s i m s h i t t y
When I was in undergrad engineering, I had a software oddity called SIMLIFE. This old program was the foundation on which modern simulation games (SIMCITY, The SIMS, etc.) were constructed, and it was a neat way to wile away several minutes, hours, days and weeks of critical study time.
Besides that, I believe it was instructional time, of sorts. Kinda my SIMsociology 101.
The version I had was what is now called Open Source, but back then it was just called uncompiled. It had many of the benefits of today's open source software, like an entire library of interactive rules, added by hackers, fans and other geeks, which could be implemented to various degrees in the program simulation. It was also completely customizable to the extent the player could follow the Fortran77, but I admit that I couldn't follow the program flow well enough to implement my own complex rules.
There were so many options already in the library, I could usually find a method of forcing the conditions I desired on to my little population without extraneous programming, recompiling and linking.
I suppose I need to describe the game and its functions a little so today's object oriented geeks will understand what I'm trying to say.
There were any number of virtual organisms, set by the user as a value called INITPOP, and visually represented by rotating ASCII characters. There were male and female organisms who traveled through their world by certain mathematical formulae governing their motion and limitations. Highly customizable rules allowed them to gather food, which occurred randomly in the universe, and to breed.
The user could, for example, set rules on the length of the maximum lifespan for a SIM, what percentage of the max lifespan was the age of sexual maturity, how efficiently procreation could take place, and there were a whole host of rules governing the accumulation and distribution of food, including transferability, shelf life and consumption rates.
You could either watch the visual simulation - male and female characters moving about, gathering food and bumping into each other creating offspring, or you could just run the equations and jump straight to the results - how many generations it took for your organisms to acheive, and then lose a stable breeding population, and how much simulated time it took for your sims to die out altogether.
Eventually, I got bored with watching them and I went about creating and destroying civilizations at the rate of several per day. Some of the things I observed in that data were downright educational.
Food was food, but it was also wealth. Modifying the default rules for food accumulation produced the most interesting effects. If you allowed food to be accumulated with no set maximum, and removed the ability for food to "spoil", certain organisms became "rich" fairly quickly. No matter how you tried to modify the individual organisms strengths and weaknesses to level the playing field, the majority of the wealth found its way into the "hands" of relatively few organisms fairly quickly. This is no surprise - once an organism is wealthy, it remains wealthy.
Allowing wealth to be accumulated with no restrictions invariably cut the time a population remained healthy pretty much in half. That was only if the wealth dissappeared instantly when the organism which collected it died.
Changing the distribution rules yielded even more interesting results. If you allowed wealth to be willable - when one organism dies, its wealth is distributed evenly among its past mates...when both parent organisms are dead, accumulated wealth is distributed evenly among progeny - the civilization collapses in about one eighth of the time the same population could have held out with default limits on how much food could be accumulated.
So, when you hear me ranting about how personal wealth wrecks society, remember I'm just a stupid liberal, and I learned my biases by playing games in college when I should have been studying - just as you suspected.
Unsoft's List
Friday, May 06, 2005 at 10:25 AM
Wednesday, May 04, 2005 at 11:34 AM
h o m e g r o w n
Monday night, I stopped at the Delaware Street Kroger's on my way home from work to pick up a few inconsequentials - mostly items applied to one end or the other of a baby. In addition, I succumbed to an impulse to snag a bottle of Cabernet, produced in Nicholas County, WV by a vintner I'm somewhat acquainted with on a personal level.
I remembered tasting a sip at the winery on a visit, and as I recalled, it wasn't the most refined thing I'd ever tasted, but it had a decent body and was better than I expected. That impression actually festered into some sort of perception of rugged appeal over the few years since, romantic and memory-revisionist that I am.
Anywho, just after the blessed baby bedtime, my wife and I retired to our little hideaway for a glass and a smoke. The following is a brief description of the events that followed.
I was disappointed to discover that the cork was that urethane synthetic crap that you find plugging most wine just barely above shitty enough to rate a screw-top. I always imagine some duct-tape aficionado squirting GREAT-FOAM expanding insulation down the neck of the bottle, right out of the red aerosol can.
Determined to enjoy my vino, I employed my grandfather's old corkscrew to extricate the offending bottle plug. The art of using a real corkscrew as opposed to some semi-mechanical bottle opening system is one I encourage and support, but the satisfaction derived from the process is definitely compromised when you twist into some substance-free synthetic pseudocork.
I "worked through the pain" and popped the bottle, anticipating an aroma reminiscent of my Grandfather's homemade table wine, and I did detect such an aroma, but it was layered with a strong odor that I might loosely characterize as indicative of contamination.
