Amazing science linkdump March 2013

One thing I really like about science is how we can use it to stop human misery. We could probably even use it help poor people too!

But I'll take helping the rich as a starting place.

Gel that stops bleeding instantly
I'm confused about why there's so much ballyhoo about this being used in wars. Drones don't bleed, right?

Another option is WE COULD STOP HAVING SO MANY FUCKING WARS.

Gene therapy cures leukemia in 8 days
For once, we're not curing mice. Actual people in actual remission.

Retinal implant gives sight to blind
If you have a certain kind of blindness to start with. But seriously, a much bigger deal than Google Glass.

SEPTA does something right

I know, I'm excited too!

People give the Nutter administration crap, but sensible, lawful things are happening on his watch. That's not saying this SEPTA thing is something he can take credit for, but it is under his administration.

What is it? As revealed in this Technology Review article, SEPTA's installing batteries at a subway substation to cash in on regenerative braking:

A massive battery installed at one of the authority's substations will store electricity generated by the braking systems on trains (as the trains slow down the wheels drive generators). The battery will help trains accelerate, cutting power consumption, and will also provide extra power that can be sold back to the regional power grid. The pilot project, which involves one of 38 substations in the transit system, is expected to bring in $500,000 a year. This figure would multiply if the batteries are installed at other substations.

Philadelphia, there's hope for us yet.

I took away the subscription box

I don't want you to read this on RSS. I don't like the feeling of sitting at my command center and watching all the info drain down the pipe toward me. I want to go get it. I want to visit the content, not have the content visit me. I know you (and by "you" I mean most savvy Internet users) are different. But like any artist, I prefer to exert control over the art's delivery.

That's how I think of what I'm writing. I'm broadcasting art over an Internet channel. You must choose to tune in, to aim your attention at what I'm transmitting. It is not meant to be read amid the lolcats and foursquare squirts and other people's tweets. It has its own space, requires a separate effort.

My blog design is sparse, and not far from its original template. But still, I made it look like this on purpose. The white and the orange and the different fonts, they are meant to convey too. You miss part of the message when these words shoot down the pneumatic tube of your feed reader.


I don't think I can stop QT from appearing in existing feeds, and I don't plan to spend any time trying to figure it out. I'm not even sure that having removed the subscribe option means anything. You might be able to snag it with or without my permission.

And if that's the case, why dig my heels in? I don't know. This is something I haven't got named yet. There's an idea behind it I'm still excavating.

But if you're curious, that's what's happening.

Why does the future still suck?

Spent two hours working on a Web site tonight, and nothing to show for it so far. But perseverance is key in these sorts of things, I hear. Must... have... operative... site... before... Art Shop....

The repopularization of RPGs pt 2

Fourth edition D&D has been correctly identified as inspired by MMOs. This is a good idea on paper, but that inspiration was a doomed choice by Wizards' game designers. It would be better to capitalize on what tabletop is good at (i.e., interaction), and minimize what it is bad at (fiddly mechanics). Instead, they chose to create a game that largely removes judgment calls, yet apes a complex game form, while reducing the complexity.

Thus you get neither the full human involvement of tabletop games, nor the full complexity of MMOs. The worst of both worlds.

The only way this makes sense is if 4th edition is preparation for a 5th edition, a game where people sit around face to face with computers doing the complex mechanical parts. This mythical 5th edition D&D would play to the strengths of both forms of games simultaneously, and could herald a resurgence of tabletop RPGs.

This is not a new idea, but the technology has never been so tantalizingly real. Before, it's just been imaginable as a good idea. Now, we can do it.

Laptops seemed to embody this promise, but in practice the form factor has been too clunky.

The Surface would be excellent for this, except:
1) It's not even available to the public.
2) It's wildly expensive.
3) The surface of a Surface is small. It's like trying to play D&D on one of those sit-down cocktail Ms. Pac Man machines.

Those are all surmountable in 10 years or so. Problem number 4 is not:

4) A single character sheet contains far too much information to display on the play surface itself.

For most tabletop RPGs, the character sheet is the most-used, and I'll go so far as to say, most important reference tool in the game. This concept has come over pretty much unchanged to computer RPGs, where the game takes you to a separate screen/tab/what-have-you to present your character's capabilities.

The amount and detail of information is so dense, there's no way to put that on the same computer interface everyone else is trying to use. You need a dedicated "screen" for every player.

This is what the Apple tablet is for, and what the iPhone can do right now. It's theoretically inexpensive enough that every player could have one. Someone will write an app that keeps track of fiddly things for you. (Character sheet apps are available now.) All the tablets/iPhones logged into the same session could talk to each other. And human interaction returns to its proper role as arbiter of information.

This will require another revision of the rules, however, because 4th edition rules will be naively simple for all that processing power. And with the useful complexity shuffled behind the technological curtain, it will be more open for new and younger players.

Roleplaying games are coming back. It will never be a popular fad again like in Gygaxian times of yore, but only because it will never be a fad again.

The repopularization of RPGs pt 1

This video has been making the rounds of geekdom lately. It's a rough demo of D&D playable on the Microsoft Surface. It's popular with good reason, because it is the nascent future of tabletop RPGs.

