Liberal and progressive Christian groups say a new computer game in which players must either convert or kill non-Christians is the wrong gift to give this holiday season and that Wal-Mart, a major video game retailer, should yank it off its shelves.... Left Behind: Eternal Forces, a PC game inspired by a series of Christian novels that are hugely popular, especially with teens...
...Plugged In, a publication of the conservative Christian group Focus on the Family, gave the game a "thumbs-up." The reviewer called it "the kind of game that Mom and Dad can actually play with Junior -- and use to raise some interesting questions along the way."
'Convert or die' game divides Christians / Some ask Wal-Mart to drop Left Behind: A Wal-Mart spokeswoman said the retailer has no plans to pull Left Behind: Eternal Forces from any of the 200 of Wal-Mart's 3,800 stores that offer the game, including just seven in California. The nearest are in Chico and Redding. "We look at the community to see where it will sell," said Tara Raddohl. "We have customers who are buying it and really haven't received a lot of complaints about it from our customers at this time."... In Left Behind, set in perfectly apocalyptic New York City, the Antichrist is personified by fictional Romanian Nicolae Carpathia, secretary-general of the United Nations and a People magazine "Sexiest Man Alive."
Players can choose to join the Antichrist's team, but of course they can never win on Carpathia's side. The enemy team includes fictional rock stars and folks with Muslim-sounding names, while the righteous include gospel singers, missionaries, healers and medics. Every character comes with a life story. When asked about the Arab and Muslim-sounding names, Frichner said the game does not endorse prejudice. But "Muslims are not believers in Jesus Christ" -- and thus can't be on Christ's side in the game. "That is so obvious," he said.... Frichner said that... his company's ultimate goal in offering the game: to bring parents and kids together to talk about the Bible. He said most teens are playing video games, so it was natural to turn the books into one...
"I was a true believer in NAFTA--the North American Free Trade Agreement. Now my faith is not gone but shaken." So states Brad DeLong, economist and creator of one of the net's most popular weblogs on economics, at http://www.j-bradford-delong.net.
J. Bradford DeLong is Professor of Economics and Chair of the Political Economy major at the University of California at Berkeley. He also serves as a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and was Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy.
With 5% of the operating system market share, Apple should be dead--overwhelmed by Microsoft's resources. But it isn't:
Technology News: Commentary: Under IBM's Hood, Oracle's Linux Move, Apple's Vista Surprise: [B]ased on the chatter I'm seeing it appears very likely that Apple is preparing a little surprise for Microsoft at MacWorld which happens at the same time as the Consumer Electronics Show in January. While Microsoft and partners will be talking about Vista in advance of the launch of that product at CES, Apple, along with Intel, will be launching Apple's version of the Media Center with iTV and Leopard. That's right -- Leopard. It looks like this puppy is nearly ready if I'm reading the signs right -- and Apple is clearly setting up for something big.
Now Intel's part goes beyond the chip and appears to contain elements of Viiv, if not all of that platform. Viiv is actually kind of cool, it's just that Intel has not been able to explain effectively what it is and, as a result, the market hasn't been particularly excited about it on Windows. However, Apple knows how to sell and with a problem where the technology is good but the marketing's not, Apple has the skills to make a huge contribution.
Recall how Apple took the MP3 player market by storm by simply looking at what was out there and figuring out how to do it right. Microsoft's Media Center isn't fully cooked, even with Vista, something that Intel actually created Viiv to fix. Now, it appears, the two of them are collaborating to do the Media Center right, and if they hit the target as well as they did with the iPod, which is likely, they could actually have a second massive success on their hands.
So, if you are into technology, particularly if you are into Apple, you'll want to hang around MacWorld in January for the Apple pre-Vista surprise party!
Oops. You didn't hear that here...
