they are caught in the middle. If they undermine the parent they are just making all kinds of trouble for themselves and if they support terrible strategies they undermine their own authority when the strategy fails.
It is also strange when we have to make decisions on what let Elli get away with at school. If she had her way she would bring sticker books, stuffed animals, random things she finds on the ground and everything else to school. Things would get broken, lost, and played with by other kids and it would be a disaster, particularly if every kid did it. Initially we relied on 'The school rules are that you don't bring toys.' but eventually other kids brought toys and that didn't fly. How do we deal with the fact that the school technically doesn't allow toys but other parents send their kids with toys? This would be easy to resolve if we were comfortable just being autocratic but we really want Elli to know why decisions are being made and see that we are consistent. I do sympathize with people who break the rules here and there; I get to see plenty of Elli standing at the door screaming that she wants to bring her kitty and I know how much easier it is to just shove the damn stuffed cat in the backpack than fight a wailing, screaming ball of hair, snot and tears to school. That conflict point where nobody is really in charge and neither side knows exactly what the rules are makes things very strange, very challenging and very interesting.
I don't envy those who work in that situation and have a lot of training on how to deal with children in the best possible ways and who end up supporting all kinds of ridiculous parental mistakes. I am not claiming any sort of perfection here, I think I do pretty well being disciplined about discipline but there is no denying how unsettling an upset child is and how hard it is to deny loved ones things they desperately want.
Monday, December 20, 2010
Friday, December 17, 2010
Neuroses
I have some issues with obligations and debt. Most people who have debt problems have problems that they have too much debt, but I go the other way. I HATE debt. I hate it so much that it colours many of my other interactions in my life where I go very far out of my way to avoid ever being in debt to anyone. This isn't just financial debt though, but also social debt. I don't like to be in the situation where I owe anyone anything; that feeling that someone might just wander by and ask me to do something I don't want to do but feel obligated to do because I owe them is intensely uncomfortable for me. This is even true with people I very much like and trust as just the idea that I have that debt outstanding is anathema. I am the guy who always insists on getting separate bills and always wants to discuss terms of repayment before anything else. This may well be all tied in with the fact that I always repay my debts; the very idea of not paying what I owe is simply unacceptable. When my inlaws lent me money to buy my condo I paid them back on time and with interest. We had not discussed interest beforehand and I expect they would have been perfectly content to get the principal back but I figured out the average rate of interest over the loan period in Canada and paid them the precise amount. Doing that made absolutely sure there is no debt whatsoever since we both gained and nobody was put out.
I don't know why I am like this. I don't recall any particular instance in my past where I was burned by being indebted to someone and my parents aren't like I am. They don't go into debt but they don't have my paranoia of unclear contracts. My father got into a business with his brothers without contracts and lawyers being involved and I would never do such a thing. I trust my brother tremendously but if that situation were ever to arise for me I would absolutely insist on everything being in writing and legally bulletproof ahead of time before ever signing my name. It is funny for me to watch people who aren't like this as I just can't fathom doing what they do. At one point Hobo and Full Bed had a apartment together and they shared bills pretty much at random. One person would pay for the phone at one would buy groceries and the other would pay the moving guy and they did not keep track. Despite the fact that I would trust either of them completely to attempt to keep their end of the bargain that is not an agreement that I could live with. I would be happy paying all the bills and collecting my due regularly or having any other absolutely equitable arrangement but just figuring 'It all equals out in the end' makes me shudder.
It isn't the money. I have enough money that these sorts of arrangements with reasonable people would never break me, it is the principle of the thing. I never want a small sum to cause resentment nor do I want to be bitter because someone owes me and doesn't feel obligated to pay. Something deep in my brain is desperately concerned with these things beyond all reason and necessity and although I recognize that I cannot make it go away just by knowing. Most people aren't like me and that can cause problems. Many people just want somebody to pay the bill, or they want to borrow some cash here and there and they figure it all works out. That is comfortable for them and not so much for me. It is a struggle for me to live within that framework and try to let go of my need for certainty and equality in the pursuit of peace. I wish everyone was more like me of course (I am not unique in that regard...) but acknowledging that they are not and trying to compromise is a uncomfortable necessity.
