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The Schrödinger Sessions: Now Accepting Applications

drorzel — Fri, 06 Mar 2015 13:10:08 +0000

The Schrödinger Sessions: Now Accepting Applications

I've updated the detailed blog post describing our summer workshop introducing writers to quantum physics to include a link to the application form. For the benefit of those who read via RSS, though, and don't follow me on Twitter: the application form is now live, and will be for the next few weeks. We expect to make acceptance decisions around April 1.

So, if you make up stories and the idea of spending a few days at the Joint Quantum Institute learning about quantum physics from some of the world's leading experts sounds like fun, well, send us an application.

drorzel Fri, 03/06/2015 - 08:10

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Announcing the Schrödinger Sessions: Science for Science Fiction

drorzel — Tue, 03 Mar 2015 08:53:44 +0000

Announcing the Schrödinger Sessions: Science for Science Fiction

A few years back, I became aware of Mike Brotherton's Launch Pad Astronomy Workshop, and said "somebody should do this for quantum physics." At the time, I wasn't in a position to do that, but in the interim, the APS Outreach program launched the Public Outreach and Informing the Public Grant program, providing smallish grants for new public outreach efforts. So, because I apparently don't have enough on my plate as it is, I floated the idea with Steve Rolston at Maryland (my immediate supervisor when I was a grad student), who liked it, and we put together a proposal with their Director of Outreach, Emily Edwards. We didn't get funded last year, but the problems were easily fixed, and this year's proposal was funded. Woo-hoo!

So, we're very pleased to announce that this summer we'll be holding "The Schrödinger Sessions: Science for Science Fiction" a workshop at the Joint Quantum Institute (a combined initiative of the University of Maryland, College Park and NIST in Gaithersburg) to provide a three-day "crash course" in quantum physics for science fiction writers. The workshop will run from Thursday, July 30 through Saturday August 1, 2015, on the Maryland campus in College Park, with housing, breakfast, and lunch included. There's a fake schedule up on that web page, that we'll fill once we get JQI scientists signed up, but it gives the basic idea: three days of lectures and discussions with scientists, and visits to JQI's labs.

The web page is a little sketchy, because we were using a pre-existing template to speed things up, but that's why I have a blog: to provide much more information. Which we might as well do in semi-traditional Q&A format:

This sounds cool, but what does this have to do with public outreach? The idea is to bring in science fiction writers, and show them some of the latest and greatest in quantum physics, with the goal of inspiring and informing new stories using quantum ideas and quantum technology.

We know that science fiction stories reach and inspire their audience to learn more about science, and even make careers in science-- things like this astronaut's tribute to Leonard Nimoy are a dramatic reminder of the inspirational effect of science fiction. Our hope is that the writers who come to the workshop will learn new and amazing things to include in their fiction, and through that work, they'll reach a wider audience than we could hope to bring in person to JQI.

But why quantum physics? Well, because we think quantum physics is awesome. And because quantum physics is essential for all sorts of modern technology-- you can't have computers without Schrödinger cats, after all. And most of all because the sort of things they study at JQI-- quantum information, quantum teleportation, quantum computing-- could have a revolutionary impact on the technology of the future.

Isn't quantum too small and weird to make good stories, though? Hardly. Quantum physics has figured prominently in stories like Robert Charles Wilson's "Divided by Infinity", and Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life" (SPOILERS), and Hannu Rajaniemi just completed the trilogy that starts with The Quantum Thief, which you can tell from the title is full of quantum ideas.

The weirdness of quantum physics is a bit off-putting, but then that's the point of the workshop: to bring in writers to learn more about quantum physics, and see how it works in practice. The hope is that this will make writers who come to the workshop more comfortable with the subject, and thus more likely to write stories with a quantum component.

OK, but why Maryland? Well, because the Joint Quantum Institute is one of the world's leading centers for research in quantum mechanics and its applications. Just check out their collection of news stories about JQI research to get a sense of the range and impact of their work. If you want to see quantum physicists at work, it's one of the very best places in the world to go.

Yeah, but isn't the weather awful hot in July and August? Look, you can't have everything, OK?

OK, let's get to practical stuff. When you say "writers," you mean people who do short stories and novels? No, we're defining "writer" as broadly as we can. We'd love to have people who write for television, or movies, or video games, or online media. Really, anybody who makes up stories about stuff that hasn't really happened is welcome, regardless of the medium in which that work appears.

How many of these writers are you looking for? The budget in the proposal called for 15, though that depends a bit on how much money we need for food and housing; if more people than we expected are willing to share rooms, we might be able to take one or two more.

So there's going to be an application process? Yes. I mean, we'd love to have a huge number of people, but we have logistical constraints to deal with. We'll take applications online starting later this week (my other major task for today is to put together the application web form), continuing for a couple of weeks, and hope to make decisions around April 1, so attendees will have plenty of time to make travel plans.

Speaking of travel, what's included in this package? We plan to provide housing for attendees in the dorms on Maryland's campus, and breakfast, lunch, and coffee/snack breaks will be included. We left dinners open, in case people want to explore the DC area a little (great restaurants there, that's one of the things I miss from grad school...), but might look at doing one group dinner with a fun talk of some sort. The schedule is still being sorted out.

There is a possibility that a limited amount of funding might be available for travel support, but again, it depends on a bunch of other factors that affect the overall budget.

And what will the selection criteria be? Well, the ultimate goal of the workshop is public outreach, so we'll be trying to invite participant whose work will be able to reach as broad an audience as possible. That means we'll be looking for a mix of established and up-and-coming writers, and as much diversity as we can manage in terms of audience, subgenre, media, etc. I can't really be any more specific than that, though.

What if I'm busy on those days, or just can't afford it this year? Will this happen again? Can't you at least let us get through one of these before asking that?

If it goes well, we'd certainly be open to that possibility, but it'll depend on a lot of factors, mostly involving money, but also level of interest, success of the workshop, etc.

-----------

And that is the big news I've been sitting on for a while now. I'm pretty excited about this, and hope it will be a great program. If you know anybody who might be interested in this, please point them in our direction.

drorzel Tue, 03/03/2015 - 03:53

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When I read the title for this article I thought it meant "Scientists for Evolution."

But maybe that will be for another Schrodinger session.

This is pretty neat. Can you say anything about the optimal level of background knowledge a person should have for this? Like, is there a minimum level required to understand what's being taught and a maximum level beyond which you're not going to get much out of it?

Chad, this is great, and I'm happy to see it. Can I suggest something, though? Open it up explicitly to all fiction writers, not just science fiction writers. There's weirdness to do with definitions of "literary writing" and "science fiction" and all that, and people get testy sometimes about where the lines are and whether the lines exist or should exist at all. But science also shows up in (and belongs in) stuff generally described as not-SF. Anyway, if you can do that, I'll happily circulate/publicize around the Iowa/McSweeneysesque crowd.

