Artificial Stupidity

You've heard of Artificial Intelligence of course...

This is artificial stupidity :) 

A friend and I had a joint xbox session of Fallout 76. We went to the Red Rocket large truck station, grabbed the workstation, and got several waves of attackers a little later.

Those attackers were the stupid Chinese head-crab "liberator" robots. The station has a few Protectrons. Generally those things aren't very capable, but these liberators are the epitome of Artificial Stupidity here.

In this video, you can see some of those head-crabs and a protectron (aka "red robot"). Red is standing there shooting some head-crabs. The head-crabs are too stupid for words. So stupid that they're funny, doing their very own Morris dance (imagine photo from The Holy Grail here that has those jumping ninnies from Launcelot's solo scene at the castle rescuing Alex Herbert; I couldn't find it and don't have time to frame-rip the entire movie and then hunt for that bit)

Similarly artificial stupid: when your NPC companion steps in between you and a target just as you shoot a massively hard range attack while zoomed in such that you can't see where your companion is and your companion gets killed instead. Or when a bunch of opponents stand around looking at you, but doing nothing, because altho they can see you up close, they can't figure a traversal path to get next to you to hit you--but they jiggle back and forth because they're in a weird math spot where they can't do otherwise.

2018 Elections

It's two years later. Been a crazy time. What do I think about the elections? Recall that last time, Sept 2016, I said I thought Trump would win. 

This time? Next week...I think there's a very good chance the Republicans will retain control of both sides of Congress. [OK, I was wrong this time, yay]

It didn't look like that a few weeks ago, but then we had the Kavanaugh episode. Now we have the "Executive Order terminating birthright citizenship". 

Recall that Kavanaugh was quoted to have said "there's no such thing as 'settled law'". This is correct, regardless of what anyone wants.

The thing folks most want to equal "settled law" is the Constitution. But it's possible for an amendment to overturn any piece of it, including another amendment. We've already done that once. (Remember Prohibition?) You know Trump picked Kavanaugh because he's likely to go along with the "self-pardon" idea.

So if there are things said, whether "constitutional" or not, that cause supportive voters to go vote to keep the power structure exactly as is, well, you know what that means.

If an XO can negate one thing, it can negate another thing, and then the entire document means nothing.

So do I think this will happen? The slippery slope has already begun...I can readily imagine that the XO doesn't get challenged, some shenanigans occur, and Trump decides to alter some other things.

What happens when he decides news reporting cannot contain what he considers "fake news" ? And that the purveyors of such can be eliminated?

Or when he decides that people who voted against him are, well, need to be removed.

Given that there are clearly people in the law-enforcement arena who are more than willing to follow orders like those of separating little kids from their parents (and probably enjoy it, or they'd refuse), what happens when he decides that the names on the lists of registered Democrats are just as much a threat? 

Do you really think that no one would go along with it?

Came to an interesting conclusion just now...

Was reading a WaPo anti-trump piece, on Election Day, and there's a comment:

"[trump] massively overestimates his abilities so he is forever driving things into the ditch, and ends every venture with disaster but still manages to walk away as everyone else is carted off the emergency room"

Remember the book "A Spell For Chameleon" ? By Piers Anthony. One of his best.

I read that when it was new, 40 years ago. The book is about a parallel universe zone in Florida near Okeechobee where magic is a real thing. Each person there has a magic skill. Except the hero. He has nothing. The book is a classic "voyage of self-discovery" in that he DOES have a skill, but it's a passive skill, not an active skill. That passive skill is that he cannot be harmed by magic. *Something* will happen to negate or block any magical attack on him. It's not a thing he controls, it just happens. 

The quote in the comment feels like this. His actions may produce disasters, but he emerges largely unaffected by the outcome, and always claims a win.

The problem in the book was that "sticks and stones could break his bones, but magic could never hurt him". Most of the rest of folks had what could be attack magic, which was rendered useless, but everyone could use a stick.

Trump feels like that, a bit. Reagan, the "teflon president", kinda did too. Altho Reagan's disasters were not on the same scale. 

That'd lead to some weird personal assumptions--like "everything I do works out good", even when it doesn't. 

Another weird episode on my Mac

I'm not sure what brought this on...

Some months ago (less than six, but more than one), after an OSX update of sorts, Messages stopped showing peoples' names and began just showing the phone numbers.

Quite irritating. For any given messager, for the very few I have a photo of, I could see that, or, if the number matched a Contacts entry, I could see first and last initials ("AB"), but that darn number was always there in place of the name.

For computers, it's more efficient to use the numbers. But for people, well, we don't work like that. Partly because we tolerate duplicated names ("John Smith") where the computer cannot.

If you look online you can't find a solution. Apparently talking to Apple Tech Support won't get it done either. (???)

Well, ok, you CAN find solution online.

Here's my situation: all works great on my iPhone. But suddenly not on my Mac. Mac running High Sierra.

Nothing I do/try fixes it.

Until this:

1. Close the contacts app. Close Messages. Close Mail.
2. Go to ~/Library/Application Support/ (in Finder, using command-shift-G)
3. Rename the "AddressBook" folder to something like "AddressBook-old" just to be safe
4. Open the contacts app. Wait a couple minutes for it to resynchronize
5. It will create a new AddressBook folder that syncs to icloud properly. Wait until you see all your contacts re-appear.
6. If it's all dandy delete the renamed AddressBook folder

OK, if it's NOT all dandy, quit Contacts, delete the NEW AddressBook folder, and rename the old one back to AddressBook.

But this worked for me. (other folks found that making sure the phone number format lined up exactly the same did the trick--but I would argue that that is a different problem)

Really don't know why. If *I* were the author of the software, Contacts, Messages, all that contacts-using stuff, this wouldn't ever happen, and some other annoyances would also go away. 

All this "Account" stuff in OSX has got some fundamental issues, primarily associated with what happens when you have a bunch of accounts and old ones go away.

Mail has never had this problem for me, but maybe that one is better about multiple accounts.

The inconsistency is annoying.

3D work on-screen

Just discovered this:

OpenJSCAD

If you've used OpenSCAD, and you are comfortable with programming, you REALLY need to check that out.

It is NOT an online OpenSCAD, although it's very similar to such a thing. You type in your code, which in this case is javascript plus all the OpenSCAD functions, and you press F5 or Shift-Return, it renders something using the OpenGL interface in your browser.

the basics:

your code has to include:

function main() {

   itemA = cube([1,1,1]).translate([-2,-2,-2]);
   itemB = sphere({r:2,center:true});

    return [itemA, itemB];
}

The return there is what gets drawn.

This is pretty nifty. Although you might feel like it takes an Advanced Degree(tm) to figure it out.

Note that the ".translate([])" is like, but not identical to, OpenSCAD:

translate([2,2,2]) cube([1,1,1]);

The .translate is a Javascript-style coding. Same thing gets done, but the syntax approach is different.

Looks like it can generate STL output, for going straight to 3D printer (yeah, agreed, you probably have to do the triangle correction step somehow).

It will generate an STL file you can download. I have no idea if it's any good, but the ASCII version is readable.

What you probably cannot do (nor, really do I think I would try) is load/copy/paste your existing OpenSCAD into OpenJSCAD. Not going to work--you'll have to fix it up quite a bit.

Fallout 76 B.E.T.A. and released game

This game is several things right now (Nov 1 2018):

1) multi-player, which I do not do.
2) Aggravating, which I do not like.

