Liliaceous chromolithograph

liliaceous (adj.): of the Liliaceae family that contains the lily, tulip and hyacinth

chromolithograph (n.): A color lithograph, specifically those of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

Another fairly random, short, post, with no specific focus. Anyway, a few things:

1. I'm surprised Josh hasn't commented about this, especially since he bothered to download the entire thing to his iPod. But they've ripped the sound track from Super Smash Bros. Braw, and you can easily find it on Youtube or elsewhere by googling "Brawl OST" (which is quite ironic, because as far as I can tell, it's not really official). Try this link. The song in that link is the "Final Destination" song for Brawl, and it's probably the best composition in the game. But of course, since it's more or less done by Uematsu.

2. Time for a real logic puzzle: Find a six-letter word such that any consecutive 4 letters or consecutive 5 letters are also a word.

So for example, if your six-letter word was "abcdef", then: "abcd", "bcde", "cdef", "abcde", "bcdef" would all also have to be words (in addition to "abcdef").

I randomly came up with this during a pretty long car ride, so perhaps it's not too hard, but I'm pretty surprised by how all of those turned out to be words. There's also very possibly more than one solution - the solution I'm thinking of though, also has the nice property that 2 (3 if you count slightly obscure words) of the 4 consecutive three-letter strings are also words.

If you can find a solution such that all the three-letter strings are also words, that would be very impressive. But that's probably impossible due to vowel-consonant positioning, etc.

3. I had the occasion to hear some music from Diablo II today (in a quite unexpected setting actually), which reminded me that it was a pretty amazing game. It's fairly cheap now, so if you're bored one day you should go and pick it up for $15-$20 or so.

The music was just a random note, by the way - the music is good, but it's not Final Fantasy epic good. It fits the game really well though.

Until next time, ciao.

-squidout

RGN#12: Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards.

To many this post's title may seem confusing, I post one thing saying that I'm reviewing games and suddenly we are at 12 random gaming notes (RGN)? Well yes, and no. The first ten RGNs were on my facebook page as notes and included other information other than reviews such as how to add channels to your wii and other semi-relevant information. The eleventh was my last post and that accounts for all eleven previous notes.

This video will pretty much sum up the game:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vdlEH0yFbg

When you have finished watching feel free to continue,




As you can see from the video it's a classic Kirby game with some character team ups and mixed powers. This however, is surprisingly a more difficult game than one might expect. This solely comes from the fact that there are a total of 100 crystals to collect and in order to find most of them you must take advantage of the multi ability use in this game. The only real downside to this game is that the game only has five worlds with five levels the fifth always being a boss level. This said every level must be revisited at least once to get everything. On a scale of 1 to awesome (10) this game ranks in at a good 7 or 8 . I urge any Kirby fans or gamers looking for a time waster to pick this game up. For $10 on the virtual console a good Kirby game from the N64 could be yours on the wii.

Cliquant heredes

clinquant (adj.): Glittering with gold or silver; a false and showy glitter

heredes (n.): Heirs

Funny words today. Clinquant comes from French, but it was actually first brought into English by William Shakespeare. You know, this isn't too surprising though - he actually 'invented' (i.e., took from other languages) thousands of common English words. Like "bump" for example. Next time you use the word 'bump' you can feel secure in your sophisticated-ness.

Heredes actually isn't an English word. It's a Latin word. Unsurprisingly, it means 'heirs' in Latin. But just like other Latin words, it sometimes crops up in the context of law, where the word 'heirs' isn't anywhere near good enough, of course =).

Anyway, I'm not really sure what to post. I could talk about why the moon was red, but I don't feel like it and you probably all already know it's because of scattering in Earth's atmosphere. So instead, I'll keep this post short, and present a nice little paradox my friend showed me:

You've probably played a lot of two-player games, like Tic-Tac-Toe, Chess (it has rules to make sure it is finite), two player Ghost, Halo, etc. Most such two-player games are finite - meaning that you finish after a finite number of "turns" or a finite amount of time.

However, one can easily invent infinite two-player games. For example, if we randomly make a game Asdfmas where turns consist of saying numbers and if someone says a negative number, they lose, is very easily infinite.

Now, one would assume that a given game is either finite or infinite - after all, if a game doesn't take an infinitely long time, then it has to be finite, no?

Well, then, consider the two-player game called Metagame. The rules of Metagame are simple. Player 1 chooses a finite two-player game, and Player 2 moves first. The question is, is Metagame finite or infinite? (If you immediately think it has to be finite, think again for a bit. Then scroll down.)

