Since then, spam traffic has been cut by 65%. *pauses for reader to stop dancing around like Snoopy* I had, in fact, noticed a slight lessening, but my filters are already pretty good. I’m curious if any of you felt this before you knew it?

According to this article at the freakonomics blog , spam costs U.S. companies (alone!) $33 billion a year in lost productivity and, according to this study (it’s a pdf, beware!), likely generates far far less revenue than that for spammers. If ever there was a parasite, spam is it. Granted, given the relative inexpense of running botnets vs. the revenue achieved, it’s likely that someone will rise up and take McColo’s place. Still, it’s nice to know that the white hats out there are learning how to shoot back.

• Prior to week 8, I had offered up a couple of trade that would have upgraded a couple of my opponents but would have upgraded me even more over the multiple trades; in other words, I make 2 opponents ~5 points better, but over the deals make myself ~10 points better. Alas, neither of them took me up on the offers, so I worked the free agent list a bit. In the end, though, I merely started Brett Favre over Peyton Manning, which was a 5-point mistake on my part. Fortunately Santana Moss, Roddy White, and LaDanian Tomlinson all went over 20, leading to a 9-point win over the doormat of the leauge; final score 111-102. Sad, but true.
• Week 9 saw me meddle around some more, sending Favre packing again (just can’t trust him) and picking up Maurice Jones-Drew. In hindsight that might seem prophetic, but he actually han’t busted out just yet. On the other hand, I had to soak up LT’s bye week so he was better than nothing. Once again, however, I failed at picking my QB, as Cutler scored 18 while Manning left his 24 on the bench. This week’s match-up pitted me against an opponent, however, whose team completely failed to show up, and I actually had a comfortable 81-70 win. From 2-5 to 4-5, maybe things aren’t so bad, right?
• Wrong. Week 10 faced me up against the league’s best team, and he proved it with an easy 99-86 mash. It figures, even when I pick a 27-point QB I manage to leave Cutler’s 35 on the bench. I had also dropped Maurice Jones-Drew that week, when he then proceeded to trash the Lions for 27. Add in two receivers who combined for 1 point , and, well, yeah - I lost. One interesting personnel note: Jason Witten was dropped, thanks to poor Cowboys quarterbacking and a team owner’s need to tinker with a few bye weeks. Frankly, a tight end on a bye is no worse than Anthony Fasano, who I’ve been starting the entire season. I scoop him up for the future. At any rate, my record is 4-6 and things are looking grim.

So, we come to week 11. I ponder and I consider, and for the most part I reason that it’s time to start a 1st string that I can live with. I crunch a few numbers (I have to say, Yahoo! Sports Fantasy leagues offer a nice set of features at the free level) and decide that DeAngelo Williams of the Panthers is a solid running candidate, particularly sicne LT remains untrustworthy. My receivers are all back, so I figure it’s time to let them roll. My roster this week:

• QB - Peyton Manning
• WR - Roddy White
• WR - Terrell Owens
• WR - Santana Moss
• RB - Brandon Jacobs
• RB - DeAngelo Williams
• TE - Jason Witten
• K - Jason Elam
• DEF - Pittsburgh (over Chicago on the bench)

And finally , I make a few accurate personnel choices. Peyton put up 24, versus 14 for Jay Cutler. LaDanian Tomlinson kept his 15 on the bench while Jacobs and Williams scored 19 and 24 , respectively. Hell, Pittsburgh went for 12, as opposed to Chicago’s singleton. Sadly, sort of, I wasted an amazing week on my opponent’s relatively limp showing, with a final score of 106-62.

This coming week, I don’t have many decisions to make, although I did reaquire Maurice Jones-Drew after his last couple of games. With two games to play before the playoffs, I’m in 5th place (out of 6) at 5-6. It’s a very tight league, I could still end up as high as 2nd, although that’s not likely. This week’s game is against another 5-6 team that relies heavily on the New Orleans Saints.

Oddly enough, I picked this book up almost two years ago on a lark; Lewis’ more recent books (Moneyball
and The Blind Side, both economics/sports books) had been enjoyable reads, so I snagged his first book, used, on a lark. It turns out that his first career out of college was in finance, and so his first book was a memoir-ish look back at his time at Salomon Brothers, just in time to see it spiral into its death throes.