Sure, I'll see if we can change that. I was thinking of it in the context of science fiction, because that's the community I'm most familiar with, and I was basing this on Brotherton's Launch Pad model. Science fiction has the most obvious and direct applicability, but I'd be happy to see applications from folks outside the normal genre pool. If you could circulate it, that'd be awesome.

I'm working on a SF series that plays with some Quantum Physics concepts extrapolated some ways into the future. I'm so synced to fill out an application for this!!!!

I live nearby, and I'm an aspiring SF writer though without any substantial credentials in writing yet. Is there any way I could 'audit' this, i.e. just show up and listen, without my using the lodging and food etc?

We did, in fact, include a "I don't need lodging" option in the application form, so go apply and check that. I can't say what the chances of getting in are until we get a sense of how many applicants we're going to have, though.

If it helps any, Greg Egan and his book "Quarantine" (I think) does a reasonable job with quantum concepts. I don't know how well it does -- I have only a semester of QM to judge it by -- but I've used it as a sort-of-guide to how not to sound ridiculous. Stephen Baxter is more cosmology and the like but he dos so too (and h was in fact a scientist).

And yes. I think this is great.

This is a great opportunity for science fiction writers.

Matthew Foster Ph.D.
quarkytrons.com

Quantum Optics: The Game

drorzel — Mon, 05 Jan 2015 09:19:24 +0000

Quantum Optics: The Game

Over on Facebook, my colleague Chris Chabris was talking up a smartphone game from a company he's associated with. Which of course got me thinking "Wait, why don't I have a smartphone game company?" (The Renaissance Weekend is also partly to blame, as I was one of about six people there who didn't have a start-up company of some sort...) Which, in turn, led to the realization that there really ought to be a quantum optics video game. Or maybe a series of games, because you could construct a whole bunch of puzzlers around quantum phenomena:

-- The most basic would be to do something like the mirrors-and-beamsplitters game Lazors, only bring in the wave nature. Have some targets that you need to illuminate, and others that can't see any light, and you have to arrange the position and relative phase of multiple light sources so that interference effects light the right ones and leave the others in the dark.

-- You could make a puzzle/strategy game about the adventures of the Elitzur-Vaidman Bomb Squad. You have some number of packages that may or may not contain light-sensitive bombs, and you need to identify the live bombs without setting them off. Which you do by placing them inside a Mach-Zehnder interferometer, or a pair of weakly coupled cavities, and exploiting the Quantum Zeno Effect. Of course, you can make the probability of success arbitrarily close to one by adjusting the mirror reflectivity appropriately and waiting a bit longer, but for game purposes, you could put a time limit on it, so you have to strategically decide which packages have the highest probability of being bombs, and allocate your measurement time appropriately.

-- Bell's theorem would let you make an "Are these entangled or not?" game: you get to make a series of measurements of the states of two particles, and have to choose the measurement bases appropriately to determine whether they're correlated in a non-local manner. Again, you can add a degree of difficulty by simulating imperfect detectors and restricting the total number of measurements.

-- Quantum cryptography would also seem to allow some game possibilities-- you can play either Alice or Bob as they try to generate secure keys, and determine whether Eve is listening in based on their bit error rates. Or you can play Eve, and run various attacks on Bob and Alice.

Really, the possibilities here are endless. If I didn't have this day job that requires me to, you know, teach classes and stuff, I'd be all over this. Also, I'd need some programming skill. That's kind of a problem, too...

Anyway, game designer types: Call me. If we play our cards right, we could turn these ideas into literally tens of dollars on the app stores...

drorzel Mon, 01/05/2015 - 04:19

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Last Week on ResearchBlogging.org

milhayser — Sun, 23 Mar 2014 18:14:42 +0000

Last Week on ResearchBlogging.org

For the first time, researchers have transformed induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) into specialized bladder cells. Meanwhile the development of iPSCs from normal cells has been shown to depend on two proteins necessary for the induction of a glycolytic state. In order to make iPSCs, researchers have previously needed to collect significant amounts of skin, bone marrow, or blood from a donor, but researchers have demonstrated a new method that requires only a single drop of blood. In the future, you may be able to prick your finger, send a drop of blood to the lab, and have them grow a new bladder for you.

Paleontologists digging in the Dakotas have discovered "a giant crested bird-like dinosaur that the experts liken variously to an outsized cassowary, or a 'chicken from hell.'" The new genus of oviraptorosaur was named Anzu after a Mesopotamian bird-demon.

By coating gallium nitride semiconductors with "a layer of phosphonic acid derivatives," researchers increased the brightness and longevity of LEDs without having to increase energy input.

Human appetite for conch snails has reduced the size of mature specimens by 2/3 in the last seven millennia.

A study of dioxin exposure via breast milk in Vietnam showed a correlation between levels of the chemical and development of autism in children.

Regardless of how long you spend playing, video games (especially those played with others) may help you relax after a long day at work.

Mexico now beats the U.S. as the most obese country in the world; they also drink the most Coca-Cola. With Coke expanding aggressively in developing nations, chronically undernourished people are faced with too much of a good thing.

Getting less sleep is associated with having less 'gray matter' in the brain, but researchers can't determine the direction of causality. In another study, autistic children demonstrated shorter sleep duration than control groups.

Among sex-changing fish, the largest females are known to replace dominant males in a pinch, but male-to-female transitions are much more rare. By studying a bunch of widowed male wrasses, researchers observed that the males would pair up with the next individual they encountered--whether male, female, or juvenile--and when two widowed males paired up, the smaller would become a female.

Baseline risk of ACL and other ligament injury may be genetically determined.

To accelerate word learning in young children, read them a story and then put them down for a nap.

Lithium-air batteries use the atmosphere as a cathode and could boost the range of electric vehicles to 300 miles or more.

Computational research has postulated the structure of electromagnetic knots that satisfy Maxwell's equations.

And finally, a study of stem cell therapy for Lou Gehrig's disease (or ALS) showed that the cells can be safely transplanted into the spinal cord and do not accelerate progression of the disease, providing a green light for further research.

milhayser Sun, 03/23/2014 - 14:14

The Sound of Simulated Bombs

drorzel — Thu, 13 Mar 2014 08:19:43 +0000

The Sound of Simulated Bombs

So, last week I idly wondered about the canonical falling-bomb whistle. The was originally intended to be a very short post just asking the question, but I got caught up in thinking about it, and it ended up being more substantial. And leaving room for further investigation in the form of, you guessed it, VPython simulations.

