- This page was created by moving content from User:Eighty5cacao/TODO (mostly the "Unknown" section).
Linguistics
NB: Issues relating to TTM go in that section
I chose not to put this under User:Eighty5cacao/TODO#Personal name due to the lack of real-world precedents: Consider the possibility of an intelligent race using a personal-naming system based on challenge-response authentication; this means that between any two members of a community, there are sufficiently many possible challenge–response pairs that no given challenge or response is repeated often enough to qualify as a "name" in the traditional human sense. This might require intelligence slightly above the human average (say 9–10 phonological loop and 250–300 Dunbar number), but it's marginally plausible that a brain like that of a bottlenose dolphin could manage this.
Toki Pona
- Somewhere on the old version of tokipona.org, there was a sample phrase <nasin mani li ike> with translation given as "capitalism is negative." This doesn't seem neutral enough. I personally would have gone with radix malorum est cupiditas; another, more accurate translation might be "consumerism is bad."
(If Toki Pona was designed specifically as anti-capitalist, please cite.)
- How would the line "I want to be a human being, not a human doing" from the song "Scatman's World" translate?
Ordinarily, "human being" = "human" = <jan>, so how would we express this distinction? If "being" is close enough to "thinking," then presumably <jan sona> and <jan pali> (or at least <sona> and <pali>) would appear somewhere in the translation. But how do we emphasize that the intended sense is "relaxed (meditative) thinking" as opposed to "busy (frenzied) thinking"? I expect that the sentence conforms sufficiently to the Toki Pona philosophy to make this question valid.
Selkie (webcomic)
- This is not relevant to the article Selkie, as Tepples explains in this edit.
The first official word on the protagonist's physiology is here. (Yes, I noticed the reference to 867-5309/Jenny here, but I digress.)
More physiology information can be found in the sketch linked from this post, directly above the comments (possibly NSFW).
My observations:
- The symptoms of the peanut allergy don't quite match with those of human anaphylaxis. (But are any fish species known to be allergic to peanuts? What about aquatic mammals?)
- "Vocal cords adapted for use in and out of water" — but what would the use be in water? Compare bottlenose dolphins, which do not have (?) vocal cords. (NB: See official explanation)
- The overall design seems too human-like and poorly hydrodynamic
Resolved
|
Tap water needs to be treated with aquarium treatment chemicals, and Selkie carries around a bottle of the treatment solution while at school. (It's off camera. See the transcript box of comic #170)
|
The Time Machine
- Yes, I'm aware the IMDb forums are shutting down. No, I don't want help fixing or removing the links (yet).
- What North Korea has to do with the themes of The Time Machine (sandefur.typepad.com)
- Explain how Weena's characterization is important to the story. Mention specifically:
- In chapter 5 shortly after the Traveller meets Weena, he is forced to alter his belief that time travel is "serious business":
- But the problems of the world had to be mastered. I had not, I said to myself, come into the future to carry on a miniature flirtation. ... I had as much trouble as comfort from her devotion. Nevertheless she was, somehow, a very great comfort.
(Clarify: To some extent, he was already altering his beliefs in response to earlier encounters with the Eloi.)
- Revision history of the epilogue (erkelzaar.tsudao.com) — the Holt edition focuses on the characters of the frame story, while the Heinemann/Atlantic text concludes with Weena's flowers as a symbol of "gratitude and a mutual tenderness"
- The White Flowers in The Time Machine (shmoop.com) — "delicate," "weak," and artificial selection — shmoop.com has more to say about Weena here, which agrees quite well with what I've said here. In general, Shmoop really seems to know their stuff... (TODO: quote?)
- More from Shmoop: Narrator hypothesized to have tampered with time machine
- Just for fun (will not make it into mainspace): Bug 471723 – Reject certs that expired before the date the browser was compiled, regardless of system clock setting (bugzilla.mozilla.org) jokingly mentions time travel/TTM
- Food for thought: How would one make PKI work in an universe where time travel is possible?
- Explain later: "If we starve for long enough, evolution might take care of that for us" (referring to insular dwarfism)
- BBC News gives an example of modern-day hunter-gatherers, which we might be able to mention in a section about diet/metabolism. This isn't so directly applicable to the Eloi though.
