Thirsty for MythBusters?

I've not had much experience with drinking games, what with being a Mormon, and therefore a teetotaler. Still, a similar sort of fun can be had with non-alcoholic beverages, with the goal changing from (not) getting smashed to trying to see who can avoid having to go to the bathroom the longest. So in anticipation of the new episodes of MythBusters coming out on October 6, I present my lovingly-crafted MythBusters drinking game. There are a few others out there; I shamelessly stole the best ideas from them and added my own. By default, each event requires one (1) sip when it occurs; those that are worth more are noted as such.

Any Cast Member

• Gets hurt (+2 if it's not Adam or Tory, or if it isn't their own fault)
• Gets drunk (+1 if it's Grant or Kari, +2 if it's Jamie and you can actually tell)
• Throws up (+2 if it's not Adam or Grant)
• Gets censored for cursing (+2 if it's Grant or Kari)
• Fails a driving test or otherwise performs poorly behind the wheel (+1 if they aren't impaired in some way at the time)
• Uses a calculator (+2 if it's Kari)
• Says something like “Well, you know we can't just leave it at that...”
• Unnecessarily abuses a dummy (+1 if it's a cast of Grant's head)
• Cites online criticisms of earlier experiments
• Adds unnecessary decorations to a prop (+2 if it's Jamie)
• Likeness appears in an animation (+1 if said likeness gets injured or killed)
• (2) Tells the audience not to try this at home (other than the standard warnings at the start and middle)
• (2) Is prevented against his or her will from participating in a test due to insurance concerns

Jamie Hyneman

• Says, “When in doubt,...” (e.g. “C-4,” “lubricate”)
• Calls Adam a big baby or makes a similar remark about his complaints
• Talks very seriously to others about safety
• Gets upset about a mess or damage to his shop or equipment
• (2) Berates someone for screwing up an experiment
• (2) Brings out the lard
• (2) Removes his beret
• (2) Giggles
• (3) Gets truly excited
• (3) Permits someone to touch his mustache or beret
• (3) Gets his white shirt dirty, or removes it to prevent this
• (3) Loses a “build-off”

Adam Savage

• Juggles or performs magic
• Displays his filthy hands
• Calls Jamie by something other than his actual name (e.g. “Heiney-man,” “Silent Walrus”)
• References Jamie's age, past occupations or extraterrestrial origin
• Mimics Jamie's mustache with his hands or another object
• Rides a Segway
• Says “Science!” enthusiastically
• Wears a self-referential T-shirt
• Speaks with an accent (+1 for the David Attenborough one talking about “The Hyneman”)
• (3) Singes his hair

Kari Byron

• Employs her artistic skills
• Screams when startled
• Incorrectly predicts the outcome of a test
• (2) Is repulsed by meat
• (3) Has a baby

Grant Imahara

• Builds or suggests building a “robot”
• Brings out Deadblow
• (2) Commits a mathematical error
• (3) Becomes frustrated or upset

Tory Belleci

• Someone refers to his Italian heritage
• Gets volunteered for something painful or potentially dangerous (+1 if called a “dummy”)
• (3) Wears women's clothing
• (3) Speaks in a nerd-lisp accent

Miscellaneous

• Something explodes, launches, crashes, shoots or incinerates (+2 if it was unintentional, unnecessary, or made out of meat)
• Buster gets busted, burned, dropped, hurled or in some other way abused
• The fire department or paramedics are on hand, “just in case”
• A previously-built rig is reused
• A radio-controlled vehicle fails to stop when it should (+2 if someone is inside when it happens)
• The high-speed camera is used in situations where it wouldn't yield any data which would be useful for testing the myth, but because the footage is fun to watch (e.g. Adam getting slapped)
• Testing is shown taking place at a gun or bomb range, decommissioned military facility, or NASA laboratory
• The “WARNING: Science Content!” plate appears
• (2) A “human analog” (a.k.a. pig carcass) is brought in
• (2) The Build Team has a myth which is significantly cooler than Adam and Jamie's
• (2) Real human body parts or fluids are used in an experiment
• (2) A small-scale experiment fails, but they go full-scale anyway
• (3) A revisit overturns the original findings for a myth
• (3) Someone's entire body is coated with a substance (e.g. metallic paint)
• (3) Essential steps or ingredients for a test are censored
• (3) No definitive conclusion is reached for a myth
• (3) A myth result is bafflingly counterintuitive (e.g. mouse vs. elephant)

