I decided to write an informational piece about Mensa. You know, the fabled seat of high intelligence, whose members strive toward excellence and the betterment of mankind. Or something like that.
What is Mensa?
Mensa, according to the homepage, “provides a forum for intellectual exchange among members. Its activities include the exchange of ideas by lectures, discussions, journals, special-interest groups, and local, regional, national, and international gatherings; the investigations of members’ opinions and attitudes; and assistance to researchers, inside and outside Mensa, in projects dealing with intelligence or Mensa.”
Personally, I would say that Mensa provides a forum for self-loathing individuals to attempt to receive some self-esteem, and exchange inane ideas with other semi-intellectual members who also lack the ability to produce something fruitful instead of debating useless details.
Who can join Mensa?
In order to join Mensa you need to have attained an official IQ score at or above the 98th percentile; you need to be among the “smartest” 2% in the world. In case you’re wondering: no, online IQ tests aren’t acceptable - you need to take tests that are graded by professionals in order to qualify. Online tests often test things that aren’t strictly IQ-related, and they also often show a better result than a proper test. Remember that the next time you get an IQ of 152 on an online test.
One common rebuttal against IQ tests is that they measure nothing at all, except the ability to take IQ tests. It’s a relatively valid claim: IQ tests measure a form of logical thinking, but skips many other types of intelligence. However, what they measure is one type of thinking that is quantifyable. It’s not easy to measure, for example, how socially intelligent a person is, so IQ tests simply ignore those bits and measure what they can measure instead. Does that make the tests irrelevant? Most of the time, yes, but they still measure something comparable.
What kind of people join Mensa?
To quote the Mensa homepage: “Mensans range in age from 4 to 94, but most are between 20 and 60. In education they range from preschoolers to high school dropouts to people with multiple doctorates. There are Mensans on welfare and Mensans who are millionaires. As far as occupations, the range is staggering. Mensa has professors and truck drivers, scientists and firefighters, computer programmers and farmers, artists, military people, musicians, laborers, police officers, glassblowers–the diverse list goes on and on. There are famous Mensans and prize-winning Mensans, but there are many whose names you wouldn’t know.”
I can elaborate a bit on that. Mensans can theoretically be of any profession and any personality, but most of the time you tend to see:
People out to prove something to themselves or the world (The Insecure)
Complete and utter introverts with bad social skills (The Nerds)
Accomplished people who seek new groups to impress (The Braggers)
Relatively normal persons just looking for something new (The Bored)
Note that this list isn’t complete, and the choice isn’t binary. (Ehm. Qaternary I mean.) Sometimes you encounter a person who completely fulfills a stereotype, but most people have a fuzzy level for all four archetypes. (I wonder if I can use the word archetype in this context; either way it looks cool.)
What can you expect from Mensa?
Again, to quote the homepage: “The society welcomes people from every walk of life whose IQ is in the top 2% of the population, with the objective of enjoying each other’s company and participating in a wide range of social and cultural activities.”
In reality, what you get is pretty much what you’d expect from a group of semi-self-claimed highly intelligent people:
Mailing lists with a mix of insanely stupid comments, insightful knowledge and Asperger-like anal retentiveness
Small social gatherings where people discuss nerdy topics and drink beer, and either watch each other with a “how the hell could this guy pass the test” look, or genuinely try to find common topics in order to become friends with the others
Large social gatherings where… Hm. I really don’t know. I guess everyone listens to lectures and try their best to impress others with their useless trivia insightful knowledge
All cynism aside, I do think that Mensa is a great place for some people. You know that the others who have joined have passed a decently difficult test of logic, so they can’t be really stupid per se (just irritating). And given the spread of people who become members you’re bound to run into many new and exciting faces whom you never would have met otherwise (although there’s a great risk that you’ll mostly see college students). And the gatherings actually provide an excellent way to meet new people (unless you’re…you know…able to go to normal parties and be charming and interesting to normal people).
“Why are you so full of contempt for Mensans,” you may wonder. “Who are you to judge people like that?” I judge all the Insecure and Nerdy people, because - Bog help me - I’m the biggest Insecure Nerd of them all. Feel free to e-mail me at karja@mensa.se if you want to complain about my hypocrisy.