This actually came up yesterday in my WOW guild. I have a ton of gems acquired by buying in bulk at ridiculous prices. Based on past experience people expect me to bring gems to raids and supply them to anyone who wants them for free. This I find intensely frustrating. I know some people view it under the lens of "Sky has boatloads of money in game, so why would I pay him?" but that just makes me even more nuts because I play the money game for fun. Having others spend my money away wrecks my money game, and this is hard to communicate because nobody else I know plays the money game the way I do. They simply get enough to get by and stop worrying about it, so for them the situation of giving away 40 gold when they have 400,000 gold is painless but for me it is not. Obviously I don't need the money but I despise that sense of entitlement, of inequality, of debt. I buy things from people and I pay the going rate. Just like anyone else I am willing to spend time to help my friends but I draw a big, thick line between money and time in WOW. In many ways that makes absolutely no sense because money = time but it is a line I have drawn in order to make the money game fun for myself and erasing that line makes the money game no good at all. You might wonder why exactly I would torture myself over the precise correct policy to follow in supplying my friends with gems when the amounts in question are trivial compared to my fortune. You would be smart to wonder that, and I don't have a good answer aside from the obvious that everyone is a little bit crazy and this is my particular variety of crazy. I have resolved to try to set aside that conundrum and simply give away gems. I will ignore the cost and pretend it isn't there. Now we will see if I can manage to convince the mad, debt obsessed portion of my mind to submit to the greater good.
I don't know why I am like this. I don't recall any particular instance in my past where I was burned by being indebted to someone and my parents aren't like I am. They don't go into debt but they don't have my paranoia of unclear contracts. My father got into a business with his brothers without contracts and lawyers being involved and I would never do such a thing. I trust my brother tremendously but if that situation were ever to arise for me I would absolutely insist on everything being in writing and legally bulletproof ahead of time before ever signing my name. It is funny for me to watch people who aren't like this as I just can't fathom doing what they do. At one point Hobo and Full Bed had a apartment together and they shared bills pretty much at random. One person would pay for the phone at one would buy groceries and the other would pay the moving guy and they did not keep track. Despite the fact that I would trust either of them completely to attempt to keep their end of the bargain that is not an agreement that I could live with. I would be happy paying all the bills and collecting my due regularly or having any other absolutely equitable arrangement but just figuring 'It all equals out in the end' makes me shudder.
It isn't the money. I have enough money that these sorts of arrangements with reasonable people would never break me, it is the principle of the thing. I never want a small sum to cause resentment nor do I want to be bitter because someone owes me and doesn't feel obligated to pay. Something deep in my brain is desperately concerned with these things beyond all reason and necessity and although I recognize that I cannot make it go away just by knowing. Most people aren't like me and that can cause problems. Many people just want somebody to pay the bill, or they want to borrow some cash here and there and they figure it all works out. That is comfortable for them and not so much for me. It is a struggle for me to live within that framework and try to let go of my need for certainty and equality in the pursuit of peace. I wish everyone was more like me of course (I am not unique in that regard...) but acknowledging that they are not and trying to compromise is a uncomfortable necessity.
This actually came up yesterday in my WOW guild. I have a ton of gems acquired by buying in bulk at ridiculous prices. Based on past experience people expect me to bring gems to raids and supply them to anyone who wants them for free. This I find intensely frustrating. I know some people view it under the lens of "Sky has boatloads of money in game, so why would I pay him?" but that just makes me even more nuts because I play the money game for fun. Having others spend my money away wrecks my money game, and this is hard to communicate because nobody else I know plays the money game the way I do. They simply get enough to get by and stop worrying about it, so for them the situation of giving away 40 gold when they have 400,000 gold is painless but for me it is not. Obviously I don't need the money but I despise that sense of entitlement, of inequality, of debt. I buy things from people and I pay the going rate. Just like anyone else I am willing to spend time to help my friends but I draw a big, thick line between money and time in WOW. In many ways that makes absolutely no sense because money = time but it is a line I have drawn in order to make the money game fun for myself and erasing that line makes the money game no good at all. You might wonder why exactly I would torture myself over the precise correct policy to follow in supplying my friends with gems when the amounts in question are trivial compared to my fortune. You would be smart to wonder that, and I don't have a good answer aside from the obvious that everyone is a little bit crazy and this is my particular variety of crazy. I have resolved to try to set aside that conundrum and simply give away gems. I will ignore the cost and pretend it isn't there. Now we will see if I can manage to convince the mad, debt obsessed portion of my mind to submit to the greater good.