To be more specific, the offending smell was equal parts ozone and petroleum, like somebody washed out an electric motor with WD40 and added some of this to the fermenting grapes. The best single source I can relate is the smell I remember associating with the HO scale electric train set I played with as a kid some 3 decades ago.
I went ahead and braved a sip, just to make sure I wasn't oversensitive, having a "brain tumor moment" or simply insane. No such luck. It tasted very close to the the way it smelled. I could still taste the wine in the mix too, but as any wastewater engineer can attest, a little bit of something very bad can go a long way.
So I'm left wondering at the source of the contamination - if it is a systematic thing and, most importantly, if I should make the vintner aware of it or just let it go. I wouldn't even consider taking legal action if I found the ever-popular severed fingertip in there, but a "heads up" to the producer might be warranted.
I kept the unused portion for whatever reason. Future chemical analysis, bragging rights, souvenir value, or maybe I secretly fantasize that if I keep this one bottle out of circulation I'm "taking one for the team" so to speak.
It does have a "West Virginia Grown" sticker on the side. "West Virginia Grown, Slightly Contaminated" describes me as accurately as any other label I could apply.
Monday night, I stopped at the Delaware Street Kroger's on my way home from work to pick up a few inconsequentials - mostly items applied to one end or the other of a baby. In addition, I succumbed to an impulse to snag a bottle of Cabernet, produced in Nicholas County, WV by a vintner I'm somewhat acquainted with on a personal level.
I remembered tasting a sip at the winery on a visit, and as I recalled, it wasn't the most refined thing I'd ever tasted, but it had a decent body and was better than I expected. That impression actually festered into some sort of perception of rugged appeal over the few years since, romantic and memory-revisionist that I am.
Anywho, just after the blessed baby bedtime, my wife and I retired to our little hideaway for a glass and a smoke. The following is a brief description of the events that followed.
I was disappointed to discover that the cork was that urethane synthetic crap that you find plugging most wine just barely above shitty enough to rate a screw-top. I always imagine some duct-tape aficionado squirting GREAT-FOAM expanding insulation down the neck of the bottle, right out of the red aerosol can.
Determined to enjoy my vino, I employed my grandfather's old corkscrew to extricate the offending bottle plug. The art of using a real corkscrew as opposed to some semi-mechanical bottle opening system is one I encourage and support, but the satisfaction derived from the process is definitely compromised when you twist into some substance-free synthetic pseudocork.
I "worked through the pain" and popped the bottle, anticipating an aroma reminiscent of my Grandfather's homemade table wine, and I did detect such an aroma, but it was layered with a strong odor that I might loosely characterize as indicative of contamination.
To be more specific, the offending smell was equal parts ozone and petroleum, like somebody washed out an electric motor with WD40 and added some of this to the fermenting grapes. The best single source I can relate is the smell I remember associating with the HO scale electric train set I played with as a kid some 3 decades ago.
I went ahead and braved a sip, just to make sure I wasn't oversensitive, having a "brain tumor moment" or simply insane. No such luck. It tasted very close to the the way it smelled. I could still taste the wine in the mix too, but as any wastewater engineer can attest, a little bit of something very bad can go a long way.
So I'm left wondering at the source of the contamination - if it is a systematic thing and, most importantly, if I should make the vintner aware of it or just let it go. I wouldn't even consider taking legal action if I found the ever-popular severed fingertip in there, but a "heads up" to the producer might be warranted.
I kept the unused portion for whatever reason. Future chemical analysis, bragging rights, souvenir value, or maybe I secretly fantasize that if I keep this one bottle out of circulation I'm "taking one for the team" so to speak.
It does have a "West Virginia Grown" sticker on the side. "West Virginia Grown, Slightly Contaminated" describes me as accurately as any other label I could apply.
Monday, May 02, 2005 at 1:51 PM
s c r e w j o b
The following breaking news article appears in this afternoon's morning paper. They promise more detail tomorrow, and I'll certainly be checking back.
The name of the contractor mentioned in the article sounds kinda familiar, huh? That's because it's the same outfit we've been hearing about in relation to a certain sweetheart deal to construct about ten miles of high-dollar Appalachian Corridor through the southern coalfields.
Nicewonder is an arm of Premium Energy, the coal industry anchor. As a matter of fact, Nicewonder Construction is more than their arm. Other anatomical analogies come to mind. The employees of Nicewonder are actually wearing 2 hardhats - one of them with a battery powered light beaming off the center like some kind of third eye of Appalachian mythology.
The crews proposed to do the work for the WVDOT are simply Premium Energy coal miners, doing what they do - constructing valley fills for fun and profit. They are even going to be paid their typical non-union wages for coalfield labor while they dig up some black gold, the only difference being they will dump the spoil along a proposed roadway alignment instead of focusing on one "intermittent" stream valley.
