Howdy y’all. I just wanted to send a quick note that real traffic (as in humans, not search bots) accounted for 343,000 pages in 2008, amounting to more than 500,000 hits last year! Not too shabby, but I’m working to make 2009 the best year so far.
I don’t have a great way for tracking RSS usage stats, but since the feed URL is polled thousands of times a month, I am going to assume the real reach of RTFA is something more than 343,000.
I want to take a moment to thank the whole editorial team (fumf and placidwater) for their awesome work! The word is getting around, and RTFA is getting thousands of real visits a month.
Also, I want to thank our readers and subscribers: thanks! You contribute some great comments! If you like our work, please include RTFA.net in your blogroll, and help us spread the word around.
This web game is to use the mouse to feed Wind powder, the powder dance to enjoy the game.
Dan-Ball has released Powder Game 5.6! That’s right - not 5.1, but 5.6, which includes a bunch of new items like soap, thunder, and laser. The maximum dot count is 20,000 but the performance is great on the new version.
If you have never played Powder Game, then you might not initially understand how to “Have fun” with it… Well, let me explain. It’s a physics simulator, so you set up these cool scenarios and see how they play out. If you’ve ever played with a marble run, then you know what I mean.
In the picture below, I set up a simple holder for water, oil, and magma. I put a metal container around each one, and I put a clone block below each one. This is a recipe for disaster!
Basically, the cloner makes tons of dots out of whatever drops onto it. Then, the cloned dots fall onto the bottom of the screen and mix. Here’s where the magic of Powder Game comes in: each dot has different behaviors when they interact. The oil and the magma create fire and wind, which mixes everything up. The water and magma create stone. The water rusts the metal, the magma melts the metal, etc…
The dots all behave somewhat realistically, insofar as they have physical properties, and the simulator does a good job of staying true to the “meaning” of the dots. The end result is a sort of sandbox or playground that lets you create all sorts of great interactions. …and it’s up to you to figure out how you, personally, “have fun” with this sort of environment.
This sort of mechanism is similar to the new game from Namco, Noby Noby Boy. In NNB, you basically just walk around and mess with the universe:
There is no explicit goal in Noby Noby Boy, any more so than Powder Game has a goal. …and yet, these are definitely “games.” The underlying principle is that you need to find your own fun; the game is what you make of it. From an article by Matt Leone on 1up.com:
…the most common criticism of Noby Noby Boy around the office is that the game doesn’t set enough goals for players — it’s less of a game, and more of a playground. Katamari was an unusual mechanic wrapped inside traditional objectives and time limits, while Noby Noby Boy is an unusual mechanic without any of those trappings. But I’ve been playing the game almost nonstop for the past few days, and have been trying to figure out why I keep playing. And I think it comes down to a feeling that there’s always something new to discover.
A great way to find some fun is to watch videos of other people having fun. Here’s a Vacuum Cleaner, that was built with an older version of Powder Game:
Powder Game, which was originally released in 2002, has this “fun” element nailed. One time in 2006, I spent 6 hours making a volcano, filling it with gunpowder and oil, drawing intestinal underground tunnels for magma to flow through…
If I spend 6 hours moving little virtual dots around to make an imaginary volcano, does that make me a freak? Absolutely not! … which is the whole point of finding your own fun. I thought it was fun, and I don’t need some game designer to give me instructions, objectives, or goals in order to have fun.
Basel II is the second of the Basel Accords, which are recommendations on banking laws and regulations issued by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision. The purpose of Basel II, which was initially published in June 2004, is to create an international standard that banking regulators can use when creating regulations about how much capital banks need to put aside to guard against the types of financial and operational risks banks face. Advocates of Basel II believe that such an international standard can help protect the international financial system from the types of problems that might arise should a major bank or a series of banks collapse. In practice, Basel II attempts to accomplish this by setting up rigorous risk and capital management requirements designed to ensure that a bank holds capital reserves appropriate to the risk the bank exposes itself to through its lending and investment practices. Generally speaking, these rules mean that the greater risk to which the bank is exposed, the greater the amount of capital the bank needs to hold to safeguard its solvency and overall economic stability.
It’s interesting to note the timing of this work. Basel II guidelines were originally published in 2004? It makes one question how much of our current financial crisis had been foreseen.
I was tipped off to Basel II from Michael Lewis and David Einhorn’s great editorial in the New York Times, which had a few suggestions for repairing the US Financial system:
Impose new capital requirements on banks. The new international standard now being adopted by American banks is known in the trade as Basel II. Basel II is premised on the belief that banks do a better job than regulators of measuring their own risks — because the banks have the greater interest in not failing. Back in 2004, the S.E.C. put in place its own version of this standard for investment banks. We know how that turned out. A better idea would be to require banks to hold less capital in bad times and more capital in good times. Now that we have seen how too-big-to-fail financial institutions behave, it is clear that relieving them of stringent requirements is not the way to go.
