Debatable

A slight variation on a common quote from a someone on XKCD forums.

Biologists think they are Biochemists
Biochemists think they are Physical Chemists
Physical Chemists think they are Physicists
Physicists think they are God...


and God? He thinks he's a Mathematician.

Stats

So I signed up to a stat counter thing when I set up this blog, just out of curiosity really, and every coupple of months they send me an email with some stats. Here is one of the readouts from the last email.

Now obviously the ones from the UK are expected and the unidentified ones I assume are from the UK also, but there are issues with me seeing where they are, and the ones from the US can be possibly explained by Samir being there a while back. But who is looking at this in Ontario, Tel Aviv, Republika Srpska or Jiangsu????

Seriously, I want to know.

LHC 2

I have heard that some people believe that when the LHC is first used it will create miniature black holes that will devour the earth. Now I have thought about this, from a physics point of view, for a good 1o minutes and have decided that it is not going to happen and they are being daft.

I have also decided that from a quantum mechanical point of view there is no reason that the scenario set out in the 'Lynx 3' advert could not happen in reality - two colliding wave functions constructively interfering - and that 'Lynx 3' some how magically increases the probability of such an event occurring, and so I shall continue to buy it just in case.

LHC

Spore

Spore, so I went down to GAME yesterday morning to buy Spore on release day.

I have been looking forward to spore for ages.... and to be honest I am a bit disappointed.

It started off awesome, developing through the stages was fun and exciting acquiring DNA points and spending them to make yourself better. I have played the beginning stages twice, once as vicious and aggressive carnivore, and then again as gentle soft and cuddly omnivore. Both were fun in different ways, but both very similar, instead of ferociously building things to destroy something you ferociously build things to trade with something.

The space stage was very repetitive and required far to much micro-management, was way to awkward and took far to long to change viewpoints all of which became very frustrating very quickly. And seriously, only one ship? You can get more donated by your allies as the game progresses but they just follow you around and help out a bit. I want several (at least) ships that I can leave places to look after things, so that I can go exploring without having to race back to solve problems every 2 mins. You may get more ships as you travel through the game, but I don't know if I can put up with it for that long.

For a more thought out and better written review read this. I agree with it completely.

It was good and I will play it some more, I want to reach the galactic center, but in a few months/years time and I feel and urge to create a civilization and see it grow over time I think i will always reach for Sim-City 3000.

Things I wanted / expected from spore:

• The Cell stage to be longer (could be optional), there were bigger and better creatures than me when I "chose" to evolve legs, but when the option to evolve was given no matter how much I ate I collected no more DNA points s could not get bigger/better/stronger.

• The triabal stage to be a lot longer, more complex and more like Age of Empires in general.

• The city stage to be a lot longer, more complex more options for buildings, better control for the military/economic options, more options over all really, and in general a cross between Sim City and Red Alert

Notice a pattern? The game was good, but when you break it down into individual stages there are games that are better. Spore should have been at least as good as all the individual games but then linked them together, but it just is not.

Red Alert

Surprisingly I only heard about this a month or so ago, and to be honest I was not too happy about it. I expected that EA would make a hash of it by trying to make a sequel to the best game of all time. However looking at the trailers and reading some beta reviews it may turn out to be surprisingly half decent.

The graphics look good, without being to busy or complicated and overwhelming, they have kept a lot of classic Red Alert 2 things around. Such as the voices and the music, which still sound as brilliant now as they did 8 years ago, the maps and terrain have the same sort of look to them, they are open and bright and seem somehow familiar.

There are two things I am slightly worried about. The inclusion of a third faction, C&C have done thisfor a while now and I don't think they have ever gotten it to work all that well, The Scrin were just annoying, although it did add an interesting aspect to the game play when you are fighting two different factions at once, Generals was too shit to play to see if 3 factions worked well however there is always the exception of Yuri's Revenge, which was just an expansion to Red Alert 2 so borrowed a lot from its greatness and slightly improved graphics. The second is the emphasis on the naval warfare, I am not a big fan of it really, but judging from the videos and the walkthough they may have done it properly and it may turn out to be amazing... I just hope they do not do the same thing as Age of Empires 3 and make the water so visually intensive that even on the lowest settings a decent PC could not run one of the levels because of the sheer amount of lag created. The release date is the end of October, by which point I shall have my new PC, so hopefully the water will not be an issue.

I am actually quite looking forward to it. And now back to waiting for spore to be released tomorrow.

EVE

This exactly mirrors my experience with EVE. I was a bit bored a few weeks ago and decided to give the 14 day free trial a go. After 2 hours of staring at tiny buttons with no obvious labeling or organization and deciphering unintelligible sub menus in the space port only to buy missiles that I could not attach to my ship because I had the wrong something (not entirely sure what, attaching skills possibly) I gave up and went back to watching repeats of Top Gear on Dave.