What's the big difference you ask? Well, for starters, no permit could have been approved for the mining activity without a place to dump fill complete with an approved post mining land use. Bingo. Highway fill = approved post mining land use and old Chuck Hayden rolls over in his grave for the umpteenth time.
Other differences worth mentioning: Several streams get the shaft, "intermittent" or not. Expansion of the plans takes place frequently, but no additional environmental study has been deemed necessary. The coal encountered during project earthwork is a freebie for the contractor (read here, coal baron). The design engineering was handed out wholesale to a "Nicewonder Buddy" (that's 10 miles of corridor design here. Totally unprecedented in a market where transportation consultants go belly-up almost daily for lack of work).
Enough for ya? How bout a little more. Federal and State highway standard specifications for design and construction have been "suspended" in the interest of saving money. Money for who? At who's expense?
Even the alignment and access control of the highway are subject to modification by the coal industry to suit their own wants and needs.
And here's the real biggie. Nicewonder, and by association Premium Energy, are to be paid with money which is to be Federally reimbursed from TEA funds. Is anybody reading? That's Federal and State transportation tax money being handed out wholesale to the coal industry for mining their own coal, all the while shortchanging legitimate engineers and contractors who have every right to opportunities to perform this work through normal competitive bidding and qualification channels. Oh, and there's fucking the environment, but who really counts that anymore?
So, what does this new development bode for us? Evidently, the coal industry isn't satisfied with building highways as a way to launder polluting waste. Now they want to build schools, too. Gee, I wonder if this has anything to do with the State's recent takeover of Mingo County Schools? Duh.
EDIT: Here is the article, published in the Charleston Gazette today (5/3/2005). I can't believe nobody over there feels compelled to direct us toward the larger picture. Local media are assclowns. You can quote me.
The following breaking news article appears in this afternoon's morning paper. They promise more detail tomorrow, and I'll certainly be checking back.
The name of the contractor mentioned in the article sounds kinda familiar, huh? That's because it's the same outfit we've been hearing about in relation to a certain sweetheart deal to construct about ten miles of high-dollar Appalachian Corridor through the southern coalfields.
Nicewonder is an arm of Premium Energy, the coal industry anchor. As a matter of fact, Nicewonder Construction is more than their arm. Other anatomical analogies come to mind. The employees of Nicewonder are actually wearing 2 hardhats - one of them with a battery powered light beaming off the center like some kind of third eye of Appalachian mythology.
The crews proposed to do the work for the WVDOT are simply Premium Energy coal miners, doing what they do - constructing valley fills for fun and profit. They are even going to be paid their typical non-union wages for coalfield labor while they dig up some black gold, the only difference being they will dump the spoil along a proposed roadway alignment instead of focusing on one "intermittent" stream valley.
What's the big difference you ask? Well, for starters, no permit could have been approved for the mining activity without a place to dump fill complete with an approved post mining land use. Bingo. Highway fill = approved post mining land use and old Chuck Hayden rolls over in his grave for the umpteenth time.
Other differences worth mentioning: Several streams get the shaft, "intermittent" or not. Expansion of the plans takes place frequently, but no additional environmental study has been deemed necessary. The coal encountered during project earthwork is a freebie for the contractor (read here, coal baron). The design engineering was handed out wholesale to a "Nicewonder Buddy" (that's 10 miles of corridor design here. Totally unprecedented in a market where transportation consultants go belly-up almost daily for lack of work).
Enough for ya? How bout a little more. Federal and State highway standard specifications for design and construction have been "suspended" in the interest of saving money. Money for who? At who's expense?
Even the alignment and access control of the highway are subject to modification by the coal industry to suit their own wants and needs.
And here's the real biggie. Nicewonder, and by association Premium Energy, are to be paid with money which is to be Federally reimbursed from TEA funds. Is anybody reading? That's Federal and State transportation tax money being handed out wholesale to the coal industry for mining their own coal, all the while shortchanging legitimate engineers and contractors who have every right to opportunities to perform this work through normal competitive bidding and qualification channels. Oh, and there's fucking the environment, but who really counts that anymore?
So, what does this new development bode for us? Evidently, the coal industry isn't satisfied with building highways as a way to launder polluting waste. Now they want to build schools, too. Gee, I wonder if this has anything to do with the State's recent takeover of Mingo County Schools? Duh.
EDIT: Here is the article, published in the Charleston Gazette today (5/3/2005). I can't believe nobody over there feels compelled to direct us toward the larger picture. Local media are assclowns. You can quote me.
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