Pet Bugs

Just about anybody who uses a computer regularly will have accumulated one or more “pet bugs”: little annoyances in the software they use, forcing them to find some way around the problem. The more they use the software, the more the bugs bother. Sometimes a bug survives several significant updates to the software, and the user begins to wonder, “Why on earth hasn't this been fixed already?” Well, I'm here to tell you why.

I can empathize with the sentiment. I have my own collection of pet bugs. But as a software developer, I also live on the other side of the issue. Many times, the developer simply doesn't know the bug exists, and if they did, they'd rapidly fix it. Other times, they are aware of the bug, but—as unfathomable as it might be for some users (and software process gurus)—they have decided, at least for now, not to fix it. Usually the reason is rooted in a problem faced by nearly any software project with a significant user base: the astonishing pile of feature requests (most of them considered “high priority”) versus finite developer resources. Somewhere, amid all that, they've got to fix bugs, too. Because of this, they tend to rationalize why some bugs can be left unfixed, with varying degrees of legitimacy. Over the course of my career, I've heard a number of different rationales; here are a few:

“Almost nobody will be affected.” It's sort of an inverse of “The Starfish Story.” It's no problem for almost all users, but the ones who do experience it are significantly cheesed off. The rationale would be better expressed as, “It is a valid problem, but there are other things we could work on which would result in a greater total benefit for our customers.”

“Yeah, but when's that ever gonna happen?” The very act of uttering these words seems to guarantee that the exact scenario in question will happen. The Y2K bug fell into this category: those who developed the software never dreamed that it would remain in use for so long without eventually being replaced by something more modern. Incidentally, another such event looms on the horizon: lots of applications (and some operating systems) store time as the number of seconds since January 1, 1970, but the storage space is only sufficient for 2,147,483,647 seconds, meaning that a Y2K-like problem is slated for January 19, 2038.

“If that ever happens, we'll have bigger problems to worry about.” Fairly justifiable, if it's really true: “Yes, emails will fail to go out if our server farm is hit by tactical missile strike, but if that ever happens...” It reminds me of a co-worker's story about someone he knew who was required to design a simple, mechanical button... which could still work after a missile hits the building. I'm not kidding. (I have a feeling that whatever it is intended to do, the button itself is probably large and red and surrounded by black and yellow diagonal stripes.) It's a reasonable requirement for military applications, I'm sure, although you might end up with a situation where the button is perfectly functional but nobody has survived to push it. As for the rationale for fixing the bug, one could always argue that if you do have bigger problems, wouldn't you like to have one less?

“If that ever happens, we'll be discussing this on a beach in the Carribean.” An only half-serious rationale: the problem would only arise in a situation where the product was so wildly successful that those involved would all be fabulously wealthy. The speaker asserts that not only can the fix be put off, but that when it reaches the point where it must be fixed, they could probably delegate it to someone else so that they could continue sipping their tropical beverages. Often termed “a good problem to have,” but responsible developers are forward-thinking and will head the these issues off beforehand, when possible. The last thing you want is to be killed by your own success.

I still am tempted to revile my pet bugs. Being a developer, I ought to know better. I ought to remember that somewhere there's a developer who would love to kill that bug if there were just more hours in the day. Except that if there were more hours, he'd probably use them for other neglected things, like taking out his will, or changing his oil, or getting a physical.

As improbable as it seems, it turns out that software developers are people, too.

Tech Support Cheat Sheet

Everyone should read this. Everyone. That is all.