Thursday, December 16, 2010
On scaling, or not
WOW has had some issues with scaling in the past. The best examples of this are dps warriors throughout the history of the game (for scaling too much) and shadow priests in TBC (for scaling too little). Scaling is a word that is horribly abused throughout the WOW community by people who fail completely to understand what it means. "Poor scaling" is regularly used to mean "I am bad" or "My class isn't powerful enough" instead of what it actually means which is that the class in question does not adequately improve given general stat increases compared to other classes. Dps warriors have historically been terrible at the start of expansions and then overpowered at the end because their rage scaled so much. Cataclysm seems to have several reduced this and it appears that rage will not scale out of control this time. Shadow priests in TBC simply gained no benefit from any stat but spellpower and since their first pieces of gear had almost as much spellpower as their top tier pieces they basically never improved at all.
Ret paladins at the moment are suffering from terrible scaling. The main problem is that there are 5 secondary stats - Hit, Expertise, Mastery, Crit and Haste. Hit and Expertise cap out fairly quickly for everyone, so there are 3 stats left. Ret paladins gain relatively little from Crit compared to other classes but aren't really abysmal - just weak. Unfortunately both Haste and Mastery give Ret paladins the same benefit - more buttons to hit to do more damage. The problem here is that Ret paladins are already nearly GCD capped anyway so more buttons is actually a very weak mechanic, particularly when both stats give more Templar's Verdict casts and TV is the third best attack we have. To give an example, say a Fire mage gets enough Mastery to gain 100 dps. Then imagine they gain enough Haste to get 100 dps. What happens if they gain both of those things? Their dps goes up by 220 (guesstimate). Now imagine the same thing happens to a Ret paladin. Instead of getting a 220 dps gain they get a 180 dps gain. The additional procs from Mastery and Haste interfere with each other and cause lost procs, not to mention the fact that Mastery in particular is absolutely trash for Ret paladins.
Right now Ret paladins are behind the curve in damage, not immensely so, but we are on the weak side. This is going to rapidly escalate as we get raid gear and secondary stats begin to pile up. There are plenty of solutions for this problem, some of which will work temporarily and some of which will work for the whole expansion. Blizzard needs to give up on the idea that a class which is nearly GCD capped can scale with two different stats that give them more buttons to hit. Actually making that work would require strikes that do truly immense amounts of damage such that they are worth hitting over whatever else would have been in that spot and that type of strike is going to unbalance pvp dramatically if a string of procs occurs. Since haste is supposed to be the 'do more' stat across all classes that means mastery simply needs to get rewritten. If the amount of mastery gained per point was doubled or trebled it would make it temporarily quite good but long term there would still be problems. Mastery needs to be something passive that simply makes more damage happen, and it could be as simple as a flat damage increase like Arcane mages get or extra strikes that proc like Arms warriors. Whatever it is it needs to get away from the 'more buttons' idea that would work for many classes, but specifically not the class that got it.
Ret paladins at the moment are suffering from terrible scaling. The main problem is that there are 5 secondary stats - Hit, Expertise, Mastery, Crit and Haste. Hit and Expertise cap out fairly quickly for everyone, so there are 3 stats left. Ret paladins gain relatively little from Crit compared to other classes but aren't really abysmal - just weak. Unfortunately both Haste and Mastery give Ret paladins the same benefit - more buttons to hit to do more damage. The problem here is that Ret paladins are already nearly GCD capped anyway so more buttons is actually a very weak mechanic, particularly when both stats give more Templar's Verdict casts and TV is the third best attack we have. To give an example, say a Fire mage gets enough Mastery to gain 100 dps. Then imagine they gain enough Haste to get 100 dps. What happens if they gain both of those things? Their dps goes up by 220 (guesstimate). Now imagine the same thing happens to a Ret paladin. Instead of getting a 220 dps gain they get a 180 dps gain. The additional procs from Mastery and Haste interfere with each other and cause lost procs, not to mention the fact that Mastery in particular is absolutely trash for Ret paladins.