This one isn't terribly visual, so you don't get screen shots, just a link to the code at Gist. It's a simulation of a falling bomb, with air resistance, tracking the velocity as a function of time. Then it calculates a "Doppler shift" using the velocity as a fraction of the speed of sound for an observer standing on the point of impact, and another some distance away.

Putting this together required some guesstimated numbers, so I gave the bomb a mass of 1000kg, a radius of 30cm (which don't seem wildly unrealistic from this page about WWII munitions) and dropped it from a height of 6000 m (around 20,000 ft, which is a reasonable value for high-altitude WWII bombing; I'm using WWII as a reference point because the whistling-bomb noise dates back at least that far).

What I wanted to see was how significant the shift would be for somewhat realistic conditions, and whether this could make a sound like the canonical falling-bomb whistle, decreasing in pitch. Looking at the physics, as in the diagram above, it ought to-- the falling bomb starts out coming toward the observer, shifting up in pitch, but an observer off to the side should see the velocity become more tangential as it drops, eventually coming back to whatever the default whistle frequency is. The question I wasn't sure about is how significant this change in pitch could be.

So, what does the simulation show? Well, the primary output is this graph:

Doppler shift due to a 1000kg falling bomb with a 30cm radius.

There are three curves here. The black points show the shift as seen by an unlucky person at the impact point, and it increases through the whole fall. In the absence of air resistance, this would be a straight line, but with air resistance, there's a little bit of curvature. The red points are for an observer who starts out 6000m away (the same distance as the height the bomb drops from), and first increases in pitch, then decreases. The green points are for an observer 3000m away from the impact point, and the shift is more dramatic, because the bomb has a velocity toward them for longer than in the more distant case.

The shift here is fairly substantial, because the bomb is falling very fast. It also does exactly the sort of thing you expect from looking at the velocity components above: first goes up, then down. So, you could get a falling-bomb whistle with the canonical decreasing pitch provided you're standing off to the side of the impact point. The closer you get to the impact point, the more dramatic the shift, both in terms of amplitude and speed-- if you make the distance to the observer just 600m, the shift goes from 70% above the original pitch to zero in just six seconds (not plotted here).

Now, this obviously presumes a particular size and shape, and thus an effect of air resistance. So, if we change the size, what happens? I tried doubling the radius for the same mass, and you can see what that does here:

The Doppler shift of a falling bomb for two different sizes, showing the effect of air resistance.

A bigger radius means more air resistance, and thus a slower terminal speed (this almost reaches terminal speed), which in turn means that it takes longer to hit, and has a smaller peak shift. You still get the reversal in pitch, though.

The other question that came to mind back when I was thinking about this was whether the decreasing-pitch whistle was a result of imagining things from the perspective of the person dropping the bombs rather than the person being bombed. I've seen clips of bombs being dropped where they seem to whistle as they leave the plane, but that might've been a dubbed-in effect, for all I know.

Anyway, just for fun, I thought it would be interesting to compare the decreasing-pitch whistle of bombs observed from a safe distance to that of a bomb dropped directly from a plane, which led to this graph:

Doppler shift of a falling bomb during the decreasing-pitch phase compared to the shift heard by the person who dropped it.

The Doppler shift just depends on the velocity, which is initially increasing at a steady rate due to the acceleration of gravity, so we expect the points for the pilot's perspective to fall on a straight line, and they do. The others are decidedly non-linear, but again, we expect that, because it should go like the cosine of the angle to the line of sight.

So, does this accurately reproduce the falling-bomb whistle? I had hoped to make Mathematica reproduce the sound pattern here, but it's very picky about which users it's friends with, and life is just too short to keep wrestling with that program. We can turn to some eyewitness testimony, though, in the form of a comment that must have a good story behind it, left by Time Eisele:

I can vouch for the ‘descending whistle’ sound in the case of falling bowling balls, at least. From an estimated peak altitude of about 1500 feet, and standing approximately 1000 feet away from the ultimate impact point, the sequence goes:

- Whistle starts by getting gradually louder at a more or less constant pitch.

- In the last few seconds of the drop, the pitch drops noticeably, all the way down to the ground.

And, you know, that looks pretty much like what we see in this graph: a slow decrease from the peak at first, that rapidly speeds up toward the end of the drop. So, I think this works out nicely. I'd like to know why Tim was being bombarded with bowling balls, though...

drorzel Thu, 03/13/2014 - 04:19

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I assume you dropped with no initial lateral velocity (and no velocity for the pilot). For folks on the ground, that would average out in people's perceptions of the sound going up or down, but a pilot is always going to be flying away from the bomb, which isn't being propelled laterally after it's released.

Also, I wonder if we can make some estimate of the volume of the sound. It might be the case that the Doppler effect increase in frequency comes while the bomb is too far away to be audible. There's also the possibility that the falling bomb doesn't actually produce a sound until it's near terminal velocity - was there any resolution on the origin of the sound?

Well, you see, there were a bunch of us who had a bunch of bowling balls, and a heavy-walled pipe just a bit bigger than a bowling ball, and some gunpowder, and some wadding, and a remote igniter, and a vast expanse of uninhabited sand at an Undisclosed Location(tm), and so was born an event we like to call "Bowling for Altitude". So we dug a hole and buried the pipe so that the top end was just flush with the ground (both to hold it steady, and to stop any fragments in case of explosion), and angled just a few degrees *away* from where we planned to be standing. After a bit of practice we were getting "bang to thump" times of about 20 seconds or so, which, neglecting air resistance, comes to a peak altitude of around 1500 feet. I think the record hang time might have been as much as 30 seconds

The bowling ball has an interesting warble in the sound as it descends, probably because of the wind whistling in the fingerholes as the ball spins. It also made an odd crater that was about three feet across, but only an inch or so deep.

I can't help but think that if you're going to drop a metric ton on somebody, including explosives seems almost superfluous.

From your first figure it looks like the bomb was dropped from a balloon and not a fast flying airplane. Shouldn´t the bomb start with a horizontal speed of around 100 m/s if it falls from a WWII bomber?

@Grant Goodyear Only if you actually hit your target dead on and that target isn't particularly strong.

Against things like submarine pens, a 1000kg bomb didn't do much even with the explosive payload. For those you had to send in the Lancasters with 6000kg Tallboy and 10,000kg Grand Slam earthquake bombs.

Some bombs are equipped with arming vanes, which are little propellers that spin in the windstream and arm the detonator only after the bomb has fallen a sufficient distance; this prevents explosions too close to the airplane or in a crash landing. Do these make any noises audible from the ground?

@Grant Goodyear: Usually your target is a building of some kind, which will be quite a bit larger than the bomb you are dropping, and with enough structural integrity to remain standing after a ballistic impact of that magnitude.

