E3 2012

E3 is over for another year so here I’ll give my rundown of the five main presentations:

Microsoft ★★★☆☆

Microsoft were up first this year, and the general feel of their presentation was more about new feature of the Xbox, rather than new games. They want to bring more media to the Xbox and connect it to other hand held devices, they want the Xbox to be the only thing plugged into your TV. To do this they’ve added things like Kinect support for 12 new languages, new services to watch NBA and NHL games and Internet Explorer (which surprised me). They also announced a partnership with Nike for a fitness game that uses the Kinect to monitor and improve your workout, which looks really well done and seems like a brilliant use for Kinect. To link the Xbox with other devices they introduced firstly with Xbox Music – a music service on Xbox, Windows 8, smartphones & tablets, then secondly Xbox Smartglass. The idea behind smartglass is that your tablet or smartphone can provided additional content while you game or watch something on your Xbox, the examples given in the show included your tablet showing an interactive map while you watch Game of Thrones, allowing your tablet to be an extra controller for designing plays in Madden and displaying game info in Halo 4. It would seem that Microsoft are trying to replicate the Wii U game-pad on your existing devices, and also remove the need to buy a smart TV, and while it looks interesting I can’t really see people using it heavily for gaming, it seems far too immersion breaking.

In terms of the games they showed, there didn’t seem to be anything that was particularly impressive or surprising ^[1]. There was the obvious Halo 4 and another Dance Central game, an angry birds rip-off coming to XBLA called Wreckateer, a new trailer for Fable: The Journey, which looks good but I would have liked another demo like last year showing off people actually using the Kinect, rather than lots of CGI nonsense.

It was an okay presentation, and Smartglass looks promising, but overall I think they failed in terms of games.

 

Asteroid Water

The recent asteroid mining story, coupled with a talk I attended recently by Crispian Jago, and inspired by a conversation with Pete Hague lead to this:

The Amor asteroids are a group of near-Earth asteroids with orbital radii in between the orbits of Earth and Mars.

 

Showing Windows 8 the Door

Since the arrival of the iPad my laptop has been slightly neglected, almost like a first-born child after the arrival of a new sibling. And so, to show it that I still loved it and that nothing had changed, I decided to use it to play with the consumer preview of Windows 8 that was released last month. If it felt neglected before I dread to think how it feels now.

The Good

Unfortunately there isn’t much to say on this front, only two points spring to mind. Firstly, the start up is quick. Very quick. From pressing the power button to being able to open Word is roughly 33 seconds, and this is on my old laptop where Windows 7 struggled to break the minute barrier ^[1]. Secondly, file transfer is a lot nicer. You can pause and resume transfers easily and it give you a nice graph showing transfer speeds.

 

My Week With an iPad

Ever since the iPad was released I’ve wanted one, but it wasn’t until I started my PhD and my girlfriend started work that we had enough money to afford one. As soon as I started hearing rumours of the iPad 3 around January I knew that I could wait no longer, and as soon as the press conference showing it off had finished I ordered one. Part of me was always worried that as soon as I got it I’d feel buyer remorse but thankfully that hasn’t been the case. Here’s what I do feel about it:

The Keyboard

For me the split keyboard is surprisingly easy to get used to and works really well, however it could just be that years of growing up with a Playstation have given me more articulate thumbs than most people, not everyone I’ve shown it to has liked the idea of typing with their thumbs. While it may have been easy to get used to the feel of it, it’s not yet up to speed. I find it can still be slightly quicker to type one handed on the full keyboard, mainly because I’m still working out which letters are on which half of the screen.

 

The Problem with Piracy

Piracy has now become an unavoidable and, I think, unremovable part of life on the internet, and is constantly referred to as harmful by the mainstream media. Whether it is or isn’t doesn’t concern me for this post, all I’m interested in is if it’s possible to know whether it’s harmful or not with any level of certainty.