Right now Ret paladins are behind the curve in damage, not immensely so, but we are on the weak side. This is going to rapidly escalate as we get raid gear and secondary stats begin to pile up. There are plenty of solutions for this problem, some of which will work temporarily and some of which will work for the whole expansion. Blizzard needs to give up on the idea that a class which is nearly GCD capped can scale with two different stats that give them more buttons to hit. Actually making that work would require strikes that do truly immense amounts of damage such that they are worth hitting over whatever else would have been in that spot and that type of strike is going to unbalance pvp dramatically if a string of procs occurs. Since haste is supposed to be the 'do more' stat across all classes that means mastery simply needs to get rewritten. If the amount of mastery gained per point was doubled or trebled it would make it temporarily quite good but long term there would still be problems. Mastery needs to be something passive that simply makes more damage happen, and it could be as simple as a flat damage increase like Arcane mages get or extra strikes that proc like Arms warriors. Whatever it is it needs to get away from the 'more buttons' idea that would work for many classes, but specifically not the class that got it.
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Relics
I was looking around the decorations at Elli's school the other day and saw a copy of a few interesting documents on the walls there. Quotes from those documents:
Whereas Canada is founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law:
The Parliament of Canada, affirming that the Canadian Nation is founded upon principles that acknowledge the supremacy of God, the dignity and worth of the human person and the position of the family in a society of free men and free institutions;
The first quote is the beginning of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the second is the beginning of the Canadian Bill of Rights, which is the precursor to the charter. The Bill became law in 1960 and the Charter in 1981, but what was remarkable to me was the tremendous difference between what was considered necessary then and what would be possible now. If anyone tried to set out a new standard for Canadian law these days and the preamble implied that Canada was/is a Christian nation and that being a Christian nation was a necessary assumption for agreeing with these laws it would get laughed at. Of course these aren't the stand out exceptions as the documents also reference the Queen of England as our iron fisted ruler; not exactly representative of anything but an amusing anachronism. I do wonder if those lines will ever be struck out of their respective homes. I doubt it will happen because there simply isn't any compelling need to go through the incredible process of changing those documents when the edits in question are changing something that is completely irrelevant anyhow. Much like the Queen being our monarch we really haven't any reason to change what everyone knows isn't true.
I got to thinking about how attitudes towards religion have changed. I remember back in public school when we had to stand up and recite the Lord's Prayer every day. There was one girl in my class who was a Jehovah's Witness who did not stand and recite with the rest of us - presumably at her parent's insistence. At the time it was more than a bit strange because the school absolutely insisted on everyone saying the prayer after singing O Canada. I suspect that it was simply an obedience thing and that they worried that if they made the prayer optional then everyone would ignore it and they feared that the contagion of disrespect would spread outward; better to hold the line. I even had religion taught to me in class though very little time was spent on it. I recall a very old, very nice lady who came by maybe once a month to teach us Bible stories. I don't know what year exactly those things ceased but they are long gone now. What I wonder is what other religious habits that seem rooted firmly now will vanish over the next 20 years? Certainly the practice of saying grace before meals, once ubiquitous, now is reserved far more for dinners with the older folks who expect it as a matter of course. I am clearly an outlier in this case but I really notice those little things like the stark difference between religious Christmas music and pop culture Christmas music this time of year.
The changes that must occur when a nation changes mindset from 'singular religion' (inaccurate and ridiculous as that statement is and was) to 'many religions, including none' are substantial and take a long time to happen. Much of the things that change are not hard to change because of religion itself necessarily but instead hard to change because people are used to them. They support and defend the old ways simply because they are familiar so it takes generations for habits to really shift. I expect that we will slowly lose nearly all the trappings of religion from public life as Canada continues to become more and more multicultural but it is a process that will most likely outlive me and my generation.
That is, unless some scientist gets off their behind and comes up with a formula for immortality. Come on guys, you probably only have another 50 years before it will be too late for me, get cracking.