If you want to destroy a target with a non-explosive projectile, you want to launch the projectile from orbit, as in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. In that case, your terminal velocity is close to 11 km/s.

The Social Construction of Gravity

drorzel — Mon, 10 Feb 2014 08:46:49 +0000

The Social Construction of Gravity

One of the more annoying points of contention back in the days of the Sokal hoax and the "Science Wars" was an argument over social construction. This is, loosely speaking, the idea that our understanding of the world is not strictly rational and objective, but is heavily influenced by interactions with other people, and the culture in which we live. The idea originally arose in literary academia, but expanded to be applied to basically everything, including science.

At bottom, this is probably the best and most useful idea to come out of whatever collective "-ism" you want to use to refer to 20th century scholarship in the arts and literature. Applied in a reasonable manner, it ought to be fairly uncontroversial-- it's not hard to come up with examples of theories that were accepted more quickly or rejected out of hand because of who proposed them, and anybody who's done research knows that there are a lot of factors beyond pure science that go into how scientists choose what to study, and how results are interpreted.

The problem is that once you have a hammer, everything starts to look nail-shaped, and good ideas get ridiculously overextended. This is true in physics, as well-- the tendency of aging physicists to wander off and start reinterpreting whole other fields of inquiry in terms of a handful of physics concepts is well documented and regrettable. In the case of the science wars stuff, this led to various post-whateverist scholars claiming that there was no objective reality, and science was entirely a collection of social constructs. A position that was rightly regarded as ludicrous, and led to the Sokal business, where a prominent journal published a bunch of gibberish that NYU physicist Alan Sokal slapped together, and was embarrassed by the revelation of the hoax.

Of course, there were a fair share of annoying arguments from the science side, as well, where a number of scientists took positions opposing the entire idea of social construction, which is in its way just as blatant a rejection of obvious truth as anything from the post-whateverists. One of the rhetorical devices frequently employed by this group was to ask mocking questions like "So, is gravity a social construct?" Which, like most such arguments, is correct in a narrow, technical sense while also being not nearly as convincing as the geeks who deploy it think.

Which made it interesting, these past couple of weeks, to see a dramatic demonstration of the social construction of gravity in a quasi-real context. I'm referring here to the short, spectacular life of the touch-screen game "Flappy Bird," which was removed from both iTunes and Google Play over the weekend, to general bafflement as to why anybody would shut down such a successful game.

The game is, as I was telling a colleague in CS on Friday, simple and stupid enough that you could probably assign "Write 'Flappy Bird'" as a homework problem in a low-level programming class. It's a pixellated little blob of a bird that flaps its wings when you tap the screen and falls when you don't, and the goal is to fly it through a series of Super Mario pipes without touching anything. It's ridiculously difficult, though, and weirdly addictive.

The difficulty stems largely from the fact that the bird falls really fast, which prompted a lot of folks to take to social media and grumble about how the physics of the game couldn't possibly be right. This was like a bat-signal sent up to physics bloggers, and Frank Noschese took up the challenge, using video analysis to show that the little blob of pixels does, in fact, fall with a constant acceleration, and that if you assume the bird is the size of a real bird, it falls at a rate consistent with real-world gravity. He put together a really nice demo of this, with a pair of iPads showing video of Flappy Bird next to video of a colleague dropping a basketball:

The two objects stay at the same height all through the fall, showing that they're falling at the same rate.

(This is not to say that the physics is perfect-- as Frank also noted, the "flap" is a little dodgy, as the bird always ends with the same upward velocity, regardless of how fast it was falling before the "flap." That's the other big factor contributing to the difficulty of the game.)

So, why all the outrage? Well, because of the social construction of videogame gravity. As Flappy Bird shows, when you put realistic gravity into video games, they're really hard. So, while games like Angry Birds and Fruit Ninja use a constant vertical acceleration, they crank down the acceleration of gravity to make the game easier. If you put in a realistic acceleration, they would be ridiculously difficult.

People got outraged about the physics of Flappy Bird because years of previous games had conditioned them to expect a lower acceleration, leading to easier gameplay. We've socially constructed an expected acceleration of gravity in videogame worlds, and when that expectation was confounded by reality, people got peeved.

Now, does this mean that the real physics of gravity is also purely a social construct? Not purely, no. There's unquestionably a bit of social dynamics involved in the development and acceptance of general relativity, our best current theory of gravity, but the underlying phenomenon is unquestionable. A different set of social circumstances and dynamics might've led to us using different language to talk about it, but in the universe where that happened, objects would still fall when dropped near the surface of the Earth, and Flappy Bird would still be maddeningly difficult to play.

------

(This is a longer version of stuff I said in last week's Uncertain Dots hangout with Rhett, but I offer it as a tribute to the passing of the game. Godspeed, Flappy Bird, you annoyingly fragile little bastard.)

drorzel Mon, 02/10/2014 - 03:46

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Wymyn and privileged minorities experienced the same level of difficulty as anonymous users. This is White Protestant European oppressive patriarchal racism at its worst,

http://dailycaller.com/2013/11/26/prof-corrects-minority-students-capit…
"all knowledge is subjective and based on one's position in society"

Apparently, someone someplace will not like something, and make a bit to-do about it. I, personally, like Flappy Bird, and have no problem with gravity - period. Thanks for your input.

Could it be argued that, to the extent that we all say "what goes up must come down", gravity is partly a social construction? Shouldn't we be saying "What goes away from the center of the Earth's mass must return towards the center of Earth's mass?

There is no doubt that social construction makes things in science more subjective, but they are supported by obvious examples (in this case how things fall with gravity). Dealing with a game like Angry Birds, is it okay to socially construct people to a world where the physics is not correct? I understand that the slower acceleration allows the game to play better, and equates to more fun, but it is for this reason that people are upset over a game like Flappy Bird. Personally, I like my video games the way they would be in real life, which is why Flappy Bird is one of my favorites. The point I am getting to is that if we construct people to a world like an Angry Birds, aren't we giving people a false sense of what the world is really like in terms of physics? I'm not saying Angry Birds is a bad game, it provides mindless enjoyment, but is that acceptable all the time? People outraged over Flappy Bird, more or less because the physics are correct and individuals could not accept that. I say make more games like Flappy Bird, the challenge is more fun and it exposes us to how forces really act in the world.