Obviously, the Metagame has to be finite, right? After all, they just play a finite game, which can't take infinitely long? Well, since it's finite, Player 1 can choose the Metagame. Oh, then Player 2 can choose a game too. Why doesn't she choose the Metagame as well? Player 1 also feels like playing the Metagame again. Hmmm...

So, the Metagame is infinite? But how can that be? After all, they just play a finite game. Hmmm....

Hopefully that's fried your brains for now. Until next time, ciao.

-squidout

PS: Here's another paradox for you, this time with a touch of Godel:

What is the smallest positive integer that cannot be defined with less than 81 characters?

(Hmm, "the smallest positive integer that cannot be defined with less than 81 characters" happens to have 81 characters...)

Lunar Eclipse

As everyone has probably heard, there will be a total lunar eclipse tonight, Feb 20 (and Feb 21 morning for Europe and Africa) for the Americas.

A total lunar eclipse happens when the moon passes completely behind the Earth's shadow:

When the moon is in the umbral shadow, it looks red:

Cool!

I happen to have a perfect view of the lunar eclipse from my bedroom, and now the moon is already in the prenumberal shadow and moving into total eclipse. In Toronto, it is expected to be in total eclipse around 10PM. I'm definitely going to be getting up from the desk every so often to watch the moon :)

Cindy

Encaustic pinxit

Encaustic – A painting medium in which pigment is suspended in a binder of hot wax.

Pinxit - Lettering on a print that denotes the original artist of the work for, or from, which the print was made (from Latin Pinx, meaning "he painted it")

Two art words! That's a change. Anyway, to start off, I found this the other day, and while it is kind of old news, so I wouldn't be surprised if some have seen it already, it's kind of funny. Well, maybe not funny, but it reminds me of all the times that someone has asked me "if you could have one wish, what would it be?" to which I, or one of my friends, would generally reply unlimited wishes. While the concept is funny, though, in actual fact, it's kind of sad how someone would destroy the Make a Wish Foundation like that. Wishing away the foundation's legal team was pretty smart, though…

Today, 49 years ago, Prime Minister John Diefenbaker of the Progressive Conservative Party cancelled the Avro Arrow program. That was a sad day for Canada. The Avro Arrow could have become the fastest plane in the world. It could have become a great defense for Canada, especially with the constant threat of Soviet bombers at the time. It could have given Canada something to really brag about. But, no. Instead, it became a $400-million pile of scrap metal. It may not look like much (especially since this is the Arrow without many of the features that were intended to be included in it), but you can watch its maiden flight here. I think it looks pretty cool. I'm really not an expert on the subject, so go to Wikipedia if you want to learn more about it.

Warning: do not click on the following link, unless you have a fair amount of time on your hands. It is far too addicting. Which is probably why it's on addictinggames.com. Anyway, you have been warned.

Filler is a very good game. Basically, the goal is to fill at least two thirds of the game screen with circles, while avoiding the evil bouncy balls. When each level starts, the bouncy balls start bouncing around, and then you have to place your circles so that, while they are growing, they do not touch a bouncy ball. When you hold down your mouse, a circle starts growing around where you clicked, and it stops when you either let go of the mouse, the circle you are making touches another circle you already made, or the circle touches a bouncy ball. In the latter case, you also lose a life. Each level, you only get a certain amount of circles and lives to place, though. If you run out of lives, you lose, obviously, and if you run out of circles, you can continue to place more, but each takes a life from you.

You now know enough to skip the game's introduction and play on your own! You should get used to it fairly quickly, so don't worry if you don't understand everything. The last couple days, I played this game a lot, and, as I am so nice, I'll give you a few pointers to make it, at least, to level 50 (though, my best so far is 76).

1. Don't bother rushing. You have lots of time each level, and plus, if you run out of time, it doesn't matter. You just lose a few bonus points. Try to spend more time optimizing the size of the balls. That being said, though,
   
2. You generally have many more balls than you need for each level. Don't wait too long to make your move, as you could probably easily pass the level with 5 or 6 huge mistakes, even more past level 15.
   
3. Use gravity to your advantage. As far as I can tell, all circles seem to weigh exactly the same, no matter their size, so, for instance, if you have one really big circle on screen, you can push it over with a few small circles, and clear up some space to place two or three decently-sized circles, in most cases.
   
