Interesting Links for 31-3-2011

[andrewducker]

• Samsung mass produces transparent LCD panels
  (tags: lcd displays awesome)
• Google tightening control over Android licensees. (Open Sourced code still open though)
  (tags: android google mobile_phones)
• Death anxiety prompts people to believe in intelligent design, reject evolution, study suggests
  (tags: death anxiety science religion creationism evolution)
• Why Angry Birds is so successful and popular: a cognitive teardown of the user experience
  (tags: design psychology AngryBirds ux ui games)
• LiveJournal has undergone the most powerful DDoS-attack in its history
  (tags: livejournal ddos)
• Why Cats Are Not Doctors
  (tags: cats medicine funny)
• When depressed, women lose their ability to judge their partner's feelings (men don't seem to).
  (tags: empathy psychology relationships women gender)
• Bacteria in the gut may influence brain development
  (tags: bacteria br brain neuroscience development)
• Official Google Blog: +1’s: the right recommendations right when you want them—in your search results
  (tags: google search social)
• Mononoke Hime (1980) - The Original Miyazaki Book
  (tags: manga translation miyazaki anime comics japan art)
• Possibly the coolest dice in the world. I want!
  (tags: dice games)
• Study finds surprising gender differences related to sexual harassment
  (tags: gender harrassment)
• Whitehall IT chief attacks Labour's record - ordering projects to "sound sexy".
  (tags: computers government labour)

Comments

[matgb]

FYI: just opened a chunk of hte above links, and got a trojan warning. No idea which one though.

[drainboy.livejournal.com]

Why cats are not doctors....didn't work for me purely because the joke acted as if cats were doctors. As a joke structure that fights against itself.

"Why cats are not doctors: While informing patient's family of their loss, doctor suddenly loses interest and walks off"

vs.

"Why cats are not doctors: While informing patient's family of their loss, doctors don't suddenly loses interest and walk off"

[andrewducker]

So "What if cats were doctors?" would have been a better subject line?

[drainboy.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it seems like such a minor thing, but it grates on every joke. IS IT JUST ME?!

[nameandnature]

Death anxiety prompts people to believe in intelligent design, reject evolution, study suggests

This seems to come under the heading of Terror Management Theory.

In similar experiments, priming with thoughts of death leads to worldview defence reactions in people who believe in an interventionalist God: see Richard Beck's blog post, part of his series The Varieties and Illusions of Religious Experience.

[andrewducker]

Cheers, that was fascinating.

(Particularly because seeing someone do these experiments while being a committed Christian feels weird to me, and I approve of anything that leaves me feeling odd.)

[simont]

It's interesting that the Angry Birds article cites as contributing to the game's addictiveness some things that seemed to me to be precisely what caused me to get fed up with it and stop playing.

They say it's a good thing that the flight of the birds takes time, so you can watch what happens. That's as may be when you're playing a shot you haven't tried before, but once you're at the stage of replaying your first two standard shots for the 40th time in order to try lots of options for the third one, it just contributes to an artificial delay between the trials and errors you're really trying to concentrate on. (Not to mention what happens if you get one of the first two slightly wrong.) It's like trying to solve Rubik's Cube under the constraint that between any two adjacent moves you have to put the cube down, answer a question from your multiplication tables, and pick it up again: it makes the action difficult in a way unrelated to the intrinsic difficulty of the underlying problem.

And this bit just dropped my jaw, after observing that you get a quick look at the structure and then it scrolls away as the screen pans over to the firing point:

These little characters [the twittering birds sitting by the catapult] are engaging in a way that for the most part erases the player’s memory of the structure design, which is critical to determining a strategy for demolishing the pig’s house. Predictably, the user scrolls the interface back to the right to get another look at the structure.

And, in my case at least, the user mutters "Why the hell do I have to do this every bloody time?" and gets progressively more annoyed and eventually gives up on the game.

And yet those features are cited as positive aspects of the UI which apparently contribute to the game's addictiveness for a hell of a lot of users who I can only suppose are utterly unlike me. Fascinating!

[andrewducker]

Yes - those are two things that specifically make it harder. But, in the first case, they heighten the anticipation and tension as you watch your bird go up and then come down three pixels off. Frustrating, but I'm willing to bet it sucks most people in.

Similarly, I find the lack of fine control to be frustrating - when I know that I want to do the same as I did last time (but with the third bird a pixel higher), but can't quite judge it right. But I suspect that this actually makes it fun to a lot of people.

[simont]

I suppose the bit about having to repeat your first two shots with a nonzero error rate in order to try a new idea for the third is conceptually not all that different from any number of games from the 8- and 16-bit era, where you always had to start playing from the beginning and only by getting really good at the first n levels could you get a decent number of chances to try the (n+1)th, and even then you'd have to slog through the first n all over again every time you died.

These days people don't seem to be quite so willing to put up with that (there's scope for dispute about whether you should be allowed to quicksave every ten seconds or whether there are time or space limitations on saving or whether you just get the right to go straight to any level you've legitimately reached, but pretty much all modern games have to have some sort of means whereby once you've reached level n+1 you can play it over and over again without having to go through the previous n every time). I suppose Angry Birds gets away with it by having the repetitive retries be seconds long rather than hours.

[andrewducker]

Yeah - same as with Super Meat Boy - you can get away with being punishingly hard if each go only takes 30 seconds.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Why not just scroll *out* and see both your bird selection and the structure at the same time?

That's what I do.

[simont]

That doesn't solve the same problem. It's not that I wanted to see the birds and the structure at the same time; there was sometimes a use for that, but more often it was that I wanted to examine the structure in detail looking for weak points, so zooming out would have been unhelpful on that score.

In any case, the thing that irritated me was that I had to perform the same UI action pretty much every time; zooming out every time would surely have been no less irritating than scrolling right.

But the point I was really getting at is that both I and the user described in the original article have the same habit here, but one of us finds it irritating while the other finds it an enrichment of their gaming experience. That's the thing that puzzles me!

Is it me, or...

[zornhau.livejournal.com]

...is that article on the DDoS attack on LJ itself on a distinctly dodgy site?

Re: Is it me, or...

[andrewducker]

It's certainly on a Russian one - I hadn't actually looked at the rest of the site to see what else it did.

Re: Is it me, or...

[mair_in_grenderich]

I thought that - it gave me popups and such like, on my (completely unconfigured) firefox.

Re: Is it me, or...

[andrewducker]

Aaaah. Firefox doesn't do popups for me (mostly), and I have Adblock Plus installed, so I don't see ads.

[undeadbydawn.livejournal.com]

Google have refused to release the Honeycomb source code, making it not open.

[the reason I have read for this is that they rushed it to keep up with iOS, and it's not ready for developer fiddling. If that is the case, I call total BS on the whole Android argument]

[andrewducker]

You still have access to all the old source code, of course. If you want to improve it yourself, you can do so whenever you like.

And my argument for Android has nothing to do with source code - it has to do with my ability to install any app I like on it, unlike on Windows Mobile or iOS.