Schmid blog 2008 jul-dec

Schmid 12:54, 28 October 2008 (CET) Egypt
Tonic Games have recently initiated a collaboration project with a Egyptian media company. To get the collaboration started, the powers that be decided to visit the mystical city of Al-Qāhira, otherwise known as Cairo. Representatives of each division of our small company, i.e. Camilla Volkersen and myself were to travel along with the big bosses, Tom Andersen and Martin Miehe-Renard.

We started our journey on sunday, and for some reason we took a small detour to the cold wastes of Moscow. It was close to freezing, and the logistics of Moscow airport was reduced to a german bus - grown obsolete in its fatherland, I suppose - taking us to a makeshift check-in point placed between white Brazil-reminiscent plastic sheets. A few angry-looking russian women at the counters slowly took care of the formalities.

Eventually, we got on the next plane and headed southwards.

After a long and relatively eventless flight - I sat next to a slightly annoying american family with kids who endlessly needed to visit the toilets - we finally entered the airspace of Egypt.

That Sunday night, we descended upon an endless sea of yellow and green lights, which only receeded to allow for foggy silhouettes of ominous triangular shapes, seemingly too huge to have been created by human hands.

Thus, we arrived in the pride of the Arabic world, Al-Qāhira - 'The Vanquisher' - named after the Destroyer Star (also known as Ares or Mars, which should have made its horrible appearance during the founding of the city). Soon after, we were driving towards our home for the coming week, the greatest hotel i all of Al-Qāhira, the Mariott.

The Mariott is a extravagant golden palace, and I am sincerely impressed by the luxury made available to such a humble man as myself. We were each assigned an executive suite, and at this very moment I am sitting in my suite bedroom. The bedroom is larger than my own bedroom at home, with a bed comfortably big enough for three people. Looking out of the bedroom door, I see the door to the large bathroom with bath and shower, in the hallway, a small tea kitchen is placed, but this is topped by the kitchen and bar in the next room; the living room. All in all this suite is larger than my own apartment, and easily more comfortable.

In the mornings and evenings, we dine outside between the palms, in a large area with small tables and several restaurants attending to a diverse selection of customers; Arabs, Indians, Japanese, Americans, Russians. We ate an extravagant breakfast today with everything any breakfast could ever contain, including bacon, sausages, cheese, fish, and fruit. Chefs were standing by to bake fresh pancakes and scramble eggs. Delicious. By the way, my personal favourite of the breakfast was delicious honey, dripping from a fresh honeycomb. Bee-licious. :)

Today, we have visited our Egyptian colleagues, and our private chauffeur drove us a bit around the city to find a place to eat.

Al-Qāhira is absolutely amazing, and I am constantly breathtaken by its beauty. The people are diverse and seem carefree and always engaged in conversation, sitting together at the roadside, smoking water pipes.

Of course, the city is enormous. Every direction I look, there are wonderfully exotic mosques and churches (10% of the Egyptians are Coptic Christians) with tall spires and beautiful intricate ornaments. However, between these structures, the landscape consists almost exclusively of endless apartment buildings which, though uniform in their dirty white colouring, still differ greatly in shape. Everywhere, there are huge palms and other exotic trees, and the chaotic man-made structures and the encroaching nature seem to exist symbiotically in way that is non-existant in Denmark. This is the true beauty of this city, the green fractal shapes of Nature and the white rectangular structures of Man live together in harmony. This city is hot, dirty, dusty, and noisy - but at the same time endlessly charming.

The apartment buildings are all crowned by large amounts of satelite dishes, and ugly metal ventilation systems cling to the walls outside every window as fat, grey parasites, trying to counteract the heat and the thick smog stemming from the exhaust pipes of two million old cars fighting for a place in the over-crowded streets.

And when I say over-crowded, it is certainly not an overstatement. The traffic here is unbelievable. The streets might have been wide enough for traffic to flow, if it weren't for every single street having 2 rows of cars parked in each side of the street. Parking in two rows is obviously asking for trouble, as the outer row must be moved for the the inner row to be able to get out. The Egyptians have solved this problem simply by parking without the handbrake enabled, which enables the crafty Egyptians to simply push other peoples cars to the side, and thus get their own car out onto the streets.

The traffic itself is a spectacle to behold; people drive aggresively and accurately, even though the streets are littered with people and other cars. Some spaces are almost too small to squeeze through, and surely enough, every single car has numerous small dents, the unavoidable wear and tear of this kind of street ecosystem. To allow for more precise control - without resorting to rules and regulations like in other parts of the world - every driver constantly emits small honks; now, in the coldness of the north, car honks signal danger or anger, but in Al-Qāhira, honking is simply an indication of position and a warning to passers-by. Every single driver uses this technique, making the cars seem almost alive, constantly communicating like bees in a tightly packed hive. From my lofty position in hotel, I listen to this cacophony of horns resounding from the streets below. Oddly charming, if slightly annoying at this late hour.