- Link to User:Eighty5cacao/misc/Human cognition#Long time scales somewhere, once that gains more content (i.e., this is an area of cognition in which the Eloi are especially lacking)
- Cryptomnesia that may have occurred during the writing of The Time Machine (erk...) – specific sources claimed are Vril and Erewhon – among other things, this proposes an OOU etymology for the name Weena; I don't agree with all conclusions
- Could cuteness aggression be relevant to the development of a predatory relationship between the Eloi and Morlocks? (livescience.com) Specifically, to what extent might it override the baby schema?
- In my (unscientific) opinion, cuteness aggression really encompasses at least two distinct phenomena: the use of excessive physical force, as described at allthetropes:And Call Him George, and the use of food metaphors for cuteness: see for example a Cute Overload commenter on Honduran white bats ("When you nibble on their ears, do you taste lemony goodness?"), as well as the "kitten huffing" meme on Uncyclopedia.
- Real-world WMG: Cuteness aggression is a relic of an evolutionary time when parental investment was generally low and hence individuals (especially, but not exclusively, of other species) that satisfied the baby schema were potential food sources.
- IMDb commenter raises the issue that detailed depictions of Eloi reproductive behavior could be confused with CP by the general public, and in particular by legal authorities; this is part of the reason both films show Eloi adults as similar to present-day human adults (I acknowledge that the post contains inaccuracies. For example, one might as well have said that "the children of the Eloi develop at such a slow rate...")
- Someone on the pre-Orain TV Tropes proposed that the film adaptations are correct in assuming a punctuated equilibrium. What to make of this?
- wikia:timemachine:Eloi Language says that Beyond the Time Machine also contains its own Eloi language. That novel proposes the etymology "boldly adventurous one" for the name Weena. (Marginal spoiler: It may be helpful as you browse that list to know that "Gimm" is a name, nickname, or title adopted by Weena during the timeline of that book, if I understand the author's official site correctly.) Of course, this is all about as much BS as the 2002 film's Eloi language. Todo: mention something about the naming conventions from The Wee Time Traveler
- Banning of fictional depictions of time travel in China - where to use this?...
- What does "...and his head was bare" in III.13 mean?. That at least some Eloi have hair is mentioned at IV.3: "Their hair, which was uniformly curly, came to a sharp end at the neck and cheek..." ("Bare" probably means only "without a hat," in the sense of trope:Never Bareheaded.) However, IV.19: "...the same form of costume, the same soft hairless visage, and the same girlish rotundity of limb" - considering the word "visage," this probably refers to a level of hair typical for infants.
- Ecological damage / resource exhaustion: Compare backstory of the xkcd "Time" comic
Unsorted
Resolved Invalid (see talk)
|
- It is often said(cn) that the size of the human brain is limited partially by the head size that can pass through the mother's birth canal. Other than problems with dental and spinal-cord growth, why hasn't evolution selected for human heads that are more elongated, like an exaggerated version of the shape that the head has immediately after birth? (Also search for
home birth on YouTube, and see examples of artificial cranial deformation — digression: what would happen to cognitive function if artificial cranial deformation were applied to make the head retain that shape?) Such a shape would presumably allow the cranial cavity to be larger without being wider. This isn't directly relevant to any fictional species currently on this wiki, though we should keep it in mind (for a potential DX Town race?)
|
- Quiz: are you good at customer experience work? (goodexperience.com) (will explain more later)
- some Scientific American editor(?) on the good kind of behavioral neoteny (a term I coined myself, not to be confused with "psychological neoteny" meaning over-dependency). As usual, explain more later
- Cracked.com on extended breastfeeding — where might we be able to use this? (See User:Eighty5cacao/misc/Eloi physiology (fanon)#Breastfeeding)
- pumpktris (cheezburger.com) (which I originally misread as "Pumptris")
- App Store Review Guidelines:
- What exactly constitutes a "professional" humorist/satirist?
- I didn't see any conlang-unfriendly terms in the specific leaked revision. Might such have been added later, though?
- Neanderthal physiology: Tepples beat me to the punch in getting it onto the wiki. Now I have to figure out what existing WMG this might be helpful with
- Find dissenting views, e.g. these comments, about the suitability of Dailymotion as an alternative video host; it may be about as aggressive as YouTube for certain musical recordings (but still has fewer false positives in general, esp. now - pay attention to the dates on those comments)
- Figure out how to work The Magical Quest Starring Mickey Mouse into the lede of Wrecking Ball Boy where precedents are discussed (XXX: wasn't this already attempted/discussed before?)
- Will We Ever Run Out of New Music?
- "Artists have a gift in representing the beauty of the world. Should this necessarily become a contribution to saving the environment?" (from a poll on the deviantART homepage) - mention at this WMG?
