Battlefield 3 - Zero Stars

I've been a fan of Electronic Arts' Battlefield series for a few years now.  Battlefield 1943 was the first one I played, and whilst it was limited in weapons and landscapes I still have to rate it as one of the best computer games I've ever played.  It's one of those fantastic games that is open enough to allow you to develop your own tactics and strategies, and the satisfaction of playing as part of a tight team with players from all over the world is something else.

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 came next.  It's a more modern version, more weapons, more maps, but much the same game overall.  The added "rush" mode which splits the two teams into attackers and defenders is a great addition and takes the whole thing to a new level.

So I was quite excited to hear Battlefield 3 was coming out.  More new maps, more new weapons, more brilliant!  Except it's not.

Don't get me wrong, it was pretty good for the first month, I was enjoying it.  And then it stopped working. 

Within a month of release it required an update.  Nothing unusual there, it's fairly common, but this required a 2 Gigabyte update.  This is clearly crazy, it implies that nearly 50% of the game required replacement.   Looking into it a bit further it wasn't all replacement code - in fact the update to the code itself was pretty minor and would have taken a few minutes.  Most of the "update" turned out to be extra maps which you could pay £15 to activate. 

But I don't want the extra maps.  I don't want to pay £15 more, I just want my game to work.  You don't have to pay the money of course, you can just download the extra content and leave it taking up 3% of your hard drive.  You do, however, have to download it.

This is a ridiculous situation - a 2Gb download of junk data to continue playing a game you paid £35 for last month?  That works out at over a pound a day before EA disabled my copy.  I certainly won't be giving them any of my money, ever again.



So I'm not a fan of a game that doesn't work.  It gets worse.


I tried to ask EAs help system if there was a way to download the update without the extra content.  They refused to talk to me because my "date of birth was wrong".  Six months and a few emails later and I've finally managed to use the Data Protection Act to get the information they hold on me.  Guess what?  My date of birth is correct on their system, so I've got no idea why they won't talk to me.


In summary, the game lasted 30 days, cost me over a pound a day and I had to use legislation just to get them to talk to me.

Mystery Fireplace Dots

Here's an interesting puzzle for you.  We got back to Misfit Cottage this evening after a few days away, and there were a bunch of small black dots in front of the fireplace.  

They were all roughly the same size, dry, and fairly circular.  They're a jet black powder.

So what were they?  I've got an answer to follow, but it was an interesting puzzle I thought I'd throw out there. 

Bring Back The BBC Micro!

I remember when our school got a computer.  It was sometime around 1984, and I was about 8.  It was a BBC Micro (or maybe a model B, I've never been much of a hardware buff).   They were fantastic little machines made by Acorn for the BBC, who through a stunningly insightful move had initiated the BBC Computer Literacy Project, something that without a doubt is a significant factor in the lives of many computer professionals today.  And a good few amateur hackers, which is equally good.

Google's own Eric Schmidt recently lambasted Britain's computing education, and unpleasant as it is to hear he's absolutely right.  By the time I hit high school, the momentum built up by the BBC had faded.  We were taught to use word processors, spreadsheets and databases.  I don't recall doing any programming at all.  From what I've heard not a huge amount had changed.  Far more emphasis is placed on the use of applications than is on actual programming.  It's akin to a craft and design class showing you a chisel and then spending half an hour teaching you how to use a chair.

But back to the BBC Micro, the little silicon hero at the centre of this minor diatribe.

It was really quite brilliant.  This is pre-GUI remember, so Mrs Bott had to sit a wide-eyed eight year-old down in front of a black screen with a little white cursor, and explain to him that this was the future.  I knew that of course.  This was a TV that could do what I told it, I was living in one of my Asimov novels (the Lucky Starr series in fact).

