Comic Sans Font Examined

Comic Sans Font Examined

Nice piece, but I wish he’d go into even further detail.

Removing Links from RSS Feed

Dear reader, I ask a slight inconvenience of you. I’ve taken my links out of my blog RSS feed. I’m not sure why, but it felt like the time to do it. I’m very happy with the stuff I find and link to, so if you’d like to keep receiving it, please direct your RSS reader to my del.icio.us feed.

The Art of Warbringer - Warriors - TankingTips.com

The Art of Warbringer

Useful Charge/Intercept/Intervene advice.

Copy Paste Character

Copy Paste Character

Great reference for special characters for use on the web.

No Fate

I’ve been thinking about the Terminator series a lot lately. Victory I guess for the Terminator Salvation marketers. So I’m giong to talk about time travel. (Mostly this will be my version of the same conversation everyone has after they see the movies, and the first one is 25 years old, so apologies if it isn’t exactly new ground.) The big question I have is this: is John Connor right when he says that “there is no such thing as Fate”?

There are a few different ways that time travel could work within a movie. I’ll pick out three:

1. Time is a closed loop that can’t be changed. One cannot alter the present by going to the past. It already happened.
2. Time exists as one open loop. The past can be changed. Such changes would be instant and unnoticed by a neutral observer in the present.
3. Time travel is really dimensional travel. When one travels back in time one really moves to a paralel Earth-n that was identical to one’s home Earth-1 until the moment of arrival.

A Note on Canon

I consider only the theatrical releases of The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day to be canonical. The extended edition of T2 changes the game severely with some deleted scenes that were wisely cut. Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicals both introduce too many inconsistencies to be dealt with with rigid coherency, despite having their virtues. We’ll see about Salvation.

The Closed Loop

REESE
John gave me a message for you. Made me memorize it. “Sarah”… this is the message… “Sarah, thank you. For your courage through the dark years. I can’t help you with what you must soon face, except to tell you that the future is not set… there is no such thing as Fate, but what we make for ourselves by our own will. You must be stronger than you imagine you can be. You must survive, or I will never exist.” That’s all. (script)

If time exists as one closed loop, John Connor’s message is wrong. It’s a nice sentiment, and probably a necessary one for his mother to have some hope that she can raise her son to prevent Judgement Day, but ultimately it’s incorrect if tiem is inalterable. If the past cannot be changed, then the future is set in stone. Every action every person and machine makes is already set. Fortunately (though I sort of like the idea that Judgment Day is invevitible), the films gives us proof that this isn’t the case. From Terminator 2:

SARAH
I need to know how Skynet gets built. Who’s responsible?

TERMINATOR
The man most directly responsible is Miles Bennet Dyson, Director of Special Projects at Cyberdyne Systems Corporation.

SARAH
Why him?

TERMINATOR
In a few months he creates a revolutionary type of mircoprocessor.

SARAH
Then what?

TERMINATOR
In three years Cyberdyne will become the largest supplier of military computer systems. All stealth bombers are upgraded with Cyberdyne computers, becoming fully unmanned. Afterward, they fly with a perfect operational record. […] The Skynet funding bill is passed. The system goes online August 4^th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn, at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. eastern time, August 29. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.

SARAH
And Skynet fights back.

TERMINATOR
Yes. It launches its ICBMs against their targets in Russia.

SARAH
Why attack Russia?

TERMINATOR
Because Skynet knows the Russian counter-strike will remove its enemies here.

SARAH
Jesus.

How much do you know about Dyson?

TERMINATOR
I have detailed files. (script)

This scene sets up the third act in the film, in which John, Sarah, and their terminator assault Cyberdyne and succeed in destroying all the files Dyson had kept, the original chip, and the body and chip of the new terminator. The terminator very clearly says that Dyson is just a few months away from finishing and releasing his new microprocessor, and he tells his wife that he’s “thiiis close” when we see him working at home.

If future events cannot be changed by time travel to the past, there is no way go reconcile the terminator’s dialog with the subsequent destruction of CyberDyne and Dyson’s files.