Art and the Game

I've been thinking recently about how video games are perceived. Yes, I know, not exactly a “deep” subject, but stay with me. For some reason that I don't fully grasp, video games seem to be relegated to second-class status compared to other forms of entertainment.

It's easy to see how this could have started. A quarter century ago, video games were fairly primitive. Your character was a blocky splotch on a screen drawn in black and white, or at best, preschool colors. Music and sound were equally primitive or nonexistent. The plot (when there was one) was insulting to an adult's intelligence. Most grown-ups didn't want to play video games for the same reason that they didn't feel inclined to eat macaroni and cheese very often: maybe their kids thought it was great, but their experienced palate demanded something more sophisticated. Only a very few games rose above the crowd and had something resembling a real plot, but most of those were text-based interactive fiction, meaning you had to type out what you wanted your character to do, then read the result. The primitive text parsers of the time made this less than fun: it's kind of hard to get into the story when you're too busy trying to figure out which synonym of the word “attach” the parser will accept. And for every really good IF title, there were scores of lousy ones.

The perceptions didn't keep pace with the technology. Many games today have deep and interesting plots coupled with equally deep and interesting gameplay. The visuals are beginning to seriously rival Hollywood. The beeps that passed for sound and music have been replaced with high-quality sound effects and rich soundtracks. I have played some games with soundtracks recorded by full orchestras. There's even a rich and vibrant independent game industry.

In fact, the visuals are now becoming so realistic that I think they're starting to suffer from the opposite problem: diminishing returns. I mean, it's amazing that the technology can make a rendering of a human that is so detailed that you could count the pores on their face, but ironically, the closer a rendering gets to reality, the less impact each improvement has. Games (and CG effects in general) have been going for hyper-realism, but what I want to see is hyper-unrealism. I see pores every day when I look in the mirror; show me something that I have never seen before. In fact, this trailer for the upcoming game “Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet” is exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about.

Anyway, there's one thing that a game can do which Hollywood's offerings cannot: actively engage you in the proceedings. Because you control the actions of the protagonist, the character becomes an extension of yourself. A well-crafted game will nurture that relationship so that you feel empathy with the protagonist more than would be possible with a film. Games which employ the first-person perspective take it even one step further, having you see the world through the protagonist's eyes. Some even make the protagonist silent and give no clues to their identity, thereby allowing you to make yourself the protagonist. (Human beings seem to have an odd way of filling out missing information with parts of themselves, resulting in a combined work that's more compelling than the work alone. It's why a monster movie is scarier when you never get a good look at the monster until the end, and why people are often disappointed with movie versions of books.)

Despite these advantages, the video game remains a lesser citizen in the entertainment world. Video games are not recognized by any of the major award shows, the increasing blur between movies and games notwithstanding. While movie soundtracks can be found nearly anywhere music is sold, game soundtracks, which are often just as good these days, are rarely seen. Many people accept that some movies can be considered art, but few grant the same status to games, despite the fact that their production frequently involves many of the same artistic skills. Why can an actor perform or a composer write music for a movie, and it's art, but if they do it for a game, it's not?

If you want to experience games as art for yourself, I'd suggest the following, in no particular order:

• Prince of Perisa: The Sands of Time
• Aquaria
• Beyond Good & Evil (no relation to a certain book by a so-called philosopher)
• World of Goo
• Paper Moon
• Psychonauts

Redshirts

Yep, you can buy one.

How are businesses like Star Trek? Redshirts.

In case you have somehow managed not to hear about them, I'll explain: Redshirts are a kind of stock character in television, whose purpose in life is to end it quickly, sometimes even before the opening credits. On the original Star Trek series, they were typically security personnel who beamed down with the main characters, and were promptly killed to demonstrate that the situation was serious without having to kill off a main character. The captain would show suitable pathos for the fallen crewman, and one minute later the entire remaining cast would have forgotten that he existed. (You'd think at least once, at the end of an episode, Kirk would have said something like, “I'm glad we've worked out a lasting peace between our people. By the way, your trial for vaporizing Ensign Nobody starts Tuesday.”) Since the security officers wore red shirts, the facetious notion arose that wearing a red shirt on Star Trek was likely to severely shorten your life span. The term continued even when later incarnations of Trek had security officers wearing gold.

