I was playing Isoball 2 last night. It's starts off very easy, but quickly becomes more tedious. One of the first things I noticed was that for some solutions you have to place pieces before they become obscured by other parts, and it isn't always obvious just what that placement should be, so there is a lot of trial and error until you figure out what those first pieces should be, based on the construction of the rest of the game.
Then I got to Level 29 where I got stuck. I finally gave up and looked up the solution, and when I found it, it was really annoying. It simply interchanged a couple of pieces in a way that should not have worked as well.
My Solution That Did Not Work
I should have know the game was bogus when I ran into the first problem: placing a bridge over a solid surface. I am pretty sure I tried this in one of the earlier levels and it wouldn't let me.
ALL-CLEAR IN THE STRATOSPHERE:Earth's stratosphere is as clear as it's been in more than 50 years. University of Colorado climate scientist Richard Keen knows this because he's been watching lunar eclipses. "Since 1996, lunar eclipses have been bright, which means the stratosphere is relatively clear of volcanic aerosols. This is the longest period with a clear stratosphere since before 1960." Consider the following comparison of a lunar eclipse observed in 1992 after the Philippine volcano Pinatubo spewed millions of tons of gas and ash into the atmosphere vs. an "all-clear" eclipse in 2003:
Keen explains why lunar eclipses can be used to probe the stratosphere: "At the distance of the Moon, most of the light refracted into the umbra (Earth's shadow) passes through the stratosphere, which lies 10 to 30 miles above the ground. When the stratosphere is clear, the umbra (and therefore, the eclipsed Moon) is relatively bright. On the other hand, if the atmospheric lens that illuminates the Moon becomes dirty enough, light will be blocked and the eclipse will appear dark."
This is timely and important because the state of the stratosphere affects climate; a clear stratosphere "lets the sunshine in" to warm the Earth below. At a 2008 SORCE conference Keen reported that "The lunar eclipse record indicates a clear stratosphere over the past decade, and that this has contributed about 0.2 degrees to recent warming."
This story reproduced from spaceweather.com (emphasis added)
When I was in elementary school we had a lesson on sound. The teacher told us how sound travels through air, water and solids, and how it travels so much faster through a solid like steel than it does through air. Then she asks the class what is the best material for conducting sound, and the class answered in chorus: air! which dumbfounded me, because by all the criteria we had just discussed, a solid like steel was the best conductor of sound. But I politely kept my trap shut.
A few years ago my wife picked up a scrub brush for dishes at Office Depot. It was great. It worked well and it lasted a long time, but eventually it did wear out. Unfortunately by then Office Depot no longer carried them. Eventually we found another brush at another store. It was not nearly as good or as long lasting as the first one, and none of the others we have had since have measured up either.
When the Ural motorcycle was first imported from Russia, it quickly acquired a reputation of being unreliable and requiring constant repair. This did not seem to phase the owners who developed a tight knit community that thrived on talking about the problems they were having with their bikes and helping each other out with necessary repairs.
When Microsoft first developed Windows, they eschewed using a task manager (the traditional method of handling multiple tasks) in favor of something called cooperative multitasking. I like to think they did this because they are lazy undisciplined louts who couldn't be bothered to learn the fundamentals of computer operations that had been in development for twenty years.
Whatever the reason, the effect was that every Windows program took twice as much effort to develop because all those things that would normally be taken care of by an operating system had to be taken care of by each individual program. So it's really no wonder that Windows and Windows application programs were riddled with bugs and crashed every time you turned around. What is amazing is that the stuff worked at all.
So I am wondering if there isn't some of the Ural motorcycle phenomena at work here. A whole bunch of people saddled with a piece of junk, making common cause with a whole bunch of other people dealing with the same kind of problems. In other words, Windows succeeded because it required ten times as many people to write a program for it, and because all these people spent all this time learning how to write programs for Windows, there was this huge pool of talent available to write more programs for Windows.
