Greg A. Brown

After much gnashing of teeth and tweaking of configurations, I finally got my computer acting sensibly again, and celebrated by relaunching into Half-Life 2, a game from late 2004 by Valve Software that - while anachronistic - might be best described as Children of Men: The Game. There are more traditional sci-fi elements to it (like aliens, robots, etc.), but it shares the same dystopic, totalitarian aesthetic. Both works communicate the backstory through the environment, rather than any direct explanations to the viewer/player. The long-takes of Children of Men even seem to ape the continuous experience that one gets from a game, with one uninterrupted take for each play-session.

Did I mention that the Half-Life 2 is also incredibly fun? Sometimes that gets lost when one starts making grandiose (but deserved) comparisons to cinema, but it remains an important component for success, no matter how high-art your aim. And Half-Life 2 succeeds superbly at both tasks, earning its status as one of the most polished games ever. There aren’t many competitors to that crown, but the only one with an incredibly clear case to be made is the episodic sequel pictured above, HL2: Episode 1. It picks up immediately after the end of Half-Life 2, and by virtue of its shorter length (only 3-4 hours) manages to be even more concisely polished.

Of course, the reason for playing both the games listed above is that HL2: Episode 2 is coming out soon. Bundled with Team Fortress 2 and Portal, two other Valve-developed games that focus on stylized multiplayer and clever puzzle-solving respectively, Episode 2 will mark a significant change for the series: open environments. Some games like Far Cry and Armed Assault boast of having wide-open levels where problems can be tackled from a variety of approaches (both tactical and geographical). Episode 2 won’t go quite that far, but they are promising some bigger and more ornate environments that have been seen in the past. Valve (single-player) games have always been extremely linear in the past, so even this seemingly-modest change is a significant shift for their development style.

Will they succeed? I think the smart money is on yes, but even if they fail there’s still two other games there that look absolutely stunning. And the chance of all three being forgettable is unimaginably small, given Valve’s track record. October 10th should be a really good day.

Probably the cutest thing I’ve seen in a long time, and the story itself only enhances the effect.

Last night I upgraded Wordpress (the blogging software used here) to the new 2.3 beta (well, actually the SVN archive a few hours before that release), so if things look wonky just whistle, gaze upwards, and stroll in a different direction. Along with that, I upgraded to the Sandbox 1.0 release candidate so that everything would run properly (and you could see the lovely new tags that are part of WP 2.3). As before, I run a tweaked version of Will Wilkins’ CSS skin for Sandbox called “Moo-Point.” It’s pretty sleek already, but I’ve pared a couple of things off it and opened up some room. Even though I’m awful at web design, the layout/presentation-centric stance of Sandbox made it easy to take out what I wanted without worrying about losing it completely.

Thanks to all the contributors to the projects I mentioned above for making software smart enough to guide me where I want to go, and humble enough to let me muck around with its innards.

The new Google Earth 4.2 has a thoroughly-promoted planetarium feature, but quieter and less-noticed is the new Gigapan collaboration, whereby high-resolution photography is oriented to overlay the Google Earth representation from a specific angle, effectively allowing for a more detailed examination of that object while still retaining an idea of how those details correspond to the 3D-space. The video explains this better than I could in words, and there’s also a Data Mining blog post with decent-resolution pictures of the process.

This is a different - and less technically demanding - approach than Microsoft’s Photosynth technoology, which correlates hundreds of images to create a rough three-dimensional representation of an object, allowing you to view the object itself as a collection of points, with thousands of image-views to choose from, all automatedly oriented in the same way they were captured. Again, the process is easier to explain by trying it out on these Kennedy Space Center examples.

Both these examples are approximations of the real end goal, which is to not just create a 3D cloud of points, but a true 3D model of the object based off comparing all the pictures, with those pictures then used to project and map detail onto the rough 3D model. The effect is sort of like using an overhead projector to project and trace a larger version of a small drawing, except against something more complicated than a simple wall or whiteboard. This holy grail of image-data analysis would function something like the techniques Paul Debevec used to create his innovative Campanile Movie and, later, the background for that one shot in The Matrix. With that technology in place, it would be cheap, easy, and utterly effective to make a model of the Empire State Building (or any other landmark) by searching for that name on Flickr.