This article was extremely interesting to read and easy to relate to. We recently learned about velocity and acceleration in my physics class. I am also one of the many who have cursed Flappy Bird for it's level of difficulty. I was very surprised to find out that the acceleration is actually exactly equal to that of gravity and not a much higher value, as demonstrated in the video. I would have to agree with Andrew about his statement regarding the fact that games such as Angry Birds have distorted our perception as to what the physics of games are in relation to the physics of reality. Personally, however, I prefer games that reduce the acceleration of gravity when velocity in the x direction remains constant. I cannot agree with the post above about making all games with forces equivalent to those of the real world simply because I believe it makes them far more difficult, and I am somewhat of a sore loser. I don't think people apply the physics and rate of gravity they experience while playing these games to real life, they play them for a simple form of entertainment. Everyone knows how quickly a cup pushed off the counter will fall because people experience things in free fall multiple times a days, they won't assume it will continue horizontally for an extreme distance before crashing into their living room couch.

The application of realistic physics to video games can have some very good effects upon the users. Many players apply their video game knowledge to real life situations, in the case of physics it could be deadly. Broadening the realism in all aspects of the video game realm is necessary, imo.

Brilliant post, Chad, on all counts.

I'm one who highly admires Sokal for his takedown of postmodernism. Yet I'm also persuaded by you that "social construction" is a useful idea when applied to purely social realities. To which I would add, so long as one doesn't take it to excess (such as claiming that human rights are culturally relative, as if people born in country X feel pain any less than those born in country Y).

As for video games, I'm less concerned about unrealistic gravity than about gratuitous violence, which has the perncious social effect (per multiple peer-reviewed articles) of encouraging aggressive attitudes and lack of empathy.

This is actually fairly complicated. Both the length and gravity of objects in video games are undefined variables. What is the height of mario vs the height of a flappy bird?

The better variable here is either character-lengths in a screen, or else time taken to fall height of screen. The time taken for each operation is our usual time "t".

In fact, thinking about this, I don't think the video really shows that the game has the same gravity as the earth. In fact, I think you could make the same video for _any_ game, regardless of its supposed gravity value.

Starting from rest, falling a distance s to the ground in time t, gravity is given by g=2s/t^2. Scaling everything to character lengths L, the total height of the screen is s=NL, and so the games gravity is g=2LN/t^2. Moreover, the time to fall from rest to the bottom of the screen is t^2=2LN/g inside the game world.

Let g0 be the gravity of the earth. To perfectly simulate the game gravity g, we require an object on earth, of length R, released from rest, to cross its own length N times in the same time as the game object. So t^2=2LN/g=2RN/g0. So we need to drop and object from a total height NR=t^2/g0, and choose R= L (g0/g), and when we do the motion of our object on earth will sync perfectly with the motion of the object in game, regardless of the games own measure of gravity.

So I don't think any video can be a demonstration that gravity in games is chosen to be less, equal, or grater than the earth's gravity. The choice of gravity in games is a question of scale.

I was going to go off and apply this argument using data from Mario, but it would appear that, as usual, the internet has already done this.

The link gives raw pixel distance and time data for various mario games, but the __higher than earth__ values for gravity derived are based on the absurd assumption that (small) mario is 1.5 metres in height. He is at most half this, so personally I would half all of the resulting values for g here.

It's worth nothing that Super Mario World (g=6.32 earth) (3.15 earth by my reckoning) is probably the most influential title when it comes to the gravity scales of video game titles. (Though I would be inclinded to look at Megaman 2 as well.)

Basically, these numbers demonstrate that gravity in platforming video games seems by default to be much _higher_ than gravity on the earth.

I agree that determining the acceleration of gravity requires a scale, which is why the relevant sentence reads "if you assume the bird is the size of a real bird, it falls at a rate consistent with real-world gravity." That is, Frank measured the rate at which the bird falls in terms of its own size, and then plugged in a value for that size based on the size of real-world birds, and got an acceleration consistent with Earth gravity.

Another approach, which Rhett takes in the linked posts, is to measure the acceleration in terms of the size of the object, then ask how big the object would need to be for that acceleration to be consistent with 9.8 m/s/s. In the Fruit Ninja post linked above, for example, he finds that the orange/grapefruit would need to be 68cm across, which is a little unrealistic.

Recently we have been studying velocity and acceleration in my physics class and was stunned and embarrassed to see the truth of this post. Out of my own disbelief i attempted and confirmed that Flappy Bird has real acceleration due to gravity of -9.8 m/s^2. I also believe, along with the fellow commenters, that true physics should be applied to video games. Anything else is like playing a game based out of planet Earth.

My Physics 101 class has been learning about speed, velocity, acceleration, and projectile motion. After reading an article that targets an area I have been studying, I became immediately interested in the topic. I am a Flappy Bird addict who has fallen in love with the game. Although I used to be skeptical and sometimes believed that the acceleration of Flappy Bird must be triple the acceleration of objects on earth, the video above proved that Flappy Bird falls with an acceleration equal to the pull of gravity (g=-9.8 m/s^2). It is interesting to see that some video game creators consider physics while creating their games. I have always ignorantly believed that they just create a game that will foster people's enjoyment and do not consider much else. As a gamer, I wish that video game creators would reduce the acceleration of Flappy Bird by reducing the pull of gravity in the game or changing the shape of Flappy Bird to something that would create more air resistance (maybe larger wings). As I learned in class, two objects will hit the ground at the same time even if their masses are different; however, an if one’s shape increases air resistance, it will fall at a slower rate. If the changes I mentioned above were made, I would have a little more reaction time. Although that would help me achieve higher scores, I have to agree with Andrew. I think that creating games with realistic acceleration is more interesting and challenging. All popular games are the ones that people have to spend weeks mastering in order to win. Introducing life like forces will make games more challenging and therefore more popular. Andrew also presents very interesting ideas about how some video games are exposing people to false constructs of reality. I believe that this is detrimental because it affects how people perceive the idea of acceleration and how they apply “their ideas” of physics in the real world. Even if one does not have a background of physics in academic settings, they can easily learn correct theories and ideas through the video games they are exposed to [with correct acceleration], like Flappy Bird.

I have been studying the topics of acceleration and velocity in my physics class as well and have played the game and found it to be difficult at first. I was very surprised when I read this blog and even tried the experiment they conducted in the video and got the same results. I also believe that real life physics should be used in video games like the other comments to add to the more realistic game play the video game manufactures are trying to recreate. I think this would lead to more challenging games in the future. I believe that this would only boost the enjoyment of playing a challenging video game. In addition, I also believe that the more realistic a game seems to be the better a game is in my opinion.
The use of real physics in video games specifically sport related games could possibly create games that take longer to beat and a more realistic experience in online multiplayer games which is something I am looking for in games like some racing games where at times it seams like real life physics are not used.

Someone is assigning your blog for class, Chad. :-)

There's a big variation in bird size. Clearly, we shouldn't be considering something like an ostrich, which doesn't fly at all, but say a large condor (3 m wingspan) versus a hummingbird (10 cm wingspan) would lead to a factor of 30 difference in the derived acceleration of gravity. So it's pretty meaningless to say that the game models the magnitude of the acceleration of gravity on Earth, unless some indication is given of the title character's size.

