inconsequence

Skylanders — Sonic Boom, Stealth Elf, and Trigger Happy

A couple of months before Christmas last year, when I was working on a number of game projects aimed at children, I scoured my local stores looking for similarly targeted games, and ended up buying a copy of Skylanders for XBox 360. I didn’t have time to play it, so it ended up as a kind of bonus Christmas gift for the girls — but they had so many new toys it pretty much was forgotten. We finally ended up playing the game in earnest about two weeks ago.

It’s a pretty good game, but it so easily could have been great. The game play is essentially late-model Gauntlet but with a few puzzle mini games thrown in — one or two players running around a 2d maze rendered in 3d with a camera controlled by Satan. The figures are beautiful and the characters they activate are fun and surprisingly different to play (we’ve tried ten different figures so far — it was the smallest set of figures I could buy in a hurry that covered all eight “elements” in the game, thus allowing all the bonus areas to be unlocked).

Our girls (who are nearly 4, which is to say a couple of years younger than the low end of the game’s target age group) actually love the game and can pretty much play it, but are handicapped by several shortcomings:

XBox 360 controllers, even small ones, are horribly designed for kids’ hands. (They’re not great for adult hands — the Playstation controller form-factor continues to reign supreme ergonomically in my opinion.)

The game varies widely (and randomly) in difficulty, and I suspect many younger players will find it horribly frustrating. E.g. the boss fights can be ridiculously difficult — especially if you’re perversely attached to a lame character — have no originality, and are annoying compared to the rest of the game. They seem like a cheap afterthought and the game would probably have been better without them altogether. The final boss fight (not including anything in expansions) is horrible, difficult, repetitive, and takes what seems like hours to finish. (I finished the final boss fight solo on my third attempt mainly playing the Stealth Elf, who is a gigantic exploit — horrendous lack of balance between characters is almost inevitable in a game like this so I haven’t listed it as a major flaw).

The game is full of lazy coding. To begin with there’s an excellent mechanism for skipping cut scenes, but it’s often not available. This is particularly galling for early levels with tutorial content built into them which can’t be skipped on replay. The game is implemented — somewhat like Super Mario Galaxy — as a hub island with an increasing number of portals to other worlds, but once you’ve completed a level you do not (and cannot) return to it by using the 3d portal, and instead simply use a poorly designed menu. Even so, the NPC who took you to the level is still present (most of the time) but does nothing but lock you into a modal cut scene (ugh).

There’s replayability built into the game design — but it’s half-assed — you can try to get three “stars” for each level, which involves finishing it (for one star), completing it without losing any lives, in a set time, etc. for a second star, and finding all the goodies hidden in it for a third star, but the game is lousy about telling you what you still need to do for a given level until after you finish it, provides no timer (for achieving the timed completion), and — worst of all — once you’ve found a secret goody the area basically becomes a giant empty area you get stuck in when you come back.

Similarly there are “heroic challenges” which are timed mini-levels with permanent stat bonuses as rewards. I suspect that many of these would be pretty much impossible for kids to complete.

The content gets “grim” (in terms of look) way too quickly, so there aren’t many brightly colored levels, which means the girls only like the first few levels which, not coincidentally, are the levels most beset by unstoppable modal cut scenes.

It’s possible that these issues have been fixed by a patch available from XBox Live, but since I refuse to pay Microsoft $80 for a WiFi adapter (let alone a recurring XBox Live subscription) and the XBox is inconveniently located for hard network access, I simply don’t know. The errors I mention would have been relatively simple to fix and are pretty egregious.

It’s also quite clear that the game is a huge commercial success. One can attribute this to the fact that it is very well-presented, actually a pretty good game, family friendly, and it allows two player co-op on a single console, meaning it has virtually no competition. Four or five months after its release, stores are still having trouble keeping the figures in stock (and they sell for $8-10 each, or $18-20 in three packs). I’ve only ever seen one of the content packs on sale, and immediately bought it.

So, I hope that the success of the game doesn’t mean that Activision (ugh again) won’t address the games significant flaws. Would I recommend this game to friends with small children? I think so, but be warned that the basic set (for one console) costs $50-70, and that the 29 extra (so far) figures cost a minimum of $8 each (and you’ll need at least five just to open all the content in the basic game), and there are three content packs that cost about $20 each. At $350 or so for the complete set, that’s ridiculously expensive.

Final Note: if you’re wondering about my choice of figures for the photo — of the characters I’ve tried, these are by far the most ridiculously overpowered.

There is no god and that’s the simple truth. If every trace of any single religion died out and nothing were passed on, it would never be created exactly that way again. There might be some other nonsense in its place, but not that exact nonsense. If all of science were wiped out, it would still be true and someone would find a way to figure it all out again.

Penn Gillette in God No! Signs You May Already Be An Atheist via Daringfireball

Far be it from me to dismiss a pithy argument against all religions, but this is actually a very bad argument. So, since Christmas is approaching, here’s an argument showing that Religion actually represents an underlying truth just as Science does. What that truth actually is remains open to debate, of course.

Math: What Exactly Do We Mean By “Exactly The Same”?

Please note: I was a lousy student, and all of this was a long time ago, so beware!

One of the more mind-blowing Math courses I did back in college was on Universal Algebra which turns out to be, in essence, a reformulation of Category Theory, itself kind of pretty much the same thing as Topos Theory. Are you getting my drift?

Universal Algebra is mathematics applied to mathematics, all done with diagrams. (Proofs in Universal Algebra tend to consist of turning one diagram into another diagram by erasing or adding an element at a time using set rules.) But the underlying principle is that there are equivalences between mathematical concepts that are exact. For example, you can demonstrate equivalences (isomorphisms) between objects in different theoretical frameworks (e.g. a fundamental shape in Topology turns out to be equivalent to a certain kind of group in Group Theory), and once you demonstrate these kind of equivalences, other equivalences fall out. E.g. the fundamental theorem of groups (which defines every possible type of group) impacts Topology (what possible shapes might there be?).