To prove that piracy is harmful you have to show that it has caused the loss of income and for me this is where the trouble comes in, how do you do this? Economics systems are very complicated because they contain people, and lots of them. People have a tendency to behave however they want, and can be hard to predict with great accuracy. Not only are their individual habits hard to predict but so are large scale features of their behavior ^[1].

Cum Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc

When presented with information about the effect of internet piracy on the media (or other industries) it is important to remember one key thing: correlation does not imply causation. Links have to be proved with data, and you should always question how the data was obtained and how the conclusions were reached. Theories have to be tested and investigated. Unfortunately, when it comes to internet piracy this is extremely difficult, maybe even impossible.

In order to accurately test the effects of piracy, for something like the profit of a film, you really need a second earth. You would have to simultaneously release your film on Earth-1, where the film can be pirated, and Earth-2 where it is impossible to pirate, and see how much money you make. If the profit on Earth-1 is less than the profit on Earth-2, all other things being equal, then you have proof that piracy has a detrimental affect on sales in this one case. After lots of similar experiments have been done you can build up a general trend/rule.

 

Solar Britain?

Could the UK survive completely on Solar Power? I was recently discussing this with Pete Hague after reading some of the recent blog posts on Do The Math. There is certainly enough solar energy hitting the land every 4.5 hours to power the world for a year, but is there enough hitting our dull and cloudy land to keep us in energy? And is it feasibly harness-able?

First we need to know how much sun we get. Below is a plot of the average isolation values (in units of kWh/m^2/day) over a 10 year period for London (Blue), Dublin (Red) and Edinburgh (Green) taken from here.

The below table shows the maximum, minimum and average values. I have also adjusted the values to take into account the efficiency of solar panels. I have used a value of 20%, taken from here, this value can of course improve over time but it is currently the best we have.

 

Geek Shame

As you may or may not know I am a huge fan of comics and board games, however at times I find myself embarrassed by this. It usually happens in situations involving my family, or people I don’t know too well. With my friends it’s fine, some of them occasionally wet their feet in the waters of comics and graphic novels and all of them are avid board gamers (hence the bi-weekly games nights). But with other people outside of my circle of friends I’m far less comfortable discussing some of my more geeky proclivities. Now this could be because of some in-built insecurities or shyness to do with me, or, my reaction to a perceived attitude towards said proclivities by the general public. I think there is some element of the former involved but I feel it is mainly due to the latter.

Board Games

There are of course some games which I feel are immune to geek shame, card games like poker or blackjack or whole family games like monopoly or trivial pursuit. There are also games specifically for adults to enjoy (I dread the day someone pulls out this at our games night) but I won’t go into them here. Chess seems to have a certain geeky/intellectual feeling towards it, but it is not a game I would feel embarrassed having people know I play. The games I’m thinking of when I think of embarrassment are games things like Munchkin, Zombies!!! or Arkham Horror.

As an example, me and my friends have played poker at our local pub and on a few occasions we have had people watching and asking to join in. When we play Munchkin however it has seemed like there’s a different attitude. On one occasion there was pointing. Maybe it was the choice of game? Maybe it was because we were playing it in a pub? All I know is that I felt slightly uncomfortable about it.

 

Last Son of Krypton

As part of my undergraduate course at Leicester there was a module called Journal of Special Topics. It involved everyone in the year working in groups of 3-4 and writing weekly ‘science’ reports that other groups would peer review and give feedback on. If a paper was good enough I would be submitted to the archive, if not it would have to be redone. One of the paper I submitted for my group was a look at the potential scientific explanations for the some of the powers displayed by Superman. I thought I’d put it up here in case anyone else wanted to give it a read.

Superman

Superman is a fictional DC superhero created in 1938. He is the last survivor of the alien planet of Krypton, having been sent to Earth as a child by his parents moments before their planet exploded [1]. On Earth he realised that radiation from our sun interacted with his physiology in such a way that he obtained superhuman powers; one of which, heat vision, will be the subject of discussion in this paper.