And we programmed, us eight year olds.  Through a simple cursor on a screen, and some basic shell level commands, we made things happen.  Turtle was a particular favourite - part programming language and part game, you could control a little cursor on the screen that drew lines.  You could move forward and rotate the cursor.  I don't recall the exact syntax, but it was something like:

FW10,R90,FW10,R90,FW10,R90,FW10

That would give you a square.  At this point we'd realise there was a quicker way, and were introduced to loops:

{FW10,R90}4

Did exactly the same.  And, of course, we'd all compete to make the best circle we could without killing the machine, so that's a basic knowledge of hardware limitations and the effect of big loops.  We were eight!

So why, I demand to know in an overly theatrical way, was I next sat down in front of a plain old terminal in 1994?  Ten years later?!  In a university physics class?  If I'd known at the time I'd have been bloody furious, ten years is forever when you're eight.

What happened in the meantime?  The school only had the one computer, and a lot of children, and no computing teacher.  They did the best they could, but there was never a chance of getting more than the odd hour on it, and you need more than that to really get into it.  Then I programmed the video for my parents a lot, and did a lot of whining about them buying me a computer.  Eventually, when when the cost/whining ratio hit a critical point, they bought me a Commodore 64, and I got to grips with BASIC.

By the time we had the mandatory-aged-14 classes on how to type and save a file I was fairly quickly convinced that computing education in schools had missed the point.

What would have been useful?  A bare bones computer the whole way through.  A basic UNIX style terminal with BASIC, maybe Perl.  Oh, the things we could have done and learned.

The thing is, these days that's possible.  If any kid wants to learn programming they should have free access.  Hell, we could easily provide a single decent computer for the school, and a lot of dumb terminals for the pupils to log in through.  But no GUI, that's the important point.  No windows (certainly no Windows), no mouse, nothing.   Certainly no internet.  Give them Lynx for Christmas perhaps.

We've lost sight of what made the brilliant programmers Britain boasts today.  It wasn't Windows and Word, don't be silly, those weren't even around when our greatest and brightest were learning.  It's a free reign.

Give them root access - give them a virtual machine.  Give them Perl and pwd and Apache.  Give them shell scripting and apt-get and sudo.  Give them SSH and vi and/or emacs.  Just give them a bloody computer and let them learn!  Yes, they'll break the computer.  And most of them won't want to admit it, and try to fix it themselves.  And some of them will manage it.  The ones that don't?  Well it's only a virtual machine after all, just reset it. 

It's not difficult (unless you're old enough to be an MP) and it's certainly cheaper than most of the nonsense spent by government these days.  How many virtual machines would a cool billion buy?  Cos that's what we spend on no trams these days.

Like A Neverending Circle, Like A Wheel Within A Wheel

So, physics is cool again [BBC News].  This happens every so often, and as far as I can tell there's a chaotic element to the cycle, but it's generally on the order of decades.  Professor Brian Cox seems to be taking a large amount of the credit and/or blame this time around, and it's partly deserved.  He's clearly passionate about the subject and puts it across very well to a lay audience (although his colleague Jeff Forshaw [YouTube] is the one to look out for if you want relativistic hyperbolic geometry to be fun!)

I don't think physics is cool because Brian Cox is involved though, eloquent as he is.  In fact, I think Brian Cox is fairly famous at the moment because he happened to be there at the right time.  The very beautiful Wonders Of The Solar System, for example, wouldn't have been made if there hadn't been a public enthusiasm for physics in the first place.  Take a look at America, where Carl Sagan's classic series Cosmos is currently being re-made.  I bet America hasn't heard of Brian Cox, let alone D:ream, and yet physics is kicking off there as well.

It's a cyclical thing, and it's always huge.  Take a look at Einstein as a classic example.  He was one of the first modern superstars, a moniker that is remarkable fitting,  truly famous across the globe, and yet most people had very little idea what he'd actually discovered.  A few decades later we had Richard Feynman, then Stephen Hawking.  It seems all you have to do to be a famous physicist is break the mould a little.  Playing a musical instrument aso seems to help;  step forward Dr Brian May PhD, and one of the greatest rock guitarists to have ever lived.  I also maintain, against much opposition, that Wayne Rooney and others like him are great physicists, even if they don't know how they do it.  So they only work with dynamics under 1g and narrowband air resistance?  Well, everybody has to specialise.