4. Try placing circles in the top left corner. Placing them in a top corner is good, because then when they fall, they move bouncy balls that are below out of the way, clearing space for you to make another circle. However, the top right corner is bad, because when a bouncy ball gets trapped by your circles against a wall, then is squished, it teleports to the top right corner, which can be annoying when you are in the middle of making a big circle there.
   
5. Lastly, try catching the bouncy balls in small spaces, so that they aren't bothering you wherever you are placing circles as much. Usually, you do this by accident anyway, and it is somewhat hard to do when you are trying to, but if the opportunity arises, go for it.
   

I'm wondering if there is any space at all once you get to, say, level 100, so if anyone manages to get there, let me know. Anyway, that is all for now, so à la prochaine!

Sexpartite lunette

sexpartite (adj.): Composed of or divided into six parts, as in a sexpartite rib vault.

lunette (n.): Something that has the shape of a crescent or half-moon (especially when referring to an architectural feature)

Latin and French today. Although, 'lunettes' in French does mean glasses, but 'lune' is moon. Actually, glasses (especially in old times) were often crescent-shaped (i.e. "half-moon glasses"), so this isn't too surprising. Anyway, finally some words that aren't biology.

Last post I might have said this post was going to be about lasers, but as usual, that was a complete fabrication. I'll talk about puzzles instead. Japanese puzzles mainly. Especially the puzzle types published by Nikoli, and particularly Nurikabe, which I've recently ordered 5 books of from Japan - they're written in Japanese, but luckily you don't need the words, and the numerals are most likely Arabic, but even if they aren't, learning ten or so Japanese characters won't kill me.

But anyway, what is Nurikabe? Well, it's a Japanese word for "invisible wall randomly in the middle of a road." More relevantly, it's a puzzle type invented by Japanese puzzle company Nikoli, who also brought you Sudoku. A short explanation is basically: you're given a grid with some numbers on it, and you want to fill some squares in black so that the numbers are on white islands with 'number' many white squares. But this flash tutorial will probably be much better at explaining it to you: http://www.nikoli.co.jp/en/puzzles/nurikabe/. Good quantities of printable puzzles don't seem to be readily available on the web but there are a bunch of online sites that publish a new one every day or so and that you can solve in your browser - just google nurikabe.

I think it's pretty similar to Sudoku in terms of average difficulty. Perhaps it's a bit harder at first, but you get used to it very fast anyway (and sudoku is probably annoying at first too... although I don't even remember when I first saw sudoku). A puzzle that I really find annoying to do are "Paint by Numbers". They're pretty popular - you may have done one or two of them. Unfortunately I never got the hang of them and they take me really long.

Interestingly, Paint by Numbers, Nurikabe, and Sudoku (it's extension to n^2 by n^2 grids) are all NP-complete, which at least means you can take solace in the fact that your computer won't laugh at you any time soon (that said, it could still solve them faster than you could).

Anyway, the Nikoli site has a bunch of other interesting puzzles. Shikaku looks interesting but they only invented it recently so there are practically no available puzzles. There's also puzzles with very funny titles, like "Where is Black Cells".

I think that's all I'll write about puzzles today. Maybe I'll conclude with some random remarks.

I rewatched Goldeneye the other day, and have come to the conclusion that it was the best recent James Bond movie. Perhaps James Bond out of the cold-war era is getting a bit strange now, so people are altering the genre a bit (*cough* Casino Royale *cough*). But whatever.

My friend told me to go get some random "Solar something" RTS game but when I went to the IGN site to look it up I got distracted by: http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/852/852953p1.html. It's about time for a new Banjo Kazooie.

This person has a lot of good trance/techno mixes and songs posted. If you like the genre (unlike some people...) you should check it out.

And that's all for now. I could talk about lasers next time, but I'd probably just copy what Munroe said and add something about petawatt lasers... so just go read his blog post! Ciao.

-squidout

By the way, the post is in the above picture. Quality 7.

Crocodilian scleroderma 2

So, this is basically a follow up to yesterday's post.

And the program I told you about is now on the sidebar. Of course, you'll probably need Python to run it, but that's fine. stegano.py will hide a file of your choice in a bitmap and unstegano.py will bring it back. Pretty handy.