The middle of the book is an amazing primer on how and why mortgage-derived bonds were created, as well as a couple of ways that they could completely screw you. (While a collapse precisely like the current one doesn’t take place, the situation is clearly predicted by Lewis’ description.) Essentially, mortgages represented an unpleasant investment opportunity for the simple reason that you didn’t know when you’d get your money back; early repayments of mortgages are common, so your 30 year mortage-based security could actually get paid back before you want it to; this does not make financial planners happy.

Then Lewie Ranieri came along. Under his guidance, Salomon created securities that… well, that did a lot of different things: split interest payments from principal payments, guaranteed first (or middle, or last) repayment, and so on. The market boomed, Salomon Brother got filthy rich, and then the inevitable infighting and decline.

Michael Lewis is an excellent writer, with a good sense of what makes a good story. I highly recommend Liar’s Poker if you’d like to see point A of the trip we’re currently on.

Just one more game, honest...

The brilliant xkcd published this comic awhile back. I knew it to be true instantly (me and a million others, it’s not hard to see the artists’ smarts) but I couldn’t remember a specific game that had caught me recently.

Well, pshaw. I’ve found a game that I cannot get enough of, and like all good disease carriers I must now bite your elbow innocuously so that you may keel over and die.

Yes, I’m too fond of metaphors.

The game in question is Curveball. It’s blessedly simple. In rough 3D, you are playing a Pong-like game against an AI opponent. Just like in Pong, you win a point by getting the ball past the other player. Unlike in pong, you’re playing in a rectangular tube, so the ball can bounce off of four walls as it goes back and forth. Last and most crucial, the physics engine allows for ridiculous amounts of english to be applied to the ball, making for some hair-raising exchanges as you progress.

Give it a try for yourself and see what I mean.

Click to Play!

The last few weeks have been filled with government announcements that they will guarantee one form of debt, or another. They think they are helping, but in fact they are doing two things:

• They are destroying otherwise healthy parts of the world financial system.
• They are putting other governments in a position where they have no choice but to do the same thing.

Generally, big governments are considered a good credit risk. For example, people generally assume that if they lend to the US Government, they will be paid back. So, imagine an otherwise normally functioning market in today’s panicky times, in which various forms are debt are bought and sold. The government announces that they will be guaranteeing a particular form of debt.

At that point, rational market participators sit back and consider their options. They can continue trading in the debt they are used to, but these are tricky times, and the government guaranteed debt is safer.

So, they very quickly move their money in the guaranteed debt. Besides meaning that a government is now on the hook for much more debt than they thought, this also means that otherwise healthy debt is suddenly difficult to sell.

The government backstop stole buyers away from similar debt. At that point the market for that other debt is distressed, and previously healthy entities start teetering. In desperation, governments announce they will backstop the newly distressed market. This then causes money to be sucked out of some other market, and that market becomes distressed.

In the end, everything is distressed, and the government is backstopping everything.

But, governments don’t have infinite resources. At some point they either refuse to guarantee something, or they default on their own debt. And then, a much larger problem that they have created unravelles in a way out of anyone’s control.

(For one example of what I am talking about, have a look at what Mr Practical has to say at Minyanville.)

Early screenshot from Elemental

Hot diggity damn.

Stardock, after teasing us for more than a year, has officially announced that they are producing a spiritual successor to the classic Master of Magic . The new title, Elemental: War of Magic , does not actually build off of the MoM license. However, MoM was a Magic: the Gathering / Civilization double rip-off with just enough differences to avoid the infringement police, so turn-about is fair play. :p More on the game in a moment.

Stardock, you may or may not recall, was the software development company that mostly did applications, with gaming as a kind of sideline hobby. Then, they released Galactic Civilizations II without any DRM. A Russian company that makes DRM then pointed to torrents of Stardock’s game as proof that piracy was a problem in their own forums . Widely seen as a blatant extortion attempt along the lines of "you sure got a lot of nice stuff here, be a shame if somebody started a fire or sumthin’," the story went huge in the geekosphere (slashdot, digg, etc…) which had the secondary effect of giving far more publicity to GalCiv than Stardock ever would have paid for. Since the game was awesome, this led to massive sales and, almost overnight, Stardock was a major game company. Their latest game, Sins of a Solar Empire , has also been rapturously received (it’s a hybrid 4x/RTS, and I don’t have the twitch reflexes for RTSes, so I’ve sadly passed).

