Uneducational "Educational" Games

I was recently asked to put in the Cool Math Games web site into the list of sites my younger sister can view in her white-list browser. Now, before adding a site to the list (which is kind of a pain due to the brokenness of that particular browser), I went to inspect it. The first thing I said to myself was, "woah, I'm glad she doesn't have epilepsy." The color scheme is just so abhorrent and psychedelic that I can't believe it's actually recommended or allowed by any education professionals. It could at least have semi-readable text. Also, I'm probably banging my head against a wall on this one, but I think it's a terrible idea for kid/educational web sites to have ads.

Next up, I checked out some of the games. One advertising itself as "the world's hardest game" caught my attention. It is indeed difficult, but there is a distinct lack of mathematics or science of any kind. (To be honest, the only reason it's hard at all is that the controls are really unresponsive.) Continuing my quest for legitimate education, I found some racing game allegedly about multiples. I guess it kind of did; you're supposed to jump (yes jump, cars can do that, you know) over the other vehicles that bear numbers that are multiples of a given number. It's a pretty dull game with essentially no learning or even testing going on.

On and on, I found totally pointless games that are not much better than just watching some video (and throw a whole lot more script errors, thank you, webmaster and browser developer). Now, just one web site with this kind of junk wouldn't be too shocking. However, this has been the case all over the internet. Everywhere I go, I find web sites with "learning" "games" for kids. Nine out of ten are pointless. The rare one that actually puts some effort into teaching/assessing has ads plastered all over the place. The only good one I've found so far is Starfall, which teaches language and a little math to kindergarten children.

Is there hope for our children? Maybe. We just have to get them away from mindless alpha-wave entertainment and into engaging educational environments. There aren't a lot of good games available for free, but YouTube and a few good sites have some awesome resources for mathematics and other important skills.

Table Manners

Tonight I was eating an amazingly delicious Thanksgiving dinner when I was gently reminded to use the appropriate methods of cutting/moving food. Usually, I would just stab the entire turkey segment with a fork and bite off fragments of it. However, it's apparently more polite to do some gymnastics involving a knife being supported by the fork cutting the meat like a hacksaw. It seems very much more difficult than just moving the food into my mouth in the easiest way. Similarly, placing utensils on the sides of the plate always facing a certain relative direction might look nice, but it's simpler to place all of them contiguously (in a napkin if you want) on the plate. I guess these customs just developed over time in Western civilization. Nevertheless, taking in nutrients would be far simpler if we were to abandon them.

The Halifax Explosion of 1917: An Obscure Tragedy

On December 6, 1917, the Norwegian ship Imo and the French vessel Mont-Blanc collided, yielding the most massive explosion prior to the atomic bomb. It was an accident, caused by a misunderstanding of the signals sent between the two ships. Mont-Blanc was carrying munitions for World War I, which detonated after being ignited by sparks created when metal scraped against metal in the collision. Two Canadian towns were leveled, over nine thousand lives were lost, and a whole lot of physical capital was damaged.

So - why don't most people know about this? I really don't know. It happened almost a hundred years ago, but everybody knows about WWI. Probably, it was "just an accident" that could have been averted if people were more careful. Well, maybe we should at least know the circumstances that caused (I think) the first man-made tsunami. Then, as people lay out designs for new vessels and transport mediums, they'll think "what might go wrong?" and implement better systems of communication and safety.

Useless Language Conventions

I learned today in Chinese class that there's a different measure word for family members than for normal things. I can understand why there might be a different one for indeterminate quantities (like sugar or snow), but I find it entirely useless to have a word that literally means the same thing as another but has to be used instead of the other in a certain context. This is why I like Lojban so much: It only has exceptions when the exceptions are meaningful. For example, the words to start a narrowing and descriptive appositive are different because those are actually different concepts and the two words provide clarity as to what is being described in the sentence. In language, it's my view that everything should be the same unless differentiation is required to display differentiation in the world.

Cellular Respiration Discoveries Timeline (Screencast)

For a biology project, I have created a video on five early researchers on the cellular respiration model. It's pretty good, so I think I'll post it here as well! For science!

Subscriber/Subscribed Index

YouTube subscriptions are things everyone wants to get. As a content producer, I love it when people subscribe to me. As a content consumer, I love finding awesome producers to subscribe to. However, I only subscribe to three people. Three. Not thirty. Not three hundred. I'm fairly certain that seeing me in the subscriber list would mean a lot more to a content producer than some pre-adolescent consumer who subscribes to pagefuls of LQ channels.

To measure the quality of subscribers a channel has, I propose the Subscriber/Subscribed Index. YouTube should, for each subscriber to a channel, divide the number of people that subscribe to the person by the number of people that person subscribes to, and then average all those. That would be a much better demographic than age to determine the devotedness of the audience.

For example, I have 22 subscribers at the moment. Only one of them has more than that (about 900). However, each one has literally uncountable subscription targets. So, my viewer base's SSI is very low, probably a little more than 1 including Mr. 900 and essentially zero without him.