Borders Blog

Another Clueless Journalist

Tom Allard, the National Security Editor of the Sydney Morning Herald thinks that the Australian SAS has people with the rank of "Lieutenant Corporal". I am not making this up!

I sure the SAS are innovative, but somehow I suspect they're not that innovative.

Clearly, it's high time the SMH did some innovation by getting a National Security Editor who isn't woefully ignorant of military affairs.
more...

Posted by: Chris Chittleborough at 08:59 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 159 words, total size 1 kb.

Another useful new word

My favorite new word comes from a comment in a Wikipedia discussion: cornfused. As the commenter explained, “it's different than confused—it's even worse/more corn based”. I think lots of current U.S. government policies on energy and agriculture are very cornfused ... and cornfusing to most U.S. voters.

Posted by: Chris Chittleborough at 01:40 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 51 words, total size 1 kb.

ZOCs and narrative together?

I've been trying out a computer game called Battle for Wesnoth. In some ways, it's like a 1970s wargame: hex maps with Zones of Control. In other ways, it's like a Role-Playing Game: units represent individuals and can level up. Then again, like most recent computer games it has good graphics, great sound effects and a nice User Interface. Even better, it's a highly ‘moddable’ — it comes with a campaign editor so you can modify the campaigns that come with it, and you can download user-created campaigns. The most radical aspect of all is that it supports strong narratives (and in zillions of languages yet), thereby unifying all three strands of game design!

Oh, and one more thing: it's free.

---

Update (30-May-2007): woops, only two strands: it's Gamist and Narrativist, but makes no attempt to be realistic, so it's not Simulationist. (See the Wikipedia article on GSN theory for a good explanation of these terms.) But it's still a great piece of Free Open-Source Software.

Posted by: Chris Chittleborough at 02:56 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 170 words, total size 1 kb.

A must-read essay from Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker, the Harvard evolutionary psychologist who wrote The Blank Slate, has a great essay titled "A History of Violence" on his website. It appeared in The National Review in March, and does a great job of debunking the Noble Savage myth. Those of us who don't subscribe to TNR can get it from Prof Pinker's website as a 200K PDF. I highly recommend it. (Perhaps growing up without electricity has something to do with my utter contempt for those who think civilisation is bad for us.)

Posted by: Chris Chittleborough at 02:33 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 93 words, total size 1 kb.

Anyone who's had much exposure to the “9/11 Truth” movement will enjoy this blog.

And this FARK thread is even better. Sample comment:

Of course, these terrestrial conspiracies pale into insignificance besides the dreadful truth about a conspiracy which changed the fate of an entire Galactic Empire. (See here.)

Posted by: Chris Chittleborough at 04:34 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 73 words, total size 1 kb.