The more interesting thing is modeling the acceleration as constant, which is Earth-like, at least at a reasonable scale of bird travel. But even then, I think we're expecting a bit much of our ipad apps if we want full-blown multiphysics simulations of the real world. Flappy Bird exists in the world that's programmed for it.

I am reading that the acceleration used for the game was derived after determining a relative size for the 'flappy' bird. But without air resistance- which is obviously not included in the game- the mass of the bird would therefore be irrelevant since gravity has a constant acceleration as shown in vf^2 = vi^ + 2ax. Whether the bird was a hummingbird or a hawk, without air resistance it should fall at -9.8m/s^2. On the other hand, I find it delightful that the creators of flappy bird used realistic circumstances when constructing their graphics. I would be curious to know the velocity and/or acceleration upward that tapping on the screen provides the bird. Is that number consistent with the displacement?

G. Smith, this explanation might not be necessary, but the idea is that the acceleration of gravity in the game has been measured from the image on the screen. Acceleration has units of length and time, so to convert that measurement to the real world, you need a scaling factor for those two values. We're all sort of defaulting to the assumption that 1 second of game time is equal to 1 second of real time. So we're left with an assumption about the length scale, and apparently, if you assume that a Flappy Bird is about the same size as an average bird, you come up with a magnitude of acceleration that is consistent with the acceleration at the Earth's surface. But if you assumed a Flappy Bird was the size of an airplane, you'd come up with a much bigger acceleration, and if you assumed it was the size of an ant, you'd come up with a much smaller acceleration. The most natural thing to do would probably be to assume that a Flappy Bird is exactly as big as it is depicted on the screen of an iPad, about an inch. And that would give a different value of acceleration.

This new craze of flappy bird has everyone bent out of shape because of the difficulty. Since all of the physics components are realistic, this makes the game significantly harder. Since acceleration of gravity is 9.81 meter/sec/sec when the user taps the screen and negative when the bird is in free fall, it goes up and down at a significant rate. Timing must be perfect when holding/tapping the screen so it fits through the small window. As the other people have said, I also got the same results when conducting the experiment. I think the creator was wrong in removing the game because of how frustrating it is. This makes games much more fun.

I have recently learned much about gravity,acceleration,and velocity in my physics class. It is awesome to be able to apply what ive learned to the real world and video games such as flappy bird. Gravity(Earths gravity) pulls objects 9.8m/s^2 regaurdless of its mass when neglecting air resistance.The Earth also experiences a force equal to the push it exerts on a free falling object. The force of Earth's gravity results from the law of gravitation and centrifugal force.

Although Flappy Birds is just a game, the idea of gravitational pull downwards plays a huge factor in the game. The bird is constantly falling downwards with a constant acceleration unless you touch the screen enabling the use of his wings to go upwards through the obstacles. Even though, the game uses constant acceleration downwards everything about the velocity going back upwards contradicts the laws of motion. Making the game extremely unrealistic but easier for people to play the game because it only takes one tap to get him back into the upward direction.

In the case of Flappy Bird, having a realistic magnitude of acceleration has only made the game more challenging and more addicting. The people arguing that the acceleration is an unrealistic magnitude are simply looking for a way to explain the difficulty of the game. Previous posters’ arguments that the unrealistic aspects of other video games should be changed or that new games should take realistic physics into account are not entirely sound. I think it would be safe to say that the average consumer of popular video games such as flappy bird do not spend much time worrying about whether or not the bird is accelerating at exactly 9.8 m/s^2, but simply play the game and become accustomed to whatever conditions the game presents. I also do not think that unrealistic properties of physics in games such as Angry Birds affect the user’s perception of the real world. The average person, hopefully, can distinguish between a videogame and a real life scenario, not to mention that if a person is consulting a game involving spherical birds, a sling shot, and green pigs for real world physics applications, they have bigger problems. Though in the case of flappy bird applying real forces has made it that much more popular, not all games require such realism and some things are just for entertainment purposes. This is not socially constructing people into alternate realities with unrealistic forces, it is simply creating a fun game.

i think that bringing logic into the video game world actually made the game better and the physics in this simple game are quite related to some things we did in my physics class about free falling and other aspects of motion in the y direction. and i believe that the game its self brought a sort of realism to the gaming community and was proven that the bird does in fact reach an acceleration of 9.8m/s^2. i think that the major success of the game and its down fall came from its use of actual physics of gravity, it made it more challenging and more addictive to get to the next level, and failure caused rage. but the best games i have played have been closest to reality. and i guess common use of these things could also raise interest with physics in youths.

In video games, people are socially constructed to believe false claims about the laws of physics. In reality, objects in free fall have a constant acceleration of -9.8 m/s^2. The creators of Flappy Bird accurately represented this concept as shown in the video above. Other video games slow the acceleration to make it easier for players to succeed. The fact that Flappy Bird is so realistic makes the game much harder. The reason this game is so addicting is because it is a lot more challenging than people are used to. The creators probably took this into consideration knowing full well that people get bored when things become too easy. I, personally, was very frustrated with this game when I first started playing. However, the only way to become better at something is to practice. In my physics class, we are encouraged to practice additional problems in order to develop a better understanding of the material. If you take this approach toward school work and video games, you will ultimately make progress and better your skills.

First of all, I literally just played flappy bird on my phone. (I luckily had it downloaded on my phone before they took it off the App store!) And now I am happy to see there is a reason the game is so difficult; a true display of the acceleration of gravity! It is really interesting to see that Flappy Bird actually uses realistic physic components, rather than the altered components most video grames use; I never thought I would be thinking of physics and Flappy Bird in combination until reading this article either! Anyways, I loved the demonstration with a real-life object and the flappy bird falling to the ground in the game. It was a simple demonstration of the truth behind the statements made. As Andrew and other commenters mentioned, I really believe video game programmers/manufacturers would benefit from including realistic physics components like Flappy Bird does, because it would only make games more realistic, which seems to be the goal these days and create a fun avenue to apply physics to other enjoyable activities! I definitely would be able to learn about physics more effectively, if we had these types of examples to relate to!

SPOTLIGHT ON KAVLI VIDEO CONTEST ADVISOR SEBASTIAN ALVARADO

carlyo — Thu, 19 Dec 2013 16:58:49 +0000

SPOTLIGHT ON KAVLI VIDEO CONTEST ADVISOR SEBASTIAN ALVARADO

By Stacy Jannis
Kavli Science Video Contest Manager

The Kavli Science in Fiction Video Contest challenges Gr 6-12 students to examine the science in fiction, including science fiction movies, TV shows, and games. Our contest advisors include science educators , scientists, and Hollywood scifi visual effects experts.