I'm playing on the Xbox, a 1X, on a 4K TV, so it looks beautiful. Far more detail that F4/etc, and apparently a much larger map.

It really seems like you MUST do it as part of a team, because what happens a lot is that you get swarmed by opponents 10 at a time--by yourself you are dead fast. And while you can respawn, you dropped all your "junk" at the death place. You can go back and get it, which is good. But the swarms are aggravating.

It is like playing survival-mode F4. I did not do that mode--the excessive focus on food/water/rads is aggravating--you spend way too much time worrying about them. I don't personally burn through food and water anywhere near that fast, IRL, so it's quite aggravating here.

The card-based "perks" system is aggravating. The Skyrim approach to all this is best; F4 is ok...but it really should be the case that you get better at lockpicking by doing more lockpicking, not by finding a perk card.

You can do PvP if you want, or you can turn that off. Which is good, or the aggravation of having others attack you would lead to servers all being populated by assholes who go around killing newbies.

As it's the Beta, there are problems. One of the worst is that there is a serious issue about clipping. More than once I have found myself "inside" an opponent, that is doing melee hits on me, and because I'm inside it, I can't even see it, so I can't shoot, but I can't even know that it's there.

Do I recommend this game? Well, no, I guess I don't. Not yet. When it's $20. It needs to become less aggravating. Am I going to continue to play? Well, yeah, but not a lot. Can't really play at home, don't have enough bandwidth--or a 4K--but of course the worst thing about multi-player is how to you put together a team? Clans? Not interested even slightly. So if you play solo some, and team some, your team is going to be level-lopsided. That said, it does feel better than ESO; I have that, may have played 4 hours. It wasn't interesting. Only paid $10, not sure it's worth even that. ESO seems very weighted towards teams, too.

Events are weird things. Every so often, in various places, there's an "event", like X is attacking Y, help out for 20 minutes. Morgantown Airport has one, where five waves of "scorched" attack. You kill all scorched in all five waves, in the time limit, you get goodies, and there's a large goodie-box dropped on you. I did this battle once with a friend, and bumped into it solo...turns out if you don't participate, it times out, there's only the first wave, and they stand around being stupid.

You have a portable "C.A.M.P." that is a "base" location. You can build walls, crafting stations, etc. In fact, you really kinda need to. But it's portable, so if you DON'T build stuff, you can relocate the camp.

Excess weight doesn't slow you down, but it takes Action Points to run. Power armor is just like F4: there's a frame, takes fusion cores to run it, and you can eventually put armor pieces on it. I have seen some power armor crafting frames, but no armor, although I know of a place where it does spawn, because friend got it there. Not really that useful unless you are able to find/make fusion cores. In F4 I have approx 100 cores, perked them up to double-duration, and I use PA non-stop. In F76, not clear that you EVER use it.

As much as anything, F76 is about finding or creating useful loot. Occasionally you do find really interesting things: I have a piece of armor that does health regen--I love that stuff.

I think the BETA agreement is that I don't publish anything about the game until it's officially released, in a couple of weeks. So this waits until after that.

Have seen critters attack each other; saw a mirelurk fighting some rats today. Robots fight each other, too. This is good; it can't be true that all the opponents are friendly towards each other. One of the robot varieties is rather much like a headcrab, all jumpy and bitey.

Apparently there are giant bats that look like dragons that somehow create[d] the scorched. A swarm is scorched is aggravating, but they carry guns and ammo. (OK, that giant bat is the ScorchBeast, L50).

Not enough merchants, so you probably do more scrapping than selling.

-----

Released game

Not enough merchants. For sure. Altho I did bump into an L50 Super Mutant wandering Merchant named Grahm; he's friendly, you can trade/sell. Saw him getting attacked by the other SMs at Grafton Steel and doing nothing. Eventually he "woke up" and beat the snot out of them (they were L10, so there was no way it was going to go well for them).

Have found things to be glitchy. The released game seems to have more trouble than the BETA; I would bet that is server issues related to the sudden large increase in players.

It has "crashed out to desktop" on me several times, leading to the conclusion that the BETA was more stable. Well, the server load was less.

Found an L50 Queen Mirelurk. And a L40 "glowing one" protecting a loot cache crate.

A weird thing I've experienced a couple times: some actions suddenly cause the respawn of a batch of opponents. Right next to you. Which then kill you fast.

The weapon swapping UI is terrible. FO4 did ok with this. FO76 is bad. They need to change to the FO4 approach.

You can play OK by yourself. You will want to be careful and stealthy if you do, there are plenty of places where you can get unexpectedly overwhelmed by a crowd.

I don't think the ability to have a "Permanent CAMP" is going to work. Today I wandered past someone's camp...if that is permanent in all map/world instances, one of these days the entire map will be filled with CAMPs. How could it not? Imagine 100 thousand players, each makes a permanent CAMP, that will dominate the landscape as far as the eye can see.

Power armor shows up here/there randomly. You'll find it before too long. I have a frame, have seen several others (which is nifty because you can take the fusion core from each one, and they have had a couple of other pieces of armor...Armor that I can't use yet, but I do have T46 (L25) and T51 (L30) armor pieces.

This is a survival game. You have to manage your food, water, rads all the time. This is really mostly annoying, because you can find enough stuff to drink and eat that there's more or less zero value to having to craft it, or be extra careful about what you're doing here/there. It interrupts game flow.

I did find a piece of "regenerating leather armor" that I am wearing. It seems not to work in power armor? But I do like these items, they let you not have to use your stimpaks all the time. Sleeping works too, but I never do that--where would you be safe? (OK, your CAMP, if you built it in such a way that it was virtually inaccessible from the ground; seen this done...it of course violates physics and construction realities--in essence the weight of all walls/floors/etc is zero, but their strength is infinite...so you can build in a choke-point corridor killing field where a wad of turrets can shoot anything on an approach vector, because you control the vector)

Incorporating H2 database into Eclipse

So I finally did this.

Here's a decent explanation.

https://ibytecode.com/blog/eclipse-dtp-configure-h2-datasource-using-data-source-explorer/

but it goes wrong at the end.

(This is for Eclipse Oxygen; Eclipse Mars can't even do this, on my machine at home; Eclipse Luna doesn't do it either. This is curious, it doesn't feel like a new thing.)


Here's much the same thing over again:

Menubar File->New->Other...

Good god. My pasted-in pictures all got lost. Yeesh. Gotta do them over, saved as files. Yeesh.

Choose "Connection Profile" and "Next"

See this: and click Generic JDBC

Type "H2 JDBC" for the name. (When you try to do this again, you can't use the same name, you'll get told it exists). Click "NEXT", and get a new dialog window.

Click on the strange icon inside the red circle:

See this new dialog:

Click on Generic Driver. Enter H2 JDBC Driver for the name.


If you don't click on Generic, you can't do the next thing:

which is click on "Add JAR". Find your H2 jar file.



Now comes the absurd part. Click on the H2 jar file name. Click on Properties tab button. It's blank. Go back to JAR list. Click the jar file. Click Properties. Still blank. Back to JAR list. Click the H2 file name.

The Edit button will now be active. Click that, the click Cancel in the file dialog. Now click Properties. Yay! props table.

Driver class is org.h2.Driver (capitalized just that way). URL is jdbc:h2:tcp://localhost/wherever-your-db-is. Name is whatever you want as a name. I'm not sure what this is for. Click OK.

enter a password, click "save", click "test connection" to be sure you don't have a typo somewhere.

The tab for "Optional" parameters would be something like mvstore=false; or other jazz.