We increasingly live in a complicated world in which those things that can be done in one click get done, and those that can't, don't. And those things that are done often acquire increasing salience. Hence the dominance of YouTube:
Gimme my embedded video! - Download Squad: Jordan Running: This has been bugging me for awhile, and I've just got to get it out in the open: If I want to put a cool movie trailer, a funny Comedy Central clip, or a news clip on my web site, why do I have to go to YouTube, where some kid has uploaded it in violation of the owner's copyright, and where as likely as not it'll be yanked a few days later, in order to do it? I'm talking about stuff that's already on the web--Comedy Central puts the best clips from its shows on its own web site, as does NBC for Saturday Night Live, and Apple.com has all the best movie trailers. But while I can stick a pirated clip from YouTube on my web site with two clicks, there's usually no simple, straightforward way to do the same thing from a legitimate site.
Some companies have shown signs of getting a clue. Google Video... some movies and TV shows--in particular those targeted at the youth market--now have a presence on YouTube... a few big record labels... but the selection remains pretty bare. What troubles me is that there's no discernible disadvantage for companies to put their own TV clips, movie trailers, and music videos online in a YouTube-like way. There can't be a technical barrier--the tiny dev team at Netscape.com put together their impressive embeddable video-sharing feature in a matter of weeks--nor a commercial one--movie trailers are advertisements, as are TV clips.... What's more, if they hosted their own embeddable videos, they could decide what plays before and after them instead of some kid on YouTube deciding for them, and though they'd be crazy to put anything longer than a two seconds before the video, after the video is a great time to advertise, as the Revver folks have discovered.
So, movie studios, TV networks, ad agencies, and record companies, here's my plea: Let me advertise your stuff on my web site. Hire some smart folks to put together a Flash player... give me HTML snippets to copy and paste... and let my visitors see your stuff, and your ads, without the extra clicks and without waiting for your lame Windows Media Player to load.
Productivity growth today is a hundred times the proportional rate it was back before 1650. That is perhaps the most astonishing thing about today's economy, when viewed in historical perspective.
UPDATE: After some viewing I think that this isn’t just a series of pretty pictures. This is a real story. What we’re watching is the innards of helper T-cell activation. The lymphocyte crawling along the arteriole wall at the beginning has picked up a foreign signal, and has latched onto a macrophage through the T-cell receptors and major histocompatibility receptors. Then we dive into the cell, and the majority of the video shows the synthesis, sorting, and delivery of T-cell receptors, cytokines, and other proteins, and we finish with the now-alerted and activated lymphocyte slipping in-between the capillary wall cells on its way to trouble....
robin andrea: That’s a stunning animation. I understand the emotional response to watching all that amazing work going on inside every cell in our body. I still remember the first time I saw graphics of mitosis. I thought it was the most beautiful dance I’d ever seen, and anaphase just knocked me out. This animation is like that only a hundred times better! Great link, Wayne.
Wayne: Robin - it was about 12 years ago that I first made the acquaintance of kinesin, that burly fellow who’s stepping along the microtubule carrying this enormous mass. It enraptured me then to think of “motor proteins”, and the visualization is perfect. I sent the link to the biology professor who teaches about a thousand students every semester. I imagine she hasn’t seen it, but I suspect she’s going to weep like I did....
I also think we are seeing a lymphocyte rolling along inside a blood vessel. We first see the exterior of the cell and then we zoom in to see the proteins in the membrane that are mediating the rolling, by contacting other proteins in the surface of the substrate. We then go inside the cell and first have a tour of the various cellular components - mostly the elements of the cytoskeleton and proteins being moved around in the membrane on lipid rafts. We then, in just a beautiful sequence, see the assembly and disassembly of actin and then microtubules before watching a motor protein (kinesin, I would say) staggering along a microtubule bearing its enormous cargo (a vesicle). In a further extended sequence we watch mRNA being processed into protein. It is ejected from the nucleus, processed and translated by ribosomes into the endoplasmic reticulum, the protein is transported to the Golgi apparatus, where it is further processed and then finally ejected into the cytosol where it carried (lipid raft again?) to the membrane where its function will be to mediate the rolling of the lymphocyte. Thus, we come back full circle....
bob on Sep 30th, 2006 at 10:26 pm: The video posted here is condensed from an eight minute piece. The longer piece has a voiceover and labels and is actually intended as a teaching tool, whereas this edit is more about just showing off the visuals. (from: http://www.spinquad.com/forums/showpost.php?p=141933&postcount=15) Does anybody know where the full version can be found?....