Sebastian Alvarado is a postdoctoral fellow in the Dept. of Biology at Stanford, with a research focus on epigenetics, as well as co-founder of the video game science consultancy group, Thwacke! Consulting. Thwacke offers scientific insight from a diversity of disciplines to aid in narrative design, world building, and ultimately creating believable content for the video game industry. Thwacke has consulted on video games including Wasteland 2 and Outlast.

What services does Thwacke provide?

We connect video game developers with academics to help make their medium more creative and immersive. Our services range from lectures and lab tours to writing documents that speculate a scientific principle into an interesting fiction. We also use some of our consultants trained in the behavioral sciences (neuroscience, psychiatry, etc.) to guide level design using a scientific understanding of human behavior.How did you first become interested in science consulting for video
games?

At the time, I was finishing my doctorate at McGill University in Montreal, where there's a vibrant game development community. This locale provided me with the added opportunity to playtest new games and supplement the humble salary of a graduate student. During the process, I got a chance to see how games are made and the thought that goes into them. I also happened to see a developer on wikipedia looking at the entry for DNA. My background was in molecular biology and it made me think that a short conversation would have saved time and avoided any misrepresentations of my field. After a bit of planning and getting to know more developers, I realized there was value in bringing this type of novelty to the sci-fi genre in the industry.

How does developing science fiction from science fact help to improve
a game?

A very important aspect of certain games requires the player to be immersed into its narrative. As a result, anything that can bring a player closer to the world the developer is creating makes a better video game. Our role in this process is to be creative outside of our own field, and bring new and interesting ideas to support the plausibility of a fictional world. We've also found that our ideas are good source material for the creative leads on a project to inspire new directions for art, story, and level design.

How can gaming be applied to other areas, such as education?

We hope that our input on specific projects inspires an interest in science in players. Most of our consultants chose their careers based on childhood inspiration from comic books, books, movies, and video games. We hope that being present in such a pervasive medium will achieve the same effect. Within this scope, we also curate our ideas to draw the most interest and reward for players, with individuals feeling smarter as they play. It’s the difference between a discussion about science that can engage an audience in a relatable fashion instead of boring them with mundane details.

Outside of mainstream game development, we are working on a few games aimed to primarily teach and educate, by aligning scientific concepts with novel game designs. So instead of trying to make a game about the immune system seem like 'pacman', we make a game that borrows dynamics inspired from our immune system to create a playable design. We hope this new approach to the educational game can bring something valuable to both educational tools in general and video games in particular.

What inspires you in your work?

Science! So that mainly narrows it down to our work at the bench and in the clinic. Every consultant for Thwacke is a scientist first, and communicator second. Our team members are active in their academic community making discoveries for their own discipline and they are encouraged to use Thwacke as a platform to advocate their field. We've also found that conversations with developers and understanding their vision serve as great 'guides' for our own creativity. They often give us the green-light on speculating what it would be like to be a mad scientist.

What is your vision for gaming in the future?

In all honesty, I have no idea. The games I played 10 years ago are very different than the games I play today. In my realm, I see games as excellent tools to conduct and crowd-source scientific research. For example, it's much easier to design a game that reaches 1 million patients than to invite 1 million patients into a clinic for questionnaires. At the same time, I feel these same tools will be a catalyst for learning within player communities and schools. Outside of my realm, I have no idea but I can't wait to find out!

Sebastian discusses the science of video games in the excellent video series "The Science of Games", hosted by Daniel Kayser, on GameTrailers.com.

Sebastian also joined our Kavli Contest advisors in a discussion about the Science of Monsters.

Follow Sebastian on twitter at @sebcredible and follow Thwacke at @thwackemontreal.

carlyo Thu, 12/19/2013 - 11:58

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260 Million Scientists a Month

drorzel — Thu, 27 Jun 2013 09:25:56 +0000

260 Million Scientists a Month

The day I bought my iPad, as I was taking it out of the box, SteelyKid (then 3) came bopping into my office, spotted it, and declared "I want to play Angry Birds!" It's a remarkable demonstration of the genius of their product: not only have they created a game that a three-year-old can play, they've managed to make every three-year-old in the industrialized world aware of their product.

It's also a testament to my current obsession, the universality of science, and not just because you can use the game to illustrate physics. After all, the process of playing the game serves as a good metaphor for the process of scientific thinking:

On first encountering a new level, you need to carefully observe it to determine what you need to do to clear it
Once you know the goal, you construct a mental model of how you might reach it: "If I hit this block with the yellow bird, it will topple there crushing those pigs..."
Once you have your model, you put it to the test, firing the birds in accordance with the plan, and see if events play out the way you expect
If your theory passes the test of experimental (videogame) reality, you move on to the next challenge. If you came up short, you refine your model ("Maybe I should hit that block instead, which will bring this down..."), and try again.

The only essential element of science that isn't mandatory is the sharing of results with others, though God knows, there are plenty of people who do that on message boards and whatever else.

It's pretty amazing. What's more amazing is that, as of several months ago, they claim 260 million users a month. That's one out of every twenty-ish humans alive today choosing to unwind by thinking like a scientist for a while. Including a good number of three-year-olds.

Keep that in mind the next time somebody suggests that science isn't something for everybody, or that some group of people isn't capable of scientific thinking. We've got 260 million scientists a month, thanks to just one of the umpteen silly video games you can install on your smartphone. Scientific thinking is a fundamental, universal human activity, employed even for frivolous purposes.

(The screen shot at the top of this post is from Rhett's study of the physics of the yellow bird. A version of this is part of the introduction to the book-in-progress at the moment, though there are some structural problems with the draft Introduction that might force it to move elsewhere; those revisions are what prompted this post.)

drorzel Thu, 06/27/2013 - 05:25

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Speaking of iPad apps and scientific/mathematical thinking, let me give a shoutout to an app I just discovered--Dragon Box. It's a puzzle game of isolating a box by moving around icons, using opposite icons to cancel each other out, adding the same icons to each side, etc. In other words, it is teaching algebraic solving of equations but using funny pictures (and gradually switching to more mathematical symbols). Give it a try--my 7-year old caught on instantly.

Angry Birds, Furious Forces! by Rhett Allain

drorzel — Mon, 03 Jun 2013 08:34:02 +0000

Angry Birds, Furious Forces! by Rhett Allain

Rhett at Dot Physics departed ScienceBlogs before NAtional Geographic fully took over, but still managed to connect with their book division for a physics text. This is part of a series they're doing tied in with the folks from Rovio, makers of the world's most popular smart-phone time-waster, and, as the title suggests, it uses Angry Birds as a jumping-off point to talk about physics. Rhett was, of course, an obvious choice for this, given the amount of time he's spent doing video analysis of Angry Birds to extract the underlying physics.

