Blessed by the Potato

The mollusk eye is often used as a counter-point to intelligent design arguments. The human eye, if deliberately designed, was not designed particularly well. The layers of tissue are laid down backwards (with the photosensitive layer that actually lets you see underneath the non-transparent, thin, easily separated blood vessel layer), and the lens setup leads to failure in middle age. The mollusk eye, on the other hand, shows evidence of having evolved independently, demonstrating that not only can an eye evolve by the process of natural selection, but that it has done so more than once. The octopus eye is in many ways more advanced than our own: the layers of tissue are the right way around. The lens changes focus by moving back and forth rather than being stretched (which means you don’t have to worry about compliance changes as the lens ages and stiffens). Indeed, camera makers have long turned to the octopus eye for inspiration on how to solve problems like how to make lenses that focus clearly on large photosensitive areas.

So then it led me to wonder: maybe there is an intelligent designer, but He designed octopi. I mean, not only are their eyes superior, but they are very smart, without having these delicate spines and specialized brain regions — they are a marvel of decentralized processing. Many can change their colours, and with their highly flexible bodies (no constrictive skeletons, just muscle), they can even mimic the outlines of other animals. They are ruthless and calculating — quite capable of escaping their laboratory tanks and eating the fish in neighbouring tanks, and smart enough to go back at dawn so no one is the wiser.

That leads us to wonder: what designed the octopus? And there is only one answer:

Cthulu.

So, will octopi one day take over the world? Here’s the scary thought: 2/3 of the world’s surface is under water, and fairly poorly explored. It’s quite possible that the octopi already rule the world, and the tiny dry sliver of land we call home is just a wild frontier they haven’t yet got around to dominating yet.

Just a quick note: there will be minor spoilers all through this.

I was trying to think of how to review Iron Man 2 when Orson Scott Card beat me to it.

It was a pretty movie that was fun to watch. But there were a lot of holes in it, especially with the characters and their motivations.

For Tony, he went through this whole nonsense of discovering a new element to upgrade his arc reactor to get around a problem with heavy metal poisoning. Supposedly, his use of the Iron Man suit exacerbated the leeching of toxins into his body. However, this made no sense to me, since he obviously managed to make power suits with their own power supply (such as the one Rhodie took), and only needed the power from a car battery to power the electromagnet in his chest. He easily could have externalized the arc reactor and used a conventional battery to keep him from dying.

I also didn’t like Don Cheadle as Rhodie, he just played it so straight. And as Tony’s friend, it made no sense to me why he’d steal the armour (even if under orders) just to give Stark’s competitor, Hammer, access to it. In all his interactions he was just such a divergence from what we saw in the first movie, where they skirt that line between professional camaraderie (or even babysitting) and drinking buddy.

I also didn’t think we got a very good look at Vanko — it wasn’t quite as bad as Star Trek for glossing over the villain, but Jebidaiah from the first one was just so much more real and sinister, and we got to see him develop and go power-mad before our eyes…

Anyhow, for all its shortcoming it was action-packed popcorn-munching fun, so go have at it!

I got the windows on the Prius tinted last weekend at Auto-Links. I ended up choosing them because they had a lot of good reviews over at redflagdeals, including a group buy discount from that group (which is still good if you’re considering tinting your car), and their prices were roughly $100-150 less than what the dealership wanted for tinting. John and Cody seem to run a quality shop, taking care to wash the windows really well before applying the computer-cut tint. In fact, there was a minor problem with one of the tint sheets and John threw it right out, no hesitation on doing the job right.

I have to admit that my heart leaped into my chest when I heard the “pop-pop-pop-pop” of the retaining clips releasing the door panel (they need to open the door panel to get the film to the bottom of the glass), but of course they’re pros, and it all went back together nicely (no door rattles either, which was my big worry since it’s a problem I’ve managed to avoid thus-far on the Prius).

I ended up up-selling myself into the ceramic tint: I really don’t care about the electronic non-interference perk, but I did want to stay with a fairly light tint since I do so much night driving, while getting better heat rejection. One of the big reasons for getting the windows tinted in the first place was to reduce heat build-up, and the ceramic was not that much more for a fairly large increase in heat rejection. The film came in a “30%” and “40%” optical transmission, though apparently the ceramic is actually lighter than the rating. It is indeed a fairly subtle tint, this isn’t a black-out gangsta limo tint:

I got 30% on the back, and 40% on the front, and there is zero issue with night-time driving, with the possible exception of some light from headlights behind me appearing to streak out along the defogger lines of the rear window (I hope to update later with a picture of that effect). I’m hoping that will settle down as the film cures and adheres better to the window, but either way it’s not a big issue. In fact, I probably could have gone darker on the back (I had in my head going in that I wanted something in the ~20-25% range), but unfortunately the one downside to Auto-Links & ceramic tint is that there aren’t a lot of choices along the tint spectrum, with nothing available between 15% and 30%. One final perk I should mention is that these guys take Monday and Tuesdays off so they can work the weekend, which was great because Sundays are a good day to have this sort of thing done!

