Month: October 2009

A reader writes:

No, they aren't. My husband is a gamer. In fact, as I type this, he's playing Left 4 Dead with a group of friends all over the country. They get together three times a week to kill zombies, drink beer, and talk smack. It's the 21st Century version of a bowling league. We've sat down and talked about why he'd rather play video games than watch movies. He's given me a variety of answers.  I'll do my best to sum them up.

First, the amount of money invested is worth it. He paid $50.00 for that game in the middle of a recession. He plays it for 8 to 10 hours a week. A movie simply can't do that. Second, it's interactive. As much as movies want audience input the focus groups often get it dead wrong. Sappy endings, terrible dialog, and horrific plots. Video games allow for user generated content that is truly unique. If his map isn't good no one will play it. A focus group doesn't need to tell him that. Third, it involves skill. I've watched my husband practice getting moves just right so he can beat levels. It takes time, patience, and willingness. Movies can't offer that. Lastly, the plot lines are becoming more detailed and timely. Sure, the original Mario Brothers called for a quest to save a Princess, but in games like Katamari Damacy is a comment on consumerism and the quest to fill one's life with stuff.

Hollywood should take note of how well the video game industry is doing, and how they are innovating their products. If they don't they won't see people like myself or my husband in the theaters for quite some time.

Castine, Maine, 3 pm

A website that recites whatever you type.

Jonah Lehrer spotlights a wine connoisseur whose tasting talents did not survive a blindfold. His take-out:

[O]ur sensations require interpretation. When we take a sip of wine, we don’t taste the wine first, and the cheapness or redness second. We taste everything all at once, in a single gulp of thiswineisred, or thiswineisexpensive. As a result, the wine “experts” sincerely believed that the white wine [mixed with food coloring] was red, or that Lafite was actually Troplong-Mondot. Such mistakes are inevitable: Our brain has been designed to believe itself, wired so that our prejudices feel like facts, our opinions indistinguishable from the actual sensation. If we think a wine is cheap, it will taste cheap. And if we think we are tasting a grand cru, then we will taste a grand cru.

Tanner Ringerud writes:

Steve Porter has a new remixed video, and apparently he’s a big fan of the new show Community. I am too, and this just confirms the shows awesomeness.

Stephen J. Dubner passes along a study:

[F]ewer than one-third of young adults possess basic knowledge of interest rates, inflation, and risk diversification. Financial literacy is strongly related to sociodemographic characteristics and family financial sophistication. Specifically, a college-educated male whose parents had stocks and retirement savings is about 50 percentage points more likely to know about risk diversification than a female with less than a high school education whose parents were not wealthy.

Stunning and disturbing images.

Freddie forwards along a document:

[C]heck out this amazing letter from Dwight Eisenhower from the last days of World War II. Some of the people who have commented on it have remarked about Eisenhower’s writing style, which is really remarkable in its clarity and directness. It’s also really interesting to read his personal reflections on towering historical figures like Omar Bradley or Patton. What really stays with you, though, is his brief description of touring a liberated death camp, and in particular, his prediction even then of Holocaust denial. This is almost a month before V-E day; the world doesn’t yet know the extent of Germany’s crimes. There’s no greater knowledge of the Holocaust yet to invite denial. And yet the terrible and persistent history of anti-Jewish hatred already compels Eisenhower to vow to stand witness against those who would in the future dismiss the Holocaust as propaganda.

Will Sherman writes:

Visiting the Midway Atoll, at the center of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, [Chris] Jordan took these disturbing photos of dead albatross chicks raised on a steady diet of plastic debris floating in the water: lighters, bottle caps and other colorful trash. He writes:

To document this phenomenon as faithfully as possible, not a single piece of plastic in any of these photographs was moved, placed, manipulated, arranged, or altered in any way. These images depict the actual stomach contents of baby birds in one of the world’s most remote marine sanctuaries, more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent.

The rest of his fascinating, heartbreaking series here.

Psychcentral passes along a fascinating study:

Previous research has shown that people spend more physical effort in a demanding physical task when they could gain a high-value monetary reward, than when they could gain a low-value reward. But the intriguing finding from this research was that this behavior occurred even when the monetary reward was presented subliminally, below the threshold of our conscious awareness. In other words, a person would work harder for more money, even if they weren’t consciously aware that more money was the reward.