This is a book that can't really be reviewed just as text, because images are pretty integral to the whole thing. Here's a screenshot of a fairly representative page:

Spread from Angry Birds, Furious Forces

This is indicative of the format: a page of text, and a big splashy image, often with Angry Birds characters added digitally. The text is very characteristically Rhett-- this might be the most blog-like book I've ever read, and that's a good thing. The approach to physics is very much in the Matter and Interactions sort of terms he uses, and the text features lots of little asides in his usual style.

I was a little surprised to find that this covers more than just the physics that's in the game. In fact, it's a quick survey of all of physics, from basic mechanics up through the Standard Model. As a result, the connection to the game gets a little strained at points, but then, it would be hard to do a whole book with just mechanics without getting into the math. And while there are occasional equations included as design elements, this is not a mathematical treatment.

So, what's the target audience for this? Well, the day my review copy arrived, it was lying on my desk when SteelyKid came bopping in. "What's this?" she asked, noticing the eye-catching cover (reproduced as the "featured image" above")."

"It's a book about Angry Birds, and science," I told her.

"Hey!" she said, "I like science! And I like Angry Birds! I should read this!"

So, to the design folks at National Geographic books: Well done.

I've long maintained that Dot Physics is one of the best blogs around, and this carries that basic flavor over into book form. It's not something that will help you get a 5 on the Physics AP exam, but it should appeal to anyone who enjoys, say, the Basher book on Physics. Plus fans of Angry Birds. And there's a lot to be said for catching potential science fans young.

drorzel Mon, 06/03/2013 - 04:34

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I Have Competitive OCD

drorzel — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 14:07:22 +0000

I Have Competitive OCD

SteelyKid is a fan of a web game called BumperStars, which my parents introduced her to. If I'm at the computer doing something, she'll march over, demand to be picked up, then point at the screen and say "Buh-Pah" until I open it up.

Of course, she's a toddler, and thus has an extremely short attention span (except when she doesn't). About two minutes after I start a game for her, she'll slide down off my lap, and go find something else to do. Which would be fine, except for one thing: I have competitive OCD.

I don't mean that I try to one-up other people who have obsessive-compulsive disorders. I just mean that I am incapable of walking away from anything competitive until it's complete, or there's no possible way I can continue. If it has a score, I have to play it out to the end, no matter what else I ought to be doing. And I have to play to win-- I can't easily manage to put in a half-assed effort, just to end something quickly.

So, SteelyKid will march over, demand "Buh-Pah," then walk away two minutes later, and I'm stuck there playing the game out, trying to get a new high score, or at least a respectable effort at one. Which is an enormous time sink, because we've been doing this for quite a while now, and a high-score game takes a good long while.

This is a big part of why I don't own any video games. (That, plus the fact that I suck at most video games.) Whenever I get involved with a video game, it tends to eat my life. Tetris consumed a big chunk of my freshman year in college, and Super Tecmo Bowl ate a huge portion of my junior year. The real rock-bottom moments of the compulsion come when I find myself sitting around watching other people play games like Tetris or Tecmo Bowl, waiting for my turn.

Of course, this goes beyond video games. The most extreme demonstrations typically involve real sports, like the time I started getting tunnel vision playing basketball in a too-warm gym, and kept playing. After all, it was 11-all in a game to 15-- you can't expect me to just walk away for a piddling little problem like losing my peripheral vision...

(The blinding headache I had for the rest of that afternoon, while I drank enormous quantities of Gatorade trying to restore some kind of electrolyte balance was ample punishment for that one.)

I don't know what's more pathetic-- the fact that I'm sucked in by a game as silly as Bumper Stars, or the fact that my weird competitive compulsion allows a toddler to outwit me. After all, once I start a game, I'm stuck there trying for a high score, which takes a good long time. And that's a good long time when SteelyKid can roam around with minimal supervision, because I'm trying to make that one last bank shot... She's a wily little thing already, exploiting her dad's weaknesses like that.

I'd say more about this, but I opened the game in order to get the URL for the link above, and now I have to go play a game. Just one, mind...

drorzel Tue, 03/30/2010 - 10:07

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Don't feel so bad -- my daughter got a CD with a game on it from Wendy's. I spent a lot of time this past weekend playing it for her until she got enough coins to buy something in the game she wanted.

I never thought "gold farmer" would be something I took on for the kids, at least in that context......

Speaking of competitive... so what's your high score, anyway? :)

73730.

For the moment, anyway. I had to open the game to check, and now that's subject to change...

(The blinding headache I had for the rest of that afternoon, while I drank enormous quantities of Gatorade trying to restore some kind of electrolyte balance was ample punishment for that one.)

"Hao to teech proper runnin 'n playin to ur hoomyn" by Emmy

Now I'm addicted to that game, thaaaaaanks. My high score is only about half of yours, but I only played for about half an hour. I'll be helpful and pass the addiction along!

Yep; two hours later... I was finally past Chad's score and able to move on :-).

Dammit. Productive week, destroyed!

In other words, thanks ;-)

I can sympathize. I had to decide pretty early on not to get into video games. Back in '82 or so I got an Atari one Christmas Eve and started playing Asteroids. I couldn't sleep for several days because of asteroids raining down the inside of my eyelids. And when I looked up two days later my girlfriend had left. She didn't talk to me again for two years.

It's happening again. I got an iPhone. My stack of books to be read is growing faster than I read them, for the first time in my life. So is my drive of time-shifted TV shows. And I now work at a game company too, just to top it off. But I have a 600,000+ high score in Wordle. At least my wife has one too, and we can play Scrabble together through the home VPN while I am waiting for the ferry.

73730? that's all? my high score is 73731...

(bwa ha ha...)

Ha! Wait until she enters the Webkinz phase. Mindless games galore there. You are so hosed....

Then comes American Girl and all the ones on their website....

I truly hope you're taking sedatives now.

it's a simple matter to block port 80, then tell your kids "oh no, the internet burned down. you better go outside and play with your friends."

I wonder if this is at the bottom of some of the intractable political arguments...not being able to accept the outcome of a vote and get on to the next subject, for example? For some people no argument or "game" can be over until they are the "winners".

I've endured many a meeting where the person running it was outvoted, and still she insisted that "we haven't reached consensus yet", because we didn't agree with her. [not at my current institution, in case anyone is wondering]

Two months and *mumble* games later, I just managed to reach level 20 (for the 'achievement' and hence dopamine buzz) and 83290 high score. I am stopping now. No, really..