Actual Quote From Radio

This is an actual quote* from a news teaser on the radio, heard on Tuesday:

Was the operator impaired on a thrill ride where an accident happened this week? We won't know until the police report comes out on Friday.

Well, by all means, let's speculate wildly until then. You could replace the word "impaired" in that report with anything: Was the operator asleep? Was the operator insane? Was the operator a kangaroo? We just don't know!

The other, more subtle, thing that struck me about this announcement was the helplessness of it: "We won’t know until the police report comes out." Because, apparently, they can't do any of their own investigative work, like, say, interviewing people who were there. But once the police report comes out, then we'll know, because police reports are issued by the Pope, and are the infallible Word of God.

*More or less - I'm quoting from memory, and it was a couple of hours before I took any notes.

What the Hell?

Is it just me, or does this article summary from the front page of CNN.com sound more like an Onion story?

No good way to tell kids they have cancer
When her mom and dad called her into the den, 9-year-old Gigi Pasley thought they were going to tell her a big surprise, "a good surprise" she said. Instead, they told Gigi she had cancer. "She burst out with this awful sound, a moan, a scream of complete and utter agony," said her mother, Jessica Pasley. The Pasleys learned that day there's no good way to tell your child she has cancer. full story

Those Young Whippersnappers With Their Weird Hair and Loud Music

International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge says "You will never achieve in a video game. It is not really success."

Leaving aside questions of the nature of "achievement" and "success" in different pursuits, my favorite quote from Mr. Rogge is "We need to hire more young people. If they have baggy pants and pink hair, that's OK."

Mr. Rogge added, "Hey! Get off my lawn, you hooligans!"

This is pretty awesome.

Technology in the year 2000, as predicted in a 1950 issue of Popular Mechanics.

I particularly like the amusing image of businessmen with documents "held up for examination" over their video phones. And yet, in the very same article, they talk about 5-cent facsimile document transmission over "telegraph" lines. I guess it didn't occur to them to link those two concepts: Even in the world they describe in the article, I'd pay the nickel to send the actual document around to my videoconference colleagues, just to avoid putting myself in the ridiculous position of holding paperwork up to a video camera for them to read.

And forget the personal helicopter (I've seen how people drive on the ground): What I want is the $5000 house, where I can clean the living room just by hosing it down.

God Damn It

The mainstream media is at it again. A study shows short-term effects on brain activity when playing video games, and that these short-term effects are different depending on whether the game is violent or not.

"Our study suggests that playing a certain type of violent video game may have different short-term effects on brain function than playing a nonviolent, but exciting, game... What we showed is there is an increase in emotional arousal. The fight or flight response is activated after playing a violent video game," Mathews said.

No real surprise there, if you ask me.

Mathews said he hopes to conduct additional studies on the long-term effects on brain function of exposure to violent video games.

So what is CNN.com's headline on this story about (rather unsurprising) short-term effects, in which the researcher explicitly makes it clear that the results say nothing about long-term effects? Why, naturally, the headline summarizes the story thusly: "Study: Violent video game effects linger in brain"

Why, yes, that does seem to be precisely the opposite of what the study actually examined, thank you for asking.

Best Headline Ever

Duct tape no substitute for a babysitter, police say

Straw Man Eaten by Crocodile! Film at 11!

By now, I'm sure anyone who cares knows that Germaine Greer took the opportunity to gloat over Steve Irwin's tragic accidental death, saying things like "The animal world has finally taken its revenge on Irwin". Not satisfied with being merely insensitive, Greer spouts ridiculous, PETA-like levels of delusional lunacy.

But my personal favorite bit is this:

You can just imagine Irwin yelling: "Just look at these beauties! Crikey! With those barbs a stingray can kill a horse!" (Yes, Steve, but a stingray doesn't want to kill a horse. It eats crustaceans, for God's sake.)

So, here, Greer imagines something she thinks sounds sort of like what Irwin might possibly have said, and then proceeds to criticize him for saying it. I hate to point this out, love, but you're taking issue with a "Steve Irwin" who only exists inside your own head. I'm skeptical that the real Steve Irwin would ever have said "With those barbs a stingray can kill a horse", since that statement is patently untrue.

Understatement

A couple of minutes ago, on the TV in the cafeteria here at work, I saw Fox News running a report on current events, with a caption at the bottom of the screen reading "Mideast Turmoil".