Some final anecdotes
I have a friend who’s one of the smartest people I know. He once insinuated that he wouldn’t want to take the Mensa test, because the blow to his confidence would be too great if he failed. Another extremely intelligent friend of mine routinely ridicules Mensa for only containing wannabes out to prove something. An ex of mine scored quite well on an IQ test, but she simply sees no reason to join Mensa. All three people are - I regret to admit it - probably more intelligent than me. The point of all of this? Don’t assume that people in a high IQ society automatically are more intelligent than non-members.
Once I was having a stroll with a girl, and for some reason we ended up discussing intelligence. No, that usually doesn’t happen, but she was interested in the topic. We talked about our opinions of ourselves and I made a suitably modest comment, along the lines that I have verified that I’m a pretty intelligent person. Her reply was, “you don’t seem like it.” That’s a very interesting comment. Personally, I’m of the opinion that the ability to fit in and adapt oneself is a better measure of intelligence than showing off knowledge and/or quick thinking. (But, of course, opinions are like arseholes.)
Sometimes it’s easy to get fooled by numbers. 2% doesn’t sound like much, but that’s one person in fifty. Seriously, that’s a bloody huge number of people! I work with IT, and I would hazard a guess that not many people in my department would fail to qualify for those two per cents. Whenever one gets the urge to feel proud of one’s supposed intelligence, one only has to think of all others who ought to qualify in one’s surroundings. (I love the word “one.”)
Over a year ago I started making a small prototype in which you played a blue box that herded small white boxes around a black playing field. “Herding sugar cubes,” my ex called it, and she was very fond of the gaming mechanic. That’s when I thought I was on to something: if the prototype was an amusing toy, it would surely become a fun full-fledged game!
I’m of course talking about the beginning of my illustrious little game Sheeplings.
About a year ago I wrote a design document for the game; the document was wildly different compared to what can be played today. I originally wanted to make a simulation game in which action levels would feature as interruptions. “Oh no! On the way to Woolyville a nasty wolf attacks; prepare to defend your sheep,” and things along that line. The action levels would be randomized, and the main focus would be on the simulation parts. Unfortunately I decided to scrap that idea due to budget constraints: it would simply cost too much to have someone draw all those locations. Instead I went with an action-based game with hand-crafted levels instead.
Why all this nostalgia? Because I am finished with Sheeplings v0.5, and this is also something I call Release Candidate 1.
The observant reader might note that this post is a very poor excuse for a post mortem, and that’s totally correct; that’s why it’s called a pre-post mortem. After all, I wouldn’t call a product at version 0.5 finished. I’m planning on making a proper 1.0 release in a little while, and after that it’s time to make a properly retrospective analysis of what went right and what went wrong in the process. All in all - given my limited resources - I’m fairly pleased with the game as it is, even though I hope to make many improvements still before I completely leave it.
So, in this pre-post mortem I’m simply looking forward to being able to look back on the project.
Or - possibly - I just wanted a more intriguing title than “Sheeplings v0.5.”
God had it wrong. The seven deadly sins aren’t wrath and sloth and whatever is in that list. He forgot a very important one: inefficiency. In fact, it should be made into a commandment:
Thou shalt not create a situation in which other people are waiting for you in order to be able to perform their tasks. This will only unnecessarily drain the company’s resources and make the waitees incredibly cross. So sayeth I.
Say, hypothetically, that a person is entering a new project and has taken upon himself the task to write a library. This project attempts to be agile and contains very little documentation. In fact, it is encouraged to store knowledge in people and not on paper. On Monday he proposes an API to the library in question but receives no response. On Wednesday he offers a more detailed description of the API and brings a few ambiguous situations into light. Still no response. He discusses the functionality verbally with some people, and then offers an even more detailed description of the API the following Monday. This is met by a short e-mail response at last: “Let’s discuss this tomorrow.”
Well.
Hypothetically, what’s wrong with this situation?