With more exacting versions of geotagging (associating pictures with the relevant latitude/longitude), the possibilities expand further. If GPS devices that recorded the position (and, possibly, the orientation) become embedded into the cameras we buy, it’ll become trivial to find all the pictures taken within a few hundred yards of a location. 3D modeling would suddenly become possible for not just the glamorous and widely-known locations, but also down to individual houses in neighborhoods. While some may cry foul to the potentially-invasive nature of such hyper-geotagging, Google’s already driving around with vans that capture the entire swath of area viewable from the street. And in any such case, the future has a habit of happening despite our strongest intentions otherwise.

A gorgeous video from Animal Collective’s upcoming album, with especially great cinematography.

Sunday’s New York Times Magazine is up, and Michael Lewis has penned the cover story on catastrophe insurance. Widely known for two recent books on sports (Moneyball and The Blind Side), Lewis got his start by writing Liar’s Poker on his experiences as a bond salesman in the 80s. With that background, he tackles the long-marginalized efforts to spread out the risk in catastrophes. In effect, these are people who sell insurance to insurance companies; while car insurance companies can trust that accident rates will remain relatively steady on a year-to-year basis, other forms of insurance are more prone to epic acts of natural destruction from events like hurricanes or earthquakes. John Seo, the protagonist of our tale, figures out just how likely and just how costly such events are, risking billions of dollars in the process.

The subject dovetails nicely with Malcolm Gladwell’s profile of Nassim Taleb, a guy who sought to do the same thing with catastrophes that were merely financial in nature. Taleb has since written The Black Swan on the commonness of catastrophes in general.

BLDGBLOG just posted a fascinating entry on the underground metropolis of Derinkuyu, and I had best start by quoting the same source as the post, Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us:

No one knows how many underground cities lie beneath Cappadocia. Eight have been discovered, and many smaller villages, but there are doubtless more. The biggest, Derinkuyu, wasn’t discovered until 1965, when a resident cleaning the back wall of his cave house broke through a wall and discovered behind it a room that he’d never seen, which led to still another, and another. Eventually, spelunking archeologists found a maze of connecting chambers that descended at least 18 stories and 280 feet beneath the surface, ample enough to hold 30,000 people – and much remains to be excavated. One tunnel, wide enough for three people walking abreast, connects to another underground town six miles away. Other passages suggest that at one time all of Cappadocia, above and below the ground, was linked by a hidden network. Many still use the tunnels of this ancient subway as cellar storerooms.

The rest of the post tries to dissect why this seems so cool to so many people, touching on the more modern sprawling subterranean constructions under many current cities, as well as insinuations of underground cities in Foucault’s Pendulum (a point that we’ll be getting back to later). (more…)

This school year, I’m serving as the president of the resident hall where I live, which means I’m also involved in a bunch of related, ancillary stuff.  One of those was co-coordinating this fall’s move-in crew, which is a bunch of students who volunteer to help others move in to the hall (with the perk of moving in earlier themselves). Like all things heart-warming and easily-accessible, it was written about in the college newspaper and I was quoted from an interview given yesterday evening at the Strong Complex BBQ. After writing my own editorials in the paper all last semester, it’s a bit unsettling to not have complete control over how you’re paraphrased, but I think it turned out OK.

Fox News just posted the PDF of a legal filing against Michael Vick that asserts, amongst other things, that he used the revenue from some pit bulls to buy missiles from the Iranian government. They also provide some context in a news story about the filing.

Politico has an excellent piece analyzing some of Hillary Clinton’s campaign tactics and comparing them to Bush’s. While the latter portion might put it in the league of a hit-piece, it’s still a very revealing analysis and useful for sifting some larger strategy out of the week-to-week churn of campaign stories.