Demonstrating these equivalences is actually not as horribly complicated as you might think; it’s a bit like Object Oriented Programming, where the complexity lives below the level of abstraction you deal with — that’s the whole point of it. It’s something that makes perfect sense to advanced undergraduate students of Math. And it is this “metamathematics” that allowed, for example, Fermat’s Last Theorem to finally be proven. You have an intractable problem, but you realize it’s similar to another more tractable problem in another field, so instead of solving the first problem, you carefully determine if the problem you think you can solve is in fact, fundamentally, the same problem. And then you solve that problem.

Now, Mathematical Principles are pretty damn immutable. In support of Penn’s statement, we have some pretty compelling real world examples of multiple researchers solving a problem independently and reaching effectively the same solution (modulo the kinds of mathematical equivalences discussed above). Newton and Leibnitz, for example, both invented (discovered?) Calculus independently using different approaches. But to accept that two theories are “exactly the same” you need to understand and accept the fairly abstruse arguments that are used to demonstrate these equivalences.

To put this a completely different way, we could rebuild math from scratch and come out with something that looks very different from what we’ve got, but which is exactly the same using these arguments. For a simple, concrete example – most of the math you know is probably built on top of counting, i.e. measuring quantity. But you can replace the axioms that give us counting numbers with different (looking) axioms that are about order or containment and end up with a functionally identical but very different looking bunch of “knowledge”. In fact the ancient Greeks built their math on top of geometry (length and area) and proved things entirely using geometry rather than algebra. We can prove their results are equivalent to results in algebra, but it’s kind of complicated. And we can prove there is some degree of infinity number of different ways we could represent the same theory, so the chances that two independent formulations of math would end up looking “exactly” the same in the naive sense is zero.

Summary: we can demonstrate, via many “natural experiments”, that science will come out “exactly” the same way, for a complicated mathematical definition of “exactly” that will make most people’s eyes glaze over. But, in common sense terms, no two scientific descriptions of the same underlying truth arrived at independently will be “exactly” the same for definitions of “exactly” that “average” people understand. (Actually, the best definition would probably be “makes exactly the same predictions”, but that’s pretty complex just on its own.)

Anthropology: The Punchline

The “founding fathers of modern Anthropology” (Claude Levi-Strauss and James George Frazer) both made their reputations in large part by finding equivalences between religions. You know, like the “guy who died and came back to life” myth. Or the “guy born of a virgin mother” myth. Or the “great flood that killed everyone except that guy” myth. Or how about the “bearded guy in the sky who throws lightning bolts” myth? Or the “dead people live forever in the sky” myth. Or the “dead people live in the underworld” myth. And the “there are spirits in the woods” myth. And on and on. In fact, there’s almost no human religious belief which, upon analysis, doesn’t turn out to be equivalent to a whole lot of other independently derived human religious beliefs. This includes the religious beliefs of previously uncontacted tribes with no written records living in the Papua New Guinea highlands — clearly a better “natural experiment” of Penn’s thesis than, say, Newton and Leibnitz.

Summary: we can demonstrate, via many — even better — “natural experiments”, that religions will come out “exactly” the same way, for a not very complicated definition of “exactly” that most people would understand. (It’s probably worth noting that many religious people are deluded into thinking their religion is unique and original, and are hostile to this line of argument. E.g. Many Christians definitely do not like to be told that the “born of a virgin” myth was all the rage in religions predating Christ’s purported birth.)

Conclusion: You Can’t Prove a Negative and Trying To is Perilous

It should not be a surprise to discover that different religious beliefs have the same kinds of equivalences as scientific theories or bodies of math. All are human behaviors, after all. It’s the underlying reasons that are in question. Are religions, like science, an approximate representation of an underlying truth, or are they, as atheists might argue, simply a reflection of human beings coming to terms with pretty much universal experiences of being human (birth, death, love, loss, hunger, uncertainty, and so on)?

But, in the end, the argument that Penn is making is actually an argument that religion points to an underlying truth. Oops.

• We [tacitly] assume that if, starting from nothing, if a body of “knowledge” derived from world comes out “exactly” the same, it’s based on “truth”. If not, not.
• Starting from nothing, science will come out “exactly” the same — therefore it’s true.
• Starting from nothing, religion will come out “different” — therefore it’s not true.
• But, arguing from natural experiment, I demonstrate that, starting from nothing, religion actually comes out “exactly” the same.
• Ergo: religion is true.
• And we can go further and argue that the mathematical definition of “exactly” is really weird and no-one, least of all religious people, will accept it.
• Ergo: science is false.

Because Penn’s argument relies on the initial, unspoken, assumption, it’s a very bad argument because it actually enables the opposing argument. Luckily, I don’t accept his premise. And with that, I’ll go back to being my kind of atheist — someone who thinks of Religion and, say, Astrology, in much the same light.

I’ve seen a whole bunch of coined abbreviations for this category, including:

EVIL (electronic viewfinder, interchangeable lens)

ILEV (EVIL for the god-fearing)

SLD (single lens digital) — as opposed to digital cameras with multiple lenses?

CSC (compact system camera)

ILC (interchangeable lens compact)

MILC (mirrorless interchangeable lens camera) — Thom Hogan has a new website devoted to these cameras — sansmirror.com

There’s a poll here.

Semantics

Part of the problem is lack of precision.

