Random Thoughts XII - Floccinaucinihilipilification

[EgonSpengler]

I think cricket is a perfect game for the radio, it lasting five days and usually ending with a draw. I could see it working for your rounders variant.

Boy, you make that sound gripping.

 

[choxorn]

I was looking at some players' WAR numbers, and I noticed that "offensive WAR" and "defensive WAR" don't add up to WAR. So I guess I just don't know WTH is going on.

They have positional adjustments (a good-hitting shortstop is more valuable than an equally-good-hitting first baseman), and baseball reference (I assume that's the WAR version you're referring to) includes the adjustment exactly once in all three of those stats, so it's:

oWAR: offensive value + positional adjustment
dWAR: defensive value + positional adjustment
WAR: total value + positional adjustment

If you add oWAR and dWAR together you double-count the positional adjustment.

 

[EgonSpengler]

If you add oWAR and dWAR together you double-count the positional adjustment.

Ah, okay. That makes sense.

 

[EgonSpengler]

Listening to my local news radio station, they frequently play clips of thematically-related songs before or after segments. After talking about St. Patricks Day, they played "Sunday Bloody Sunday" by U2. Is that really the best song for a day meant to celebrate Ireland? Does the person who selected that song knows what it's about?


EDIT: Oh, okay. He's talking about the evolving Irish identity, and comparing it to the conflict between Ukraine and Russia. In that context, I suppose The Troubles are pertinent, maybe even essential.

 

[Kyriakos]

I think there's never a good reason to play U2

 

[Samson]

Listening to my local news radio station, they frequently play clips of thematically-related songs before or after segments. After talking about St. Patricks Day, they played "Sunday Bloody Sunday" by U2. Is that really the best song for a day meant to celebrate Ireland? Does the person who selected that song knows what it's about?

There has been a bit of news about it recently, with the UK gov dropping all chance of charges about the killings, so it could be that he knows exactly what he is doing.

 

[MaryKB]

Yeah, I mean isn't the song about a British atrocity against the Irish?

 

[EgonSpengler]

I think there's never a good reason to play U2

I like U2. Mostly.

There has been a bit of news about it recently, with the UK gov dropping all chance of charges about the killings, so it could be that he knows exactly what he is doing.

That's true, it could have been a 'pointed' choice.

 

[EgonSpengler]

Listening to my local news radio station, they frequently play clips of thematically-related songs before or after segments. After talking about St. Patricks Day, they played "Sunday Bloody Sunday" by U2. Is that really the best song for a day meant to celebrate Ireland? Does the person who selected that song knows what it's about?


EDIT: Oh, okay. He's talking about the evolving Irish identity, and comparing it to the conflict between Ukraine and Russia. In that context, I suppose The Troubles are pertinent, maybe even essential.

"He" in this case was Fintan O'Toole, with The Irish Times. I've never heard of him before, but he wrote a book titled We Don't Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland.

 

[Birdjaguar]

WEEKEND CONFIDENTIAL | EMILY BOBROW

Jane McGonigal:A futurist is creating games to prepare the world for new challenges.

In 2008, game designer and futurist Jane McGonigal led Superstruct, an immersive online game simulating a pandemic. Nearly 10,000 players from all over the world strategized about how to cope with a global outbreak of a respiratory virus, accompanied by supply chain disruptions and bad actors spreading misinformation and discord on social media. The game’s premonitions were so astute that in early 2020, many players told Ms. McGonigal they felt strangely calm and ready to face the cascade of crises that began with the first cases of Covid-19.

“Simulation participants kept telling me, in their own ways, that pre-feeling the future helped them pre-process the anxiety, the overwhelming uncertainty, and the sense of helplessness, so they could move faster to adapt and act resiliently when the future actually arrived,” Ms. McGonigal writes in her new book, “Imaginable,” which will be published next week. At a time when news stories regularly use the words “unimaginable” or “unthinkable” to describe our moment, she hopes her book’s “futures-thinking tools” will help readers feel less blindsided by what might be coming next.

“Nobody wants to white-knuckle our way into the future in a state of perpetual anxiety and dread,” Ms. McGonigal, 44, says over video from her Bay Area home, which she shares with her husband, Kiyash Monsef, and their twin daughters. “Games are psychological safe spaces where we can encounter crises before they arise.” As director of game research and development at the Institute for the Future, a nonprofit think tank in Palo Alto, Calif., she has recently created games simulating dire developments like a cryptocurrency collapse or the mass migration of over a billion people owing to climate change. By dramatizing potential challenges, she aims to inspire people to feel not only more prepared for the future but also better motivated to shape it. She quotes the computer scientist Alan Kay: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”

Ms. McGonigal has always been fascinated by games. The daughter of two public-school teachers in Moorestown, N.J., she began programming games on the family’s Commodore 64 when she was in elementary school and built a life-size board game in the basement. “I was always turning things into a game,” she says.

In fifth grade she began playing Activision’s Tass Times in Tonetown, an obscure “text adventure” computer game that she solved only after graduating from high school, in collaboration with a couple of friends. This “absolutely pivotal” experience helped guide her insights into how games can linger in the brain, bring different people together—“ I was a nerd, they were popular”—and teach things like grit and resilience. “The signature emotion we see in gamers is they believe that if they try again that they will improve,” she says.

Ms. McGonigal remained an avid gamer while studying English and media studies at Fordham University. She often played single-player adventure games with boyfriends, which she says was a great test of a relationship. “When you’re spending weeks or months controlling one character together, can you share your power? Can you make decisions together? How frustrated do you get when the game isn’t going well?”