First of all, keeping little to no documentation may sound fine in practice, but it will lead to ambiguous interpretations and difficulties for new team members. Secondly, despite this it can function well if feedback is offered speedily; but it will cause unnecessary work due to unclear specifications otherwise. Thirdly, the lack of information in the response makes it totally useless: does the API need corrections; does it need to be re-structured totally; is it passable but needs to be understood by all parts - the e-mail response tells us nothing about that. It becomes the final nail in the coffin: it becomes impossible to perform any more work on the library because there’s no way of knowing if it will be useful or not. Many hours of productive time is lost because of this. The person responsible for the library will most probably rant about the situation on his blog instead of doing anything worthwhile - effectively losing the company money since a useful pastime is not possible to find.
I hate inefficiency. Or rather: I hate waiting for other people. I don’t care how others do their work, but I loathe being unable to do something productive when I want to. It just leads to frustration, cynism and irritation. The library in question could be written in a few days if the desired functionality was known and specified. In a perfect world projects would be agile, but there would be non-ambigous and thorough specifications for everything. A contradiction in terms? Maybe, maybe not: I fully believe that a team can work in an agile manner but still keep information readily available.
However, playing the devil’s advocate I have to blame myself as well. The information is readily available - it’s simply spread out over several people who have lots of other issues to deal with. If I were truly desperate to be productive I would hunt them down and demand instant feedback on my thoughts, and ask them to guide me to the ones who could offer constructive criticism if they weren’t able to give me feedback. Maybe that’s what’s expected and required in a situation like this. Personally, I would prefer it if people could offer these hints by themselves, without any external pressure.
Maybe I should think of that the next time someone is waiting for a response from me.
Final note: I used the term deadlock in the title, but that’s of course not applicable anywhere. This is simply a mutex that’s locked for too long. But I like the power and force of the word deadlock, so I used it anyway. Sue me.
English grammar contains many tricky pitfalls. Should we say “the media are” or “the media is?” Is “majority” plural or singular? (The answer is of course: it depends. Media is per definition the plural form of medium, but there are countless examples of ”the media is.” If enough people choose to interpret media as singular, that’s what it’ll be. And majority can be either plural or singular depending on the situation.)
However, some things shouldn’t be hard.
Lately I’ve seen many examples of people writing “alot.” I think this has turned into my new pet peeve.
“This matters alot to me.”
“He did alot of damage.”
“Her rectum has seen alot of penises.”
I won’t give you any links to the offending sites since I don’t want to be an anal bastard. (Yes, I’m terribly proud of this pun, coming right after the last example above. I’m giggling right now, in fact.) But I really don’t see how hard it is to make that non-existing word into two separate - correct - words. And I also don’t see how people reason when they write alot. Are they confusing it with allot? That’s a verb, for Bog’s sake!
Now, there might be some mitigating circumstances. For one thing, as a non-native English speaker I might have missed something; maybe this error comes from how one learns the language as a kid, or maybe it’s caused by schools offering strange grammatical rules to apply in strange places. Since I learned English after my native tongue I might be immune to those particular traps. Who knows! But it still irritates me. As this page notes: “just remind yourself that just as you wouldn’t write ‘alittle’ you shouldn’t write ‘alot.’”
Speaking of that site (Common Errors in English) there are other cool mistakes listed there. “Awe, shucks,” “full of pith and vinegar” and similarly mutilated idiomatic expressions seem to be very common - and I find that quite interesting since I haven’t seen many of these errors. Again, this is probably due to my non-native-ness: I mostly read English literature, watch English shows, read semi-litterate English articles and so on. I’m probably protected from everyday English, in other words. Even if one can complain alot (ah-hah) about the linguistic quality in books, TV, movies or articles, they probably have much better grammatical correctness compared to speaking to Bob the janitor while you’re waiting in line for the bathroom.
To all people who get the urge to enlighten me about how hypocritical I am since I complain about other people’s grammar but make mistakes myself: please send your complaints to shut_the_fuck_up@karjasoft.com
I’m a geek. So far, nothing new. But I feel especially geeky when I sit at work listening to old game tunes. People drop in to my office and go “hey, isn’t that some racing game” now and then; that is, when I’m not listening to NOFX or Johnny Cash or the 1812 Overture. I brighten up like a Christmas tree every time someone recognizes an old game song, and happily inform them of the title. That’s about when they start to back away slowly again. Anyway, I’m sure that all of you are familiar with video game songs; but in case you’re not I decided to put together a strange little top ten list.