Rangefinder cameras (including the innovative X100) actually have mirrors. Sorry. So do the not-quite-so-compact SLT (“T” for translucent) pellicle cameras from Sony. And if someone produced a small sensor DSLR with interchangeable lenses would we start searching for a new acronym? (Minolta and Pentax both sold 110-based SLRs.)

Similarly, if someone started selling $1000 Leica M clones do you think they would be considered part of the category? (Why hasn’t someone done this? Fuji? Hello?) I think that mirrorlessness is both inaccurate and beside the point. (Sorry Thom.)

Interchangeable lens is debatably part of the equation. There’s the Ricoh GXR system which is fairly compact and has interchangeable lens + sensor modules. I think this is a ridiculous concept since the viewfinder/storage component is the piece that will become obsolete the fastest (RAM gets cheaper, CPUs get faster, displays get better in every way, etc.) with the sensor close behind while the lens is the least likely to become obsolete. I think it’s safe to say that the GXR represents a conceptual dead-end (my first serious camera was a Ricoh rangefinder so I have a soft spot for Ricoh, but this is just silly).

In any event, the term “interchangeable lens” does not differentiate these cameras from DSLRs which don’t mention “interchangeable lenses” as a differentiator. Presumably a fixed-lens DSLR (which is a perfectly plausible idea — why not make a small, cheap, light D2000 with a fixed 18-135mm lens?) would still be a DSLR.

It’s also easy to imagine mirrors figuring in future designs which, say, fold optical paths to reduce camera thickness. It’s clear to me that compactness is a key part of the equation. There may be interchangeable lens cameras out there that aren’t compact, but they’re a different category. So I think we can all agree that some letter connoting compact deserves a place.

The word “system” is worse than useless. It excludes the Leica X1 and Fuji X100 (APS-C sensor cameras with super fixed lenses) both of which are far more deserving of a place in the pantheon than, say, the Pentax Q. And it would include the Canon S cameras and (worse) the Panasonic TZ cameras which are part of a system that includes waterproof housings and the like. Including the S95 et al isn’t horrible, and in fact maybe it’s a step in the right direction, but I don’t think the word system is useful.

Digital is accurate but redundant. Digital as opposed to? I think we can ditch D from SLR for that matter. It’s not like we call compacts or point-and-shoots “digital compacts” or whatever.

And finally there’s MILC (apparently leading in the polls). First it has the word “mirrorless” and then “interchangeable lens” and finally the redundant “camera” (so we’ll have “MILC cameras”). That’s four letters for three concepts two of which are debatable and the other redundant.

So, drum roll, here’s my suggestion:

Low Noise Compact

Why not Large Sensor Compact? It’s not a bad option for now, but the point is low noise not large sensors. The Pentax Q gets superior image quality to enthusiast cameras with larger sensors by using backside illumination. (My iPhone 4 gets great IQ relative to my old Panasonic TZ for the same reason.) If someone comes up with a miraculous technology that allows incredibly small sensors (e.g. using sensor arrays) while retaining the image quality associated with larger sensors, why exclude them or change terminology again? Given that the Nikon 1′s sensor is half the size of the Olympus Micro Four-Thirds cameras but produces better image quality we would be wise to not make assumptions about sensor size.

The point is good, clean images and compact size. Everything else (indeed digital-ness) is beside the point. High Image Quality Compact is a bigger mouthful and sounds more subjective. Besides, using the word “quality” sounds like advertising bullshit rather than a real product category. Enthusiast Compact is simpler but again seems subjective (the Lytro would qualify, as would cameras with entertainingly bad image quality).

As a bonus, LNC works as an adjective and a noun (because compact does). So we can say LNC or LNC Camera without making fools of ourselves. “The lesser of two EVILs is funny”, but doesn’t actually parse.

LNCs Compared

Anyway, because no-one else seems to have done this properly (believe me I’ve looked) here is a head-to-head comparison along all the axes that I think are important of what I consider to be the viable LNC contenders. I’ve tried to get the specs as accurate and objective as I possibly can. Please let me know if you (@podperson) find any inaccuracy or you think I’m missing a key axis of comparison.

One thing you may find controversial is that I’ve only represented each camera system with one “exemplar” which is the camera I consider the most tempting from that system. A lot of people might pick the Panasonic G3 over the GX-1 because it has a built-in viewfinder, the same sensor, isn’t much bigger, and is inexpensive (and available!). I’ve ignored the GH-2 and the NEX-7 despite the fact that both are clearly the “top-of-the-line” of their respective systems because they’re not compact. If I want a camera that big I’ll just use a DSLR. Including Leica is kind of ridiculous (it’s a whole different category of user) but in fact the Leica meets most of the requirements for an LNC better than the Sony E series, it’s just stupidly expensive.

I’ve included DxOmark sensor scores because I’m sick of reviewers who show side-by-side comparisons of images out of different cameras and declare this one better than that one based on eyeballing them. DxOmark isn’t perfect, but it seems more impartial.

What I Excluded

Aside from only including one “exemplar” for each system, I’ve left out a lot of potential contenders. It would be nice to have at least one smallish DSLR (e.g. the Pentax K-5), an SLT, and an enthusiast compact like the S-100 or XZ-1 in the table for comparison. I think everyone understands the tradeoffs between these systems and the DSLRs and their ilk; besides we’re all probably invested in one such system or another and the point is pretty much moot.

I’ve omitted the Pentax-Q because its sensor is essentially the same quality as the premium 2/3″ sensors in premium compacts, it has a weak range of lenses, it’s actually too small to be easy to handle, and I think it’s ugly, poorly designed, and overpriced.

I’ve omitted the X100 simply because it makes the wrong tradeoffs for me — it has a fixed lens and — for my tastes — it’s the wrong focal length. Because it’s a one-off camera and not a “system” this isn’t something that can be “fixed”. If Fuji had instead made it an M-mount (or similar) I would have bought one on the spot and started hunting for second-hand lenses. (I happen to prefer 50mm lenses to 35mm lenses for example.)