TFox on Oct 1st, 2006 at 6:33 pm: With respect to crowding, see just about anything by David Goodsell for static pictures with accurate representations of cytosolic space. This is a beautiful video though, and I think it'd be hard to see what was going on if it was realistically busy.
farrold on Oct 2nd, 2006 at 2:00 am: This is a beautiful piece of work, and accurate in many dimensions -- the animators worked closely with Harvard faculty. I'd like to see more of this work, but I'd also like to see a version that makes clear which aspects are utterly false (and why the animators were forced to do it this way).
The main cheat is in the motion trajectories. What looks like action-at-a-distance is, in most instances, a consequence of this cheat. The animations shows smooth motions at the molecular scale that are in reality random walks by twisting, tumbling objects. Brownian motion and thermal fluctuations rule dynamics in the biological world of soft molecular structures moving in water. (By contrast, stiff, anchored structures could indeed move smoothly while merely vibrating.)
To give a sense of the magnitudes, the rotational relaxation time for an ordinary, mid-size protein is less than a microsecond: that is, it will typically rotate through a large angle in that time. In a time of the same order, it will typically travel a large fraction of its diameter. Many of the scenes portray protein mechanisms on a millisecond time-scale, however, so the smooth motions shown represent what are actually random walks following paths perhaps 100 times as long. If shown realistically, the molecular parts would thrash, rattle, and wander, sometimes blundering away to nowhere, but sometimes passing close enough to a target location to respond to short-range forces that align and bind them.
However, this realism would obscure the functional behaviors, making it hard to see the net result of all the jiggling. The actual animation instead obscures the fundamental physical nature of the processes, producing a false impression of mysterious vital forces at work. I'd like to see a version that shows a few mechanisms both ways, giving an explanation of their relationship and the reason for the cheat in the rest of the scenes.
(Also note that the among the objects shown, the ratio of actual size to screen size varies by a thousand or more, and the time scaling varies by a similar factor. Making this clear would be a great help.)
So I am moving my morning coffee videocasts over to YouTube:
Morning Coffee Videocasts: NAFTA: I was a true believer in NAFTA--the North American Free Trade Agreement. Now my faith is not gone, but it is shaken.
Morning Coffee Videocasts: Bob Woodward: Bob Woodward's reporting is not just not "indispensible," it is wrong. I was there for the events that he recounts in "The Agenda" and again in "Maestro." There's no way Woodward could have thought he was telling the story straight both times he told it.
Morning Coffee Videocasts: Brad DeLong's Morning Coffee: Max Sawicky: Max Sawicky has the best riff on Isaac Newton's old line that I have ever heard. He says that those modeling the international economy assuming perfect capital mobility are "standing on the shoulders of men in ditches. Very deep ditches."
In which I drink my morning coffee, hog Vox's bandwidth, and sing the praises of Alan Furst's Dark Star: a novel that really is like seeing Casablanca for the first time.
In which I drink my morning coffee, hog Google's bandwidth, and muse on the many reasons contributing to the massive inflow of capital from abroad into the United States:
Brad DeLong's Morning Coffee. Capital is flowing into the United States for a number of reasons: (i) people think that the complementarity between capital and technology makes investments in the U.S. highly profitable; (ii) foreigners think that U.S.-located assets would be a wonderful thing to have in the event of "political instability" in their home countries; (iii) foreign governments think an undervalued currency and huge exports are a wonderful thing to have to avoid "political instability" by maintaining full employment; (iv) foreigners are overoptimistic about investments in the U.S.; (v) America's budget deficit means that we are printing lots of Treasury bonds which must be sold to somebody; (vi) the Federal Reserve's low-interest rate policy (which I don't think was a mistake) pushed up housing prices, made Americans feel rich, and so they looked around for people to borrow from to turn their home equity into liquid cash--and foreigners are a convenient source of funds.