Another good solution to the too-big-to-fail problem is to break up any institution that becomes too big to fail.
In the middle of all this, Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. persuaded Congress that he needed $700 billion to buy distressed assets from banks — telling the senators and representatives that if they didn’t give him the money the stock market would collapse. Once handed the money, he abandoned his promised strategy, and instead of buying assets at market prices, began to overpay for preferred stocks in the banks themselves. Which is to say that he essentially began giving away billions of dollars to Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and a few others unnaturally selected for survival. The stock market fell anyway.
It’s hard to know what Mr. Paulson was thinking as he never really had to explain himself, at least not in public. But the general idea appears to be that if you give the banks capital they will in turn use it to make loans in order to stimulate the economy. Never mind that if you want banks to make smart, prudent loans, you probably shouldn’t give money to bankers who sunk themselves by making a lot of stupid, imprudent ones. If you want banks to re-lend the money, you need to provide them not with preferred stock, which is essentially a loan, but with tangible common equity — so that they might write off their losses, resolve their troubled assets and then begin to make new loans, something they won’t be able to do until they’re confident in their own balance sheets. But as it happened, the banks took the taxpayer money and just sat on it.
Great stuff! …but where does Basel II fit in? The timing truly is strange - what motivated its creation? How early were banks aware of the impending disaster?
In our modern culture and society, we’re making a mistake that is costing us… well… everything.
In the past, wealth was about things like land, gold, food, and money.
Today, wealth is about education, enjoyment of life, quality of time and relationships with friends, cultural experience, personal development, fulfillment, contribution… and is COMPLETELY intangible and unmeasurable (in the traditional sense).
But the bizarre and almost mystical thing about these new forms of wealth - that makes them COMPLETELY different from monetary or “physical” wealth - is this:
When you give these new forms of wealth away, you still have them.
Think about that for a minute.
Let me say it again:
When you give them away, you STILL HAVE THEM.
You can give them away all day long, and not lose anything.
But that’s just the beginning…
The next question is: “How do we GET MORE ‘New Wealth’ - and truly become wealthy?”
The answer is so simple, and so counter-intuitive that almost every single person misses it almost completely.
The answer is to GIVE these new forms of wealth to as many others as possible.
Not only do you not LOSE these new forms of wealth when you give them away, you actually get more of them by giving them away.
This is a really thoughtful meditation on the value of things, and while I’m convinced by the presentation of this idea, I think it is also supported by the dollar-amount cost of items like education and health care. Year over year, education and health care (which I’ll call “real value”) outpace inflation, as measured by the cost of a “standard basket.” On this basis, real value becomes increasingly unattainable by those earning the minimum wage.
Earlier this week, 11,000 mothers who use Facebook changed their profile pictures to photos of themselves breastfeeding children to protest against the social networking site’s decency standards.
It’s the latest blow in a continuing battle between Facebook and some of its users since it began removing photos that show breastfeeding.
The single-day protest, known as the Mothers International Lactation Campaign, was organized by Stephanie Muir, an Ottawa woman and mother of five who is one of more than 87,000 members of the group “Hey, Facebook, breastfeeding is not obscene!”
The group is pushing Facebook to change its policies regarding breastfeeding pictures and its regulations surrounding how much of a woman’s breast can appear in photos posted on the site.
…
This isn’t the first time Facebook - which boasts 140 million users - has ignited a controversy after pulling breastfeeding photos.
In June, 2007, a San Diego woman named Kelli Roman complained that the company removed photos of her nursing her baby. After Facebook refused to change its policy, she started the protest group on the site that Ms. Muir and thousands of others joined.
…
Facebook, however, is standing by its position. Only photos that contain a “fully exposed breast” - which Facebook defines as a picture showing the nipple or areola - are removed, the company said in an e-mail.
Facebook said it takes no action against the “vast majority” of breastfeeding photos, as long as they do not contravene the site’s terms of use.
This is hilarious and great. There’s no question this protest is over a matter of principle, so you just gotta love the humans.
Now, although breast feeding is all well and good (and in fact offers dramatic health and cognitive benefits for the person being breast fed), I have to say that when you pair the protest with the official Facebook response, quoted above, the situation reveals itself as being amazingly hilarious. Facebook does allow images of mothers breastfeeding so long as they do not show the nipple or areola. So, it’s not an issue of Facebook banning breastfeeding pictures … it’s an issue of Facebook banning pictures that involve both breastfeeding and the good old areola. So, are these women posting pictures of themselves just hanging out topless with a kid about to latch on?
Anyway, good times with humans. I highly recommend reading the article, as it closes with statements from a spokesman from the TopFree Equal Rights Association. Classic!