Summing Up

Olympus, Leica, and Samsung are, at least in terms of sensor tech, a generation or two behind the leaders. (Leica at least makes up for it by having the best glass.) So I think they’re all non-contenders. And hey, you can buy all the other cameras and a bunch of lenses for the price of the Leica body alone. Sony in many ways produces the best camera, but the lenses are ridiculously big (they’re not even small compared to APS-C DSLR lenses) which negates the whole point — once you get as big as the Sony with a typical useful lens you might as well have a DSLR.

To my mind this leaves Nikon and Panasonic, with each having stuff the other desperately needs to be truly compelling. E.g. the Nikon V1′s focus system is clearly superior (it may not be super fast in low light, but look at the continuous shooting speed) and it offers manual control when shooting video. I don’t want to harp on the built-in viewfinder too much because if it’s that important, get a G3 (although by golly that’s an ugly camera).

So the winner is: something someone releases next year.

Parting Thoughts

The Canon S100′s image quality is barely lower than that of the Nikon 1 and it’s inexpensive and genuinely pocketable. It’s tempting to add a column for the S100 just to see how it compares (its sensor scores are pretty close to the Olympus). The Nikon leads on the video side (although its small sensor makes shallow depth of field difficult, and the NEX-5N has 1080P60). I think what I’d really like to see is Apple produce an iPhone or iPod Touch variant aimed at photographers. Stick a 2/3″ BSI sensor and a lens mount in a “fat iPhone”.

P.S. The other thing that might rescue these systems from their compromises is price reduction. I saw the Panasonic GF3 selling (briefly) for $399 at Target (with the old, huge 14-42mm kit lens). The Nikon J1 would be pretty tempting at $499. (I finally found a demo unit that was “working” and its autofocus was pretty spectacular. I say “working” because while the autofocus was wonderful and I could take photos, my attempts to use aperture priority were wholly unsuccessful, and if I need to read a manual to figure it out then it’s already failed.) Basically if I can get a credible LNC for a similar price to a premium compact that I might get a lot less picky. That said, premium compacts — especially older models — are dropping below $200.

Spoilers everywhere!

A couple of my wife’s grad students put me onto The Walking Dead, an AMC TV show* about a small town sheriff’s deputy who is badly wounded in a shootout, falls into a coma, and then wakes up in a world overrun with zombies. Eventually, he joins and quickly assumes leadership of a rag-tag, ethnically diverse band of survivors — although as of the end of season one, I think they’re all out of black and brown people.

This rant is based on watching the first season on Netflix. Let me just say, from the outset, that I found this show utterly compelling despite all the complaints that follow. It’s very well-made, well-cast, well-acted, and the story works well (too well sometimes) at an emotional level. It’s also possibly most intensely gory thing I have ever seen (and I’m a Cronenberg fan), but hey, it’s a zombie story.

Note: right now AMC is responsible for Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and The Walking Dead which, by my count, puts it ahead of HBO in terms of compelling original content for the moment.

What is it with zombies?

The world of The Walking Dead is, as far as we can tell at the end of season one, pretty much completely overrun. In the course of the first season the survivors have never picked up a radio transmission from anyone else. The thing that bugs me more and more as the series progresses is just how stupid absolutely everyone had to have been in order for the characters to: (a) have gotten into their predicament, (b) be in their predicament, and (c) remain in their predicament. It particularly bugs me because I find the story so compelling and like many of the characters so much and I feel sad when they die, and yet their problems could so easily have been avoided, mitigated, or solved.

The zombies in The Walking Dead, like zombies in general, defy the laws of physics. As far as we can tell, they can operate on virtually no sustenance for ridiculously long periods of time, and have superhuman strength. (The former fact prevents the human race from taking the obvious approach of waiting them out.) But zombies are slow, unperceptive, and stupid. (They can’t operate vehicles or heavy machinery or use weapons — they can, however, turn doorknobs. Ominously.) It seems that zombies are created by humans being “infected”, generally by being bitten by another zombie. (Reading ahead in the Wikipedia article on the graphic novels on which the series is based, this seems to be at least slightly incorrect, but the actual vector has not been revealed.) Whatever the cause of the zombie plague, it doesn’t appear to be terribly contagious, and it’s not like someone is going to transform from healthy human to zombie fast enough to catch anyone by surprise (a corpse can come back to life in as little as three minutes, we discover in the final episode the end of season one).

So, how the heck did this get out of hand?

• Only dead people become zombies. Until you’re dead, you’re not turning into a zombie. (I suppose it could have infected some living people originally but everyone still alive is immune. But there’s zero evidence for this.)
• Zombies are easily identified (e.g. they can’t talk); all the zombies we’ve seen so far look gross, but that may have to do with how they died; perhaps early on some zombies looked OK.
• Zombies are slow moving (again, their weird gaits may be an artifact of how they died, but they don’t seem to move like living people)
• Zombies can’t use tools or drive vehicles
• Zombies are easy to cripple, but it requires a hit on the brainstem to “kill” them; assuming the characters live in a world without zombie fiction they may not have known, initially, that you need to hit the brain stem, but it seems like a pretty obvious thing to try, and zombies are easy targets. So it’s simply implausible to imagine trained soldiers with military gear having any real trouble with them.
• Zombies appear to be a lot stronger than people (but it’s TV/comics so strength varies with situation) — still let’s assume they’re pretty damn strong

The cliche, of course, is that zombies shuffle around, arms outstretched, rasping the word “Brains!” But in The Walking Dead, the zombies say nothing, and it’s the living who desperately need brains.

What happened to the police?

