I want you to look back on everything you’ve ever read, and I want you to pick one that you feel is the most influential, the most powerful, and just simply the most impressive. For me, it’s difficult to pick a book. I can see several different reasons for picking any of a number of simply awesome books. To make my point, however, I’m going to pick Dante’s “The Divine Comedy”.
The Divine Comedy is the story of the author’s imagined journey through the the three realms of the afterlife, Hell (inferno), Limbo (purgatorio) and Heaven (paradiso). Guided through these rather foreboding realms by people important to him and (at least in his feeling) history, The Divine Comedy represents both a huge religious statement, a significant political commentary of the time and one of the most significant works in literature ever. Despite having no religious feelings myself, I still find the Divine Comedy and awe-inspiring piece of work, something that should be treated with great reverence and care. This is why I am appalled to discover that “Inferno” is being made into a videogame.
I understand that consumers are forever asking for deeper and more meaningful stories, and this is possibly why they’ve decided to make this, but unfortunately the likelihood of this is extremely slim. From my previous knowledge of video game conversion (and from viewing the trailer) Dante appears to have been removed from his role as worried observer and been given a new role: to go through the levels of hell and hit as many things as he can.
This new level of depravity in marketing disturbs me. This is obviously not a game for those who have read the book, the large majority of such people are unlikely to play video-games, and I do not believe that those who do are likely to wish to play it. Who could possibly believe that the story could be converted into a pop-culture friendly video-game? Who then is the game for? The only option conceivable to me is that it for those who have heard of the book, and are interested only in the concept, not achieving knowledge of the real thing, after all, how likely is it that the game will convey the meaning, or realistically, any of the content of Dante’s book?
EA have released several press statements stating their excitement for this opportunity to “fuse great gameplay with great story”, but I remain unconvinced. There is no need for a video game of Inferno, and there never will be. Please just leave the classics alone.
I hate exams. Admittedly it’s not a feeling confined just to me, but it’s a feeling that I wish to share with everyone else. I understand why people feel the need to give exams, it’s a way to test if we’ve learnt the things we’ve been taught during the first semester. The problem is that it obviously doesn’t work. It’s a problem that is well known within the educaton system, but it’s just a silly and counter-productive way of doing things.
Education aims to teach us two things, facts, and the ability to use those facts in productive ways, and great debate rages on which of the two things should have more emphasis. Maths suffers from this dilemma in a particularly irritating way. The subject lives in a small and isolated segment of the education sector where you are theoretically teaching no facts and just technique (it is true that this claim could also be held by art and music subjects, but somehow they seem to slip more into the familiar “history of…” doctrines than maths). The problem that comes from this is that standard exam technique is not really sufficient to test this kind of learning.
Your standard maths exam contains last years problems with different questions, and can usually be marked by someone with little or no knowledge of the subject. They ask for a student to got through the machinations that they have been through before to solve similar problems, and therefore test only the learning of the method, rather than any actual ability to think through the problems.
It can be argued that the actual practical value of any mathematics qualification is more the ability to think logically through a set of steps rather than to think laterally around a problem, but would such a qualificaion be much use.
Though it would make assessing each student much harder, would it not be better to see how they cope with a series of more complex problems that they have never seen before than a set of problems which they are supposed to tackle merely by rote?
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On a lighter note, I recently got a new netbook, a Samsung NC10, and it’s AWESOME! The early netbooks suffered from some real problems, runing extremely slowly, and seeming as if their size had completely nerfed their functionality. For me, this is the first netbook I’ve really seen that actually seems to be useful, despite its tiny size. It has a reasonably decent battery life (4-8 hours depending on the use), and runs XP SP3 without any discernable problems. It’s basically the equivalent of a laptop just a couple of years ago, but much smaller and extremely light. I’m very pleased with the purchase, and highly recommend it!
It’s been a long time since I last wrote anything on this. I originally set it up as somewhere where I could write about my university experiences. That idea seems to have gone down the pan somewhat as I’ve written one and a half posts in the month and a bit since I got here. to fill in this gap however, I’ll blog, rather than about exciting things that have happened to me, (which are currently a little thin on the ground) about things that I’ve found that I think are interesting.
Most of the people that I know have, by now, seen the “awareness test”, used by THINK! (a government agency know for such wonderful and intuitive advice such as “Speed Kills” and “Don’t drink and drive”) as an advertisment recently. It’s a wonderful idea, and probably one of my all-time favourite adverts, being both remarkable intellectually pleasing, and yet, at the same time, actually puts it’s message (”It’s difficult to see what you aren’t looking for”) across. (For those of you who have not yet experienced the wonders of the world’s oddest basketball game, there’s a link at the bottom).