"Turmoil"? "Turmoil"!? They're lobbing missiles at each other! That's not "turmoil", that's open warfare.

Lions and Tigers and... Oh, my!

Ok, now CNN is clearly just reporting stories that are specifically targeted to get mentioned on "The Colbert Report":

Study: Warming turns bears into cannibals
"Environmentalists contend shrinking polar ice due to global warming may lead to the disappearance of polar bears before the end of the century."

I ask you, was there ever a news story that sounded more like it was deliberately designed to get Colbert calling for people to do their part to increase global warming, now!?

On a slightly more serious note, I really think someone ought to do a study of news reports. I could swear that the number of actual, serious news reports involving bears has increased dramatically since "The Colbert Report" started airing.

I Must Be a Violent Dope Fiend By Now

Violent video games linked to risky behaviors. Well, um, sort of.

First of all: I applaud the researchers for actually matching similar games for their violent vs. non-violent comparison. An earlier study I'm aware of compared playing Quake to playing Myst, and it's hard to imagine two games more different from each other in every conceivable way, leaving many, many uncontrolled variables other than merely "violence level". Here, they matched Grand Theft Auto III against The Simpsons: Hit and Run, which has very similar gameplay to GTAIII, but cartoonish instead of gritty & violent. Bravo.

But what effects did they actually observe? Those who played the more violent game:

1. Immediately afterwards, were less cooperative/more competitive.
   
2. Immediately afterwards, were more likely to interpret others' attitudes as hostile toward them.
   
3. Immediately afterwards, expressed more permissive attitudes toward alcohol/marijuana use.
   
4. Only among those with higher exposure to real-life violence, elevated systolic blood pressure.
   

Once again, we have a study that measures an effect (or several effects) immediately after playing a violent video game, but makes no apparent attempt to measure whether/how quickly this effect normalizes over time. Is there still a measurable difference an hour later? A day? Is the effect permanent and cumulative? We don't know...

Now, about the headline: It's a complete lie. The study has not in any way linked violent video games to risky behaviors. It has linked violent video games to permissive attitudes about risky behaviors. I'd like to see how the question was worded: It could be that violent video games just make players more forgiving of risky behaviors in others, but not more likely to personally engage in such behaviors.

It's also unfortunate that Reuters doesn't report any more information than one can glean from the abstract of the actual study. I don't really want to pay $15 just to find out the actual magnitude of these observed effects. How much more competitive? How much more permissive?

Pen Stolen

Today on CNN.com, a headline on the "front page":


Now, I will admit to watching "American Idol". I'm not proud of it, but I'll admit it. Last night, four of this season's semi-finalists were eliminated: The two men and the two women with the lowest numbers of votes. None of the eliminated contestants even sang well this week, so even the specifics of which people were voted off didn't come as a real surprise.

So how in the bloody Hell is this news, when a television show proceeds exactly as planned? If they had booted four contestants because they found them participating in a Satanic ritual goat-sacrifice, that might be newsworthy*. What's next: "Price Is Right Contestant Wins New Car"?

And yes, the title I put on this post is a reference to a classic Onion story, although it was in their pre-Internet days, so it's not in their online archive.

*Not "front page" newsworthy, but probably worth mentioning. A Satanic ritual infant-sacrifice, now, that I'd put on the front page.

Awww, He Thinks He's People!

Elton John and partner 'tie the knot'

And according to the IMDB report, "The 'newlyweds' left Guildhall at 11:45am..."

Here we see one of the problems with only allowing civil unions, while leaving "marriage" exclusively heterosexual: The patronizing use of quote marks around words and phrases like "tie the knot". It conveys a sense of, "Awwww, look at the cute little gay people, pretending they're married! How precious!"

My preferred solution, by the way, is to remove the word "marriage" from the law books entirely. Those who oppose legalizing gay marriage have a valid point: "Marriage" is not just a civil institution, it is also a religious ceremony. The problem is, to the extent that they are correct about this, it means the government shouldn't be involving itself with marriage at all. So I say separate the parts out: Civil unions for everyone, gay or straight, for the legal/civil/secular reasons and benefits, and let the churches decide which relationships they will bless with the word "marriage". And, incidentally, I have no doubt that if this were the case, there would be churches willing to perform homosexual marriage ceremonies. United Church of Christ, for example.

Incidentally, although CNN couldn't manage to report on Elton and David's wedding without diminishing its status with quote marks, Fox News, those evil right-wing bastards, treated the union as real throughout their version of the story. One might almost accuse them of being fair and balanced...

