Living in the Age of Innocence

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (Skyrim), despite its liberal violence, does not allow depicted children to die, by fault of the player's character (or avatar), NPCs (non-player characters) or the environment. Because of this, a player going by the name of Kharmah published a mod, 'Killable Children', on the Steam Workshop that disposes of this restriction. Needless to say, this caused quite a controversy, with supporters of its release pointing out improved realism and freedom for the player, and others raising morals and ethics against it.

The ingame killing of children, with the special status their real-life counterparts enjoy, is a contentious issue for many computer game developers, who are well concerned about their business and social standing. In forming an opinion on it, two matters should be considered:

1. Whether the killing of real-life children is unethical
2. Whether the killing of ingame children raises material real-life consequences.

Especially heinous
Almost anyone of sound mind would agree that killing a fellow human being is immoral. In reaching that conclusion, it may be raised that life is sacred, that every human being has a natural right to it from birth, that every member of Homo sapiens has a duty to further the species, or that one's automatic dignity and self-worth is to be respected. Indeed, virtually all governments on Earth outlaw homicidal acts, be it murder, manslaughter or (in many cases) assisting in suicide. With unnatural adult death depicted so frequently in print, cinematographic film and computer games and that of children rather rare, one may wonder what makes the latter an exception.

Computer Games as Literature

Despite the bad press that video (computer) games get, they still are a multimedia text type. Utilising all five components of media (text, still images, audio, animation and video), they combine them along with interactivity in a way rarely seen with other forms of literature. This combination gives it great potential for immersive and effective storytelling.

Considering that, I will treat computer games as fictional literature and engage in a summary kind of literary analysis. To help with this, I will pretend to try to convince a public library to include some examples as part of their collections. Please note that, because of strict licensing requirements, this is often not actually practical, despite a strong supporting case!

Standard form
As part of maintaining its collection, this library solicits suggestions from the public for works that should be added to or removed from it. It does so through a form a member of the public fills out. Thus, my 'literary analysis' will take the form (mind the pun) of a filled form. As the form may have been designed with more traditional text types in mind, some questions will take some interpreting:

Doomsday: High Impact

Earth is humanity’s cradle, but by no means can it completely harbour us from harm. Many risks threaten individual lives, but there are some catastrophic enough to wipe out entire species. Is it possible for the prolific human species to face extinction?

Impacts with space debris are truly spectacular events, as the size of the object belies the devastation they can wreak. Not only does an impact event obliterate the the area around it, rock can also be thrown high into the air and particularly large ones can change the very evolution of life.

History
After the birth of the solar system 4.6 billion years ago, its planets saw many planet-sized collisions. Mercury was hit by an object that formed the 1550km Caloris basin. Venus suffered a glancing blow that was enough to make it spin the other way. Mars saw an impact that created a crater the size of half the planet's surface.

Doomsday: Pandemic

Earth is humanity’s cradle, but by no means can it completely harbour us from harm. Many risks threaten individual lives, but there are some catastrophic enough to wipe out entire species. Is it possible for the prolific human species to face extinction?

It is not good to be sick. At this day and age, the practice of medicine ensures that people stand a good chance of survivng all common illnesses. However, some diseases do pop up which no medical literature covers and against which no treatments exist. The burden then falls to the rest of society to contain its spread as a pandemic as scientists work frantically to develop a cure...

History
The Bible describes ten 'plagues' that befell the citizens of Ancient Egypt. Subjecting the Israelites to slavery, the Jewish God was accounted to have exacted His vengeance. The tenth plague, which finally convinced the Pharaoh to release the Israelites, was one which killed all firstborn sons in the kingdom. It is known that it was common practice to feed the firstborn son a double helping of grain, and with the ruin of their crops from the previous hailstorm and locust plagues, they needed to draw from supplies stored underground.

Doomsday: Extreme Weather

Earth is humanity’s cradle, but by no means can it completely harbour us from harm. Many risks threaten individual lives, but there are some catastrophic enough to wipe out entire species. Is it possible for the prolific human species to face extinction?

Earth's climate is a complicated system, one which climatologists are still studying. Like in a car or computer, a minor change in one component can cause more major effects throughout. Although volcanoes can disrupt this delicate machinery, there are other factors which can plunge Earth into an ice age, some of which built in, others brought about by humans.

History
150 000 years ago, Earth orbited a little further from the Sun than normal. It went through a particularly severe ice age, where the human population dropped to as low as 2000 people.

Doomsday: She's Gonna Blow

Earth is humanity’s cradle, but by no means can it completely harbour us from harm. Many risks threaten individual lives, but there are some catastrophic enough to wipe out entire species. Is it possible for the prolific human species to face extinction?

Volcanoes cause much disruption in their own right. However, much larger supervolcanoes do exist, with as many as eleven likely hotspots found around the world. Should one erupt, the surrounding area will certainly be levelled and buried, and the broader world would go through an unseasonal winter.