Now, you'll notice that you can specify the quality of your steganization. This basically describes how many bits of the hidden file we hide per byte. So it ranges from 1 to 8, with 1 being very subtle (you're only altering the LSB) to 8 which is very unsubtle (the entire pixel is replaced with stuff from the hidden data). The bonus is, of course, 8 takes up 1/8 the space of 1. Even 2 takes up only half the space of 1, and looks the same to my eye. To see the difference between the qualities, here's the first two paragraphs of this post repeated 5 times hidden in Mr. Happy from yesterday at all possible quality levels:

Quality 8:

Quality 7:

Quality 6:

Quality 5:

Quality 4:

Quality 3:

Quality 2:

Quality 1:

Original (no hidden info):

It should be noted that it always takes the most significant bits from the image, so even with quality 7 (where there's only one bit from Mr. Happy) the noise is quite "see-through".

Now, how can the evil enemies detect this? Well, there are lots of advanced statistical image processing techniques they can use to see if there is something "beneath" the image. You can go google 'steganalysis' to figure out how it's actually done - I'll just show one of the most crude techniques.

First, behold the below image of some random very badly built Mechano toy that I threw into the snow today:

You'll notice it's a JPEG. That's because I'm definitely not going to upload a 1632 by 1224 bitmap image for you. Definitely not. But I did the following test with a bitmap, so no worries.

The reason, of course, that I'm not going to upload a 1632 by 1224 bitmap for you, is because bitmaps are big. While the bitmap is about 5 megabytes large, the corresponding JPEG is only 122 kb. So, a lot of space is wasted in bitmaps. And we make use of that space when we hide stuff in them.

Of course, every 1632 by 1224 bitmap file is about the same size. But, what if we try compressing them? I have a feeling a 1632 by 1224 black rectangle compresses just a bit better than the above image. Similarly, if we hide information inside bitmaps, it has to be compressed too. So hmm...

In any case, I took the Gettysburg Address (1.4 KB), the Declaration of Independence (9.1 KB), and Dickens' Great Expectations (997 KB), and hid them all (with quality 2) inside a copy of the above image. Then I zipped the resulting images. The results:

Hidden Information	Size of Hidden Info	Size of Compressed Result
None (original picture)	0 KB	1646 KB
Gettysburg Address	1.4 KB	1648 KB
Declaration of Independence	9.1 KB	1652 KB
Dickens' Great Expectations	997 KB	2168 KB

So, you can notice a difference =).

Of course, this is a very hard test to do if you don't have an original picture, because different images compress differently. But you can generally notice if someone is trying to hide Great Expectations =).

Oh, and perhaps I didn't mention it, but of course, you can hide any type of file this way (because after all, all files are ultimately binary). Hiding Mr. Happy in:

(I know, we'd usually hide the Secret Plan in Mr. Happy, but the Secret Plan file is bigger, so stick with this), at quality 4 we'd get:

Yeah, it's noticeable but whatever. Given all the other random things happening in that picture, it doesn't look so off. If you use quality 1, 2, or 3 though usually you don't notice anything.

In any case, this was my first 'big' project in Python, which seems to be a really powerful language even though I only know about a quarter of its features. It may not be as powerful as C++, but it's probably a good choice for someone new to programming to learn.

Anyway, there are a bunch of improvements that you could probably make to the programs. The first is modularizing it and allowing to bypass the annoying input so you can do tests like the one above much more easily. Secondly, non-integer qualities would be nice too. Like, if I have lots of room, I should be able to set it to say 0.3. Since quality acts harmonically (1/n ish), there'd even be a considerable difference between 7.3 and 8. The nicest thing would be to figure out the best possible quality that takes advantage of the entire file - because only using the bottom n rows is pretty dumb. destegano should be able to figure out how large the file is by itself (although honestly, any self-respecting file type allows extra zero bytes at the end, so we could just choose the size of the steganograph). Also, it needs to be optimized a lot - hiding Great Expectations took quite a while. But for a quick hack, it's pretty nice.

If you actually bother getting it to work, have fun playing around with it and hiding files from other people. But that's all for now. Maybe next time I'll talk about laser beams or something.

Until then, ciao.

-squid out

Crocodilian scleroderma

crocodilian (adj.): belonging to the order of large reptiles, Crocodilia

scleroderma (n.): a chronic disease characterized by excessive deposits of collagen in the skin or other organs,

By the way, crocodiles are the closest living relatives to birds, since they both happened to evolve from dinosaurs.

Anyway, I felt like posting, so since I've been programming a bit of stegano stuff in Python recently, I think I'll move on from swords to steganography.