- [[torbug:8557]] should mention bmo:783047
- Slate article on the copyright ethics of Full Screen Mario
- examples of monospace fonts
- Is anyone working on a JVM written in JavaScript (basically the opposite of Rhino)? This seems like the next logical step after pdf.js and Shumway... (An implementation SHOULD NOT be granted any more network/file system/... privileges than the JavaScript engine already has by default. Thus, such an anti-Rhino would not be useful for bank authentication applets that profile the user's system specs, nor for Pingtest.net, but it would be good enough for simple educational demos
like Paul Falstad's physics applets TODO: find current example.)
- Does there exist a "Flappy Flappy" game which combines the mechanics of Flappy Bird with the characters of Flappy?
- Running on Ice "NES" mix (not really, as it's obviously a MIDI file played through GXSCC); one of the comments suggests familiarity with Tepples's simfile
- It pisses me off when people rant about inaccuracies on Wikipedia without attempting to fix them themselves. (The problem is that even those who are willing to learn MediaWiki syntax may have difficulty putting up with BRD and/or providing reliable sources. Potential mini-rant topic?)
- Assigned clown at birth (image of slogan on a jacket)
Subpages not within project scope
Subpages within project scope
Subpages, status uncertain
- User:Eighty5cacao/misc/Libre-without-gratis games – Artists need to get paid. So how does one make a game that is Free software but not free of charge? (In other words: Gratis-without-libre is easy; libre-without-gratis is hard. This is especially a problem for those who are interested in developing video games; see Genres of non-free software § Video games.)
How would a developer protect against users who would rather spend the time to build from source than the money to purchase a precompiled binary package? Keep in mind that a truly Free project would have no nonfree assets that need to be excluded from the source distribution. To sidestep this question, a more complex business model is needed. Or is our economy fundamentally broken?
The GNU Project acknowledges the need for discretionary non-gratis distribution of libre software, but my point is that game developers naturally object to gratis sharing of a product they are also selling for money.
The purpose of the page is not solely to list examples of existing games, but rather to give suggestions for business models, development strategies, and genres.
Any such essay should explain why game developers should care about Free software in the first place.
- Related: The problem with the video-game industry is that as the capabilities of computing hardware grow, so do the financial and manpower resources needed to achieve high production values suitable for a commercially-successful game. This may justify certain "retro" gaming trends; the problem with that is that many casual gamers don't understand why faux-retro games should cost more than used copies of true-retro games. Therefore, developers and publishers are left with doubt how to design and market such faux-retro games.
- As a broad philosophical question: Why do video games exist at all, if there are few or no economic arguments for their continued development and use in a world where a libre-content movement exists? What about tabletop games, which like video games tend to have more copyrightable assets than the kind of playground games that have value as exercise? (The answer has something to do with eustress vs. distress vs. relaxation; TODO.)
Extended sloppy content
|
- Consider the orders of magnitude of money over which we strain our brains, the social/ethical implications of luxury goods, and how cryptocurrencies could change this.
Perhaps the world "should" have one economy that deals with basic life necessities in fiat currencies and a parallel economy that deals with artistic/entertainment products in cryptocurrencies, with exchange between the two allowed at a more limited volume than that which currency exchanges currently allow. Although this would sidestep comparisons of earnings from "real office jobs" and creative jobs, the point is not for creative people to avoid working "real" jobs; we as a society just need to make "real" jobs less stressful so that most people wouldn't mind doing a creative job on the side. Perhaps we need to make better use of robots to do jobs that are too stressful for humans to perform quickly and reliably. (The scare quotes around "should" are there to distinguish it from the more rigorously-defined SHOULD of RFC 2119; it is very weakly normative if at all.) Caveats: Currently-defined luxury goods aren't easily classified in this system, but perhaps people simply wouldn't sell newly-created art for luxury prices. Also, I am unconvinced that the Bitcoin-based blockchain design for cryptocurrencies is the right one, as the disk-space requirement may be onerous in the long term, especially on mobile devices. However, I lack the expertise to suggest an alternative.
- The economic issues of the points above are exemplified by a tweet by Christine Love,(same link outside this box) which suggests that game developers often underestimate their fans' willingness to pay and so sell themselves short by targeting a cheap mobile price point. My response is not purely an objection; even though the "race to the bottom" is driven by the consumer, it is intertwined with the developer's realization that "libre-without-gratis is hard."