D&D is nowhere near as cool as it was 20 years ago (much less 30 years ago), but it still has millions of players worldwide. World of Warcraft touts their 11 million subscribers. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that many people also play D&D once a month.

Eleven million people is a decent customer base, and professional hobbyists have programmed extremely complex programs (Campaign Cartographer and Fantasy Grounds to name two) which cater to them.

People talk about the wonderful social aspects of MMOs, but building and maintaining a friendship in an MMO is like building a ship in a bottle -- a lot of delicate work done through a desperately small opening.

The very best social platform is F2F. In games, you can only do this with a LAN party, a LARP, or around a table. LAN parties and LARPs are very resource intensive. They go away after a certain stage in life. Tabletop games remain viable regardless of age, station, or income.

The part of games that MMOs do best is automating tedious, precise mechanics. Players have complained about the difficulty of running 3rd edition D&D, but even that is checkers compared to the multiple thousandths-of-a-percentage mechanics a single home computer adjudicates running WoW.

More on this tomorrow.

Google Wave: invited

Ok, thanks to Jon, I have a Google Wave account. So far, I'm a little baffled.

My friend, Dave, summed up the stutter-start with Wave (on Google Wave):

Hmmmm. There's a lot of interesting and useful tech here. Now all I need is an idea big enough for it to fit into. you know, a reason to use it.

I can see the business application easily, but the social media-esque applications are missing me, especially with limited choice of people to talk to.

Furthermore, and I think this is my central dromedary hump, I have a mindset that works well with unbroken streams of time. The regular Internet is a pretty hefty distraction as is, but talkative friends whose work styles differ from mine, or whose jobs don't require as much focus, can wreck an afternoon.

I'm still very interested in Google Wave. I particularly like the idea of using it for event planning with large groups of people. I can also envision a robust PBEM DnD game. I plan to make time to fiddle with it in the upcoming weeks.

Le Voyage dans la BOOM

We shot a missile at the moon. We punched the moon.

I think we can all agree that humans in America got problems, but I'm gonna risk some hyperbole to say I don't think there's ever been a more amazing time to be conscious.

Google Wave hello

I have a reductive approach to complexity. When anything starts to get complex, I try to do without it. This is a principal reason why I would never be a good engineer.

Sometimes I wonder what I miss by eschewing complication. I'm aware of technological generalities, but almost never the specifics. I don't get trendy things until they're not trendy anymore. Sometimes that means I don't get them at all.

It also means I spend a lot of time in the boondocks. I often wonder if I've made a mistake for valuing things the way I do. But man, two roads diverged in the yellow wood, you know what I'm saying?

Enter Google Wave. I think I'm supposed to be excited? I am a little excited. Curious. Interested. But, like when gmail started up, you can only get in with an invitation.

So I applied. This is what I said:

I'm a semi-neo-Luddite, a late adopter, but a curious one.

I want to see how this thing works. I want to see if it's something I'll want to use, or if it will be another distraction, another new system to learn that becomes outmoded in 18 months.

I want to see. Let me see.

So we'll see.

On Twitter a couple days ago, Merlin Mann said:

Guess I'm resistant to any tool that thinks my REAL problem is not having fast enough access to what 1000s of strangers just typed.

That is my flavor of Internet cynicism right there. If someone at Google gives me the nod, I'll report here.

Messy simplicity in Craigslist

Good (longish) article from Wired on Craigslist: Why Craigslist Is Such a Mess.

It's enduringly strange to me that people want to "improve" Craigslist. Here's a news flash to everybody involved in the Web except for Craig Newmark: People basically want something simple that works without having to learn anything new.

We don't necessarily want something beautiful that works. We definitely don't want something complex that only works if you understand the mindset of the programmer who coded it, and if you're willing to put up with a couple of things that don't work very well. Here's the order we want things:

1. Works
2. Simple
3. Other stuff you might think is neat

Craigslist is notably unconcerned with anything past 2 on that list.

A quote from the article:

It is the same reason that craigslist has never done any of the things that would win approval among Web entrepreneurs, the same reason he has never updated its 1999-era Web design. The reason is that craigslist's users are not asking for such changes.

"I hear this all the time," Buckmaster says. "You guys are so primitive, you are like cavemen. Don't you have any sense of aesthetic? But the people I hear it from are invariably working for firms that want the job of redoing the site. In all the complaints and requests we get from users, this is never one of them. Time spent on the site, the number of people who post—we're the leader. It could be we're doing one or two things right."

I frequently get crap from people for my pseudo-Luddite ways -- as though I prefer to do things the hard way. That is the entire opposite of what I want. What I want is a thing that works like I expect it to work, and some built-in accountability in case it doesn't. And I want to maintain some control over the process, and be able to extract myself from it when I'm done. The number of "simplifiers" that actually complicate is so much larger than people want to believe.

I hear people bitch about how their iPhone doesn't work like they want it to. I never hear anyone complain about an iPhone they don't even have. That seems deeply simple to me. And maybe to Craig Newmark?

Update: See the related article in the same issue of Wired, The Good Enough Revolution.