Back in 2002, I was working as a software developer for a .com startup. Like most other CFO's at .com startups at that time, ours was yelling, “Cap'n! She cannae take much morra this!” But the way you knew that things were getting serious was when the redshirts started falling victim to the pink slips. I survived round one, but in the second set of layoffs, I took the phaser blast/acid spray/weird alien disease along with most of my co-workers.

Sometimes if things are really bad, main characters can die, too, although they generally don't go down until a significant number of redshirts have expired first. This is also true in business. The first round of layoffs pretty much never includes any of the top brass. This isn't surprising; after all, if the situation were reversed, you'd probably rather the redshirt to go down instead of you. However, unlike TV, sometimes it's preferable to be the redshirt. A co-worker who survived the second round of layoffs informed me later that, in retrospect, he probably would have preferred getting canned. After all, better to get shot by the evil overlord's henchmen outright than to rot for months in his dungeon, only to eventually die anyway. It's not fun going down with the ship.

From what you see in the news, it seems like a lot of redshirts (and yes, even some captains) in business are getting posthumous honorable discharges. Let's say that you would rather not be the one that gets his or her head gnawed on by a giant lizard creature in the first act. What do you do? Well, the most straightforward answer would be to go into science or medical rather than security. Unfortunately, in business, if you're at the bottom of the org chart, you're a redshirt, regardless of what you actually do. So that means you want to get promoted fast. However, this is up to your superior officer, who, if he's thinking about it, probably likes the idea of having a meat shield when the natives start throwing spears. (“Look, I cut expenses!”)

So that pretty much leaves one other option, short of quitting Starfleet altogether: stick to the captain. Nine times out of ten, when a redshirt passes into the great beyond, he's by himself. Nobody actually witnesses the stroke that does him in; they just hear his agonized scream and come running to find him lying on the ground, not breathing and covered with purple goo. But the captain has an invisible aura of protection around him; he won't go until everyone else is dead first. So if you can get inside that bubble, you can share that protection. Granted, this may involve spending way more time with him than you'd prefer, but hey, it's that or get eaten by a giant carnivorous plant. Take your pick.

Big Boom

If you don't regularly watch MythBusters or missed Wednesday's episode, you have got to see the following clips.

A little background: They were testing the myth that a head-on collision between two semis could sandwich compact car between them to the point that the compact car would not be visible until the semis were separated. After they attempted it and did not get the desired results, they decided to determine what it would take to smash a compact car that flat. What did they come up with?

They shot a rocket sled at it at 700 mph.

Here's a shot of the point of impact.

Now here's the truly amazing clip: a slow motion close up of the car. It doesn't really crumple; it looks like it's just getting erased from existence by the rocket sled.

Happy 1234567890!

Nerdiest. Holiday. EVAR.

No Honor

Colorado Convenience Stores Robbed by Man Armed with Bat'leth

I am a User Interface Snob

What follows is a rant on a geeky topic that most normal people probably don't give a lick about. You have been warned.

One of my pet peeves is a poorly designed user interface, not just for software or web sites, but in physical objects, too. A common example is door handles in public buildings. The two kinds you encounter most often are the vertical handle and the horizonal bar that goes across the entire door. A person encountering the former will automatically tend to feel that the door should be pulled to open it, while the latter causes people to want to push it open. Yet sometimes, you encounter a vertical handle on a door that has to be pushed. They have to put a “PUSH” sign on it so that people will know they have to push it, and you will still be able to see people trying to pull it all day. Instead of putting up a sign, why not just use the right handle?