I don't recommend turning on "connect every time". Regrettably, you'll have to go through this again every time you have a new database, but the end result here is that you can create a .sql file in a project, and connect it to this database, and run sql live right there from in the buffer.



I should have done this years ago...but Eclipse is not really the best of all possible interfaces to H2. Especially since it won't show the result from "SELECT * FROM my_table;", just whether or not it executed error-free.

I have some other tools I wrote for real database interface work, but they don't do text-edit buffer.

--------------------------------

Of course, H2 already has to have that database created...I was trying to get a CSV dumped into a single table to practice some SQL with. Just the load was trickier than I wanted.

How to load a table from CSV into H2:

(Yep, I'm looking at some FCC data.)

H2 doesn't give a very good explanation for CSVREAD to load a DB. Tried it before, and spent an hour today trying to guess what it wanted for syntax. It's actually really simple, simpler than it looks in their doc.

INSERT INTO table(col, col,col...) SELECT col,col,col... FROM csvread("file-location.csv");

There's a simpler way if your table will have exactly the same columns as the CSV, but mine had that extra "ID" column first.

Even supposed whiz-kids get it wrong

So I needed to try to export Contacts info in OSX High Sierra to a CSV file. Sounds simple enough, right? If *I* had written the Contacts app, this would be a direct thing off the file menu.

Apple, however, in its infinite wisdom, has completely failed on this. You cannot. Full stop.

You should NOT need an Advanced Degree (tm) to figure this out. But apparently you do.

OK, that said, there is a way, but it's really stupid to have to do it. OK, there might be two. I only tried one.

You have to open Contacts, figure out how to "Select All" (or whatever subset you like), then you open Numbers (yes, Numbers), and click/hold/drag that bunch of contacts over into Numbers (and not just anywhere, you have to land on the actual cells grid. Then you wait a few moments, and poof, the cells are filled with your data. 

From Numbers, you can then do a CSV save. Ye Gods.

That is pointlessly over-complex. CSV is a basic output flavor for contact info--even if you don't look at it in a table (come to think of it, why is THAT not an option? What happens when I need to look at two at once?), it's a table, and. you can always output a table as CSV.

Especially when most things that import tabular data want either a CSV or XLS. Like something I'd need to dump contacts info into.

-----

Looks like Automator might be able to do it. And there maybe is an app in the Store that reads the regular abbu export and makes a CSV. 

Seriously?

Supremes

Well, today is the day that Republicans will nominate Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.

It will break exactly on party lines. The infamous Collins and Murkowski pair will NOT grow a pair and vote against him. They never do.

Dr Ford could have come in yesterday with witnesses, DNA and photographic proof that Kavanaugh did satanic sacrifices of babies and then ate them, and they would still be voting him onto the SCOTUS this morning.

Why?

Because there are some other goals being attacked here.

We have quite a few people who are very uncomfortable with some things that have happened in the last 100 years (well, more, really, we all know what), and the SC is the "long game" approach.

The "long game" is:

1) Repeal Roe

2) Repeal Obergefell

3) Repeal Civil Rights Act

4) Repeal SS and Medicare

5) Repeal Obamacare

6) Make (white) America Great Again (via getting rid of brown people): be a bully around the world. Because that's great. It's how you make friends.

7) Make it ok again say certain words again when referring to those disgusting people that all need to leave the USA or die.

So Brett Kavanaugh will be confirmed. No matter what. Because the Republicans in Congress (and the voters they are afraid of) want those things.

Why is it so many folks need to act stinky towards others?

-----

Update: Yep. Went as above, except that Murkowski got a safe out where she got to do a harmless NO vote. Had it not been harmless, well, she'd have voted yes. And Manchin voted YES--otherwise he was going to lose re-election.


There's another subtle item. Trump wants someone there who will agree that he can pardon himself. Because you know that could end up being important, once all his past "deals" get fully exposed. You know that is going to turn out to be full of shady-to-illegal aspects. Back in the day (and maybe even now) you didn't get things built in NYC without the mob.

You know why there are so many unemployed people here?

Well, one reason is that we fired them from their phone-answering jobs and replaced them with really stupid software, and then hired dummies with foreign accents to answer the phones.

Bought a piece of software today, that is delivered via download. That wasn't easy itself. I created a login with the software vendor, that part is ok.

Tried to register the software. That wouldn't work. Not clear why, but after it failed, there's a dialog window that says "Please call XXX-XXX-XXXX so that an agent may assist you".

So when I call in on the phone to do this, I do get someone. An ESL person. First problem: their system software is stupid. I have called in on the primary phone that is registered with the vendor. But apparently this guy can't (doesn't?) know or see it, so that instead of having the number itself include my registration info, I have to tell him this over again. Then I explain what I'm trying to accomplish. Again.

I am trying to accomplish "Online Registration". The software itself has asked do I want to phone in, or do online. I want to do online--in theory, that should go A LOT faster.

He says "I need to have someone in this other department help you". OK, that's not necessarily a surprise, happens often enough.

The problem is, he's misunderstood the word "online". Partly because the vendor has misused this word in a way that encourages this misunderstanding.

Vendor has an "online version". I want to do "online registration". BUT NOT for the "online version", it's the desktop version.

So first guy shifts me over to the "online version" Helpdesk. As he is doing this, I realize his last words to me are taking me the wrong place.

So that's where I go, I explain immediately that we have done the wrong thing and that I need to do "online registration of desktop version of software". Which eventually does take place properly. But it took nearly 90 minutes to get there.

But really, vendor people, your phone software sucks, your support software sucks, your name choices lead to poor results with your Helpdesk people. Yeesh.


Most other places I have had to call in, they know me from the phone I call from, there's no asking over again why my name/info is, etc.

----

So the software above is QuickBooks. It was/is at least as much a nightmare getting QB connected to my bank account. Something is not working correctly.

And now I'm back on the phone with QB. Their software is still terrible. Good god. And this particular problem is a paid solution--I have to pay them to have them to explain why their software doesn't work. (Pretty sure I can write better software than this)

It's now just under two hours on the phone. Today.

I'm going to have to go to the liquor store on the way home.

The Bat is Dead

in case you didn't know...there was never just one.

took that picture ~2015.

Another Game: Elder Scrolls Online

Have been waiting a while for circumstances to line up properly before acquiring this. MMOs aren't really my cuppa. Played Guild Wars for a while, some years back. That seemed to have a slightly better aspect about forming an adhoc group.

I waited until I could have my games PC on a really good internet connection (I have 175 MBits, at work (home is abysmal)), and the price was good ($10 on Steam summer sale).

So here's a couple of pictures taken on my phone because I don't know how to screen-snap the game and deal with it afterwards (I know, not hard, I just haven't tried).

Here's something funny, and not even slightly new:

Bethesda has been making games for a long time. Their 3D is excellent. But they still have a few issues--either that or their mages can float everywhere. Granted, the setting IS Morrowind, and the mages DID fly there. Or, as Doc Brown said once "Is there something wrong with gravity?"

Here's a another classic:

What do you know? Somebody feels a disturbance in the force...Vivec: "that would be me"

The setting is still the island of Morrowind, and it's WAY prettier than I remember...and it's WAY more dangerous, too. The mudcrabs aren't all angry and can be ignored, but virtually everything else wants to kill you.