Over and over we see cases where people supposedly made a heroic last stand against apparently overwhelming numbers of zombies. I don’t get it. As of 2006, according to answers.com, there were just under 700,000 police officers in the USA. Assuming the police aren’t immediately turned into zombies that’s 700,000 people sworn to uphold and protect, and carrying around — let’s be conservative — one fully loaded pistol, at least one spare clip of ammo, a shotgun (with extra ammo), and probably a rifle (with extra ammo) each. (Incidentally, I did a little research indicates that when you buy a Glock it comes with four clips each holding 15 rounds, many police in the US are being issued AR-15s, typically with two 30 round magazines.) We can conservatively call this 120 rounds of ammo per police officer. That’s 84,000,000 rounds of ammo being carried around by police officers on a daily basis. Now, zombies move slow and don’t shoot back — they’re basically slow moving target practice. So let’s assume 2-3 rounds per zombie. That’s enough ammo to deal with over 20 million zombies with no advance warning or preparation.

And the well-regulated militia?

Now assuming that the police didn’t have to deal with more than twenty million zombies without any warning, there’s the extra ammo in the trunks of their police cruisers, back at the stations, firing ranges, homes, Wal-marts, sporting goods stores, outdoor centers, and so forth. That’s in addition to the heavily armed populace (especially in the South where the story takes place), national guard, and army (much of which is housed in Southern states). Now, if I heard one whiff of zombie apocalypse news I’m heading to my local sporting goods store and getting some guns and a ton of ammo, and in the US there’s a lot to go around. I might add we have a couple months supply of barely edible emergency rations at home just in case of natural disaster along with, conservatively, another couple of week’s supply of food in the pantry and the house is pretty defensible (good lines of sight all round). So exactly how did the national guard and police protecting the CDC get overwhelmed? And how did it get to that in the first place?

Bear in mind, the zombie apocalypse didn’t come with zero warning. (We know this from flashbacks and discussions of what happened between characters.) Some people were caught unaware, but presumably the majority of the police had some warning and thus some time to get more ammo before “SHTF”. So, again, exactly how did the police and military run out of ammo? Bear in mind that guns are really easy to shoot people with if they’re shuffling slowly towards you and you’re not afraid of them shooting back. (I learned about The Walking Dead when we were at paintball — my first time ever — and from a marksmanship point of view I would have no problem head-shotting zombies from a safe distance with a weapon as woefully inaccurate as a rented paintball gun.)

And something that didn’t really strike me until I lived here, but the South is a freaking disaster area. It is subject to regular tornadoes, hurricanes, horrific thunderstorms (if you’ve never seen “blinding rain” you’ve never lived here), and — in winter — ice storms. (Actually it’s still Autumn and we just had a minor ice storm yesterday.) A lot of people here prepare for the worst as a matter of course. After the tornado hit Tuscaloosa earlier this year and caused lots of power outages, the nearest Costco had diesel generators stacked to the ceiling, and sold them all very quickly.

And the easily fortified buildings?

Then there’s the buildings that can easily be secured against physical assault by non-tool-using zombies, like stadiums, banks, post offices, armories, hospitals, jeweler’s stores, high-end apartment buildings, mansions on private islands. Sucks they all got taken out. Then there’s those facilities that have guards, concrete walls, and barbed wire fences surrounding them. You know, like nuclear reactors, and important military bases. How did the zombies take them out? (Consider air force bases in the middle of deserts — relatively isolated, strong active and passive defenses, excellent communications, on-base medical facilities, and lots of weapons and supplies. Exactly how did all of these get taken out?) And bear in mind many military bases house the families of the soldiers on-base or nearby, so there’s not even the “I’m gonna go get myself killed heroically rescuing my loved ones” excuse.

And the folks with armored vehicles?

How do guys in tanks get turned into zombies? Seriously. If it gets that bad, don’t you close the hatch and shoot yourself? I mean really. But hey, wouldn’t you have kept enough fuel in the tank to drive out of town? Or did you maybe let your buddy siphon off your tank so he could try to find his girlfriend in the worst hit part of town? I guess every tank had some guy with a girlfriend in the worst part of town who needed their emergency reserve gas.

An M3 Bradley — we see a lot of them abandoned near heroic last stands — has an operational range of 250-300 miles (it gets about 1.5 miles per gallon) and carries 1500 rounds of machine-gun ammo (did you know machine-guns can fire single shots?). That’s a lot of zombies you can shoot and run over before driving to safety. (I have this vision of a tank crew circling a gas station and leveling all the buildings and flattening all the zombies before rolling up to a pump to refuel.) Remember they move slow and don’t shoot back. Seriously, how did these guys die?

Oh and there’s the abandoned helicopters. You know where helicopters ran out of fuel during the evacuation of Saigon in 1975? Not in downtown Saigon. So many helicopters were landing on the carriers that they were pushing them overboard to make room for more to land. If you have a helicopter and you know how to fly and you’re not an imbecile, your helicopter is not going to be found in the aftermath of a heroic last stand. But maybe you siphoned off the gas for your buddy whose girlfriend was in the worst hit area. That’s the ticket. (Of course some of those helicopters must have inadvertently carried zombies onto warships. Oops!)

And the navy?

Boy, it sure was tough defending nuclear powered aircraft carriers from the zombies. Those last desperate broadcasts from the bridge of the Nimitz as the surviving crew, equipped only with the pitiful weapons available (you know, assault rifles and stuff), struggled to survive as their zombie shipmates beat through metal hatches — designed to stop seawater sinking the ship in case of a hull breach — using, we assume, their heads was awful. Or maybe they starved to death. Whatever. Let’s not even get into the tragic deaths of nuclear submarine crews. Sad, sad times.

And our plans to deal with global thermonuclear war?