Stardock does a lot of things right, in my opinion. They have the most open lines of communication with their players that I’ve ever seen. The updates to their games often amount to what you’d pay for in an expansion pack for other games, and their expansion packs are absolutely nuts . The no-DRM issue isn’t huge for me, but I respect the stance they take. (I suspect the Gamers Bill of Rights is the subject of a separate post.) They also recently emailed their annual report to everyone who has registered with their website.

Back to the matter at hand, though. For a long time now they’ve been only a little coy about the fact that Master of Magic is a game they thought should be remade, and were only a bit more coy about the fact that they were messing around with the idea. In fact, they spent some(?) amount of time negotiating for the license to make MoM2. In any case, the small but incredibly dedicated fan base for MoM should be thrilled to know that a fundamentally sound developer who really, really gets games is developing this title for early 2010.

I have already pointed out that the root of the problem is that many companies are functionally bankrupt because they are holding debt that has no value. They do not want to admit they are bankrupt. The powers that be are so afraid of a system collapse that they are not willing to force companies to come clean. I personally think that they are making a system collapse much likelier with their current actions. More on that in another post.

The current claim is that “the markets are frozen up and need more liquidity”. This is a load of bunk. What is actually going on is that a lot of people without enough money are trying to pretend they have money, and the Federal Reserve Bank (”The Fed”) is trying to help them do it. The Fed is doing this by making huge short term loans.

Here’s how it is done:

The Fed dumps a ton of money into the market, as loans. Companies take those loans, and try to pass the money around as fast as possible, to prove to any doubters that they aren’t bankrupt, and then give the money back to the Fed.

It’s a bit like a man with $1 that owes five people $20 each. He can borrow $9 for a day, and then rush around showing the $10 he now has to those people, and tell them that he has almost made back the money he needs to pay them back, and he’ll pay them back next week for sure.

If he’s lucky, he might be able to make a little money from that $10 and add it to what he has after he gives the $9 back.

Will it work?

Sure. For a while.

Apple to Apples: the Apple Crate Edition

I recently met a new couple that I really like, and they live incredibly close to me. It so happens that another couple with whom my partner and I have been friendly also live close by, and we’ve all said to each other at different times that we should hang out more than we do. So, what the hell, I introduced them to each other and suggested that we all get together. In the back of some of the involved minds is a similar thought: “D&D Group!” But that’s not something you just jump into, so we’re getting started with simpler games first. It’s been almost a decade since I’ve had to host a gathering where a bag of dice wasn’t all I needed to entertain; how’d it go?

I knew everyone involved was a game-player to one degree or another, so at least I had some hints. It also was not a dinner party, so food was simple enough. I peeled and cut some carrots, opened up some great Dorito-like chips for Trader Joe’s, got out some pretzels, and chilled some wine and soda. Simple enough. Now to pick games, and here’s where I made my only serious mistake. The game I led off with was Twitch, a Richard Garfield game that’s sort of a mix between Uno and War (or Egyptian Rat Fuck, or any other speed-based card game you can think of). The thing is, while the rules are fundamentally simple, it’s a difficult game to be any good at right off the bat, leading to a lot of frustration for all but the savviest game players. I wasn’t even that good at it, as it’s a game I’ve admired but almost never had a chance to play. We gave it a few minutes, I took stock of the grimaces and frowns, and pulled it off the table.

Fortunately, I wised up and fell back on the game I usually break out for this sort of thing: Apples to Apples. (I note with mild astonishment that, when I went to find a link, A2A has a Wikipedia entry….) If you’re ever planning on having friends to your home for an evening, and they can read, buy this game. Anyone can understand and enjoy this game within moments of picking it up. It’s this simple:

Each player has a hand of red cards. On each card is a noun, most proper but some common: Madonna, London Bridge, Republicans, rock n’ roll, My bedroom… there are thousands of possibilities. On each turn, one player sets their hand down and becomes the judge. As the judge, they pull a green card from a deck and read it out loud; this card will have an adjective on it. Funny, sad, melancholy, sexy, etc… the other players will play face down from their hand a red card that they think is best described by the adjective. Then the judge will mix them up (so as not to know whose is whose) and select the card that they think does the best job. They announce the winning card, which is only then claimed by the winner. The game goes until a person reaches X number of green cards (decided beforehand) or until time runs out and you count up your wins.