Party formation is weird, it's simpler to do the routine of wandering wherever, wait for others to show  up to kill things you don't want to fight, grab the target loot while they're fighting, and run away. (Guild Wars was better about the party formation...there were meet points where you could find others waiting like you, and agree to go somewhere together. Once that was done, you were back at the meet point.) That way you weren't stuck with a group where folks couldn't agree on what/how to do (shades of Leroy Jenkins).

I haven't tried talking to anyone here yet. You can just join in a fight, get credit for the kill, grab the loot, and move on, without even talking to anyone. Did that yesterday.

A stupid, but interesting tactic...work a task solo, grab the loot, then let yourself get killed...you get to respawn at a waypoint that is somewhere away from danger. I did this today by accident and got out of a cave place where I didn't see how to escape and it was jammed full of opponents. That probably cost me something, but I don't remember what. Probably now I need to get armor repaired.

This game takes place before Dagoth Ur arrives, but the Red Mountain is leaking lava. No ash storms yet. Lots of giant mushrooms. I'm playing as lizard-man again, because of the water-breathing attribute. That has always been very useful.

----

Four weeks later: well, I haven't played more here as I got sidetracked pretty hard at work. Can't say this had felt interesting enough to hurry back to.

I bought SpellForce 3 during Steam Summer Sale. The graphics are better but I think the UI is distinctly harder to use.

Things that aggravate me in computer games...

Well, it's probably just one, really.

It's the situation in a game where the creators force you to play it *their* way, as opposed to allowing me to go at it *my* way.

Especially bad when you don't even know what you're doing at first. 

Cases in point:

Because I'm leading up to playing Wolfenstein 2...on Xbox:

1) Wolfie: New Order -- I played up to the point where you come back from the moon, and end up facing Mr Stompy. This is an arena fight, your ability to aim and do some other funky controller things that I am not good at, really it's the run+slide+shoot = too many things at once. So that's where I had to stop. My patience for these things is getting lower. I did, however, play through this successfully on the PC a few years ago, although I remember that being tricky then too.

2) Wolfie: Old Blood: You have to fight Jager, in the tavern. It's another arena, and it's tiny. Jager is in power armor. It turns out that you have to shoot the blue power nodes on his shoulders a few times; he powers down for a short bit, you have to go pry a piece of armor off while he's in that state. Then you have to do it again, several times. There's really not enough cover of significance to work with, the power armor seems to have dual-wield miniguns with infinite ammo, and he's in motion all the time. And this is after he smashes down the front door, but it's still blocked so you can't run outside where there's better cover--because you know he's going to come after you: you killed his dog.

3) Wolfie: Old Blood: Just before Jager, you fought the big mechanical dog out at the end of the bridge. This is really contrived, because you have to either be doing run-n-gun as soon as he shows up, or you have to find the one hiding place where he doesn't attack (except for the part where he does, and can hurt you *thru the walls*. I watched a couple youtube videos about this, and it turns out (at least on super-easy) that it takes two measly shots with the kampfpistole (which is essentially the single-shot grenade launcher). But I had to try various weapons a bunch of times to figure that out.

4) DOOM: there is the spot where, even on super-easy, there are two of those great big demons, it's an arena fight...

5) on PC: Wolfie: Return to Castle W: I'm in this cathedral thing, have to climb a ladder up a tower, and there's a grenade-girl at the top who is going to kill me before I get in position to aim at her. It's basically an arena except that it's really a tube, and the cover works against me. If I could actually turn around further...but you can't, your range of motion is explicitly limited.

OK, you get the picture, it's these arena fights. The arena is *always* a "locked room" and it won't unlock until your opponent(s) is dead. Mostly what I'd prefer is to be able to draw the opponent's attention and then run away. 

The problem on my end is of course that (1) *I* am not quite good enough to do this their way, and (2) the xbox controller isn't either, and finally (3) on PC I have to play left-handed for RSI reasons. That's less an issue on xbox, actually, b/c there IS NO left-handed-ness...on Windows, well, that's an imperfect modified key-mapping (but at least you can do that, which wasn't always true in the past).

This results in my preferring the Bethesda RPG vs FPS games, where I can fight and run away. 

The current situation with Wolfie is that I'm done playing those games. And not coming back to them later. Which is too bad, because I was near the end of (1), but not even halfway through (3) and (5).

Wolfenstein 2 is coming up, but I'm not sanguine about my chances there--it seems entirely too likely, in advance, that there will be some of this arena-battle stuff that I can't get through. (Later: yep, there was. The "courtroom" battle is an arena. With A LOT of opponents, and the scenery/furniture is destructible, which means you can't really hide behind it for very long.)

I played all the way through all of these things (exc Doom) on my PC when they came out. Mostly that was a few years ago and now I'm older.

Related to the "have to do it *their* way is the "I want to climb up to *right there*" but I can't. In (2), you're in the tavern, there is clearly a "trap-door" up some stairs to the second floor, but it's locked. (actually, it isn't even a door that *could* be opened, it's a visual decoration).

The visual aspect of "town" in (2) and (3) is fabulous--this is some really good-looking surface texture art.

-----

Later that night: played Wolfie 2 some. After the point, still on the flying platform, where you get the super-suit, you end up in an arena battle against *something* that is big, clearly tough, has dual-wield *something* that looks like big laser or railgun (well, not railgun, really seemed energy weapon, has a charge time with an associate noise). I've no idea how you take this one out, but it seems fairly stupid, and it certainly isn't fast--easy to outrun, but there's not really a safe spot. (OK, this is the "laser cannon", kinda like the minigun, you can't keep it). You need this weapon to burn a hole in a wall, so there's no way out of this battle. (At least it's not Jager in the tavern again). Ah, apparently there's a second one, a little later, before you get to leave the airship.



There's a play-style dichotomy in this game (as with the predecessors):
"You will see some icons with numbers appear on the screen. They indicate the positions of special enemies - the commanders - who are able to call in reinforcements. You should always prioritize these targets (preferably take them down quietly) first to avoid troubles."

This game is about killing nazis. Why would you want fewer of them? 

-----

Also: I hate "jumping games" where your jumping has to be perfectly timed/aimed/something in order to get around. You try to do that with wireless kbd/mouse...yeah, not so much.

I'd be more or less ok doing such jumping IRL, if I was, you know, 25 years old still (but I'm nowhere near)

European Economies and Economics

(cutting to the chase:) apparently it DOES take an Advanced Degree (tm).

Stardate: May 2018

A few years back Greece was having a real serious economic problem. Spending was out of control, government revenues were inadequate for debt service, yadda yadda. Heard it before.

All true, but not new. And still there.

The real issue was NOT that spending was out of control, but rather than federal tax revenues were inadequate to pay for services spending and debt was increasing to cover the gap.

Why were tax revenues inadequate? Why was spending so high?

Well, the spending was NOT so high. The revenues were short, for sure.

Why inadequate tax revenues? That is the real problem and question.

Citizens weren't lazy bums (altho others elsewhere certainly said so).

The problem is this: the gray-market economy is as large as the "real economy" (the reported economy). They don't trust the national government to be/do the right thing, to be honest and not corrupt, so the Greeks treat tax-evasion as a national pastime.

First off, what's gray market economy? ("black market" is illegal/stolen goods sold; white market is the regular market we participate openly, and is reported openly.)

Gray market economy is unreported financial transactions. Transactions that are handled as swaps, or all cash, un-reported as taxable income. You hire someone to cut your lawn, pay them in cash, they don't list that as taxable income anywhere, no one knows about it.

There is gray-market activity like this everywhere. You, as person hiring a lawn-cutter, do not know that the employee here is not going to report the income. You pay in cash, it's untraceable.