Whereas Canada is founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law:
The Parliament of Canada, affirming that the Canadian Nation is founded upon principles that acknowledge the supremacy of God, the dignity and worth of the human person and the position of the family in a society of free men and free institutions;
The first quote is the beginning of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the second is the beginning of the Canadian Bill of Rights, which is the precursor to the charter. The Bill became law in 1960 and the Charter in 1981, but what was remarkable to me was the tremendous difference between what was considered necessary then and what would be possible now. If anyone tried to set out a new standard for Canadian law these days and the preamble implied that Canada was/is a Christian nation and that being a Christian nation was a necessary assumption for agreeing with these laws it would get laughed at. Of course these aren't the stand out exceptions as the documents also reference the Queen of England as our iron fisted ruler; not exactly representative of anything but an amusing anachronism. I do wonder if those lines will ever be struck out of their respective homes. I doubt it will happen because there simply isn't any compelling need to go through the incredible process of changing those documents when the edits in question are changing something that is completely irrelevant anyhow. Much like the Queen being our monarch we really haven't any reason to change what everyone knows isn't true.
I got to thinking about how attitudes towards religion have changed. I remember back in public school when we had to stand up and recite the Lord's Prayer every day. There was one girl in my class who was a Jehovah's Witness who did not stand and recite with the rest of us - presumably at her parent's insistence. At the time it was more than a bit strange because the school absolutely insisted on everyone saying the prayer after singing O Canada. I suspect that it was simply an obedience thing and that they worried that if they made the prayer optional then everyone would ignore it and they feared that the contagion of disrespect would spread outward; better to hold the line. I even had religion taught to me in class though very little time was spent on it. I recall a very old, very nice lady who came by maybe once a month to teach us Bible stories. I don't know what year exactly those things ceased but they are long gone now. What I wonder is what other religious habits that seem rooted firmly now will vanish over the next 20 years? Certainly the practice of saying grace before meals, once ubiquitous, now is reserved far more for dinners with the older folks who expect it as a matter of course. I am clearly an outlier in this case but I really notice those little things like the stark difference between religious Christmas music and pop culture Christmas music this time of year.
The changes that must occur when a nation changes mindset from 'singular religion' (inaccurate and ridiculous as that statement is and was) to 'many religions, including none' are substantial and take a long time to happen. Much of the things that change are not hard to change because of religion itself necessarily but instead hard to change because people are used to them. They support and defend the old ways simply because they are familiar so it takes generations for habits to really shift. I expect that we will slowly lose nearly all the trappings of religion from public life as Canada continues to become more and more multicultural but it is a process that will most likely outlive me and my generation.
That is, unless some scientist gets off their behind and comes up with a formula for immortality. Come on guys, you probably only have another 50 years before it will be too late for me, get cracking.
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Telling a Story
In the new Cataclysm zones in WOW there is an entirely different style of play while doing quests. In the old game quests were largely optional - you could do them or not and nothing changed and if you ignored some of them it really didn't matter. In the new model things are completely different because quests are telling a gigantic story with your character at the heart of it and you cannot avoid nor skip them. To complete each of the zones in question and see the final quest you have to do absolutely everything in the zone first. Because of the new phasing technology employed everywhere you also have to do everything in precisely the order the quest designers set up. The number of options available to the player is thus very small in terms of what comes next. That is offset by the fact that quests are now vastly better. There are all kinds of boss fights you can do solo, the world actively changes to reflect the things you as a player have accomplished and the things you do feel much more epic because you can see the effects of your efforts. The new style is much better for those who want to experience a story or watch a movie or feel epic but much worse for those who want freedom to explore and do their own thing.
There are many complaints about WOW but two big ones over the years are that:
1. Quests the players do have no impact on the world and nothing changes no matter what supposedly has been done.
2. WOW is too much of a theme park where the player is forced onto the straight and narrow instead of simply going out there to see what can be seen.