The logistics of Egypt are, of course, ridiculous. Every single task, no matter how simple, has to be attended by three or four people. Computers are rarely used, and mistakes and misunderstandings are very common, even in the impressive Hotel Mariott. When we arrived yesterday, we were told that due to an error, we had temporarily been reassigned to the executive suites instead of our originally assigned rooms. No problem with us, we could just change rooms today. And sure enough, when we arrived back from work today, we were told that we should go to our suites, and someone would come and take our luggage to the new rooms in five minutes time. After waiting for an hour, I called the reception, which ensured me that someone would come along immediately. Three hours later, I settled for staying in the suite for another night. The stupidity culminated when someone actually entered my room at midnight while I was sleeping, probably to clean it. I really didn't care for that experience. What can a hotel really provide if not a room with a lock on the door?

Schmid 16:34, 14 August 2008 (CEST) What is -1/2?
Depends on who you ask. If you ask a C-like programming language, you get 0. If you ask Ruby or Python, you get -1. It sort of makes Ruby less usable as a rapid deployment language for C-like language projects. Edited discussion from irc.freenode.net#ruby:

16:18 Why is -1/2 = -1 ? 16:18 schmid: wow, good question 16:19 * theoros waits for someone else to fill him in too 16:19 < tango_> because negative numbers get rounded down 16:19 < tango_> so 1/2 = 0, -1/2 = -1 16:21 It's the same in python 16:22 I made a ruby prototype and then reimplemented it in Mono C# - I've spent an hour figuring out why the results were different 16:27 < guenther__> Boy, I hope we have languages with correct math again in a couple of years. :-P 16:28 < tango_> guenther__, that is correct math 16:28 < tango_> although you might not agree with the choice, when rounding you have five choices: nearest, towards 0, towards signed infinity, towards plus infinity, towards minus infinity 16:28 < tango_> the correct choice depends on application 16:31 < guenther__> tango_: To me, correct math is more like 1/2 = 0.5 16:32 < tango_> guenther__, that's not correct integer math 16:32 < tango_> if you want 1/2 = 0.5, you do 1.0/2 16:34 < guenther__> Floating point numbers don't have arbitrary precision. 16:34 < guenther__> What if I want 1/3? 16:35 use Rational ? 16:35 < sepp2k_> guenther__: Why do you think 1/3 would be particularly hard to represent precisely as a floating point number? 16:35 < tango_> guenther__, what if I want e or pi? there is no way for a computer to represent all numbers 16:36 < tango_> guenther__, look into interval analysis and other self-verified computing methods if                           you want self-verified methods, but there is no way to represent every real or                            complex number with a computer, even with arbitrary precision 16:36 < guenther__> sepp2k_: Because floating point numbers are in the form M*2^exp (M and exp being part of                            the number representation), 1/3 doesn't fit into that scheme.

Schmid 01:42, 9 August 2008 (CEST) Pork Ca-boom
Working with Unity has its perks. My newly acquired electronic device, which I have dubbed 'Pork Ca-boom' or 'pork' for short, consists of the following elements: The electronic brain (which is a MacBookPro4,1) employs the Mac OS 10.5.4 operating system, which is a joy to use.
 * 2.5 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
 * 6 MB L2 Cache
 * 4 GB Memory
 * 800 Mhz bus
 * Hitachi HTS542525K9SA00 233 GB SATA HD
 * GeForce 8600M GT, 512 MB VRAM

Nicotine and Alcohol
Smoking tobacco is being slowly phased out of existence in Denmark and, indeed, most of the Western world. This is supported by politicians, scientists, news media, and artistic media. Smoking is publicly condemned, and is being outlawed in institutions and workplaces, slowly enough not to cause public outcry, slowly enough so that we may get used to the idea whilst progressing towards a nicotine-free future. Nicotine will become an illegal drug, which seems rational, given that the scientific evidence supporting its damaging effects is valid. And I believe it is.

In Denmark, alcohol seems to be a considerable problem, especially amongst the young. I would like to se a future where the young drink sensibly, or perhaps, not at all. So alcohol is being publicly condemned, the view toward alcoholics is filled with ridicule and disgust.

The artistic media joins and celebrates the political views - there are many examples:
 * In 1983, Morris replaces the trademark cigarette of Lucky Luke with a straw.
 * In the 1991 TV series 'The Adventures of Tintin', Captain Haddock doesn't have a drinking problem and doesn't swear.
 * In a new print of one of my childhood favorites, 'Rasmus Klump', the sailor character of 'Skæg' won't be smoking his pipe anymore.

The humorous and positive spins on alcohol and (soon-to-be) drug abuse in such literature are being removed from existence, all traces of the former acceptance of these habits are being systematically removed, so as not to confuse the kids.