Steganography ('stegano' for short), for those who have no cryptography experience whatsoever, is probably best explained like this: Let's say you want to send a secret message to your friend, containing say, the word "crocodilian". This is known as the plaintext - it's the net information that you want to send to him. But the evil enemies want to know what you're sending to your friend too, and with their unlimited resources they can intercept the messager or mailman or telephone or e-mail or any other means of communication you can think of. So, naturally you encrypt it and turn it into ciphered text (often shortened to just ciphertext) by say, shifting every letter one letter forward: "dspdpejmjbo". Of course, your friend needs to know that everything is shifted one letter forward too, but presumably you arrange this ahead of time. Anyway, you now send this to your friend and it gets intercepted by the evil enemies. Now, the evil enemies notice something fishy - why would you bother sending your friend a string of gibberish letters like "dspdpejmjbo"? So, suspecting something, with their multi-million dollar budget they hire a crack team of researchers who manage to crack your code in a few years - and your secret has fallen!

Of course, one way to avoid this is to simply make the cipher trickier (two spaces forward!). But another way (and the way related to steganography), is to just not make them suspicious. We could do this, say, by making an English sentence where the first letter of every word corresponds to the letters in "dspdpejmjbo" - such as: "Do stupid peons derail planes entering jam made joyously by Olga?" When the evil enemies intercept this, they would, of course, find nothing unusual about the sentence and just let it pass through. After all, they can't spend a multi-million dollar budget analyzing every message that comes their way for hidden information.

So, in short, ciphering is hiding information; steganography is hiding the fact that you're hiding information.

Steganography is a pretty cool part of cryptography in that there are so many possible ways to do it. You might have noticed, that the sentence I constructed above is pretty fishy (i.e. they might eventually notice something was a bit peculiar about it). Also, even for a short sentence such as this one, you'd need almost an entire paragraph (if not more) to hide it all in that manner. So nowadays, most stegano stuff is done by hiding the information digitally in the insignificant layers of files.

Take the above black box, for example. If you copy it into Paint (or an equivalent) and play around with it for a while, you'll notice that it does contain the information "dspdpejmjbo". This is quite more subtle than "Do stupid peons derail planes entering jam made joyously by Olga?", since now you can hide a hidden message inside any block of uniform color. You can even hide the block too - you could include it surreptitiously at the bottom of a photograph or something.

But the evil enemies are getting smarter, and have just written a computer program that checks all picture files for blocks of uniform color, and then tries floodfilling the block with various colors to check for hidden text. So how do we get around them now? There's a very nice way to do this, but it is slightly more technical.

Of foremost importance is understanding how .bmp (or any other graphics extension of your choice, although they tend to be much more complex) files are stored. Luckily, with a hex editor it's not very hard to find out (if you don't know what a hex editor is, go learn to use a computer).

Open some arbitrary bitmap file (the one below, for example) in a hex editor.

If you do open it, you'll see lots and lots of bytes represented in hexadecimal. Of course, hexadecimal is always used because 16^2 is 2^8, so one byte goes to two hexadecimal characters. Similarly, ASCII ranges from 0-255 for the same reason; you can express one ASCII character with two hexadecimal characters or in one byte.

Now, if you're not used to hex cracking stuff, it'll probably look a little foreign. But if you play around, you should be able to figure out what most of the things are. For example, the first 2 bytes in a .bmp file are always "42 4D" - representing the ASCII "BM". This basically helps programs identify it is a bitmap (a nice trick is, if you are ever given a mystery file, open it in a hex editor and look at the first two bytes - they often identify the format of the file).

Then, bytes 3-6 denote the file size of the bitmap, in bytes (yes, there are only 4 bytes for this - we too hope that you don't feel like making a 4.3 GB bitmap file anytime in the near future). Now, if you look at the file size of something, you'll note that it's represented a bit oddly. By that I mean, they put the least significant bytes first.

What does that mean? It's basically akin to writing the number 7543 as 3457 - here the least significant digit, 3, appears first. Although, you don't need to worry about the bytes, so if you see "5E", that really means 5*16+14 = 94, not 14*16+5 = 229. Altogether, that means that something like "5E 26 00 00" actually represents the number 26*(16) + 5E = 9822 - not 24102, and definitely not 1579548672 (by the way, forgive the flipping between hexadecimal and decimal so often - only 26 and 5E are in hex there).

