Signed, Onymous

I was meandering my way through the climate science wing of the internet the other day when I came across something that amused me. Besides my longtime, nerdy interest in actual science I also find the psychology of the participants quite fascinating. Not only do you get exposed to such exciting concepts as denialism, authoritarianism, projection, Morton's Demon (aka confirmation bias) and Dunning-Kruger syndrome - you also get to see them in action!

The following excerpt of a comment comes from someone claiming to be Tim Curtin (who?) on a climate science blog called, "My view on climate change". Hmm. What the name lacks in creativity it makes up for in simple honesty, I guess. Anyways, nobody else seems to have noticed this section of comment at all (or didn't feel it worth commenting on) and it's off-topic so I won't clutter that thread up. Also, I find it to be a subject worth a full posting of my own, so I'm writing about it here.

Irony and Comedy Live Together in Mike Behe

In 1996, at the tail end of the 20th century, a biochemist named Michael Behe published a book in which he reveals an idea that he describes (in a fit of uncharacteristic humility) as only being one of the greatest scientific discoveries of the last 100 years (cue triumphant music). It really is an amazing idea; amazing because it points scientists to God. (Disclaimer: does not necessarily point scientists to God. *wink*)

This amazing idea was apparently less amazing when it was first presented to the world eighty years earlier by someone else. Perhaps because that older version was (ironically?) more correct. I'll get to that later.

Google Chrome Rules

I love Google Chrome. There are so many things about it that are just so nice, but I just found a new one and felt like blogging it. This ties in with Vista (64 bit) and Apple annoyances. Ever since I switched to Vista, my experience playing MP3 files through the browser has been awful. For whatever reason, Quicktime is the default player for MP3 files in the browser and for whatever reason it shows up black on black. I have no idea what's going on, I just know I hate it. The controls exist, they just can't be seen. I'll show you what I mean:

Disregard (As Usual)

This is just a test to make sure the new links page provides accurate links!

Cool Game: Machinarium

Random browsing led me to a story about a cool, cheap game that had been pointlessly hacked. What's the point of hacking a $10 game? And when you consider that it was lovingly made by a small company, who thinks they're going to be perceived as anything other than a total dick for doing so?

Anyways, the game is called Machinarium. It's a Flash game. You control a little robot who's been tossed on the trash heap. The first thing you have to do is get his torso over to his head and then find the missing limbs. Control is pretty limited, but it's more of a puzzle game than an action game. With limited actions and limited resources, you have to stumble around in each level until you figure out both what you're supposed to do and how you can do it. It reminds me of Adventureland, but with cool graphics and excellent music. (The music is moody, which suits the game. Don't expect a soundtrack you can groove to just because I said it's good.)

Un-vive la différence

Something has been bothering me for a while. Resized photos on the napaJapan website look a little fuzzy and a little dirty. Take a look at the two photos above (Winter Strawberry Kit Kat, in case anyone is interested). The one on the left was resized (from 498x498 to 210x210) using AspJpeg from Persits. The settings are bicubic interpolation and 90% quality. The one on the right uses almost the exact same settings (80% quality bicubic) in Photoshop, but it looks beautiful; crystal clear.

What's Photoshop doing to make it look so good? More to the point, what's AspJpeg not doing and how can I get it to do that? Admittedly, the uglier image is about half the size (13k versus 33k) of the nicer one, but neither is huge. I'd be willing to sacrifice a little speed for beauty. The site in question is trying to sell the product. I don't know for sure, but I'm guessing people are a little less excited to buy products that look like they've been run through an uglifying filter.

I could be wrong, though. I was wrong about people using IE6 to buy something from the site. I thought IE6's own special brand of website uglifying filters would chase them all away. These days, to test IE6, I need to install and run a virtual computer. For less than 10% of just the IE users, it's not worth it. I'm sorry, but if you're using IE6 your browser is broken.

Web Design - The User Experience - Part 1

Emphasis on user rather than experience. A number of years back, one of the clients of the company I worked for hired a consultant. He had two recommendations. One is that we add more orange. The other was that we try to get away from your usual website navigation and give the user what he liked to call an experience. To him, this meant "something exciting and new, not something you see at every site". To me - and I like to think most other website users - this meant "a website that frustrates me so much I will never return to it."

We added more orange.