DYSON
Alright, yeah. You’re right. We have to destroy the stuff at the lab, the files, disk drive… and everything I have here. Everything! I don’t care.

Sarah’s team destroys everything. Even working from an unmentioned backup, it’s implausible to think another team could have caught up with Dyson, completed his work, and released a chip within a few months. The terminator’s “detailed files” are clearly artifacts from a timeline incongruous with subsequent events. History changes.

The Past Can Be Changed, or, I Hope You Like Paradoxes

Moving away from the notion that the all events, past and present, are predetermined, is it possible that the future can be changed?

REESE
[Skynet] had no choice. Their defense grid was smashed. We’d won. Taking out Connor then would make no difference. Skynet had to wipe out his entire existence.

The Terminator had already gone through. Connor sent me to intercept and they blew the whole place.

Note Reese’s statement that “the Terminator had already gone through.” We don’t see this scene in the film, but from Reese’s lines there were clearly at least a few minutes between the time the terminator goes back and he does. During these few minutes, any number of things could have happened. The machines could have blown up their own time displacement equipment. They could have killed both Reese. The machine could have malfunctioned. Since we know that Fate doesn’t exist, we have to consider that all are possible future events, that none depend on another occuring in the future. When the terminator goes back through, the success or failure of its mission doesn’t depend on Reese going through a few minutes later. Indeed, since the terminator goes through first, and Reese isn’t already back in the past to stop it, there’s no reason to believe that the terminator wouldn’t succeed in killing Sarah at the Tech Noir club. The second the terminator disappears into the past with no one there to stop it, the world of 2029 should vanish, instantly replaced by a new world where John Connor was never born. History changes, the resistence isn’t led by Connor, it hsn’t defeated Skynet, and Reese isn’t there at the lab ready to go back in time to save John.

It gets worse. If John Connor is never born, the resistence never matures to the point that Skynet needs to resort to time travel. Even if they decide to do it on a whim, they don’t know about Connor, so they wouldn’t send back a machine to kill him. If they don’t send back an assasain, then he does get born (though not by Reese, who doesn’t have go go back after the terminator, despite that he can’t ever get back because it wipes out his timeline before he would have been able to go back), and he grows up to lead the resistence. Also if no machine goes back in time, no chip is available for Miles Dyson to study, so Skynet can’t be developed (at least not by him). If Skynet isn’t developed based on Cyberdyne technology, a reprogrammed terminator can’t go back in time to warn Sarah Connor about destroying the building.

So: paradoxes. It’s possible that the universe just doesn’t care about paradoxes, that they’re just problems our simple human brains and limited logic have. Maybe an effect can prevent its own cause and life can go on, but since I’m incapable of reasoning past my own reasoning capability, I’ll move on to part three.

Strings and Branes

String theory is a complicated physics thingie that uses terms like “strings” and “branes” to describe the structure of the universe that I’m not going to pretend to understand. 1 Idea being: there is more than one layer to the universe. When one travels through time, one actually jumps from one’s own dimension to a new one. That new universe was identical to the previous one up to the point of arrival in the past. From there things will progress naturally and may diverge significantly from one’s original timeline. Using DC Comics’s parlance, I’ll call the original timeline “Earth-1” and the new world with its altered history “Earth-2”. “Earth-2” here is defined as the timeline anyone arrives on who travels in time from Earth-1.² When the terminator and Reese travel back to 1984, they’re really moving to a new tiemline. Anything they do there will affect only that timeline’s future.³

Here’s what happens: The Earth-1 humans fight and defeat the machines. In desperation, a terminator goes back in time to kill Sarah Connor. Reese follows, leaving his dimension and arriving in the past of Earth-2. On Earth-2, Reese-1 saves Sarah-2’s life, falls in love with her, fathers John Connor, and dies destroying the terminator. Sarah retreats to Mexico, gets her picture taken by a small boy, and wonders what kind of world her son will grow up in. John-2 grows up, shows this photo to Reese-2, leads the resistance, wins, and sends Reese-2 back in time to save Sarah-3’s life. Earth-2 is the world of 2029 we see in Reese’s flashbacks, and Earth-3 is the world of the 1984 segments. We know it’s not Earth-2 because of the photograph. Sarah poses for this photo when she’s on the run in Mexico after having been warned of Judgment Day, and she’s started keeping a dog with her to help her watch out for terminators. The photo has to have been taken in a timeline when she already knows about the future. Reese-1 is from the original timeline where there was no time travel involved yet, so he couldn’t have seen that photo of Sarah.⁴