First of all, what are the criteria?
The song must have been made exclusively for the game. No covers, no movie songs, etc.
Remixes are fine, in the cases where I feel that the remix is an actual improvement.
I choose the songs that affect me somehow; I don’t care about musical quality, technical skill and such things.
No pooftas!
Okay, let’s bring on the songs… I’ve made an attempt to embed a cool flash-based mp3 player. We’ll see if it works. Try pressing the play button again if the song doesn’t start - that seems to work for me. I hope that some of the songs will touch you like they’ve touched me.
Number 10: Final Fantasy IX - Loss of Me
This marvellous little piano piece is simplistic but extremely emotional. It’s one of the few things I really liked about FF IX; the rest of the game was a bland mix of meh and bleh and yay, but this song stuck out and metaphorically grabbed hold of my metaphorical heart the moment I heard it. The soft piano in the beginning is a great way to conjure a feeling of weakness and hurt.
It’s also not too hard to play on the piano - I managed to struggle my way through the first part after an hour’s training. (Yes, that long. I play the piano about as often as I say no to alcohol.)
Number 9: Mega Man II - Intro
I instinctively feel that this song should be placed higher, but it fits in pretty nicely at place nine. It’s short and sweet and to the point; it contains excellent energy; it really makes me want to get into the action. Despite all of this I must place the other songs higher, because I fear that it’s pure nostalgia that makes this song appealing. It lacks depth somehow.
Either way, it’s a classic and probably a song that would feature on many others’ top ten lists as well. But the next song might be a bit more obscure:
Number 8: Final Fantasy Mystic Quest - Last Castle
What the hell? FF MQ?! Am I insane? That’s a sucky game! Yes, it is - but this song rocks. There’s no other word for it: it just rocks in a way that few other FF songs do. They’re all beautifully composed, but this beast leaps up and grabs you by the throat with its opening riffs. “Look laddie, you’re at the last castle now. You’d better be prepared to kick som ass or go home crying to mama.”
And I can’t tell you how refreshing it was after eight hours or so of dull FF MQ, to finally get close to the end and be greeted by this song!
Number 7: Lotus II - Intro
Time for an Amiga game, and a great racing game to boot. This game looked great, felt great to play, had a good split-screen mode in which one could humiliate one’s friends, and had a kick-ass intro tune. Seriously, just listen to the first minute and tell me that you don’t dig the techno beat accompanied by the catchy melody.
In fact, this is the first song I’m going to play when I finally get my thumb out of the arse and get a driver’s license. It’s going to be so sweet, cruising down the street in a Mazda MX-5 listening to this song. Or possibly the next one…
Number 6: Out Run - Magical Sound Shower
Who doesn’t love the music to Out Run? This is a remix by Instant Remedy, though. I love the original song from ‘86, and the new version from Out Run 2 isn’t bad either. However, this remix feels more appropriate for a racing game. I may be a punk rocker at heart, but a melody-driven techno tune with a good beat does get my blood pumping at times.
As you know, you got to select your background music in Out Run. I really don’t see how some people can prefer Splash Wave or …Something Something Breeze to this one. Some people just don’t have any taste.
Number 5: Wizardry - Title
I was never a big fan of Wizardry to be honest, so I don’t remember if this is from the first one or not. This song is actually something of an anomaly in this list: I don’t have a strong connection to the game at all - I simply love the song itself. I can’t even say why it appeals so much to me. It just does. Naa na naa naa na na na na naaa, na na naa na naa na…
Curiously enough, a few years ago I had just picked out this one on guitar when a friend asked me if I could help him write a mobile phone ring tone based on this melody. It seems more people than me get lured in by its intoxicating sound.
Number 4: Cannon Fodder - Intro
A classic from the good ol’ Amiga days! The game was terrific and this song was jaw-dropping. The music is great, the melody is catchy, the sarcasm is stinging - the song is excellent on so many levels. When I listen to it now I can hear the (relatively) bad quality, the slightly off-beat vocal sample joinings…but it doesn’t matter, ’cause the song carries itself well despite that.