So of course no one knows the size of the gray market--it's not reported so it can't be measured. The *estimate* I've seen is that Greece's gray market is the same size as its white market. So if the gray market all moved to white, the tax revenues would be sufficient to meet national spending needs.

Everyone was worried about Greece at the time, but Greece is tiny. Problem not solved, apparently, but not in the news. GDP/debt ratio is bad.

-----

So that same problem exists in Italy now. Same origin, same reasons, same issues. You read about the problems here and there, will Italy remain in the EU? Can it? No one talks about the source issue. They talk about the Euro, as though unified currency is the problem, versus being able to devalue their own currency in the market. (Well, that might help, for a little while, but it's a terrible idea.)

The fundamental problem goes unspoken. Basically: the citizens are crooks. Well, that sounds harsh: they are tax cheats; they all know it. If you confronted one of them, you'd get an earful. Is/was the same in Greece.

The pure-cash/barter economy allows a lot of tax cheating.

I can't do it in my business, I need the proper openness of white market. But I see plenty of gray market around me. Participants drive around with snakes on their plates.

Italy's economy is 10X bigger than Greece. Had Greece folded, there'd have been much hand-wringing and teeth-gnashing, but the fallout would have been pretty small. Italy has a problem? That's going to be a bigger splash.

-----

This is a flaw in the economic models you hear about: why Alan Greenspan's view of economics was inadequate: the black and gray markets are things they can't think about, and are bigger than they imagine. When half the annual economic activity is unreported gray market, well, the white market has problems. The government cannot pay its bills.

And it's not like gov officials there don't know about it. The problem is that EVERYONE participates.

No, I don't know how to fix this. Well, get rid of cash. All transactions are electronic/online, therefore traceable. Otoh, that pushes people towards crypto-currency, which I'm not convinced is safe/secure.

-----

Later: this gray-market activity is also knows as "underground economy". All off-books, no-taxes-paid.

New Thinking in AI

I found this interesting:

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/05/machine-learning-is-stuck-on-asking-why/560675/

(For those not knowing/remembering, he's also the father of Daniel Pearl, journalist who was kidnapped and murdered in Pakistan)

He invented a really good technique back in the 80s. We used it on the project I worked on 86-90. It's a good statistical basis for probabilistic reasoning, called Bayes Network. It worked.

Now he's talking about the reality of cause and effect. This is a good thing, and working it out probably requires...yes, you guessed it...

An Advanced Degree (tm). Let's start the process.

(I don't disagree with him, per se, and certainly he's been thinking the right thing, but I think there's a logistical failure)

I was working this problem too, mid-80s, for an activity called "Failure Modes and Effects Analysis". or FMEA (often pronounced feema).

An FMEA for a system (and a simulator to do the actual analysis) would require you to exhaustively describe all the failure modes (i.e., "causes") at the level of detail you want (or more properly "can afford"), and the possible "effects" that would occur.

The problem is that it's really really hard to do this to the detail depth that would be adequate to produce a valuable result. You need a really serious model of parts. So it's really expensive to do, time-consuming, and generally skipped.

And it isn't the most obvious failures that you really want to understand, it's the weird ones, like how leaving a wrench in the wrong place inside a 60s space capsule leads to a fire that kills astronauts.

Pearl is thinking about a larger problem, wants cause/effect descriptions, and complains about what he calls "curve-fitting", which is more or less about finding a limited model that describes a dataset, and allows a little bit of prediction outside that dataset (I suspect, really only accurate for first-order behaviors). He poses a couple of questions as examples: "what if I had finished high school?"

Well, there's no possible way to answer that, except by use of statistics data that we already have, and of course you only get an averaged answer (which continues to be speculative): you probably would have earned more money in your life. If you want more detail than that, like "you would have gotten a scholarship for UMD, graduated and then found a cure for cancer when you were 43 years old", how large a model would it take to do that? How many assumptions about random events would you have to make?

If you're into AI enough to know the historical aspects, recall Doug Lenat's work on Cyc. Remember what that was? They were trying to produce a knowledge base of some sort that was really a massive ontology.

Ontologies are hard. REALLY hard. Mostly you fail, or acknowledge that incompleteness is unavoidable. Generally what I've found is that creators try to do WAY too much, it becomes unwieldy and misses the target. (Pretty sure that was a blog topic a while back, but if not: micro-ontologies are the only thing that can work ok.) Remember SUMO? You can't put enough into it to make it usable without making it unusable.

So how will humans do what Pearl says, when we haven't already done it? I grant you, computers are bigger/better/faster/etc than Lenat had access to 30 years ago, but that probably just makes it possible to get too big sooner.

Back to the FMEA thing: although I was making an attempt at it, I was almost for sure going to fail because the amount of detail necessary to succeed wasn't going to be creatable. Why? Because it's not the obvious failures that you need to find, it's the really weird ones. And I was working in Lisp, where you work with symbols rather than numbers, so you can't run into the computational exhaustion of too many numbers. FMEA is pretty much never done because of the cost, and while a computerized version would be some faster, it'd be hard to create--the real benefit would of course come from being able to reuse component models, but you casually lead yourself astray by eventually thinking those component models are complete.

In any case, I applaud Pearl's thinking, but...problem still untractable.

Why? The simplest way to simulate the universe would be to build it.

Working with Ubiquiti wireless devices

Because of some other activities, been working with Ubiquiti (http://www.ubnt.com/) wireless devices.

Ubiquiti has an interestingly large range of devices. Would not pretend to understand them all just yet. If not an Advanced Degree(tm), you need advanced training and experience.

Had a heck of a time getting some things going. According to their documentation, you mostly just plug-n-play...or not.

Apparently it takes an Advanced Degree(tm) to figure this out.

The first problem is that the wireless connections are excruciatingly slow to operate. Spent hours wondering what the heck was going on. Finally I decided to attach to the wire--THAT works as you expect, and its properly fast. Problem is, that GUI doesn't quite do everything. There's no control for PoE.

The issues begin with the "airCube". The documentation says you can direct connect a PoE radio device to the PoE output on the Cube and power the radio device. Turns out this is not quite true--not at first--despite the documentation saying you can, incl the pictures.

AirCube appears to have PoE turned off by default, out of the box. You want to use it? Not so easy to do. Out of five units, they were inconsistent about PoE being on. Not sure what that means.

In addition, the AirCube does NOT respond to casual broadcast pings. I.e., if you try "ping X.X.X.255" it doesn't answer. If you try specific IPs (like X.X.X.22) it will if you hit the right one...?

How to do it: You need to use UNMS, or you need to use the your phone. In those GUIs, you can get to the control to turn on PoE. You can get to a management web-page on the device if you connect via the wire, but you CANNOT turn PoE on this way (post-firmware-update: that might have changed).

Or you need to guess the IP. Could get this via "nmap" (unix thing). Even so, changing PoE isn't on the service webpage.

Or maybe you run Wireshark and it tells you. Wireshark will pick up all traffic on the wire it's on, and show you all active IPs. A fully passive IP wouldn't be seen until it does something specific.

On top of all this, I don't think the units are consistent about what they are doing.

Once you have the device detected in UNMS, you can get it to do the firmware upgrade, that puts some new controls in front of you, one of which will be "turn on PoE". I did not, at this point, go look at the direct web-page to find a PoE button.

-----

The NanoBeams are far simpler to get going, they do the obvious thing with a known-in-advance IP address (.1.20). Wire straight to them, set to DHCP, reboot, they are on your regular network, can then config via webpage (altho you still have to track down the dhcp ip addr).