People who prefer gratis games or engage in piracy may not be totally unwilling to pay; they are just unwilling to pay with their precious work money. It could make life easier for such people if the global economy could be rebooted and restructured to include a separate pile of "play" money. In the present economic reality, the best I can suggest is that we push for Free-software games on DRM-free distribution channels while encouraging developers to accept donations.
- Web hosting (as needed to promote a creative product) is a potential problem area: In the present economy, it is difficult to run a website that is fast, reliable, and ad-free (or at least free of anti-adblock) without relying on untrustworthy third parties or implementing draconian anti-hotlinking/anti-bot heuristics. ("Reliable" means in particular "reliable enough that HSTS (+ HPKP?) is not a liability," in that hosting changes often bring certificate or other TLS misconfigurations. Regarding CDNs, "origin pull" is really an euphemism for MITM, much as "content delivery network" itself is an euphemism for "global active adversary." Many oppose all commercial CDN providers on that principle alone. However, few can afford to construct their own geographically-distributed load-balancing arrangement. For a repository of freely-licensed content, hotlinking becomes a legal concern only when it amounts to a denial of service. As for bots, one should keep in mind the Wayback Machine and other preservation-of-service mechanisms, especially where one does not trust one's own server to be reliable enough.)
|
- User:Eighty5cacao/misc/Economic implications of neurodiversity
- Introversion and the autism spectrum make it harder to get a good-paying job, even though geeks like technical fields (find or suggest research about jobs tailored to the autism spectrum and training of hiring managers about neurodiversity; also, to what extent do extroversion and allism correlate with wealth?)
- User:Eighty5cacao/misc/Importance of free software – How much does it really matter? A writing prompt, which is admittedly a bit of a strawman, inspired by Bruce Schneier's movie-plot threat contests: Devise a plot in which a global adversary can choose a person at random and have him/her heavily fined, imprisoned, tortured, executed, ..., or otherwise harshly sanctioned for matters related directly to his/her use of non-free software. To make this interesting, you should avoid focusing solely on issues of hidden surveillance code in said non-free software; the adversary should interpret the mere use of some software to be a punishable offense.
More practically: Free software ultimately requires free hardware, to avoid dependence on proprietary drivers. The problem is that the ideal free-soft/hardware world that includes free CPU architectures is unachievable because it will never be affordable for a hobbyist to design and fabricate his/her own chips, and the existing fabs will never be independently auditable enough to satisfy the paranoid people. (Existing FPGAs don't solve this problem because they are proprietary designs produced on proprietary fabs, and programmability results in some sacrifice in performance/power/cost tradeoffs.)
In other words, taking the definition of "libre" to the extreme would imply that every nontrivial computer program is Java-trapped by nonfree hardware.
- User:Eighty5cacao/misc/Global economy and technology – more specifically "Observations on the global economy and technology"; supertopic for all the above (except perhaps the autism-spectrum stuff)
Formerly commented rambling
|
cite "Should web apps have existed in the first place?" and "Managing complexity by delegating minigames" on NESdev. My response to the former: The complexity of a typical computer system exceeds the level for which a human brain is evolutionarily prepared, so exploitable bugs will almost always exist. This is true for many possible definitions of "system," from an application package to an entire operating system. (Did I already say this elsewhere?) It is therefore impossible to implement a "sufficiently useful" computer system securely enough to satisfy every conceivable threat model, and society just needs to structure itself so that level of insecurity is statistically not a significant problem. (The problem is that individual people don't think statistically; to "become a statistic" is to suffer a horrible accident, and in this context, having one's bank account drained by a hacker certainly counts. Could parallel economies as described above offer a solution? Needs further exploration)
In particular, CSS will never replace JavaScript even though it is Turing-complete, since if we gave CSS all the bindings to other Web technologies that JavaScript already has, CSS would become just as hard to implement securely as JavaScript. (Vulnerabilities in JavaScript engines have often been related to JIT compilation; there is something to be said about such performance-vs-security tradeoffs and their impact for the higher-level tradeoffs in user and developer behavior – TODO.)
As for whether those "other Web technologies" should exist at all, we can't let a demand for greater security stifle innovation forever.
Perhaps some fundamental innovation in programming languages and/or CPU architectures would help, but I lack the expertise to explain any further than what I've already said in the above bullet point about Free hardware.
|
- ↑ From Wikipedia: "The music video ... [starts] off with a snippet from the Porter Wagoner show from the 1970s ... The video was recorded on videotape to keep with the theme of the video"