There's something deeper to physics-cool than celebrity endorsement and TV documentaries though.  Physics is cool because it makes you look smart.  Everybody seems to have a strange impression that physicists are particularly intelligent, that it's a subject for geniuses.  That's generally quite wrong, it's a remarkably simple subject if you get your head around the rules of the game.  It is exceedingly good at making you look smart though. 

I've lost count of the number of times I've "cleverly" fixed something using what I learned in physics classes at the age of 15.  Problem with the ice machine in the pub?  Well, that's a transformer, I recognise the coils, and it's making that grid of wires hot because electricity does that, and they melt the sheet of ice that comes from there.  But that wire is broken...

Shazzam, free drinks for the night and a reputation as a super-genius thrown in. You get to look like The Doctor and Sherlock thrown into one. Steven Moffat is clearly a physicist at heart.

Physics is cool because it gives you some very solid ground to stand on when you need to build an argument.  You know the basics, you can rule out daft ideas at a stroke and concentrate on what's actually real, in front of you, and how you can use it.  If you are faced with a problem you've never seen before you've got a head start, because you understand the rules the problem has to obey.  Sometimes, just sometimes, you solve a problem by going right back to first principles, and that feels particularly cool.

Smug Mode: On

Last September, at the height of the Old Town Mouse Season, I posted some  observations that the mice in our flat seemed to have developed a distaste for poison laced grain, and suggesting that evolution of some description was going on.  ("Mice, Chickens, Eggs & Evolution")

Now I'll point out once more that what I do on this blog isn't actually science.  I have fun exploring science, yes, but very little I do is actually science.  The mouse thing sort of got close - there were repeated observations and the vaguest semblance of data gathering, but it was all very wooly.  "Anecdote is not a synonym for data" is a phrase you'll hear a lot.  "Correlation is not causation" is another.  The mouse thing wasn't science - an interesting angle to explore the basic idea of evolution from, but not science.

But now some real scientists with proper notebooks and letters after their name have taken the idea and turned it into proper science. They even got it published in a journal, Current Biology.

What they've discovered isn't precisely the same as my hypothesis.  I wrote:

For some reason or another they didn't go for the free food. Maybe it was the smell, maybe the colour, maybe they just didn't like the taste - maybe they're refined mice and expect more presentation than a small plastic tray.

Whereas Song, Endepols et al wrote:

Polymorphisms in the vitamin K 2,3-epoxide reductase subcomponent 1 (vkorc1) of house mice (Mus musculus domesticus) can cause resistance to anticoagulant rodenticide

Or, if you prefer, the mice have naturally bred a resistance to warfarin, the poison often used on them, rather than not even eating it in the first place.  It's actually a better tactic, because then they get free food as well.  I love it when the best laid plans come together.

Fear And Coding In The Highlands

It's not the most impressive life-changing-move as far as they go, but I've still been freaking out left right and centre for the last three months.  I was, previously, a science buyer for a the fantastic Blackwell's bookshop in Edinburgh's bustling Old Town.  Fun job, great people and reasonably well paid.
Now I'm an unemployed house-husband of sorts in the middle of the Scottish Highlands.  The nearest place of note is the village of Nigg (I'm a Niggle, since you ask), the nearest pub is 6 miles away, and if I want to get a reception on my mobile it's a 45 minute drive away.

That last one is a bonus in my book.

There are other bonuses too.  We're sat right in between two RAF bases and their bombing range, so the Tornado GR1s screaming overhead add a certain ambiance to Battlefield Bad Company on the XBox.  There are 360 degree kitesurfing beaches within a few miles, and the sky is BIG...

So what am I doing up here?  Well apart from avoiding a seven hour, £50 round trip to see the girlfriend, I've decided to go into web design and support.  I've got myself some rather funky servers in a data centre, I'm putting together the website, and I'm about to start advertising locally.  The thing I'm particularly keen on is the support angle - there's lots of people who want to set up a basic blog, or get started on eBay, or a hundred and one other things that geek-types see as being ludicrously simple - that's my target market, people who want things to be as simple and as easy as possible.