Also, I'm heading up to Wisconsin for Christmas, so I probably won't be posting anything until I get back next week.

This Just Gives Me A Pre-Headache

Two Million U.S. Teens Are Pre-Diabetic
"The average level was 89.7, within the normal range, but 7 percent of the children in the study were in the pre-diabetic range" [100-125].

PRE-diabetic? There weren't enough of them with actual diabetes to frighten people, I guess, so they had to start calling essentially normal kids "pre-diabetic" in order to scare the public.

This could be the start of a whole new trend: Smokers can all be called "pre-cancerous". Anyone whose blood pressure is 125/85 or so is "pre-heart attack". It might be difficult to distinguish between the "pre-anorexic" and the "pre-obese" - probably best to just flip a coin, there.

Or maybe we could save time and just start referring to everyone as "pre-deceased".

This is a joke, right?

My favorite part of this story about overly-enthusiastic spanking strippers is the fact that their attorney is named Jeff Wankum.

Thing Happens to Person

What the hell kind of a newspaper headline is "Suspect jailed on other charges"?

Reefer Internet Porn Madness!

Cyberseduction: His Secret Life:
"In just a few mouse clicks, good-natured student and athlete Justin Peterson (Jeremy Sumpter) went from your average hormonally charged teen to an Internet porn addict."

The only way I can see this being anything but noxious is if they use Da Vinci's Notebook for the theme song.

(via Radley Balko)

Google Advertisements

I've followed Joe's lead and added Google Adsense advertisements to my blog. For similar reasons: I greatly desired to see what Google's advertising algorithms would do with my recent post entitled "Dance of the Enormous Robot Dildo". Alas, the results weren't nearly as interesting as I had hoped.

String of Profanity!

Gamespot, an honest-to-god video game news/reviews site, reports on a kid in Japan who beat his parents to death, then blew up their apartment to cover his tracks. They quote the boy saying to police, "I wanted to kill my father since he made a fool out of me. I decided to kill my mother as well, since she was always saying that she wanted to die because of all the work she had to do. I felt sorry for her."

So what headline does Gamespot, a site devoted entirely to video games, remember, a site whose very existence depends on the popularity of such games, attach to this story? "GTA linked to homicide in Japan". Why? Because "the boy's schoolmates have described him as an average student who loved playing video games and who was a fan of Grand Theft Auto III."

What the fuck? How is the video game industry supposed to combat the public misperception of video games as "murder simulators" training whole generations of sociopaths, when even fucking Gamespot uses headlines like that on such a tenuous connection?

Jesus, Peter, Paul, and Mary. You might just as well put on a headline like "Studying linked to homicide in Japan" - he was an "average student", right? Or how about "Being a teenager linked to homicide in Japan", that seems equally relevant.

Sometimes, I think that if I let myself go, I would never stop slapping people.

[PC | Console] Gaming Is Dead?

CNet predictably predicts the Death of PC Gaming.

This is not exactly anything new. This question seems to come up every time a new generation of consoles is released.

The argument invariably goes something like this: With a whole game console available for under $400, why would anyone pay over $2,000 to play PC games? The new consoles are putting out graphics equal to or better than the best available video cards for PCs, so the more expensive PC offers nothing beyond what the consoles do!

Among the flaws with this argument: People don't pay over $2,000 to play PC games. People pay $1,500 or so for a computer to do all the things one uses a computer for (web, email, office apps, graphics editing, music downloading, etc.), and then spend an extra couple hundred for a video card that they don't need for all that stuff, but which enables them to play games. Comparing the full system price of PCs vs. consoles is comparing Apples to oranges.

As for the second point, that the graphics from a $400 console are as good as the graphics from a $400 video card for a PC: Right now, at this very moment, that's true. However, well before the next generation of consoles is released, probably after about 18-20 months, the $400 PC video cards will be putting out graphics far beyond what the non-upgradeable consoles can do.

And when they are, the folks at CNet and other PC/Tech magazines will be predicting the Death of Console Gaming.

Myself, I expect things to continue much as they always have: Serious game geeks like me will have both a PC and at least one console. College students will have access to both PCs and consoles, even if they don't personally own them all. Technogeeks who aren't interested in games will have PCs. People who can't afford computers will have consoles.

Best Headline Ever

From Reason Online: "Rejected By Creationists, Monkey Embraces Polytheism"