Clearly Blizzard decided that the first complaint was one they should address - and they did! The question is whether they went too far, and I think they did, but only a little. The trouble with this new model is 100% of the quests are mandatory so having bizarre, challenging or strange mechanics either have to be made trivial or they end up annoying a lot of people. In particular the jousting quest in Hyjal would have been a good place to have a little side quest - you could do the jousting or continue with the main questline. I would enjoy it greatly if the main plot series was designed in the current fashion but there were side quests, things that weren't entirely necessary to advance the plot, scattered around. While I don't like to give him too much credit, Gevlon actually had a neat idea to have the main questline for a zone have red ! and ? markers so players know that these are the really important quests to do and have optional ones be the normal gold colour. Everyone recognizes that you can't tell the epic story without a strict chain of quests but giving players the option to complete a few extra things at the current hub or move on to bigger and better stuff would be nice.
All in all I really did like questing through the new zones and the phasing, new and better quest/bossfight mechanics and epic storytelling were a lot of fun. I do wish though that I could push ahead with the story and leave a few of the 'go find me 6 bottles of rum' quests for later. A happy medium between the old way and the new way looks to be the best way from where I sit.
There are many complaints about WOW but two big ones over the years are that:
1. Quests the players do have no impact on the world and nothing changes no matter what supposedly has been done.
2. WOW is too much of a theme park where the player is forced onto the straight and narrow instead of simply going out there to see what can be seen.
Clearly Blizzard decided that the first complaint was one they should address - and they did! The question is whether they went too far, and I think they did, but only a little. The trouble with this new model is 100% of the quests are mandatory so having bizarre, challenging or strange mechanics either have to be made trivial or they end up annoying a lot of people. In particular the jousting quest in Hyjal would have been a good place to have a little side quest - you could do the jousting or continue with the main questline. I would enjoy it greatly if the main plot series was designed in the current fashion but there were side quests, things that weren't entirely necessary to advance the plot, scattered around. While I don't like to give him too much credit, Gevlon actually had a neat idea to have the main questline for a zone have red ! and ? markers so players know that these are the really important quests to do and have optional ones be the normal gold colour. Everyone recognizes that you can't tell the epic story without a strict chain of quests but giving players the option to complete a few extra things at the current hub or move on to bigger and better stuff would be nice.
All in all I really did like questing through the new zones and the phasing, new and better quest/bossfight mechanics and epic storytelling were a lot of fun. I do wish though that I could push ahead with the story and leave a few of the 'go find me 6 bottles of rum' quests for later. A happy medium between the old way and the new way looks to be the best way from where I sit.
Monday, December 13, 2010
God does play dice with the universe
There is a famous quote from Albert Einstein that goes
God does not play dice with the universe.
Einstein was an atheist so I don't have any incentive to harp on that portion of it. However, the point of the quote is that Einstein didn't believe that the universe contained any real, fundamental randomness. He was convinced that if we looked deep enough and understood enough we would eventually see the patterns underlying seemingly random events and would be able to model, calculate and predict them. He was wrong. Quantum mechanics shows that the universe is in fact random and events at the tiniest scales simply cannot be predicted ahead of time even with perfect information (the possession of which is also impossible). When I was 16 or so I had strong feelings on the issue and believed that Einstein was right. It was surely a laughable bit of hubris that I thought I had anything relevant to contribute to the field but that did not shake my beliefs. I made my decision based on the fact that people have considered things to be random and unknowable throughout human history and consistently, without fail, we have been able to model, compute and predict those things. Until quantum came along, that is, and we found out that there are things that are fundamentally random. For the past couple years I have had an uneasy truce with this fact because although it certainly seemed true I had no real concept of the proof of it. This changed when I read The Matchbox that Ate a Forty-Ton Truck.
This book is a marvellous manual of modern physics written for people with a bit of background but without the desire to go through derivations and calculations. Marcus Chown manages to talk about extremely complex topics using a combination of scientific knowledge and simple analogies that stitches together the knowledge the experts have with ideas lesser mortals can understand to leave the reader with a really respectable idea of how things work. I have read a number of 'physics for the layperson' books, in particular when I was 16 and thought I might have something to say on the topic, and this one is by far the best. The trick is to combine 'common sense' ideas and analogies to give the reader a real idea of what is going on but provide just enough raw scientific knowledge that it becomes clear in the end how inadequately these simple models portray what is really going on.