So, if you want a website, or something even funkier like an online app to do X, Y or Z then drop me a line:

www.webdesignhighlands.co.uk

Blatant plug aside, normal geek service will be resumed as quickly as possible.  I've been a little busy recently, what with moving everything I own a couple of hundred miles, plus having to build new bookshelves, but things are settling down.  I'm toying with the idea of exploring the history of science in the area, there's some cool geology for starters...

The Earnest Importance Of Zombie Plans

I was in the Scout association for fourteen years, and learned a lot about self-reliance, teamwork and initiative.  From day one a Scout's motto has been the famous "Be Prepared".  Prepared for what?  Just about anything is the point.  We were expected to look after the younger kids on camp, lead patrols on mountain expeditions, even run messages for the emergency services in the event of a major disaster.  It's an ethos that has served me well in the last thirty-odd years, and one that is frequently recognised by employers and the like as being a Good Thing.  Despite the whole boys-in-shorts image you have to remember that Baden-Powell based the training on the principles of a specialist military unit.

So where do zombie uprisings come in?  Well, zombie attacks are very close to being a worst case scenario for modern civilization.  The combination of a highly lethal viral style epidemic and violent civil uprising make them very difficult to deal with.  I'll have to admit at this point that I don't believe we'll ever actually see a Romero style Day Of The Dead, but the point is that if you can deal with zombies you can deal with anything short of a direct nuclear strike.  Be Prepared for the undead and you'll Be Prepared for most eventualities.

"Official" attitudes are slowly coming round to this point of view too.  The US Centers for Disease Control recently posted a slightly tongue-in-cheek guide to preparing for a zombie apocalypse which outlines their approach to a large scale outbreak and gives good advice on general disaster preparation.  "If you're ready for a zombie apocalypse," they say, "you're ready for any emergency."  And that's official government advice for US citizens.

In the UK we tend to be a little more reserved in our Armageddon preparations, but zombies are starting to pop up on the radar.  After a freedom of information request Leicester City Council recently admitted that they are "unaware of any specific reference to a zombie attack in the council's emergency plan", a situation that will hopefully be rectified as a result of the publicity generated.

Political bodies aren't the only ones waking up to the very real usefulness of preparing for Z-day.  In 2009 the prestigious journal Infectious Disease Modelling Research Progress published a paper entitled "When Zombies Attack!: Mathematical Modelling Of An Outbreak Of Zombie Infection".  (Munz, Hudea, Imad & Smith).  This perfectly serious (if lighthearted) paper uses proper epidemiological methods to simulate the effects of an uprising and concludes that quarantine and cures do very little to help - swift and aggressive action is required if we're going to stand a chance.  The models used have also found real world applications which do not require the undead roaming the streets:

The key difference between the models presented here and other models of infectious disease is that the dead can come back to life. Clearly, this is an unlikely scenario if taken literally, but possible real-life applications may include allegiance to political parties, or diseases with a dormant infection.
- Munz et al (2009)

The Munz et al paper also holds the distinction of being the only peer reviewed work I've seen which references Bainov and Simeonov's Impulsive Differential Equations: Asymptotic Properties of the Solutions (1995) alongside Frost and Pegg's Shaun Of The Dead (2002).

So apart from disaster management, bio/political mathematical models and some very entertaining films and computer games, what have the undead ever done for us?  I've got one more idea up my sleeve...

There are some mathematical questions which are very difficult to solve, the travelling salesman problem being a classic example.  One way to find an answer quickly is called ant colony optimisation, it simulates the way ants find their way around to find what is probably the right answer (note the "probably" - it's not a proof, just a good estimate).  I firmly believe that software zombie simulants can be used to perform a variation on ant colony optimisation - in fact, if we had a real zombie uprising in a major city we could use careful placements of unprepared people (or "bait") to find optimal taxi routes.  And that's something that's useful to everybody.