Here’s a quick example of play, which hopefully shows why this game is so fun:

I’m the judge (yay me!). I set down my hand of red apple cards and pull a green apple card. “Ok. This word means dastardly, evil, and opposing. (Every card has descriptive text or examples, to make sure nobody feels dumb for not knowing what the card is talking about…) The word is villainous.” Ethan, Jen, Lisa, Siobhan, and Steve now search their hands for cards that they think are described by “villainous” and play them, face down, in front of me. I mix them around dramatically and then pick them up. “Hrm,” sez I. “Well, kittens” I say, snapping down the first card, “do, in fact, grow up to be cats, which are all assholes, but until then they’re pretty innocent.”

“Oh come on!” Steve moans, “the little furry Nazis can’t be trusted!”

“”Nazi kittens” would’ve been a good one,” I agree. I snap another card down. “Villainous fruit punch? Right, moving on…”

“Guess who didn’t have a good answer and was sick of looking at fruit punch…” says Lisa.

“Republicans. <snap> I see what you did there, but I don’t think my parents have a death ray in their basement….”

Steve wants to throw me off, so he says “Just you wait…” Sometimes you can tell who played what card, but most times people will play nice and try to keep it a secret.

“Nice,” I reply. I snap down another card. “Now, I have to say in most hands Wile E. Coyote would have been an amazing play, but it’s still baseball season so I have to give the nod to <snap> George Steinbrenner.”

“Oh come on!” yells Siobhan. “Hot damn!” grins Ethan, scooping up the green apple card that he just won.

And so on and so on. It’s an amazing, conversation-generating game that everyone should have in their closet or on their shelf.

Well.

Georgia scored an early touchdown, and the entire team ran out and into the end zone. Now, Coach Richt says that he only expected the players on the field to participate; others call “bullshit.” Personally, I’m not sure but I suspect cow patties may, indeed, be involved. Whatever. Georgia won that day, and the nation’s sports media ate up both the event and the Gators’ fuming about. And yes, I think the Gators have a point - the coach telling his players intentionally to incur penalties is not a smooth move.

So, now this year’s game approaches. Florida is ranked #5 in the nation, Georgia is #7. The winner of this game has the inside track to the SEC Championship game, the loser is probably out of the BCS standings. Plus, Georgia - Florida is the biggest game on either team’s schedule. So, really, I don’t think it’s a big deal that the new book about Urban Meyer, Urban’s Way: Urban Meyer, the Florida Gators, and His Plan to Win, contains his antipathy towards Richt and the Dawgs.

Reluctant even months later to talk about Georgia’s premeditated penalty, Meyer would only say “That wasn’t reight [referring to their knowingly breaking of a rule]. It was a bad deal. And it will forever be in the mind of Urban Meyer and in the mind of our football team.”

Meyer has chosen not to go public with his feelings for lots of reasons, not the least of which is affording Georgia any bulletin board material to use against him.

“So we’ll handle it,” promised Meyer, meaning any response would be done within the rules. “And it’s going to be a big deal.”

Geez, Urban, really? I suspect the pregame speech doesn’t need to be anything more than “Georgia’s out there, go git ‘em” to put the Gators into a frenzy. Nobody has to be told, and nobody will be surprised, that the Gators are going to be out for blood. Tony Barnhart at the AJC says much the same thing. Just hang in there, Dawgs, let Florida get it out of their system, and then kick their lizard-y butts.

Have a look at this:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1079963/The-new-Concorde-Supersonic-jet-London-New-York-just-hours.html

That’s the Aeiron Business Jet. Pretty huh? Not only is it pretty, it’s ground breaking.

Aeiron have figured out how to defeat the formation of a shockwave at supersonic speeds (they call their design technique “Supersonic Natural Laminar Flow”). This is a big deal for two reasons:

1. It takes a lot of energy to make that sonic boom. By stopping its formation, you save lots of fuel. This means supersonic air travel might just become affordable for the man on the street in the future.
2. The sonic boom is very disruptive, being loud and damaging, meaning that it is illegal to fly supersonic over US land. That could change in the future if there is a really quiet supersonic plane, ALSO meaning we could all be travelling from A to B at supersonic speeds in the future.

I have family all over the world. Being able to do those long trips at faster than the speed of sound would be great. And, I’m an engineering geek, and it’s just cool.