We’ll just ignore all the precautions we took against all-out thermonuclear war, like Cheyenne Mountain, designed to withstand direct hits from hydrogen bombs and keep out radioactive fallout. Somehow, the zombies got in. And don’t think too hard about people living on private islands, motor yachts, say. Sometimes you just need to go shopping, I guess. (Should I mention that the kinds of people most likely to live securely also have the best access to comms and independent sources of fuel and power? Shhhh.)

But, OK, somehow because mistakes were made early, often, repeatedly, and by everyone, the situation got totally out of control and then the police and military became demoralized and — OK I give up. Everyone died! Just accept it.

And our other fortified underground bunkers?

But now, the scientists in France and the US who were in fortified underground class 5 research facilities (where you need to wear a double-layered spacesuit in a negative pressure chamber protected by airlocks to do low risk experiments, and work in a glove box or using robotic arms to do high risk experiments) all died because of … power failures? Of course, they had to run out of diesel eventually (although France gets 80% of its electrical power from nuclear but shhhh.) After just a few months? And remember, this disease is not terribly contagious. You can blow a zombie’s brains out at point-blank range and be splashed with rotting gore, blood, and brain matter and not get infected. They could just have moved to the roof of a building to continue their research safely. But, OK, they’re all dead too.

Having survived all those mistakes, we’re still fucking stupid.

Oh, and the survivors’ communications systems suck. They have a total of two walky-talkies, no spare batteries, and don’t even think about satellite phones. (Did the zombies take out our satellites too? It was sure horrible hearing the screams on the International Space Station when a zombie somehow got onboard. Bastards!) Given that the US is awash in gadgets, including hand-cranked radios, solar battery chargers, batteries of all kinds, generators of all kinds, and cheap and extremely capable portable radios this is plain stupid.

The stupid runs deeper though. The ragtag band of survivors chooses, as its base of operations, a small clearing in a forest that can be approached from almost any direction without being seen. (There’s a guy who hangs out all day on top of his trailer, watching for trouble, but not at night.) Shockingly, zombies sneak up on them at night and kill several. Look guys — your enemy is stupid, slow, and restricted to walking (they’ll chin drag if you shoot off their limbs, but won’t choose to crawl for purposes of stealth). Find a place where you can limit approaches and see anyone coming and you won’t be taken by surprise. It’s not like the zombies know how to sneak or rappel down the sides of buildings. In an early episode, our heroes come across a group of survivors operating out of a nursing home in Atlanta, who have fortified their building with whatever materials came in handy such that it has only one entrance. (They’re doing fine, thanks — despite caring for all of the patients in a nursing home) It’s a shame the military, police, national guard, etc. didn’t try to physically barricade vital facilities and people like that, but who would think of such a clever idea? (Incidentally, standard tactics for urban warfare involves turning buses and trams into barricades to block roads.)

You could explain everything a lot more easily if the zombie contagion is much worse or more insidious than we think. It could be airborne. It could infect healthy people, kill them, and turn them into zombies. Initially, zombies might not look different from people — until they bite you. But if these things are true then either it’s a very low risk or our heroes would all be dead by now. And if it’s a very low risk, then it again doesn’t explain anything. OK, perhaps it’s something some people have a natural resistance to, but when you get bitten that natural resistance is overwhelmed. That means that initially aerosol transmission did happen a lot, but if so some people would (a) have remembered this happening, (b) mentioned it at some point, and (c) still be paranoid about it. Just for example, the underground labs full of scientists who devoted their last months to studying the disease but died having gotten nowhere and left no record of any such discoveries.

Oh well, maybe they’ll eventually bump into a group of survivors riding bicycles along interstates, each carrying a walky-talky, rechargeable batteries, solar cell, flare gun, and plenty of ammunition, and keeping in touch with the US Navy via satellite phone. Maybe everyone in Canada is just fine but they can’t be bothered helping the US.

Aaargh!

I’ll try to resist watching season 2.

Oh Amazon, maybe if your carousel interface worked it wouldn't need an explanation.

My Kindle Fire, ordered the day it was announced, arrived this afternoon. The out of box experience is excellent (it comes with your account info already set up and a charged battery; when you turn it on i updates itself and you’re good to go in five minutes.

After reading a couple of early reviews (in Wired and the NY Times), I thought I’d be sending it back for a refund, but I really like it so far. It’s not as fast as an iPad 2, or even an iPad, but it’s fast enough for reading and watching videos (although the one app I’ve purchased, Sketchbook Mobile, ran pretty choppily). The display is just fine, very sharp for reading, and while it feels quite heavy for its size, I think it’s light enough for extended reading in bed. I have a wonderful book on animation (Drawn to Life) that displays very nicely (which it clearly doesn’t on the e-ink kindles).

When I tried to write this blog entry on it WordPress complained that I was using an out-of-date version of Safari. When I tried to press on, I found the going impossible. Oh well — strike one against the Fire. And no, there’s no WordPress app for it yet. (I’m writing this on my iPad 2.)

This was, in fact, my first real negative impression of the Kindle Fire. I will say that almost all of the bad things with the Kindle Fire involve its browser, with the exception of one touch purchasing… Not only can you accidentally buy stuff with a touch, as far as I can tell there is no option anywhere to lock it down.