Reckless Driving and Unhealthy Food


Another major cause of deaths are traffic accidents. Most of these are caused by high-speed cars or trucks, which in the future could be replaced by trains or smaller, more slowly moving vehicles, perhaps electric cars. Of course, high-speed cars should be treated just like smoking or alcohol. The killing effects of high-speed cars are trivially proven from the traffic death statistics, so the politicians must rule towards lower speed limits, as they already are. The media will have to follow suit, and works of art and computer games glorifying reckless high-speed driving must be phased out. There are a lot of movies that glorify reckless driving, and they must be removed from the public view or changed suitably, such as Bullitt, The French Connection, Gone in 60 Seconds, Die Hard, Lethal Weapon, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Batman, The Terminator, and many more. Certain racing video games also glorify reckless driving, such as Grand Theft Auto, Test Drive, Burnout, or Gran Turismo, and they should of course also be outlawed.

And why stop there? Unhealthy food also kills thousands of people, and places like pizza restaurants or Burger King dishes the poison out every day. The scientific evidence against unhealthy food also seems convincing, and the general public views overweight people with disgust and ridicule. Unhealthy restaurants could be outlawed, and replaced with healthy cafés, serving only salads and dry meat. Several fictional characters are notoriously gluttonous, but they could be slimmed down and have their eating habits changed, as not to reinforce a positive view on unhealthy food intake. These should include Obelix from the Asterix comics, and of course Homer Simpson.

Violence


An obvious source of death and anguish is violence. Violence is of course outlawed, and numerous campaigns condemn violence, emphasizing that violent people often have emotional problems. The artistic media must follow suit on this issue.

The controversies surrounding ultra-violent and increasingly realistic video games like Manhunt have existed for almost as long as the games themselves, and indeed a huge number of games depict violence in a heroic and positive light. Games such as Grand Theft Auto have no punishment for violent behavior, and games such as God of War takes it one step further and actually rewards the player for sadistic and extremely brutal behavior with points and bonuses for literally tearing the limbs of opponents. In line with the phasing out of smoking and alcohol, such glorification of violence should be censored and removed from the line of sight of impressionable youngsters.

The world of movies is a whole other chapter as almost every action movie will glorify violence. Movies such as The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, The Matrix, Star Wars, not to mention the enormous quantity of superhero movies, martial arts movies, etc. The censoring and self-censoring of these types of movies has always existed, and a recent example is the censoring of the bar fight in the newest version of Star Wars. Han Solo cannot shoot first any more, it is simply too brutal an act for a hero character. But should he shoot at all? Most of these types of movies cannot bear removal of all scenes with glorified violence, and the movies must simply be banned. Of course, this goes for almost all superhero comics, so prepare for the removal of Spider-Man, Superman, Batman, The Hulk, Spawn, etc. from existence.

The New World Order
When we have succeeded in this project, we will have mutated or censored away most of our culture. Classic literature, movies, music, and computer games are all ripe with negative thoughts and ideas, they glorify antisocial behavior, and horrific acts of violence are accepted or even applauded. We should start over, burn our books, delete our games, and create a new culture, free of negative influences. Our children will grow up, never knowing that people used to kill each other, drive recklessly, eat unhealthy food, take drugs, drink alcohol, or smoke. Our history of sin will be erased, and the world will be a better place for it.

Of course, some children may have violent or deviant behavior emerge from physiological problems in their brains, but such children could be treated with drugs or surgery. Even better, such behaviour could be recognized using genetics early in the pregnancy of their mothers, and they could be simply aborted. Abortion could be seen as the ultimate censorship, the removal of negative influences before they even have a chance to be released into the world.

If resistance towards a world order such as this should arise, it must of course be rooted out, either through psychological treatment or special reeducation camps. Several examples of such facilities can be studied in the history of our Western Civilization. Regimes employing such techniques have not always been successful, but this could stem from other problems or from them not being thorough enough.

We know how the world should be. It is up to us to remove all traces of any other world.

Epilogue
OK, when did I lose you?

This is my vision of the horrors of the future, all stemming from extremely well-meant education of the general public, by the general public. Of course it will not go that far. But can it be tolerated that works of art are censored to suit the spirit of the times? Should pieces that stick out and dissonate with the current ethical harmonics be filed down or removed? Should genius authors be coerced to retroactively change their past works? When the originals are lost, the new versions will be hollow, soulless shells of political correctness...

Most censorship and self-censorship is counterproductive, short-sighted, naive, and ultimately evil. I fear the current development of an all-pervasive political correctness. I fear it and I will fight against it.

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By the way, if Lucky Luke cannot smoke, why the hell is he still allowed to shoot at people? I mean, shooting at people is way more dangerous than smoking...

I don't get it.

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And just to round the discussion off on a positive note, here are some bonus slogans for the kids:


 * Smoking is cool.
 * Drinking is fun.
 * Chicks dig fast cars.
 * Pizza rules.
 * Violence kicks ass.

Oh no, I just corrupted hundreds of young minds. Schmid should not be allowed on the Internet.