CO2 Vision

We will model his heat vision as a type of carbon dioxide laser. A CO2 laser works by using the vibration and rotations of a CO2 molecule to produce the laser light in the 10.6μm range [2]. This infrared beam is mainly used in industry for cutting, welding and engraving. Superman uses his heat vision for similar purposes and when you combine this with the fact that that this type of laser uses molecules readily found in the body it seems to be good choice for modeling his heat vision. Although in the comics and films Superman’s heat vision is primarily displayed as bright red beams this is probably more for visual effect. Add to this the fact that he is able to produce invisible beams it does not seem unreasonable to model his vision this way.

Photosynthesis

As stated, Superman’s main source of energy is through the absorption of solar radiation, a process which will be assumed to work in a similar manner to photosynthesis. Photosynthesis is a chemical process in plants that uses the energy from sunlight to convert CO2 into sugar and we can imagine

 

Student Moans Loans

The old (before 2011) system of students loans is being replaced. This caused many students to complain and go on marches and generally make themselves look foolish and immature by acting without thinking. I may not be affected by the new changes but I was a student and so I’m going to give my opinions on the new system, but first I’ll give a brief outline of the old and new systems.

The old system, the one in place while I was doing my degree, had the tuition fees at £3,000 a year. So by the time I finished my Masters I had a debt of around £12,000 (not including the debt from maintenance loans). Repayment of this doesn’t commence until I’m earning over £15,000 a year, and then consists of 9% of what I earn over the £15,000 limit. Interest is added after the first repayment and tracks inflation.

The new system has seen the tuition fees rise to a maximum of £9,000 a year, which would have left me with a total debt of £36,000 (again, not including maintenance loans). Unlike the old system interest is constantly added to the loan. For the duration of your studies it is inflation+3%, it then drops back down to the base rate of inflation+0% when you finish, and then increases back up to inflation+3% when you earn between £21,000 and £41,000. You start paying back when you are earning above £21,000 this time, but like before you pay back 9% of everything above this limit. We can work out the faction of your wage you’d pay back each year under each system, y, as a function of how much you’re earning, x, using the following equations;

The plot of these can be seen in the graph below

 

It Begins.

I’ve decided to start my own blog in the vain hope that someone out there wants to listen to what I’ve got to say. A couple of my friends have blogs and one of them semi-regularly contributes to The Pod Delusion, a podcast about skeptical thinking. I submitted one piece for them about the new student loans scheme a while back but since then have struggled to find the time, however I’m hoping that with my own blog I’ll be less constrained by the topic of skeptical thinking (hopefully there will still be lots of that here though) and can post other things as well, specifically things like film, game and comic reviews, updates on my PhD and anything I think may be interesting. I also think it’ll take less prep and execution time to write a blog post than it did to write out and record my Pod Delusion piece.


I suppose the idea to get a blog really kicked off when I started my PhD. A friend of mine who I did my undergraduate degree with (the semi-regular Pod Delusion contributor) also managed to land a PhD position at Leicester and since we started in October we’ve been car sharing to and from work. It has now become a bit of a routine that we start every morning with a coffee and chat about the general problems of the world, before going off to solve two very specific and very diametrically opposed problems in physics (I’m a condensed matter theorist, he’s a theoretical astrophysicist). It is worth pointing that the two problems we are solving as part of our PhDs are the ones we are, hopefully, very informed on. More so as the PhDs progress. The problems we discuss over coffee almost universally involve subjects in which we have no official expertise, but have at least a general understanding, interest and have usually read about in other blogs or reports. We try to apply our own brand of problem solving and thinking to see if we can come up with a solution (regardless of whether one is needed or whether a better one already exists).


A number of the posts in this blog will hopefully revolve around some of those discussions, and by putting them on here we may get an outside opinion that we are missing (there’s always the worry that the two of us are becoming more and more extreme in our views, to the point where people may give us horrified looks when we explain our ideas, but hopefully that’s not the case), or just get the chance to discuss our ideas with others and have people who may know what they’re on about point out everything we’ve got wrong.