For those who don’t know, if you preorder StarCraft 2, you can get access to the beta and start playing right away (albeit, a beta version). I’ve been too busy to play much, but I have had at least one game with each race, and here are my first thoughts:

The general game: Blizzard’s last RTS, WarCraft 3, was a real revolution to the genre. Heroes, smaller armies, autocasting, smart casting, creeps/mobs, treasure, potions, shops, and mercenaries made the game a pretty wild divergence from the earlier RTS games. StarCraft 2 on the other hand, is pretty true to the original StarCraft. Autocasting and smart casting did get brought up to reduce the amount of micromanagement required, and unit group sizes are no longer limited to 12 (which, IMHO, further encourages massing units). But there are no heroes, no creeps/mobs, no shops, and the unit cap is still quite high at I think 200 (I haven’t had a chance to actually hit it yet).

The units got mixed around and changed quite a bit — the firebat is gone, for example, leaving the Terrans without any melee units. The zerg queen has gone from being a fast flying scout caster to a den mother that watches the hive. The bigger change under this is that the rock-paper-scissors aspect of the original StarCraft has been watered down to an extent. There are still units that get bonuses in their attacks to units of a certain size, and armour still plays a role, but it doesn’t appear possible to counter specific mass strategies as it was in the original StarCraft (or Brood War). Back then, someone could build a fleet of 48 mutalisks, and you could pop them all with just 4 Science Vessels and some micro, or a handful of Valkyries. Basically with some good scouting, you could counter most “mass unit X” strategies with much fewer resources than massing something of your own would take. In SC2, the damage seems to have levelled off a bit, forcing you to build up your army rather than fleshing out your niches. With just a few weeks left to go before release (eek!) there probably won’t be too many drastic changes to the game, but balance issues will be front and centre in what changes do get made.

I was reading some of the pre-beta articles about the game, and was afraid that it would be chalk-full of transforming units to keep track of. I don’t remember if the articles just seemed to focus on the Viking or if there were other transformers as well, but it sounded complicated from the previews. In practice, the transforming nature of the viking and siege tank are not overwhelming.

Macro is the new micro: One of the changes that really struck me was how your macro game — harvesting resources and building your armies — has really come to the forefront in SC2. Much of the micromanagement in a match is now dedicated to the macro part of the game, and these can be very crucial things to optimize (indeed, find yourself just a minute or two on the slow side in building your queens and your allies will jump down your throat!). The Terrans can call down advanced, time-limited workers called MULEs to harvest resources at a faster rate; the Protoss can turbocharge their buildings to pump out units faster, via a spell that must be recast quite frequently; the zerg Queens can increase the larvae spawn rate at your hives with a spell of their own. Also, there is no residual vespene extraction: once your geyser is depleted, you have to move on, which leads to a tiny bit more micro to support your macro game.

Other changes: The way the game handles having the high ground has changed. In case you didn’t notice in SC1, there was a definite advantage to be fighting from the high ground: units firing up the cliff would have a miss rate applied to them. Now, you can’t fire up a cliff at all without a spotter, but if you can see up, you do full damage. There’s also no need to scout just to see the terrain: maps start fully revealed (but covered by the fog of war). Plus, of course, the pretty, pretty graphics.

The players: It’s only the beta, I’m still in the newbie league, there’s no single-player or battle the AI option to learn how to play, and yet people are still assholes when you don’t play “perfectly”. Dudes: relax, people have to learn somehow, and even if these matches were ranked, your ranking on the beta ladder doesn’t really matter (even when compared to how little the release ladder rankings matter).

Rushing seems to be huge from my subset of games played. I’ve even seen players build barracks/gateways inside another players base to rush them, which is pretty damned audacious. Past strategies for defending against the rush don’t seem to be as effective any more — blocking the choke-point doesn’t work on many maps because many bases have a back door with destructible terrain, and I don’t know if the movement speeds are higher or what, but just having “a few” defenders doesn’t seem to be enough to hold them back any more (a rusher used to be at an inherent disadvantage because even if you were a little slower, you had some extra time to build more units while they were charging down from their side of the map, and if they tried to beeline for the workers, they’d often get chewed up by the marines). WC3 seemed to have a lot of resources to try to block rushing (and it was novel strategies like the orc tower rush that often proved to be the most annoying to counter), not the least of which was the strength of your hero, and the defense of the workers (wisps were completely enclosed, humans could turn into militia, undead acolytes were admittedly corpsicles, but you were guaranteed to have at least a few ghouls to get wood, and orc peons could jump into the burrows and shoot back), plus the strength of the early tower defenses.

A weird, weird day in the markets today, as on basically no new news there was a huge negative spike at about 2:45pm. The markets are still down considerably as I write this (a few minutes before the close), but if you check there are a lot of companies with a big spike right at that time, some down 30% or more.

My day started off weird too, as I tried to put a bid in for SPB just to have it cancelled instantly by TD; the stock went down to $8.40 at one point with no bids (and that was when I really wanted to be the only low-ball bid!) before trading was halted. When it resumed it came back to the $13 range. Again, a weird computer issue at the exchange?

Update: it looks like they are indeed blaming a computer glitch, and are reversing some trades.