There's a lot more information encoded like this, like the length of the picture, the width of the picture, etc. However, we want to get to the interesting stuff - the actual picture. So skip ahead to byte A. This tells you the byte at which the actual image information starts. For my computer it's usually 36 - so the 54th byte. But it could change depending on the operating system, settings, the actual image, etc.

Now, you'll see familiar triplets of bytes - they encode the RGB values. So, if the 54th through 56th bytes are "00 FF 00" that means that the RGB of that pixel is "Red: 0, Green: 255, Blue: 0", so it's a green bit. (Actually, it's really the BGR values - the first "00" is the blue value - but we don't need to worry about this since we treat everything the same).

The observant person might have noticed that when I said "that pixel", I never really specified what pixel I was talking about. Now, you might intelligently assume that the first pixel would be the pixel in the top-left corner - but you'd be wrong. After all, if you look at the image, the pixel in the top left corner is cyan, not green. So hmm...

For some reason (hey, don't ask me) bitmaps represent the picture data from the bottom up - so the first pixel is actually the bottom-left corner. Then the next pixels are all along the bottom-most row, then they proceed to the second bottom-most row, etc. all the way to the top row.

Of course, that's not nearly annoying enough. To make things even better, they force the width to be a multiple of 4 - so you'll find that if you have 6 pixels in a row, you'll see the RGB's for those 6 pixels, followed by 2 "00 00 00"s.

Luckily, none of this matters to us, since we just want to hide "dspdpejmjbo" in the data. The first step is to translate that to an equivalent hex string: "6473706470656A6D6A626F00". Now, we're going to break up that hex string into triplets of characters: "647 370 647 065 6A6 D6A 626 F00"

Now what do we do? Well, consider the R hex value for some random pixel, say "A2". Now, this represents a red value of 162. Now, if we changed it to say, "A6", you probably couldn't tell the difference. But if we changed it to something like "62", you probably could - the red value has changed by 64.

We call the "2" the least significant bit (although it's really 4 bits, but shh). We basically are just going to replace the last 4 bits with one bit from our message. So for example, if our first pixel was "A2 B3 C4" it would get changed to "A6 B4 C7", since our first triplet is "647".

And when we do that, the new picture is:

Now, our message wasn't very large, so all of it managed to hide in the bottom row. You can notice the steganography in paint, since we are doing +/- 16 shifts to the color values. But nevertheless, it's a pretty nice way of hiding information. And I bet the evil enemies wouldn't suspect anything!

I'm going to go play Halo 3 with somebody now, so I'll stop now, but I'll post more about this later - like my program that automates the process, how you can actually detect stegano, and how to hide pictures within pictures.

Until then, ciao.

-squidout

Returning, finally.

Sorry to keep the dry spot with no posts from me lasting so long. I am back with more to talk about and I will try to post as often as possible now.

Just seeing the creature on the right (I hope) many will immidiatly understand my absence.

For those who don't this is a screen shot from super metroid the third installment in this nintendo produced series and my personal favourite. To give a brief explanation as to this game and whatever relevance it has to SG, here we go.

Super Metroid: after the first metroid on the NES, the space pirate leader Mother Brain is destroyed. In Metroid 2 on Game Boy Samus destroys all the metroids except a hatchling which thinks Samus is its mother. Super Metroid takes place soon after that when Samus delivers the final metroid to researchers. after leaving the research station ceres she recieves a distress call saying the station has been attacked. The game begins with samus, with none of her suit's abilities from previous games (for some inexplicable reason) attempting to save the metroid and eventually returns to the planet where it all began Zebes to save the metroid.

I have recently beaten this game on the Wii's Virtual Console and haven't done much else with my time.

The relevance to SG?: Since Point-Counterpoint wasn't so big I figured I'd do what I do on facebook where I give gaming news and review games for others to play. This said I recomend everyone with a wii goes and gets this game for 800 points.

Till next time,

Aaron

Re: the last 3 posts

So, right off the top, I want to say that even if the Olympics were in Beijing (which they are going to be), and I significantly disliked Beijing, I would probably not hate them, and still watch events that I found interesting. I guess maybe if you are like the US in the Cold War when the Olympics were in Russia, you might have an okay reason to dislike the Olympics, or not send anyone to them, or something similar, but I highly doubt that China is planning on launching nuclear bombs at Amir, and we know that in general he does like the Olympics (see the second sentence of his post), therefore I do not see why Amir should hate the coming Olympics. Plus, the whole point of the Olympics is to spread unity and peace, not spark debates comparing the US to China. But, as the debate has already been sparked, I will join in. Now, I probably don't know much about the situation in China at the moment, and I probably have a huge bias towards the US, as I, and most of my family that I know, were born there, but I'll try to not be too bias. Well, the next paragraph might make this seem unlikely, but just hold on.