I'm worried because I think a big part of the story is reason (iv).
In which I hog Google's bandwidth, drink my morning coffee, and express my support for Ben Bernanke's policy of telling the financial press what he is thinking about the economy and monetary policy:
Ben Bernanke is neither an inflation dove nor an (excessive) inflation hawk. He is prudent. The market will learn to deal with this. The financial press corps may not.
Brad DeLong's Morning Coffee. Why would we want to raise other Americans' taxes by $600 a year in order to allow the heirs of the superrich to inherit an extra $5,000,000 per estate?
Brad DeLong's Morning Coffee. It's very sad to watch both political parties abandon all shred of principle in the hope of winning political advantage by exploiting the gasoline price issue.
In which I hog Google's bandwidth, fail to drink my morning coffee, and muse on the implications of the fact that new White House press secretary Tony Snow doesn't have a 401(k) account:
Brad DeLong's Morning Coffee. New Bush press secretary Tony Snow doesn't have a 401(k). This is very bad news for Bush's "ownership society." The "ownership society" fails if people don't act responsibly. Yet it seems that even Bush's closest aides are not certain to act responsibly.
6 min 21 sec - May 13, 2006. Brad DeLong's Morning Coffee. Technocrats--the Federal Reserve--handle our monetary policy. Should we change our system so that technocrats handle our fiscal policy as well?
4 min 10 sec - May 12, 2006. Brad DeLong's Morning Coffee. Don't be fooled again by supply siders--we don't have to give each person making more than a million dollars a year a $42,000 a year tax cut present in order to guard against recession, no matter what Dick Cheney may say.
In which I drink my coffee, and muse on the fact that the years since 1945 have been the longest period since 113 B.C. in which no army has crossed the Rhine with fire and sword.
In which I drink my morning coffee, hog bandwidth, and violate the truce between economists and political scientists by talking about the saddest book on my bookshelf:
In which I drink my morning coffee, shift over to using Google's bandwidth, and hem and haw about how strongly I can be for international capital mobility.
In which I do drink my morning coffee, hog bandwidth, and also talk briefly about Susan Rasky's and my course about economic journalism... or maybe it's about journalistic economics...
In which I drink my morning coffee, hog bandwidth, and talk briefly about what I am going to do today--largely think hard about the equity premium, and about why stocks have been such a good investment
Alan Blinder on Outsourcing: Summary: Economists who insist that "offshore outsourcing" is just a routine extension of international trade are overlooking how major a transformation it will likely bring -- and how significant the consequences could be. The governments and societies of the developed world must start preparing, and fast...
Alan Krueger on Immigration: Immigration policy involves fundamental issues about what and who we are as a
country. There are no simple answers on immigration policy because different people
can legitimately assign different weights to the welfare of new immigrants, recent
immigrants, and various groups of natives. In addition, there is considerable debate disagreement among economists about the economic impacts of immigration....
Brad Setser on Barry Eichengreen on global imbalances: Eichengreen provides the best summary I have seen of competing views on the sustainability of large US trade deficits, along with the impact of sustained trade deficts on US external debt and the investment income balance. He leans towards what he calls the standard view: what cannot go on forever, won't go on forever. But he also clearly explains competing views, whether the "New Economy and Higher productivity make it all OK" view of Richard Cooper (and Michael Mandel), the "Savvy investor" view of John Kitchen (Cavallo and Tille have a similar argument) or the US isn't really in debt because of dark matter view of Hausmann and Sturzenegger and their various acolytes in the investment world. Well worth reading.
In which I drink my morning coffee, hog huge amounts of bandwidth, and think about whether it's really in Greg Mankiw's long-term interest to do the balanced, non-partisan two-step...
Economics Roundtable: Presidential Economics: Two Views - Google Video: Two leading economists argue the policies of the presidential candidates with MIT Sloan School of Management Dean Richard Schmalensee advocating for President Bush and Brad DeLong, Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley speaking on behalf of Sen. John Kerry, the Democratic nominee for president.