On Earth-3, Reese-2 saves Sarah-3, warns her of Judgment Day, and conceives John-3 with her. In 1995 a T-1000 and a reprogrammed terminator arrive from an unseen point on the timeline of Earth-2. The good terminator tells them about Miles Dyson, they blow up Cyberdyne, and either humanity is saved and John becomes a Senator or homeless drifter or whatever, or someone else invents Skynet, as the residents of Earth-1 did originally and as seen in Rise of the Machines and the Sarah Connor Chronicles, and the whole thing starts over again.

Timelines and Terminators and Branes, Oh My!

Judging from the previews, it looks like Terminator Salvation is going to deal more with time travel more directly than the other movies have. None of this time travel mechanics stuff is necessary to understand the first two movies, they just use it as the catalyst to start the action. The movies even tell you not to think too much about it, with Sarah saying, “you can go crazy thinking about all this” and John’s that “it messes with your head.”

Personally, while the sci-fi string theory interpretation is necessary to allow for sequels, I actually prefer the notion that history can’t be changed and that they really are subject to the whims of fate. I like the invevitiability that John knows he’s sending Kyle back to his death in the past, but that he has to go to become his father. I like the idea that the terminator brings about Skynet’s birth by getting killed in the past and leaving behind its technology for Cyberdyne to discover and bring about their own doom. Yes, it means Judgment Day is unavoidable, but it also means that John’s resistence ultimately wins.

1. io9 sketches out the timelines from the TV series here.. I’m providing my own take and won’t go into the TV series as much. ↩
2. I’m simplifying things somewhat by assuming that if two people leave Earth-1 they both arrive on the same Earth-2. You could imagine that one arrives on Earth-2 without the other second traveler, and then the second traveler arrives on an Earth-3 they both inhabit. This would allow for the Earth where the terminator arrives but Reese doesn’t. It’s moot, since to tell the story of the movie we just need the Earth where both arrive, so I’m not concerned with Earths we never see and don’t affect the story. ↩
3. Since all this happens in another dimension, the inhabitants of Earth-1 don’t really have to bother with it at all. They’ve already won their resistence. They could just shrug, say, “sucks to be Sarah-2”, and move on. Fortunately for the story they’re either too heroic for that or don’t understand sci-fi string theory. ↩
4. Earth-1 is a strange place, and we never see it on film. This is the “first” timeline that hasn’t been fiddled with at all by time travelers. Kyle Reese isn’t the father of John Connor-1, since for him to be the father he’d have to have traveled back in time, which hasn’t happened yet. This John-1 must have been fathered by a unknown man, and he would have grown up without foreknowledge of Judgment Day. He wins the war against the machines without the benefit of a childhood being prepared by Sarah Connor, so he’s extra badass. Food for thought: is he better off than the others Johns? We know both get the job done, but by inadvertently changing half of John’s DNA Reese could have screwed things up badly. Also the Cyberdyne of Earth-1 didn’t alreay have a chip to base their invention on, so its Judgment Day was probably later than 1997. This is another reason we know the timeline of the movies can’t be Earth-2. If the terminator that comes back were from Earth-1, its J-Day would be different. If it gets picked up for a third season, I expect _The Sarah Connor Chronicles_ to play with the idea of how John was affected by spending too much time trusting machines as a kid. ↩

Configuring AirPort Extreme to Work With Blizzard Downloader

(Moslty for my own reference.) If you’re trying to download a patch of World of Warcraft, have an Apple AirPort base station, and are getting the error “Your computer appears to be behind a firewall”, these are the steps I was able to use to get it to work.

