The Earth Stopped Warming

I hear this one a lot so I wanted to store this link somewhere where I could easily recover it again next time this gopher sticks its head up again.

"Of the 20 hottest years on record, 19 have occurred since 1990. And of the 10 hottest, nine have occurred since 2000."

Cramming isn't worth it

If you want to pass the test tomorrow, best to get some sleep.

A Letter To A Concerned Mother

Recently a friend related me a request for some advice for her son's career through a rather circuitous route. It started with admiration for my career, and appeared to me to be asking on behalf of her son how to get into games -- although both she and her son himself declined to email me directly themselves -- attached to it a copy of one of the most banal and lightly decorated resumes I've seen in a long time. I puzzled over how to respond, and eventually came to the inference the mother was rather more keen on the matter than the son was. Desiring to cut out the middle man I addressed her as follows:

"To answer your question, like anything in life, you can find success when you find something you love to do, and make sacrifices of secondary priorities in dedicated pursuit of the primary. If your son has no single minded passion, it's not really fair to expect him to artificially develop one; if he does have one, it's only a matter of time, dedication, and good luck before that will blossom, and my help isn't really needed. If the case is the former, my suggestion is rediscover respecting who you are now, and be open to new experience that may teach you something new to love.

If it's the latter, and you've asked me specifically about the games industry, you'll have to understand a great many people enjoy games (like film and music), and a great many people graduate with non-specialist degrees (non-Science, Engineering, Technology, Mathematics), so outside of Engineering or Art, your son would face a lot of competition that is equivalently qualified and candidates are very hard to distinguish from each other. Walking into the industry empty handed basically has zero chance of success.

That's not to say there's no hope to break in, it just means the sacrifice I mentioned before will have to be proportionate. The only real way to get in is to start making games -- now. It's never been easier for a small group of modestly talented people to create something fun and distribute it (near) instantly to thousands or perhaps millions of people. Find a group of like-minded individuals and start making *something* -- it doesn't have to be good, but it should get you noticed, and hopefully you'll grow connections that will one day land you the job you've been searching for. That hold for marketing-level jobs -- there's lots of independent promoters out there doing great things, getting their game mind share and market share.

The games industry, thanks to competitive pressures, is highly localized in a select number of cities: Vancouver and Montreal in Canada, and places like Seattle, San Francisco, and LA on the West Coast of the US. If you're willing to sacrifice for your dream, you going to have to give up your home-town friends and your daily familiarities and move where the work is. A lot of mid-level management in games got their start from moving across the country to take a poorly paid Quality Assurance job, and started working their way up. Then again, at lot of those poorly paid QA workers also went nowhere as well.

The age of heavy organizations filled with ripe white collar, middle management, paper-pushing jobs is coming to a close thanks to technology; there's only going to be room for people who are meeting tangible business needs. Scientists are doing the research, Engineers are building the products, Sales is building demand, Retail is serving the customer -- pick where you want to sit in the hierarchy and make yourself valuable to some facet of industry, according to your own tastes and abilities.

However I have the impression your son isn't really passionate about games, you're just kinda guessing he might get into it if given the chance. One thing I've learned in life however, you can't make a horse drink water, and trying to force the issue only backfires. If your son doesn't want to become a game developer or a doctor, it's best to redefine what you expect out of life and enjoy the son you have now.

Sincerely,"

"War is god's way of teaching Americans geography"

Terrorism is god's way of teaching Americans what then?

Missing Warming

Recently I've heard a couple climate deniers claim the world has stopped warming within the last couple decades; aside from being categorically false, it turns out we know where the expected warming has gone -- into the oceans.

Homeoprogramming

Write a few lines of code on a home project, and dilute it with reddit until statistically you've done nothing all day, yet claim the work accomplished has left an impression on your keyboard or seat. (See Home Programming)

It's more like Trickle Out...

I've always strongly believe "trickle down" never made any sense. More recently the rhetoric is about the wealth as the "job creators". I'm not sure this is any more justified. For me it seems much more likely the money spent by the wealthy mostly just circulates amongst the wealthy.

If you had a sudden windfall of over $10M what would you do with it? Start a risky new venture where you could very easily lose it all (job creation)? Spend it all right away on your friends and family within the local economy (trickle down)? Or would you buy a nice mansion and luxury car, hire an expensive accountant/lawyer/estate planner and park your money in investments and tax havens?

It seems the reality is very much the latter.

Climate Skeptic Cheatsheet

Stages of denial.

Hitler wasn't an Atheist

"My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was his fight against the Jewish poison. Today, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for this that He had to shed his blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice."[1]

"The National Government will regard it as its first and foremost duty to revive in the nation the spirit of unity and co-operation. It will preserve and defend those basic principles on which our nation has been built. It regards Christianity as the foundation of our national morality, and the family as the basis of national life."[2]

1. Speech delivered at Munich 12 April 1922; from Norman H. Baynes, ed. (1942). The Speeches of Adolf Hitler: April 1922-August 1939. Vol. 1. New York: Oxford University Press. p. 19.
2. Adolf Hitler. (1941). My New Order. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 144.

Praise the Job Creators

The [...] study found attitudes about greed to be the most significant predictor of unethical behavior.

"These findings have very clear implications for how increased wealth and status in society shapes patterns of ethical behavior, and suggest that the different social values among the haves and the have-nots help drive these tendencies,"