The Good

• Good performance when used as book reader or movie viewer
• Best Kindle reader experience I’ve had (better than dabbling with e-Ink readers, nice display of color illustrations)
• Good display quality
• Adequate performance when using more general apps (I’ve only tried one thus far)
• Great size and weight for extended reading or video viewing in bed
• Best Android UI I’ve used (but my Android experience has been pretty superficial)
• Excellent “cloud” integration
• Flash works (although performance with larger or more complex elements is terrible)

The Bad

• Much too easy for anyone using your device to buy stuff on your account — deliberately or accidentally (definitely not something I can let my children use unsupervised)
• Power switch is stupidly positioned on bottom edge allowing it to be accidentally pressed
• System detects all-numeric keypard, but numeric keypad is poorly laid out and you need to press “Done”
• Web browser is not up-t0-date relative to other webkit browsers
• Web browser double-tap to zoom is poorly implemented (animation is slow, stutters; worse, it often zooms to wrong position)
• HTML5 media UI is pretty piss poor (worse even than Chrome)

Of the bad features, most can (and I hope will) be fixed quickly via software patches. The ease with which you can deliberately or accidentally buy stuff is a show-stopper — it means I can’t let my kids use it, and I actually feel paranoid when browsing the built-in store. It’s so bad I think it’s class action lawsuit material. The power switch positioning is unfortunate; it would be less unfortunate if the login screen weren’t always aligned so that the power switch is on the bottom edge.

Further Observations

So far, the more I use the Fire the more annoying surprises I find.

Lots of dialogs are poorly laid out. Some very prominent dialogs (e.g. the username / password dialog box for websites) have the buttons in unexpected places (the Fire puts the “action” button at the bottom-left; Apple puts them at the bottom-right, Microsoft puts them somewhere on the right, but Amazon knows better). In some cases the system will generate a full screen dialog with a huge blank space and buttons on the bottom. I’m guessing this is some kind of auto-layout.

Text selection is pretty borked. To begin with, there are two text selection UIs (that I’ve found so far) one for most apps and another for the Kindle. Getting either to work is iffy at best, and once you’ve made a selection there’s little you can do with it.

The way the web browser handles PDF downloads is bizarre. If you touch a PDF link it will (maybe, eventually) try to download it, you’ll get a message saying that it’s downloading, and then eventually a notification that it has downloaded. You can now view the PDF by touching it in the notification, but once you’ve looked at a PDF once, I have no idea how to get it back again — it’s storing it somewhere, I think, but I can’t find it under books or docs.

PDF viewing is pretty poor. The same double-tap-to-zoom issues that plague the web browser are worse here, and PDFs designed for standard page sizes are unreadable (and not well-rendered). There’s no way to set up a default crop and you really miss Apple’s subtle scroll-locking (how when you scroll some views more-or-less vertically iOS figures out what you want to do and locks it to vertical scrolling).

The global interface that the Fire wraps around apps is somewhat broken. Because there are no hard buttons (except the poorly positioned power switch) the Kindle always reserves a small band at the bottom of the screen for a global widget that discloses the standard navigation pane when touched. It would be really nice if this band included a go back button so that you don’t constantly have to disclose the pane to get at go back (which is very annoying in apps). It also seems to preclude true full-screen apps.

I tried Angry Birds (the free ad-supported edition — damned if I’ll pay a second time for it) and my first reaction was “how does anyone put up with the ads”? The way ads are implemented in Angry Birds is both intrusive and incompetent (e.g. the first ad I saw was displayed in the wrong orientation). Performance (for Angry Birds) was certainly adequate. I didn’t see any hardcore 3d apps to try out in the Amazon App store (but I didn’t look very hard).

Amazon gives you a free copy of the New American Oxford Dictionary with the Kindle (and even the Kindle app on iOS… or so I thought, but I can’t find it right now) but as far as I can tell, there’s no way to simply look up words in it. (You can search for a word, but the search in no way favors the canonical entry for the word over occurrences in the text body.) You can look up words in other books by selecting them (if you can get the selection system to work) but that’s it. (And it’s not integrated into the rest of the operating system, so you can’t look up words on websites etc. the way you can on an iPad.)

One thing that continues to boggle my mind w.r.t. e-readers (and this applies to the Kindle and iBooks) is their inability to display cover art nicely. Typically, they’ll display a shitty low-resolution image of the cover as a rectangle on the title page. They’ve obviously got the cover art lying around because they render the books nicely as icons on bookshelves — why isn’t the first thing you see when you load a book a nice full-screen image of the cover?

Bottom Line

As I was heading out the door for a late lunch today with my backpack, I thought “OK, which tablet will I take?” I thought it would be cool to take the Kindle Fire with me as “my only tablet” for the day to see how it would stand up, but on quick reflection, I grabbed my iPad 2. The fact is, the Kindle Fire is a nice book reader and possibly a nice video player, but in its current form that’s basically it.

On the other hand I think it’s probably the cheapest Android device that comes without some kind of “plan” and doesn’t suck, and since I need an Android device for testing… (Hmm do I need to jailbreak it or something?)

Other Opinions

Walt Mossberg’s review of the Kindle Fire is pretty accurate and balanced. He complains about battery life (I haven’t run out yet, but I’ll take his word for it) and the bookshelf UI (which is pretty but borked) — pretty damning given that it’s front-and-center. I actually like the hardware design just fine (aside from the poorly located power button): it’s a black slab with a touchscreen. Why is this bad? It doesn’t have gratuitous curves, unsightly bulges, a useless hardware keyboard, or razor-sharp edges. It’s thicker and heavier than I’d like but not much thicker and not much heavier. He also points out the lack of cameras and GPS (iPad 2 doesn’t have GPS). $300 will buy you a camera with GPS built in — get over it.

The Economist’s review of the Kindle Fire is, in my opinion, spot on. The UI is a bit flaky, the power button is stupidly placed, and it’s no iPad-killer, but it’s cheap and it works.

Marco Arment seems to pretty much hate it. He’s had his a day longer than I and used it a good deal more (I haven’t had time to read three books in the last two days!). I disagree with some of his points, e.g.