I actually taped this song from my TV’s speakers so that I could have it on one of my oh-so-typical-for-the-time mix tapes. I wonder if the terrible sound quality made the low sample quality and the mixing sound a bit better.
Number 3: Turrican II - Level 1
When I do a search for songs from Turrican II I often see the title song remixed. Sorry lads, you’re barking up the wrong tree: the first level tune is the real shit. This is a remix by Pointless Trace, but I think it captures the original very well. Man, how many times did I not start Turrican II only to realize that I had spent a minute listening to the song instead of playing the first level.
Maybe it’s a good thing that I sucked at the game; this way I got to hear the level 1 tune many many times. I doubt I ever came farther than level 2 in the game, in fact. Games were real games back then. Games that didn’t fall over and submit that easily.
Number 2: Enlightenment - Druid II - Title
Speaking of games that won’t submit: this C64 one is a killer. First it begins with a pair of massive doors swinging shut, forming a sinister logo. Then the title screen is shown and this song begins to play. Slow, mysterious and menacing….
After pressing the fire button you’re thrust into a world of constant dread. There are undead everywhere, you must gather spells and defeat the evil demon lords, and it’s all bitching hard. I know that I suck at games, but this can’t have been a simple game for anyone. I think I just managed to kill one of the demon lords!
Many people have made remixes for this song, and I’ve listened through maybe half a dozen of them. Not a single one one-ups the original, though. This version combines sombre beauty with menacing undertones in a marvellous way; the high notes combined with the simple low bass makes it far superior to remixes where there’s simply too much going on. Sometimes less is quite definitely more than… Um. More.
Number 1: Secret of Monkey Island - Title
I know, I know. This is so boringly predictable. But I must give this song the first prize. First of all, the game is one of the best ever. Secondly, the musical quality is astounding with its caribbean steel drums and jazzy undertones and dream-like melodies. Thirdly, I feel that the first version has much better dynamics than - for example - the title to Curse of Monkey Island. It simply speaks to me in a more powerful way.
And no, I’m not insane. It doesn’t really speak to me. It just whispers suggestions for what I should do. “Make me number one in your list,” for example.
Of course there are countless other worthy songs that are omitted from this list: Bubble Bobble, Last Ninja, IK+, Bomb Jack, Wizard & Warriors, Pinball Fantasies, and many more. They’re all great in their own ways, but they mostly conjure nostalgia in me; they don’t really affect me as much as these do. That’s actually pretty amusing considering that there are basically no new games featured in my list: obviously I am letting nostalgia guide my decisions to some extent. But to my defense I must also claim that newer games may have technically superior music, but the melodies are almost non-existent. How am I supposed to remember the music from Titan Quest or Half-Life 2 for example?
One modern game has impressed me immensely with its music, though, and I’ve found myself humming many of its songs. Guess which one?
This got me thinking. It’s a well-known fact that flash memory has a limited amount of rewrites. A common number to throw around is a hundred thousand rewrites. Reading up on the issue a little shows that things aren’t really that simple… A hundred thousand rewrites seems to be a fictional number that someone conjured as a vague average: instead, what matters is the number of erase-write cycles. These number a whopping million rather than a hundred thousand; however, the mapping between erase-write cycles and rewrites isn’t that simple.
There are two types of flash memory: NOR and NAND. NOR flash memory is slow and expensive, but it has a full address interface which allows random access to any location. It’s basically comparable to normal RAM in that aspect. Apparently, it’s often used for BIOS and firmware for embedded consumer products. This type of flash was used in Compact Flash earlier, but later scrapped for the cheaper NAND. NAND also has faster erase and write times and longer endurance, and is used in most products these days. (In fact, I can’t see any reason that NOR is better for BIOSes or firmware. There’s nothing in the nature of those products that requre random access; it must be a typo in Wikipedia.) This type of flash is the one that has a million promised erase-write cycles.