Will be back to this in a few days, make it more coherent, etc.

-----

And apparently if you use 'ssh' to get into the device, there are still more settings you can work with. They run a micro-linux. Amazing.

HP Printers, LJ2300 in particular

I've been using Hewlett Packard electronics since 1976.

Never really had any trouble with them (except maybe RPN, way too weird).

Have an LJ6 here at home, still works fine, on USB. Seldom used now.

Replaced that with an LJ 2300 ~10 years ago. That works nicely, have probably printed 20K pages on it. Still in regular use.

Bought a second 2300 to have at work.

I also have a 9055 around, for 11x17 work. Very nice.

The 2300 has parallel (yeah, it's that old), USB, and can take an ethernet plug-in card.

The 2300 is really harsh on those ethernet cards. I haven't figured out why. I've had to replace the ethernet card in the first one about once a year since I got it. Fortunately they are available easily on EBay.

New one: I've had it only a few weeks, it came with a DOA ethernet card, I put one in since I have spares for this reason, that worked ok, but it has since died and I put another one in this morning. This new one is working ok...not sure for how long, tho. (At some point later, that one quit too)

So: word to the wise: if you have a 2300 you already know about this...if you don't, well, be aware.

The 2300 is long-since out of production, you can only buy one used. I guess I don't recommend it necessarily. Probably better if you got a newer one with wifi; printers didn't come with wifi when I got it.

That said, if it's working it does a great job. USB works fine, too. I always have it on ethernet so I can casually network print to it from multiple machines.

-----

July: bought a four-pack of ethernet cards, and one RAM stick. Ethernet card #1 is working ok. RAM arriving in a few days. I don't remember putting memory into one of these printers before, that should be interesting. Apparently it has two slots for RAM; came with 48, am adding 32.

A Skyrim question for those in the know...or willing to test this

I was talking to another Skyrim player today, who asked if I had ever resurrected/re-animated a dragon.

No, I couldn't even imagine how such might be possible...right? You kill it, you take its soul immediately, no oppo to resurrect.

No, he says, there's a gap between the death and the soul capture where you might resurrect it. If your spell (and I guess your appropriate magic skill) is high enough, you can, he says.

I have not tried this? Any matching experience on this?

You do reach a point where you get to summon a dragon (Durnhevir or something like that). I haven't found it that useful.

Upgrading from XBOX ONE to XBOX ONE X

For unexpected reasons, I got to buy a new Xbox One X this month...i.e., it basically cost me nothing. Otherwise I probably would not have.

So Microsoft wised up re XBOX ONE the past few years, with several things:

1) you can finally attach an external disk and install games onto it, so that you aren't space-limited to the internal drive it came with that cannot be upgraded. So there's also disk-management tools in the XBOX OS now, to format, transfer, and delete games. Yay! I did not know this, but it was a long time coming, given that the One had 3 USB ports.

2) somewhere 2-3 years ago the finally released a 360 emulator, so that you could continue to play your 360 games. Well, some of them, anyway...after saying for some time that there would never even be such an emulator, all of a sudden there was. Yay! Fallout 3/FNV come back. Oblivion does not.

3) with the release of the One X, now there's built-in help for new owners to be able to upgrade from old box to new one. This would be me.

Unfortunately, it's not as smooth as it should be.

It should not take an Advanced Degree to figure this out. But it almost did...

But you have a bunch of things you need to do.

1) Update the entirety of the Xbox One. If you're me, this could be a problem--it requires a real no-data-cap internet service, which is not what I have. So I didn't even BUY the X until I could time it with a visit to mom's house where she DOES have such a thing. It still took several hours. First I updated the OS on the One, then all the games that wanted it. (Mom's internet speed is decent but not extra fast.)

1A) Make sure that while you are online at this point, that you launch every game that has saves, so that all those saves are synchronized to the Xbox cloud. If you don't, those saves are going away.

2) You copy the "personal profile" (aka login & prefs) from the One, onto an external hard drive. This takes maybe a minute or so total, incl power up/down. There's a size minimum on external drives, so you can't do this with a thumb drive (which is stupid, since your profile is tiny).

3) Attach that external to the One X. Start the One X. It will copy your profile from the external disk. There will be some login monkeying around, some prompting about little things, but you will quickly have a profile on a new, but empty, machine.

4) You need to have the One X update itself. This turned out to only be 800 MegaBytes for me, so reasonably fast.

5) OK, not a step, per se, but it was nearly 10 pm by this point, so time to go home.

6) Next day--power up the One. You have to find where you can tell it "allow game transfer" in Settings. The reason you want to do this is that you want to copy all the games from the One to the X, over ethernet. This should be fastest. You have to be online to do this. You could also pop that external disk back on the One, copy all the games to the external, move that external to the X, and transfer them off the external; I didn't try this. 

7) Power up the X. Also online. Go to Settings/Network something, where it will say "Transfer", and let you see the One. Clock on the One icon, and you will get the list of games that can be transferred. Click all you want, then Go.

8) Wait until done. My two machines ran that at about 300 megabits/second the entire time, but it did still take a while, because we are talking about 275 megabytes. I guess I thought the Xbox ethernet would be gigabit like every other machine I have, but maybe not.

9) Power down the One. Unplug it completely.

10) Restart the X. Somewhere along here it is going to ask you about changing your home machine to the new one. This will log you out of the One, which is fine, because I'm going to wipe it and sell it anyway.

11) Try things out. Every single one you transferred. Because some of this won't go properly. Be online for this, so that it recovers all those game saves you did in step 1A.

12) I lost my game saves for FNV. Granted, that's a 360 game, I've no idea how those work internally. But my FNV saves are gone. The game does start up ok. But there are zero saves. I don't know if the Dishonored 1/2 saves are there or not, but not important: if I touch that again, it will be to start over. Grow Up seemed ok. Just need Skyrim and Fallout 4 to work. Wolfensteins aren't here yet. Diablo 3 looked ok--did I test if far enough?

13) Oh crud. Fallout 4 wants to do ANOTHER UPDATE, 17 GB this time. Ouch. I can't do that. Skyrim wants to do a 7 GB update; small enough that I let that go, but it does mean data will be a little tight the rest of the month. F4 is not getting that update yet.

14) Try out other games. Mostly that worked, I didn't try everything, but you need to, to be sure that all online sync gets done ok.

15) Bad discovery: my Skyrim game saves won't load. Apparently they are not portable, somehow. I can see them, incl the little screen-capture for each one, but if I choose one, it starts to load, then the screen goes black and stays there. If I press the "Home" button, I get a seg-fault crash that is so hard that the machine powers down--and I don't see any of it: screen stays black until the power light goes off. Wow. This equals a loss of, um, how many hours was it? "a lot" comes to mind.

Update: that crash is so hard that the controller won't restart the device. You have to hand-push the power switch on the front of the X.

16) Tried "New Game" in Skyrim. That works fine, but I really didn't want to be throwing away the old character. No idea what is going on.

17) I wonder if the Fallout 4 saves are broken too...I'd be ok with starting over there

18) Try loading Oblivion. The box says "Xbox One and 360" but no, it won't even allow the attempt. Power up the One--same deal. Not going to be doing that...I was willing to keep the One around for Oblivion, but no need.

19) Fire up the One and wipe it clean (well, except for the two Assassin's Creed games that came with it).

20) EBay. 

Whew. Harder than it should have been.