Anyway, this leads me to the point of this post. They’ve brought out another one, which is even better! As their website seems to be slightly behind their advertising, you’ll have to watch the lovely Youtube version:
To me, this is really the epitome of advertising. Despite their strange insistance that what will get to people the most is flashy graphics and silly catch-phrases, I still think that something clever and surprising will do the job much better. It’s true that we all remember that Washing Machines live longer with “CALGON”, to have a break, have a KIT KAT, and many others, however it seems to me that something clever is going to stick with you in a slightly different way than a catchy jingle (not to mention that it’s difficult to think up a catchy jingle for the message “Don’t run over cyclists, it’s not very good for them, or your lack of jail time”). I won’t deny that I rather enjoyed the inimitable Barry Scott on the Cillit Bang adverts, but I’d much prefer to see more adverts of this calibre, despite the technical brilliance of the latest car or perfume ad.
The other awareness test (and probably this one by the time anyone reads this) can be seen on http://dothetest.com and several others, not used for advertising, though still quite good, can be seen on Youtube. That’s about as interesting as I can think of for the minute. They seem to have changed Songza so that you can’t embed music any more. I assume no-one ever clicked on the boxes anyway, so I’ll just leave it now.
I’ll write some stuff about Fresher’s week later, but it’s been a little bit tiring, and so actual explanations of what’s been going on, (not too exciting I’m afraid) will have to wait until later.
This post is really just to point out that I’ve eventually bothered to create a photo gallery to display pictures in. It’s currently sat at http://www.pbrohan.com/gallery/ (although there are a couple of design and orientation problems that I need to fix before it’s perfect).
If you want to see some (mostly unedited so far) photos of my freshers week, you can see them there, soon to be joined by some of my other photos.
I hope everyone else is doing ok as well, and that eveything is going well.
Google has done it again. They’ve brought out something mildly innocuous and managed to make a huge fuss over it. This time I have to say that they’ve gone a little over the top with it, however I suppose we’ll have to wait a few months to see if they’ve pulled it off.
I’ve been playing around with the browser for about a day now (well, as long as its been out basically) and I’m not sure what to make of it. After reading the chrome comic
Chrome Screenshot
(which I feel was just a rather dull marketing mistake, only to be read by bloggers with too much time on their hands), it seems that chrome’s main selling point is that it has an independant task for each tab. This is lovely, but they do seem to have got a bit over-excited about the concept.
Their arguement is that if something goes wrong in one of your tabs, rather than feeling the need to shoot the web designer for crashing your browser yet again, you can merely close that tab, and everything else will be fine, as it was working in an independant process. I can see the arguement here, in fact, it’s a really good idea. Unless you’re one of those people who must have 20 tabs open at once, it really is good. I haven’t yet managed to crash a tab in chrome yet, but the theory is great. (On a side-note, this also allows a feature that has been sorely missing in other browsers; the ability to create a new window out of a tab without refreshing the page).
My favourite feature in chrome is actually hardly talked about in the docunmentation at all, which is that chrome will give you a link to a suggested webpage if it can’t find the one you’ve asked it for. This is extremely useful if you happen to be bad at spelling. It can’t help you if your favourite blog/news feed has gone down, but no-one can do everything.
There is a little niggle however. I don’t know if it’s because I’m using a laptop touchpad, but the scroll is extremely fast, and only works going down the page. As scrolling is my main means of navigating, I find this rather annoying.
I installed the new Internet Explorer beta today as well, just because everyone has been comparing chrome to it, and it it, as I expected, pretty much the same as internet explorer 7. Except it doesn’t save cookies any more. To be fair to microsoft, this isn’t completely true, however it does set itself up in ‘protected mode’, by default (chrome has something called ‘incogneto mode’ which is quite similar to this). Basically, protected mode stops any cookies or well…. anything getting onto your computer whilst you’re browsing. I quite like being able to use cookies. They let me access my e-mail and talk to people on facebook. The only possible reason one might want to do something as severe as activating incogneto/protected mode would be if they were about to access some particularly dodgy webites. From what I can tell, the websites that are most likely to install things onto your computer are those hosting cracked versions of windows software. All protected mode means (certainly to me) is that it would now be easier to download cracked versions of office. Rather shooting themselves in the foot I feel.
IE8 also comes with a shiny feature called “suggested sites”. This is basically stumbleupon, except that it doesn’t work if you’ve deleted your browser history, (i.e. if you’re using protected mode) and you can’t choose what topics it gives you. I really like stumbleupon. It can lead you to some extremely pointless websites, but as it started me reading xkcd I can’t really complain. Although I do see it as rather nice that Microsoft is trying to bring these features to the technologically uninitiated, I think that most people with internet addictions severe enough to want stumbleupon already have it installed, and the rest of the web just wants the news and bebo.
There is, however one reason why I am unlikely to be converted from firefox to either of these browsers. They don’t quite show me anything I feel I need badly enough to leave all my plugins behind. I realise that it would ruin the speed of chrome (not to mention opening so many processes that your cpu explodes) and that IE8 runs slowly enough already (something that I am much less keen on), but firefox’s plugins, though not all nessescarily useful, make me happy, and that’s something that I am reluctant to leave behind.
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