Now I have a decent intuition about why exactly the periodic table has the patterns it does and what that means for the formation of life. I can comfortably say I am at peace with the idea that the universe is in fact fundamentally random because I understand why we know that is true. I am much more in awe of the accomplishments of physicists who model the progression of the universe from the Big Bang onward after reading the sorts of things we have figured out about it and how those ideas came about. In short I am informed, I was entertained, and I think anyone with a curiosity about how things really work ought to have a read of this book.
Friday, December 10, 2010
Basic Training
When playing WOW you first level yourself up by bashing monsters in the head for 85 levels. This used to be incredibly simple and straightforward - you run up to the monster and beat on it until it dies, then you go to the next one. Eventually you find that your level is at the maximum and the next step is to start raiding, which is destroying difficult challenges with many people. The challenges of raiding are substantial compared to soloing, and in particular it requires all kinds of skills that you simply had no place to learn while soloing. The classic example is getting out of the fire. Bosses in raids put fire on the ground and you have to not be in it, because it will burn you very badly. Sometimes the fire is actually poison, or frost, or whatever, but it is bad. The trouble was that when soloing this never, ever occurred and a new raider would find themselves trying to master a skill they had zero opportunity to learn on their way up. This was a flaw in the game's implementation, that skills that are considered baseline and necessary in the endgame did not appear at all in the early game.
Cataclysm has changed all this, and done it beautifully. Previously when a monster in WOW was supposed to be hard to solo it would simply be given a few more hitpoints and it would do massively more damage. It was much harder certainly but generally the tactics required were no different. In Cataclysm there are all kinds of solo encounters with monsters that have immense hitpoint totals but who do very little damage, thus the fight can continue a long time, just like raid encounters. These encounters also have mechanics exactly like raids in that bosses put fire on the ground or do incredibly destructive attacks that can be entirely avoided with proper reactions. People like myself who have raided forever will mostly find these mechanics very simple but they do still lend an air of grandeur to a solo encounter that was sorely lacking before. The screen will give you instructions on how you can avoid these terrible attacks
"Overload Zingband is casting a Shadowbolt Volley! Find someplace to hide!"
If you hide behind a pillar or somesuch the Shadowbolt Volley does nothing, but if you just stand there and take it you will die. Just like in a raid you need to be constantly attacking the enemy and occasionally dodging their devastating moves. It is wonderful!
The combination of giving a little basic training to newbies and providing a bit of fun, variety and epic feel for a veteran is a great one and this is one of the great success stories of this new expansion. Now if you level up to max and get started raiding you will definitely have experience in dealing with all kinds of raid challenges - interruption of casting, movement, line of sight strategy and many others. There are a lot of things that cataclysm did right but to my mind this is the biggest - make the transition from soloing to raiding smoother and make soloing feel much more meaningful in the process.
Cataclysm has changed all this, and done it beautifully. Previously when a monster in WOW was supposed to be hard to solo it would simply be given a few more hitpoints and it would do massively more damage. It was much harder certainly but generally the tactics required were no different. In Cataclysm there are all kinds of solo encounters with monsters that have immense hitpoint totals but who do very little damage, thus the fight can continue a long time, just like raid encounters. These encounters also have mechanics exactly like raids in that bosses put fire on the ground or do incredibly destructive attacks that can be entirely avoided with proper reactions. People like myself who have raided forever will mostly find these mechanics very simple but they do still lend an air of grandeur to a solo encounter that was sorely lacking before. The screen will give you instructions on how you can avoid these terrible attacks
"Overload Zingband is casting a Shadowbolt Volley! Find someplace to hide!"
If you hide behind a pillar or somesuch the Shadowbolt Volley does nothing, but if you just stand there and take it you will die. Just like in a raid you need to be constantly attacking the enemy and occasionally dodging their devastating moves. It is wonderful!
The combination of giving a little basic training to newbies and providing a bit of fun, variety and epic feel for a veteran is a great one and this is one of the great success stories of this new expansion. Now if you level up to max and get started raiding you will definitely have experience in dealing with all kinds of raid challenges - interruption of casting, movement, line of sight strategy and many others. There are a lot of things that cataclysm did right but to my mind this is the biggest - make the transition from soloing to raiding smoother and make soloing feel much more meaningful in the process.
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