Upgrading a Mac is simpler than this. You do it entirely over the wire--just did it last week. Coupla mouse clicks and that's it.

This is probably the first time MS has actually done this, really. I don't know what Windows 10 does for changes/upgrades...I recall it being nothing for Win 7, when you are changing machines.

-----

Update: I have just gotten actually high-speed internet at work yesterday morning.

So I did all the updates on X 1 X. All good. Forgot about checking the F4 game saves, will do that tomorrow.

Because it was the HS stuff finally, I went to the Xbox store and bought Oblivion. Was reading about it the day before, apparently it's gotten a fresh re-release with some kind of "Enhanced for X1X" activity. It's not new 4K textures, but it's something in that direction. I tested it on a 4K tv, and by golly it looks better than HD. Very impressive. Just couldn't install from the DVD.

Oblivion is of course still a 360 game, but there it is...4K. Yeah! The key things to remember is to boost sneak before leaving the training area, and do a custom character class so that the major skills are the ones you are going to use the most.

How to get your sounds into High Sierra for custom use

I have had a custom "new mail" sound for years and years.

A new machine arrived recently...well, ok, new to me. I have a 2011 IMac 27 inch. Same screen as I had at old job 5 yrs ago. Very nice. Very inexpensive, $650. Has High Sierra already.

So can I use my custom sound(s)? No, apparently not. Or not anything like the same way. Used to be that you could start Mail, go to Prefs, click the little menu for New Message Sound, there would be the standard list, and also a choice to add something to the list. So I had used that "add something" previously.

High Sierra: No such animal.

Finding the correctly explained solution was harder than it should have been, but the solution itself is pretty easy.

You have to have a sound file. It has to be ".aiff format". A tool like Audacity (free) will do the conversion for you, where ITunes will not. (Did it used to? Could swear that was once a possibility...)

You have to move that file into ~/Library/Sounds.

You can do this via Finder, with "Go To Folder" (aka "command-shift-G"), and enter ~/Library/.

You will then see the list of everything in Library. This folder used to be visible for you all the time, now it is not. This is Apple locking down things so you don't shoot yourself in the foot.

Find the Sounds folder, double click on it. Now drag your .aiff sound file in there.

Quit and restart Mail. Open Prefs. Click on the New Message Sound menu. Viola! Your sound is at the bottom of the list. Hooray!

I think this same approach is true for Sierra, and probably going backwards a while, altho previously you could also use the "add something" choice.

So I now have my new-mail sound back working again. And maybe I'll do some others now too.

----

Ringtones are a different beast, but a similar process.

Skyrim interesting discovery...

Small, but interesting. Learned this from a friend.

If you have the Solstheim expansion, there's a location called Kohlbjorn Barrow a short distance SE of the dock you land at. There's guy there who needs help because draugr keep killing his archaeological dig crew.

It takes several rounds of dungeon delving to get this all resolved, but at the end is a "Black Book" in a greenish room on a pedestal in the center. You read the book, you are transported to wherever (Hermaeus Somebody's realm), you have to do a quick run to the far end, where there's another book you want to read. The Black Books have some options for a "power" that you can choose. Here you want to pick "Secrets of Arcana".

Why? The power is that once a day you get a 30-second window in which you can cast a spell and it costs zero Magicka.

Not actually that useful, unless you have a super-expensive spell you want to cast.

OR...

you can cast a spell that is a continuous spell rather than a point spell. i.e., a point spell is like Fireball and a continuous spell is like "Flames" where you hold down the key until the opponents are all dead or  you are.

OK, that's not actually useful here. What IS useful: there are a few, and only a few, spells that do not require actual targets in order for you to get skill point boost. Those spells include Telekinesis, Detect Life, Detect [Un]Dead. You just hold the "hit" key/button down and away they go. So with Secrets of Arcana, you can launch that power, then select Detect Life somewhere there are plenty of people (like Whiterun town square, or maybe Riften), and cast the spell. Keep holding down the cast button/key, and if there are plenty of Live or Dead things, Alteration will race to 100 pretty quick. (Later: I was hoping I could use "Clairvoyance" to boost Illusion, but no go; the spell has to have an actual target to act upon in any category to do any boosting. Detect Life doesn't have a "selected" target, just bodies in detection range.)

I did this by finding a skeleton that wouldn't see and therefore not attack me, telling my companion to go somewhere else and wait, then launching spell as above. I held it down for a bit, then I went and got a fat rubber-band to do that holding for me. Went from level 32 to level 90 on the rubber band.

Remember that I'm on an Xbox One here, so the controller is possible to do this way. Friend came back and said I could get Detect Life from Tolfdir so I did that...then I could go to Whiterun and do it again. I think that from 32-90 took about two hours on Detect Dead with just the one skeleton, but going from 90-100 on Detect Life took about 5 minutes because Whiterun town square has so many folks walking around.

The speed of level-up on these skills is based on how many creatures are in range. Same deal with Sneak--more people walking around nearby, the faster your sneak skill goes up. I suspect you could go from 30 to 100 in Alteration in 15 minutes, with those first ones going by ridiculous fast. Didn't occur to me to measure it, so I don't know.

The only flaw in here is that you will probably gain 4 overall levels at the same time, and you can't pause in the middle to go find someone to buy training from, so you lose that oppo.

You appear to only be able to do this in Alteration (grabbing and holding a something with TK works just as well, and you can do that anywhere), and Illusion, all the other spells/categories require targets of some kind and aren't continuous or they have "ends", like healing.

Same friend suggested that perhaps for Restoration if you could use Greater Ward in conjunction with one of those soul-gem-based lasers you occasionally find, if the laser is less powerful than the Ward that you could do Restoration too. But that requires finding a really weak one of those lasers, and I haven't seen one in quite a while...I tried this, with Steadfast Ward which is not strong enough, and when it has shield failure which is almost instantly you have to recast, which doesn't work with Arcana.

If you know of another spell this works with I'd like to find out.

----------------------------------

Later: OK, there's another way. You can boost Restoration interestingly to the top, and it doesn't involve the Solstheim thing above.

I'm sure there are some variations on this that will work.

Find the "Atronach Stone" and accept the blessing. This blessing is that magical attacks on you convert 50% of damage back into magicka. Then you want to find one of those bird-beak things that shoots fire continuously and stand in front of it. Note that I do NOT mean the soul-gem based things.

Now you are taking damage and gaining Magicka. You probably want to wear some enchanted armor pieces that do magic damage reduction, and maybe boost your magicka regeneration. Then, on top of all that, you want to choose "Healing" as your active spell and run it continuously. Healing takes a target, i.e., *you*, which means it works for skill-leveling. You want your magicka regen to be more or less the same rate as Healing uses it up, 8 pts/sec, and you want the actual fire damage to be about 8/second, so that these things balance. A little more complicated, but you can then run Restoration to 100. You might need to step out of the flame for a bit to heal full up on occasion, so it's not as easy as Alteration was. And you can do it without having to drink potions.

Watched someone do this for a couple minutes. Again here you'd want to stop when your character levels up so that you can go buy 5 training levels.

There's another blessing of Atronach you can get, worth about 20% attack=>recover_magicka that might help.

+++++

So these things are of course a little bit game-destabilizing, when you combine them with the rollover you can do by claiming "Legendary" on, say, Alteration, resetting it back to 15, letting you take those skill points and apply them elsewhere, run the Detect Life routine again, all the way to 100, declare Legendary again, etc. If you have the $, you could train up along the way, etc.