You go to the Point-Of-Sale (POS) terminal (aka the cash register) to buy your latest Piece-Of-S**t (POS) consumer electronic do-dad (WARNING! DANGER WILL ROBINSON! FOWL/FOUL LANGUAGE! NSFA!):
A few years ago we got a Motorola DVR (Digital Video Recorder) from Verizon. It pretty much works most of the time, but for as much as it costs, and as much as it gets used, it's a real POS. It's a pain in the neck to use, it doesn't do what it's supposed to, it's just a pisser.
Santa brought us a Logitech Revue for Christmas, and it sounded pretty good, I mean they were hooked up with Google, but after living with it for a week I am not sure it is any better than the Verizon, er, Frontier DVR. The first test is trying to watch a show via Netflix. The 1st day was no go. A couple days later it worked fine. Last night it wouldn't work again. We ended up watching an old episode of In Plain Sight on my wife's laptop. There we are sitting together on the couch, in front of the big screen TV, watching an old TV show on the laptop. Both the laptop and the Revue are using a wireless connection to the same router in the basement, so there's really no excuse for the Revue to fail.
Except I suspect the software was written by a bunch of arrogant asshats who don't know didley about writing firmware, who wave their hands and use big words and C++, the most useless POS ever foisted on the programmer world.
It's all my own fault of course. I'm lazy and I'm cheap. I could set up another computer to do all this, and it would probably work better than what I've got, but that means having to do some actual work, and undoubtedly having to spend hours combing through web pages full of useless information in order to find the two or three bits I actually need, and me being who I am, and the web being what it is, I will undoubtedly get sidetracked and spend three or four weeks chasing wild geese just because I've never seen a goose painted with hot pink camouflage and sequins.
P.S. The first link I tried for In Plain Site went to the USA Network's official website, but it brought my computer to a stop while it was loading all this crap, so I opted for the Wikipedia link instead. Quick, direct, and no clogging my computer with all their extraneous garbage.
There are a bunch of theories floating around that purport to explain why the USSR collapsed. The one I always liked was that we outspent them in the Cold War arms race. They could not keep up and went broke.
Today I got an email from Steve that prompted me to go looking for information on U.S. oil imports and I came across a variation of this story. It makes my favorite theory look simplistic. From Wikipedia's article on United States Oil Politics:
Former Soviet Union
Richard Heinberg, a professor from Santa Rosa, California argues that a newly declassified CIA document shows that the U.S. used oil prices as leverage against the economy of the Soviet Union:
The Memorandum predicts an impending peak in Soviet oil production 'not later than the early 1980s' (the actual peak occurred in 1987 at 12.5 million barrels per day, following a preliminary peak in 1983 of 12.5 Mb/d). 'During the next decade,' the unnamed authors of the document conclude, 'the USSR may well find itself not only unable to supply oil to Eastern Europe and the West on the present scale, but also having to compete for OPEC oil for its own use.' The Memorandum predicts that the oil peak will have important economic impacts: 'When oil production stops growing, and perhaps even before, profound repercussions will be felt on the domestic economy of the USSR and on its international economic relations.'
...Soon after assuming office in 1981, the Reagan Administration abandoned the established policy of pursuing détente with the Soviet Union and instead instituted a massive arms buildup; it also fomented proxy wars in areas of Soviet influence, while denying the Soviets desperately needed oil equipment and technology. Then, in the mid-1980s, Washington persuaded Saudi Arabia to flood the world market with cheap oil. Throughout the last decade of its existence, the USSR pumped and sold its oil at the maximum possible rate in order to earn foreign exchange income with which to keep up in the arms race and prosecute its war in Afghanistan. Yet with markets awash with cheap Saudi oil, the Soviets were earning less even as they pumped more. Two years after their oil production peaked, the economy of the USSR crumbled and its government collapsed.[9]
My cave reached the bursting point this morning, so I did a little clearing out. In the process I uncovered half a dozen computer mice of varying species: wireless, optical, wireless optical, what have you. With all this new fangled technology, why am I still using the old mechanical mouse with a wire that originally came with my computer? Sure I have to take the ball out and clean it occasionally, but that usually just means rinsing off the cookie crumbs and then drying it. When it gets really bad I have to open up the mouse, pop out the rollers and wipe off the cookie grease with a tissue. It's a nuisance, but it's better than having to spend actual money to buy something that is going to crap out in six months.