1. Open up AirPort Utility.
2. Click on your AirPort station and select “Manual Setup” from the “Base Station Menu” (or ⌘-L).
3. Click “Advanced”, and “Port Mapping”.
4. Click the “+” button.
5. Enter “3724,6112,6881-6999” into the Public and Private UDP and TCP ports, and enter your own IP address into “Private IP Address”. (To get your IP address, open up System Preferences, go to Network, click on your AirPort station, click “Advanced”, then “TCP/IP”. Your IP address is what’s listed as IPv4 Address.)
6. Click “Continue”, and name it whatever you want, then “Done”.

The Blizzard Downloader should turn green. If it doesn’t, try restarting the app.

How To Keep Motherfu#%s From Putting Their Seats Back

How To Keep Motherfu#%s From Putting Their Seats Back

tweenbots

tweenbots

Real life project: will people help an adorable little robot reach its destination? Says Bruce Schneier, “it’s a measure of our restored sanity that no one called the TSA.” Also I like seeing something that has nothing to do with Twitter for once.

Will Fox Air Dollhouse's Final Episode or Not? - E! Online

Will Fox Air Dollhouse’s Final Episode or Not?

Fairly confusing, but at least it’s not cancelled (yet).

Boxee

Fueled by a slight desire to watch Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles the other night, I downloaded and played around with Boxee. Overall I think it’s a neat product that works more as a thought experiment than a full-fledged service. If the question were, “is it possible to make a portal for all the various TV sites’ vidoes?”, Boxee proves that they answer is “yes”, but that the technology has moved faster than the networks’ willingness for it to exist.

Basic broadcast TV is very easy to use. You tune to the right station and you watch whatever program is on. You can’t pause, and if you miss a moment you have to ask a friend what happened. You turn on your TV and you watch what’s on. TiVo, while being very easy to use, does add some complexity. You get new features like pause, rewind, etc., but you also get an illusion. TiVo’s user experience is good enough that you usually don’t notice it, but when you pick an episode of The Simpsons off its menu, it’s not really showing you an episode of The Simpsons, it’s showing you what was on channel five between 8:00 PM and 8:30 PM. The distinction is irrelevant most of the time, until a Nascar race or a football game runs late and the illusion of a la cart television is washed away. It doesn’t happen often, but it’s annoying when it does.

AppleTV/iTunes do what TiVo mimics: when you buy a show from iTunes, you’re buying an actual video file of that show, not a recording that was tuned to a broadcast of it. And since the file is on your computer and has few use restrictions, you can stop, pause, fast forward, and rewind to your heart’s content.

Boxee seems to sit in the middle somewhere. Like iTunes, you are picking actual episodes from the menu, so you won’t have the problem of a show being pre-empted by a weather emergency or a late football game, but more like TiVo, you’re stuck with what the originating website gives you. No major network right now lets you just download a copy of the file you want to watch. Instead, they embed the video and show you a stream of it. This means that each time a viewer wants to re-watch a show, they have to watch it from the network’s website again, and the network can monitor how many times that show has been requested and collect money from the advertisers and pay the writers of the show accordingly. But they also sneak in restrictions. Example: I started to watch an episode of Veronica Mars from The WB’s website via Boxee. I got about ten minutes in and then hit a key that stopped the video somehow. I started the show over from the beginning but wasn’t able to fast-forward back to where I’d stopped because The WB doesn’t allow it. Like TiVo, Boxee is providing the illusion of watching video files when you’re really watching streams. Worse, each network has different rules for how their videos work. Some networks allow fast-forwarding and rewinding, others don’t, and Boxee can’t do anything about it. Maybe down the road a standard will emerge, but until then Boxee is going to be stuck with a very inconsistent user experience. If Boxee’s reason to exist is to provide one clean source for internet video, this actually ends up working against it. If I know I’m watching a WB show, I might be careful not to mess with the stream since I can’t fast-forward back, while with a Hulu show I’d know I can come back later if I want to. Boxee wants to pretend that all internet video works the same, but it clearly doesn’t.