But, and this is a big but: NAND only addresses memory sequentially. There’s no random access, so if you want to - say - read address 0×00ffc you have to read the entire block that contains that address…and the same goes when you want to write something down. In other words, large files will span several blocks and require several erase-write cycles. The last bit is what makes me sit up and take notice.
The hybrid hard drive prototype uses 1 Gigabit OneNAND Flash as both the write buffer and boot buffer. In the hybrid write mode, the mechanical drive is spun down for the majority of the time, while data is written to the Flash write buffer. When the write buffer is filled, the rotating drive spins and the data from the write buffer is written to the hard drive.
Is it just me or does this seem rather ineffective, considering that HDDs have a relatively long lifetime - probably longer than the flash’s amount of rewrites. What happens if the flash gives in prior to the HDD? Is the write buffer required or can the hybrid HDD be used as a normal HDD after the flash has croaked? I hope the latter, but I fear that the functions are relatively hard-wired; HDD lifetime expectancy will probably drop, in other words. I know that people talk about switching all your hard drives every third year or so, but seriously, how many do that? I have hard drives that are probably older than some of you who read this. (At least the spambots; I’m sure that I have older HDDs than them.) I do not want a trend where life expectancy is dropping in favour of non-movable parts.
But then again, flash firmware have this neat thing called wear levelling:
This effect is partially offset by some chip firmware or file system drivers by counting the writes and dynamically remapping the blocks in order to spread the write operations between the sectors. This technique is called wear levelling.
I can only assume that similar techniques are implemented for the hybrid HDDs, and that the very nature of using the flash as a write cache rather than random access media will cause the wear to be level. Still, balancing out the wear doesn’t cover the fact that erase-write cycles are pretty limited. I wonder how many blocks are accessed per day in normal computer use; speculating about life expectancy would be much easier if I had some real numbers to mess with rather than throwing up vague ideas that “HDDs last longer than flash.”
It’s strange, really: I’ve been working with flash-based embedded systems for a while, but I never had a grasp of the hardware involved. It’s probably a good thing to read up on things now and then.
I am slowly but inexorably losing my mind. I’ve been working on Sheeplings for ages, and now I’m finally almost done. I released 0.3 to the public and received lots of good feedback that helped me improve the game. I released 0.4 to a smaller number of people and received even more feedback that made me fix some important details. Now I’m almost done with 0.5 which will be the release candidate.
“Well, get it done, then,” I hear you sigh. But I just…can’t. Making the levels is destroying my mind. The first dozen were fun and new. The second dozen were interesting, since they brought in new gameplay elements. The third dozen had the appeal of bringing in new “logic puzzles” into the fray. And so on. Now I have made 69 bloody levels, and it’s just not fun anymore. Y’hear? It’s not fun! I need 15 more levels for the last quest before I’m satisfied, but I loathe starting up my level editor whilst vainly trying to think of a new concept I haven’t flogged to death like a bug-ridden equestrian carcass.
Isn’t my editor beautiful:
At least it’s almost WYSIWYG. The objects at the top are clickable, and you can place them on the playing field below. You can also remove things (if you’ve clicked the grey box beforehand) and add goal areas (if you’ve clicked the red box). But it’s still a big steaming pile of excrement even worse to work in than vi. Well, okay, not really quite that bad.
Oh well. Let’s move on to my little proposition: can you imagine yourself a level designer for my marvellous Sheeplings? Can you think of some levels that utilizes the existing concepts and characters and limitations, and doesn’t include new functionality like “the sheepdog has a paintbrush and has to re-paint all white sheep black” or similar things? I assume that not a single person will take me up on this offer, but if - for some reason - you would be interested I can offer a free copy of Sheeplings once it’s done, and your name in the credits section of the game. Making levels really isn’t such a chore, so you don’t have to be totally put off by my ranting; it just gets extremely dull once you’ve made so many of them.
In a vain escape from finishing the game I’ve started making small promotional pictures I intend to use on the homepage later:
My God, I have no shame.
About
Miro Karjalainen is a pretentious bastard with a background in punk rock, computer science, linguistics, embedded systems, game development and the noble art of drinking beer. E-mail: info@karjasoft.com