First of all (to demonstrate my bias, it would seem) I think the founding fathers of the US were very smart people. The US declared independence on the 4th of July, 1776, because it got mad at Britain for implementing all sorts of taxes on them without their consent. In fact, they didn't even have representatives in British parliament. Nobody likes being taxed, especially when you don't even get to choose who is making you pay more taxes, and thus, people got mad. "No taxation without representation," coined by Jonathan Mayhew, became a prevalent view among people in the US. So, they fought the British for their independence. Right at the beginning of the war, however, the founding fathers drafted the Declaration of Independence, which stated very clearly:

"all men are created equal."

Basically, the US was made because its citizens wanted to be fairly represented, and choose what happened to them. Therefore, many years later, when Communism came around, it would make sense that they disliked it, as it was more or less what they had fought against for independence. Thus, everyone started hating communists, and, among other things, ignored fascists, which may have helped cause the Second World War, but that's another story. While it may be the case that democracy was good for the US, however, this is not the case for all countries. If what Cindy said is true (which I assume it is), then China needs communism to be able to do anything. Obviously, this is not the case for the US, for instance, as they manage to do things like declare war on Iraq, but once again, that's another story. But then, Amir says: "I also don't like how the Chinese government is letting hundreds of thousands of little girls and women be raped by Arab militants." I don't know whether this is true or not, and assume that there is at least a little bit of fib in it. It makes sense, however, that people in the US would blame the Chinese government for this, though. Basically, they see a country where the population has no say in what happens, and people being raped (or at least they are being told that they are seeing this by people like Amir), and probably think that the situation in China is similar to theirs back in the 1770s, and thus blame the Chinese government. Once again, I don't know enough to say for sure (maybe I'll look into it when I don't have stuff to do), but I think that the situation regarding Falun Gong looks a lot like Britain taxing the US without asking them first, too, and if the people of China started revolting against the government, I would be surprised if the US didn't help. However, I haven't heard of any revolutions in China recently, thus I assume that the people of China don't care as much about being persecuted for practicing Falun Gong as Americans did about being taxed, or that they value productivity more than they care. At any rate, both sides have pretty valid points. I guess it all depends on your perspective…

Now, in Jon's post, he discussed how hive-mindedness probably comes naturally when there are many people. To an extent, I agree. I guess I don't really know both sides to this one, but in the stereotypic view of most Western people, Chinese are mostly as Amir described in his post; they accumulate money, status, and achievement for the sake of achieving money, status and achievement. Stereotyping is very bad. I am sure that that is not the case with all Chinese people. I would be highly surprised if everyone just did lots and lots of work to get good grades. I know many people in the US and Canada don't. Then again, it may be in Chinese culture to make your children do lots and lots of extra work so that they succeed, which might cause lots of people to "strive" to do well, or copy their neighbors in playing music, which I have heard alot. Whether or not either of those are true, they do remind me a lot of the American Dream, as well. Though, there is one big difference that I see. The American Dream is that all Americans have the opportunity to do whatever they want to through hard work, because the US is a free country. While this opportunity is available, not many Americans actually seem to work very hard, which is true of most people, because they don't see the point in working hard when they could just not work hard (nor do I, in most cases). While Jon's point on the matter does have validity, I think that, if the Chinese did not make their children strive to do well, there would be a wider range of people's views on working hard in China, as there is in the US. Then, when he says that the American Dream is what is on the mind of all Americans, I disagree, because, firstly, nowadays, the American Dream is usually only associated with immigrants coming to the US so that they can do better than they were in their home country, but also, not close to the majority of Americans actually take advantage of the opportunity they have to work hard then succeed. Walking around any part of the US that is not a rich neighborhood will show you that (ie, Broadway probably doesn't count). Plus, the only time I remember hearing about or thinking about the American dream, with the exception of now, in the last 4 or 5 years at least, was when Harry Potter married his best friend's sister. I doubt that most Americans have just that on their minds. Anyway, that is all I have to say for now, and I have to go eat, so I will leave my comments at that. Maybe I'll write more if I can think of more to say. Or if Amir or Jon or Cindy writes anything else that I feel like commenting on. En tous cas, la prochaine!