Spent a big chunk of today playing 6 player Halo over at a friend’s house. That game is so amazing. We talk a little bit about the idea of video games being a spectator sport. Not a new or novel concept. In fact there are people getting paid to play video games today. There are, of course, professional testers and play testers, but then there are also those people paid to play massively multiplayer games (like Everquest and Ashron’s Call). I have a friend that was given free online time with AC if he agreed to tutor people online. The interesting thing was that there was a team meeting for a large division at work where there were probably 100 spectators watching a Halo tournament. How long until there is an arena? :)

Finished the weasel, but guns is taking longer. A very interesting thing in guns is the idea of history in the large. I remember reading the Foundation books (well, some of them) and in that (if memory serves) Asimov has this concept of future history. That you can basically predict the behavior of the human species over a long enough time. In the book they perfect this technique and can really predict the future. In guns Diamond talks about history using these broad strokes of time. He talks about “short” time spans being 1,000 years. Distances are measured in the time it takes for ideas and people to populate an area, saying that the Americas were populated in a short 8,000 years from the time the first people came across the straight.

There are some great passages in the book where Diamond talks about the fact that historians can’t agree on a reason for why certain people adopt technologies. He lists of a litany of alternative ideas, and then states that since no one can agree, and there are so many options, that this can be seen as a random occurrence and therefore he can look at this in the large scale. Heh heh.

Another very interesting part discusses the creation of written language. He has a really interesting narrative about a Cherokee Indian named Sequoyah that invented a written language for the Cherokee around 1820. Sequoyah had seen English writing, but didn’t understand it. He saw the value, and therefore created his own version. Makes what we all do each day seem like a bit trivial – did you invent written language today?

On a final note, we are thinking of buying a new house. We just refinanced, but given the low interest rates and our desire to start a family in the next year or so is making it seem like a reasonable option. Our agent sent us a bunch of listings tonight. We aren’t in a great rush, or really convinced that we should do it, but we’ll see…

11:46:46 PM    comment []