• “The backlight leaks significantly around the top edge (when held in portrait).” Not for me, so maybe it’s poor quality control. (Note that when you drag a scrolling view past its furthest extent the visual effect looks like bleeding backlight, which is both aesthetically ugly and stupidly alarming. I’d make a screenshot but, of course, I can’t.)
• “The asymmetric bezel’s “chin” is distracting in landscape orientation.” Really? OK I guess I’m not that easily distracted.
• “The page-turn animation, a simple full-screen slide, is distracting, too long, and jerky.” It’s not great but it’s not as bad as e-Ink page turns for example. (It is, occasionally, so jerky you don’t realize you’ve turned a page, so yeah I do get his frustration. Maybe I should replace “as bad as” with “any worse than”.)
• “Magazines are a special beast on the Fire.” I don’t disagree but the situation’s no better on the iPad. The way to do magazines on tablets is called having a good website. I prefer reading newyorker.com (despite its annoying full page ads) to either the magazine itself or the tablet app, and it pisses me off mightily that I can’t simply log in to newyorker.com and read all the content on demand. Fuck magazine apps.
• “And finally, I don’t like the “carousel” flip-card-style home screen interface… It’s a poor, unusable interface metaphor that our industry should retire.” Eh. It’s a browsing interface not an “I want THAT” interface. The problem isn’t that the Fire uses a carousel, it’s that the carousel is badly implemented (it often interprets taps on an item as scrolling, and you can only tap the front-most item, and only with care) and that the “I want THAT” interface is buried (if you want to get from the “Books” view to the “Apps” view you need to go via home, which sucks).

He does make several good points I missed:

• “All text is justified, and there’s no automatic hyphenation.” Indeed. Why no ragged right option? (Why can’t I pick fonts in the iPad Kindle app? Oh and why can’t I reduce margin sizes as far on the iPad? Maybe it’s not Kindle that sucks so much as Amazon as a software company.)
• “It really needs hardware volume-control buttons.” He’s not the first to bring this up. I don’t really mind the way the global prefs menu works though (I do mind the lack of settings, though.)
• “The free Prime video selection is very poor compared to Netflix’s streaming library.” True, but you get Netflix as well so what’s the problem? Oh wait…
• “The Netflix app is terrible.” I haven’t tried it so I can’t comment. I assume he’s right since, as far as I know, the best way to watch Netflix, bar none, is on an AppleTV v2. (I have tried it now and it’s not as bad as a Roku.)
• “The bottom-left corner of the Fire, when held in portrait, gets noticeably warm during use.” That’s just sad. (I guess we know where the video decoding chip is. The Fire has never gotten warm for me though, even watching video.)
• “MP3 playback isn’t gapless.” I don’t need Kindle Fire to be a great MP3 player but it’s nice to know that it’s piss poor at it.
• “Headphones sometimes “pop” loudly in your ears when you insert them in the jack”. The latter is true for pretty much everything, but the former is sad.
• “The built-in Email app is pretty poor” (see my comments below — pretty poor is an understatement) and “I was unable to find good apps for many common roles in the Amazon Appstore”. File under “this is not an iPad-killer”.

As a blow-by-blow critique it is, as Gruber puts it, scathing.

Marco’s conclusion: “The Fire is an Android version, sort of, of the iPod Touch. It’s the first device available that’s inexpensive and offers Android in a somewhat reasonable package without a cellular contract.” Exactly. It’s cheap, requires no contract, and it doesn’t suck. (It doesn’t “not suck” the way BBEdit “doesn’t suck”; it doesn’t suck the way most Android crap sucks. OK maybe doesn’t suck the way something that has sharp blades that spring out and injure your hands sucks.)

More Observations

B-Team Kindle App

This morning, as I was reading Iain M. Banks’s latest on my Kindle Fire (Surface Detail, seems to be better than his last couple thus far — certainly a more interesting central idea), I rubbed the screen on my shirt to clean it and found that it had randomly popped me back a whole bunch of pages. No problem, I thought, I’ll sync it the furthest point reached. It scrolled me forward a few pages, well short of my furthest progress. Exactly how do you fuck up something that simple in book-reading software? It didn’t even scroll me as far as my furthest note.

Screen Shots

I saw some tweets yesterday concerning a supposed 22 step process for taking a screenshot on the Kindle Fire. (Hint: it involves installing the Android SDK, tethering the device, installing some kind of remote debugger stub, and pulling the screenshot from the command-line.) The fact is, taking screenshots isn’t a feature of the Kindle Fire so it’s not really a criticism per se, just a missing feature. It’s not like Jeff Bezos personally approved of having a screenshot feature on the Kindle that was this ridiculously hard to do, it’s that taking screenshots didn’t make it into the Fire’s feature-set and this is a cute hack to get around it.

So, the short version is that you can’t take screenshots on a Kindle Fire.

Email

I have two gmail accounts — my personal account (which uses dual authentication) and my work account (which doesn’t). I cannot access either account using the Kindle Fire’s email client (despite it having an explicit Gmail option). The defaults don’t work and no amount of fiddling has helped.

Orientation Bug + Stupid Power Switch = Sad Panda

I think I alluded to this problem in my earlier post, but it’s getting on my nerves. In order to avoid accidentally hitting the power button constantly when reading, I use the device “upside-down” and have the screen orientation locked that way. But, the login screen ignores the orientation, so I have to log in and then flip the device upside-down every time. Have I mentioned that I despise the login screen?

 Battery

I’ve run the Kindle Fire out of juice a few times now, but I don’t have a big issue with battery life. Part of it is that it’s just not a pleasant device to use for anything much except reading books and briefly visiting a website. (I should note that the double-tap to zoom functionality seems to have improved slightly since I first started using it, and I wonder if Amazon has done something server-side to improve it.)