Or at least train things that aren't, all the way to 50. That's reasonably inexpensive; after 50, the price is quadruple, so you probably don't have that much cash.

-------------------------------

A generically similar approach can be taken with Blocking, and Light/Heavy Armor. You want to let a rat bite on you, but not really take health damage. Rat continues to attack, you cast heal. I found that holding a shield in left hand and Healing in the right did well. Block can be run to 100; again, you want to stop for training oppos. But if you did this with the Atronach/Heal-Self combo, you could stand there forever letting the rat work on you until Light and Heavy Armor are at 100, Block is at 100...

--------------------------

Back in Oblivion, you could run Sneak to 100 without even leaving the initial training area, same basic deal. There's that point where you are told to sneak behind that goblin. Turns out there's a location opposite where you enter his room where you can aim yourself at the wall, lean on the move-forward key, and go AFK. If you selected Sneak as a Major skill, you can level your character up to 10 after a while; this will actually take several hours, but does not involve any danger for you, the goblin will NOT look backwards. The only trick is getting yourself aimed properly, and then managing the 25/50/75 perk points.

You couldn't really do the rat-bite routine, because getting attacked damaged your armor, too, which meant you needed repair hammers or spare armor. I can't recall if you could do repairs while in combat...

Also possible: On the Xbox (finally!) that sneak boost above can be done unaided, you can put a rubber band on the the controller and walk away.

Facebook

A separate project has forced me onto Facebook.

What a piece of garbage software.

I'm trying to find the marketplace, in order to buy a small amount of office furniture. I'm kinda wanting to be able to use it like Craigslist, but I can't even find the start page for Marketplace.

Someone sent me a link to a Marketplace item, I was able to look at that. And I can do a search from there. And I get returns that look a lot like Craigslist. But I can't click on any of those returns to look t the item--brand-new search results and I get told "item not available"--every time.

Garbage.

The Health Care business

This is an enormously complex problem, overall.

My experience is not extensive, but I have had to use several "providers" over the last 40 years.

Kaiser Permanente was superior. Also, the most expensive. KP is the most computerized HC provider that I am aware of. This means that their knowledge and planning and efficiency is highest, and that they can be proactive about various things, like telling you when it's time to do this or that (just like the Ford dealer sends you an email when it's approx time for an oil change).

The rest of the industry seems a lot less data-efficient. There's no good reason for that, other than lack of willingness to spend the money to be better, and a fear on the part of some employees that computerization will put them out of a job. That is of course, true, but is like a buggy-whip manufacturer in 1910 saying "automobiles will never replace horses" -- yet here we are.

So today I have read an announcement that Warren Buffet (of Berkshire-Hathaway fame), Jeff Bezos (creator of Amazon), and a guy from J P Morgan Chase (CEO?) will team to create a brand-new Health-Care service to tackle the US HC-provider cost issue.

This is great.

I have no idea who the JPM guy is, and let's not pretend that the banking/financial industry in the US has a good reputation (the seemingly endless parade of scandals based on the industry being greedy goes back as far as you can read).

But we know who Warren Buffet is, perhaps the epitome of good guy who is really wealthy.

Jeff Bezos is the guy who is revolutionizing the retail industry. Amazon is the business to be afraid of if you are in retail sales--aka brick-n-mortar stores. He bought Whole Foods last year, and while we haven't seen "organic food delivered by quad-copter drones" yet, we will.

So this combination is really interesting: you won't go to CVS for prescriptions, NewCO-HC will delivery them via drone. Well, KP sent me pills in the mail, so this isn't too far-fetched at all. The only reason to use CVS is when you get a prescription and need the pills immediately. KP had its own pharmacy in-house, so you could see a doc and then go downstairs for the pills. Refills I always got in the mail.

The initial story on this is that the service will be for their employees, but of course 20 years ago Amazon only sold books.

This will be interesting.

A little political humor

Stable genius:

On the left...

Stable genius?

It ain't this guy:

The Very Model

Advanced Sci Fi and TV

Watched new X Files last night. Hadn't really planned to, but there it is.

Just as crazy as before…hope this time it will move the main plot a little faster. I lost interest last time around, and missed a few things like "CSM" being Mulder's dad. Scully/Mulder shoulda killed him years ago. But no, everyone is back, and in classic form, no one can be trusted.

But one thing that got mentioned, in passing, clearly as an aside to the SciFi fans, was "Dyson Sphere".

Read about it here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere

A clever idea, and probably sort of true, but in no way practical. "W" article talks about some of this.

Eventually it says "probably not enough material in the solar system to actually create such a thing" Nor is the material we have actually innately strong enough.

Why not? It'd have to rotate to have "gravity", there'd be coriolis tension and compression and shear, drift around the star…

Imagine a large balloon enclosing a baseball, both perfectly spherical. How thick, how much reinforcement/bracing, and other clever crazy stuff would we have to have so that it didn't disintegrate…

Where would enough atmosphere come from to "fill it" let's say 10 miles thick? Oh, no, you wouldn't do that at all. You'd make a flat layer whose inside surface is glass, and the air is trapped between that and the outer layer, so that you stand inside the outer layer and are looking up through the glass inner layer; maybe it's 20 feet thick. Well, there's plenty of sun, then, and the air is contained. Lots less air needed. Still…a lot of air. I don't think we have enough. We'd have to mine air from…um…we'd have to make it.

A test case, avoiding any thought of the coriolis aspects:

The earth is 8000 miles diameter. Let us imagine it is solid iron. How thick an outer surface do we need? Other aspects will determine that, but let's say it's one inch.

The Dyson radius always used is 1 AU, or 93 million miles. You probably wouldn't actually build it that distance, but for convenience we'll say 100 million.

The surface of the sphere is 1.7E26 square inches. 

Earth = 8000 miles sphere of iron = 268082573106 cubic miles = 7.5 E18 cubic feet = 6.8E25 cubic inches. A little short. 

But only a little. That's interesting, and less damning than I thought. 

We could only build 1/2 inch thick shell. We probably really need more like a foot thick, but we aren't making tall buildings, no point; that, and they'd be unsafe to create. And the sphere would be one billion times more square miles than the entire surface of the earth, of which we currently use very little. We'd still be all bunched together because of the need for fresh water. We'd end up distilling the entirety of the oceans into fresh water. And managing the location...that'd be weird because we couldn't build oceans (the "depth" would create other impossible tension stress forces that would be totally destructive: a half-inch-thick shell couldn't "handle the weight".

Huh. Not so bad as I thought. 

Of course, it'd be vulnerable to things from the outside.  Earth's atmosphere prevents the surface from looking like the Moon, but the outside of a sphere would have no equivalent thing--there would have to be huge team of people and "somethings" whose job was to continually deal with attacks. We'd have to clear the stellar vicinity and the Oort cloud. 

There are a variety of smaller/simpler things also discussed, where we don't actually build a full sphere, but rather a close-in constellation of power collectors. Similar vulnerabilities, of course, but no catastrophic failures likely.

The "W" article give a brief mention to "Niven Ring" which is of course Ringworld. It's a 1AU strip around a star. Much more doable, not that wide and not subject to coriolis shear forces. It rotated, so it has gravity. There's no "roof" so you could fly up/out. Still vulnerable: remember how Ringworld had a "mountain" in one place where a large asteroid had punched through from the back?

We still aren't doing it, tho. The engineering of such a thing is beyond us. The materials are beyond us. Maybe carbon nanotubes would be the thing.