I ran into another one just now, when scanning a file with the AVG virus/malware scanner. It's nice that it scans for both viruses (Why aren't they called virii?) and spyware, but the results screen leaves something to be desired. It basically says something like this:

Infections found:	0
Infected objects removed or healed:	0
Not removed or healed:	0
Spyware found:	0
Spyware removed:	0
Not removed:	0

Every time that screen comes up, my brain has to sit there and figure out where I'm supposed to look to tell whether it found anything or not. The screen ought to look something like this:

NO BAD STUFF FOUND!

Then there's that recorded voice that tells you, “You must first dial a 1 before calling this number.” Why doesn't the phone system just pretend that you dialed the 1 and connect you? I mean, we have computers now! The system clearly knows what you meant, so why not just do it?

The best interface designers understand how to make things that just do the right thing with a minimum of hand-holding. They don't clutter up an already busy amusement park by putting up a sign that reads “Don't sit on the railing;” they just cover it with bumps or pokey bits that make it incredibly uncomfortable to sit on. They don't write software error messages that just tell you that it didn't like what you did for some arcane, programmery reason; they write ones that tell you what to do about it, or if feasible, make it impossible for you to make the mistake in the first place.

So what do you wish was better designed?

Santa, This is What I Want for Christmas

Jamie Wants Big Boom

And now, for your viewing pleasure, animals which bear a striking resemblance to one Jamie Hyneman. Click any of the pictures below to enlarge. First, for comparison purposes, an image of the great beret'd one himself:

Puppy Jamie:

Hyneman kitty:

Here's one I screen captured from one of my daughter's animal DVDs. Ladies and gentlemen, I present Jamie the Emperor Tamarin:

By the way, if you don't already watch MythBusters, you're really missing out on a great show. Go check it out.

Review: Ken Jennings's Trivia Almanac

Sister read my review of Aquaria and told me that I should do more reviews. She even went so far as to accuse me of having good taste. So I thought I might go ahead and review the book I'm reading, Ken Jennings's Trivia Almanac.

In case you were living under a rock during 2004, Ken Jennings entered the public consiousness with a 74-game winning streak on the syndicated game show Jeopardy!. Of course, when he got done making approximately $34,000 an hour, he was approached to do the obligatory cash-in-your-15-minutes book about his experience. Instead, he wrote Brainiac: Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs, which is only partly about his experience, and partly about the world of trivia fanatics in general. (A great read, by the way. Maybe I'll review it as well at some point.)

In the course of writing Brainiac, Jennings unsurprisingly accumulated even more trivia. He figured he'd write another book, this time a full-fledged trivia book, and get all that stored-up trivia an outlet. (He calls it a “trivia enema.”) The result is the Almanac. Each page is devoted to a day of the year, giving one or more events that occurred on that day, followed by a bunch of trivia questions relating to that event in some way. The blurb on the back cover explains it better than I can:

For example—February 21: In 1912, on this day, Teddy Roosevelt coined the political phrase “hat in the ring,” so Ken Jennings fires off a series of “ring” questions. What two NFL quarterbacks have four Super Bowl rings each? What rings are divided by the Cassini Division? Also on this date, in 1981, the “goth” music scene was born in London, so here's a quiz on black-clad icons like Darth Vader, Johnny Cash, and Zorro. Do you know the secret identities of Ivanhoe's Black Knight or Men in Black's Agent M?

The title of each quiz section is often pretty clever and funny. One of my personal favorites appears at the head of round of trivia on mediocrity: “It's Raining Meh.” Anyway, I'm still slogging through October, but it's one of the most enjoyable slogs through a book that I've ever had, and back in the February section I'd seen enough to heartily recommend it.

Software Releases Will Eat Your Brain

We're almost done with a massive software release at work. Massive, of course, means, “If we've done everything right, you won't notice a difference.” As a result, I've not had much time for updating my blog, <sarcasm>much to the disappointment of my legion of fans.</sarcasm> The good news, at least, is that we're getting pretty close, and I've managed to fight my bug list down to something a bit more reasonable. Wish me luck.