After graduating in 1999 and dabbling in New York theater, Ms. McGonigal headed to the University of California, Berkeley, to study the relationship between science and artistic performance. But she got sidetracked when she noticed that gamers were starting to think about how they might apply their skills to real-world problems. “I wasn’t sure if this was a delusional idea,” she admits. But she was fascinated by the potential to harness a “natural human desire to do something that matters” to the kind of teamwork, flexibility and creative thinking typical of multi-player role-playing games like World of Warcraft.

When Ms. McGonigal decided to switch her academic focus to gaming, her adviser told her that the field didn’t yet exist. Undaunted, she crafted her own syllabus, joined a computer science lab and an art-practice program, and began creating online games that toyed with alternate realities. She earned her Ph.D. in 2006, designed some games professionally and was recruited by the Institute for the Future, which saw value in her theories about gaming. “The people who are good at futurist thinking are those who are trying to pull the future they want into the present,” she explains. Game Studies is now an academic discipline at universities across the country.

For the past 15 years, Ms. McGonigal has been inventing games that teach futures-thinking skills and collect insights into how people may respond to various scenarios. Armed with data on how players handled quarantining in the Superstruct game, for example, she cautioned religious leaders and party planners to shift to virtual gatherings as early as February 2020. But while Ms. McGonigal is glad her games have yielded some actionable intelligence on human behavior, her real goal is to “give individual participants a transformative experience,” she ex- plains. “To me the result of a simulation is in the change in mind-set and readiness of players, the actions people start taking today.”

In her popular TED talks and bestselling books, Ms. McGonigal has long touted the value of gaming, virtual and otherwise. Frustrated by claims that videogames are responsible for everything from obesity to violence, she has made it her “personal mission” to highlight research that gamers are often more optimistic about challenges and resilient in the face of failure. She points to studies showing that the surge of videogame playing during the pandemic helped boost well-being by providing cognitive stimulation and opportunities to socialize while reducing anxiety and stress.

Ms. McGonigal personally learned the healing power of games after sustaining a serious concussion in 2009. To aid her recovery she created “Jane the Concussion Slayer,” a game that involved close family and friends assigning her real-life missions such as “walk a few steps more than yesterday.” The game’s “bad guys” were anything that could trigger symptoms, like bright lights and crowded spaces, and Ms. McGonigal could gain strength from “power ups” such as cuddling with her Shetland sheepdog for five minutes.

WINNI WINTERMEYER FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

She later adapted the game into SuperBetter, an app for people facing all kinds of challenges, from depression to chronic pain to unemployment. Ms. McGonigal says she hears regularly from people who say they feel stronger and more hopeful after playing the game, and a 2014 study found that it could play an important role in treating depression. “Building an evidence base for these wild ideas is important to me,” she says.

Yet she acknowledges that not all gameplay is equally helpful. She warns that gamers often experience harmful effects when they play more than 20 hours a week or use video-games as an escape from reality, rather than as a space to learn, grow and socialize. For her own twin 7-year-old daughters, she requires an hour of physical activity for every hour of videogames, though she doesn’t set limits on “creative screen time,” such as a game that involves writing and illustrating stories. She also regularly pushes them to try new games. “I want them to feel confident that through their own attention and effort they can get better at things they haven’t tried before,” she says.

Although Ms. McGonigal spends much of her time envisioning grim future scenarios, she calls herself an optimist. This is partly because she believes in the potential for scientific breakthroughs to prevent catastrophes. But it is also because she sees evidence throughout history that people can learn from mistakes and make wiser choices: “All you have to do is look back to see how humans are capable of changing the rules of society to play a better game.”

‘The signature emotion we see in gamers is they believe that if they try again they will improve.’

 

[Takhisis]

I'd rather not replay this one, in any case.

 

[MaryKB]

For Lent, I've decided to forgive my mother for a lifetime of abuse & neglect. I'm not forgetting how she's hurt me, and I'm not going to let her get away with things, but I've let the bitterness out of my heart. I'm feeling much more at peace.

I've been talking to her on the phone every day that Matt is working. On Friday I used Doordash to send them some McDonald's, and I thought they'd put a receipt on there with my name on it. Well they didn't. So my dad didn't know why they got this, and my mother said he went to all the neighbors asking if it was theirs, and even called McDonald's but they wouldn't give him the name of who ordered it. At least they did get the food, and I told them that if random food orders come by then they're probably from me.

 

[Snerk]

Why is it so much easier to get sad than happy? Seems like a silly featur but IDK

 

[Birdjaguar]

Why is it so much easier to get sad than happy? Seems like a silly featur but IDK

Because we don't get what we want more often than we do?

 

[Snerk]

Because we don't get what we want more often than we do?

But why do we want what we can't have?

 

[Takhisis]

I'll just use the catch-all answer: ‘human nature’.

 

[Snerk]

Stupid humans with our stupid nature

 

[Takhisis]

Damned humans, they ruined humanland!

 

[MaryKB]

Why is it so much easier to get sad than happy? Seems like a silly featur but IDK

Because you're too far away from me.

 

[Birdjaguar]

But why do we want what we can't have?

I think it is more "don't have" rather than "can't have". Part of our humanity is a giant hole in our psyche that longs to be filled and we do so with with all kinds of things including "stuff" and relationships. But the hole never stays filled to our liking so we keep looking. Long term relationships with people and tasks, both near and far, probably come closest to reducing the craving for more and new. More than likely @MaryKB is transferring her shopping love to things that cry out in the night and cling during the day. Her new sweaters will be in much smaller sizes.

The Buddhists point to the Four Noble truths and the Eightfold Path.