I don’t want to knock Boxee’s product (nor TiVo’s), rather just to point out that these are inherent hurdles to its usability. That said, how do I see myself using Boxee? Almost certainly not as a wholesale replacement for broadcast TV. If the networks show over time that they are going to put their stuff online in a timely fashion and do away with their interaction restrictions, that could change, but even then, there are times when one does want to watch something live. Sporting events, weather reports, national emergencies, the morning news, election coverage, Presidential addresses, Emmy/Oscar broadcasts, and TV show finales all need to be watched on time and are often events that people tend to organize parties around. Waiting until a file appears on a website won’t work. There’s no reason that networks couldn’t stream shows right to the web, and if they did Boxee could pick those up, but that’s not being done now on any large scale.

In the fall I bought an antenna and a converter box to play around with the new digital broadcasts, and was generally pleased with the results. On the channels we picked up, the picture was actually clearer than over our Comcast cable for which we pay hundreds of dollars a year. At the time I also did a survey of what TV shows we watch regularly and found that 70% of them were available for free over my little antenna. Comcast’s monthly bill was only giving us three extra shows out of every ten that we watch. Plus, if we had an HDTV, we’d be paying Comcast even more money for that 70% which is already in high definition over the air for free.

What I see happening is that cable companies will lose their monopoly on TV viewing. If I can get 70% of my shows for free over the air, it’s not hard to imagine I’ll come up with a better way to get the other 30% that doesn’t involve paying Comcast $50-100 a month. In a post on Boxee’s blog, Mark Cuban argues that cable companies can provide anything the web can, and while technologically that’s true, it assumes that cable can continue to convince people to keep paying for them. Bandwidth might be a compelling reason, but the likelihood that they come up with a device that’s as easy to use as TiVo/Boxee/whatever isn’t something I’d bet on.

I would not be surprised if the big loser in the internet switch ends up being cable networks. With Battlestar Galactica over, I don’t watch anything that the Sci-Fi channel offers, and even then they had that online so if I hadn’t had cable, I could have watched it for free on their site or bought it from iTunes for less than one month’s cable bill. In the short term they make money from my online viewing, but if lots of people start dropping cable they’ll lose out on that bundling revenue they get from Comcast, Time Warnet, etc. And that’s just original programming. Hours of programming on many cable stations are filled with old movies, but now Netflix offers instant viewing and Hulu offers reruns of old TV shows. I don’t see The Daily Show going online-only, but I also can’t see much use for Comedy Central if I can watch its biggest shows for free from its own website. No network wants to admit that its carefully marketed image isn’t worth anything if viewers only care about one show on its lineup, which is why they try to add restrictions to online viewing and why they’ve been trying to push Apple toward offering TV shows as bundles instead of as one-off purchases. TV networks aren’t in a very different situation than record labels were a few years ago when suddenly consumers could just buy the one good single off an album, but they’ve had a few years and a few million lobbying dollars to think about possible ways to stop viewers from being able to do things that conflict with their business models. Thus the flaw in Boxee’s model and the hesitation of the TV networks to do more than dip their toes in the pool.

All of this isn’t to say that people just want things for free. Five years ago, post-Napster shutdown, getting music illegally was free but inconvenient. You’d often get disconnected before downloading a complete file, and often the file would be corrupt, low quality, or the wrong song. iTunes’s success with music showed that what people want is for things to be easy, and they’ll pay a fee for easy unless it’s costly enough to make free worth the effort. Right now, for most consumers, the cost of cable is high but the trouble you have to go through (and what I just wrote thousands of words about) to get all the same stuff for free likely isn’t worth it. But I think that’s changing. I’m glad Boxee’s playing with the idea, but I worry that they’re the electric car, a clever concept released before the rest of the industry is ready for it.

Comments off. Mention @davextreme on Twitter to discuss.

STAR TREK Line of Urns and Caskets

STAR TREK Line of Urns and Caskets

Dear Santa…

Behind the scenes at Netflix - Boston.com

Behind the scenes at Netflix

ThinkGeek :: Tauntaun Sleeping Bag

Tauntaun Sleeping Bag

Dear Santa…

DiD US Presidential Election 2008

http://gamu-toys.info/sonota/sw/obama/obama.html

Dear Santa…