History
There are countless examples of volcanic eruptions throughout human history, let alone throughout the life of planet Earth. A more famous one occurred in AD 79 when Mt. Vesuvius erupted. Nearby Pompeii and Herculaneum were buried under several metres of pumice, sudden enough to preserve the inhabitants in their original positions.

Gift Card Creditors

Last February, REDgroup in Australia entered into voluntary administration after finding it difficult to pay off debts. Owning the Borders and Angus & Robertson bookstore chains in Australia, the administrators demanded that gift cards issued by these stores only pay for half the cost of purchases; the remaining half would have to come out of the customer's pocket.

As customers are accustomed to gift cards' applying to the full cost of a purchase, this caused quite an uproar, with sales staff being abused despite no fault of their own. However, this gesture may well have been a generous one considering how liquidation works, for gift card holders are creditors to the issuing business.

Gift cards are debt
The Framework for the Preparation and Presentation of Financial Statements (AASB) concisely defines a liability as:

...a present obligation of the entity arising from past events, the settlement of which is expected to result in an outflow from the entity of resources embodying economic benefits.

Doomsday: Sunfury

Earth is humanity’s cradle, but by no means can it completely harbour us from harm. Many risks threaten individual lives, but there are some catastrophic enough to wipe out entire species. Is it possible for the prolific human species to face extinction?

The Sun provides all living things with the heat (and, indirectly, food) needed to survive. Yet for all its needed sustenance, there are also times when it turns against life, in particularly spectacular fashion. Every 13 years it throws a tantrum of sorts, with the next one due on late 2012.

Doomsday: The Mayan Code

Earth is humanity’s cradle, but by no means can it completely harbour us from harm. Many risks threaten individual lives, but there are some catastrophic enough to wipe out entire species. Is it possible for the prolific human species to face extinction?

The Maya empire fell centuries ago, yet their work continues to intrigue to this day. Among many opinions of that work is the conclusion that the world will end on 21 December 2012. How well does that theory stand up to modern scrutiny?

Random Ramblings to 28 August 2010

Carriage return
A typed character that commands the computer to move the cursor to the beginning of the line in a word processor. It is created using the Enter/Return key, which also sends another character that commands the computer to move the cursor to a new line. It is named after the lever on a typewriter, which performs both functions on a typewritten document.

The Stuff of Sensations

With the senses of sight and hearing, a person can see colour and hear sound, respectively. So many hues and timbres exist, yet both are composed of basic elements and can be constructed by combining them in special ways.

Colour

• Sensing body part: Eyes. The lens and cornea focus light to fall on a surface of rods and cones, the pattern of which is sent to the brain as electrical impulses.
• Element: Primary colour
• Medium: Colourants (usually ink) on a white surface, or light on a black surface
• Types of element: For colourants, cyan (reflected blue and green light), magenta (reflected red and blue light) and yellow (reflected green and red light) (practical implementations also use black), although the fine arts has traditionally used blue, red and yellow (which alone cannot theoretically produce black). For light, red (long-wavelength visible light), green (mid-wavelength visible light) and blue (short-wavelength visible light).

Vision’s Incentive Systems: A Case Study

Every World of Warcraft raiding guild aspires to progress through raid content in a timely pace. Most members of the raiding corps focus on attaining gear and other goals, and so cannot be expected to directly satisfy the guild’s purpose. Thus, the guild must facilitate this indirectly by setting compatible goals, and then motivate raiding members to achieve them.

Human Resources (HR) departments of real-life companies handle these issues regularly, and the officerships of ingame guilds are no more exempt. I will introduce the theories associated with incentive systems, then apply them to analyse the incentive systems of my current guild, Vision of Frostmourne US.

Random Ramblings to 24 April 2010

Cascading failure
A failure of a system where one component's failure causes a chain-reaction failure of other components. A system bearing a load is susceptible to this type of failure, where an overloaded component shifts its load to other components upon its individual failure. In an electrical grid, a cascading failure occurs when a transformer's failure requires the other transformers to bear the electrical load, increasing the chance that one of those transformers will also fail due to overloading.

Where the components are fully interconnected and handle a fixed load, the per-component load trend is a rectangular hyperbola. This signifies that the per-component load increases at an increasing rate as components fail. As a result, the chance of any individual component's failing also increases at an increasing rate.

A graph illustrating a cascading failure in a World of Warcraft boss encounter. The trend is a rectangular hyperbola.

Random Ramblings to 31 January 2010

Acetylcholine
A chemical in the body which transmits messages between a neuron and the nearby cells (a neurotransmitter). Its presence will signal muscles to contract. Nerve agents prevent its breakdown, causing muscles (including those in the heart and lungs) to contract uncontrollably. Atropine, the toxin of deadly nightshade and an antidote of nerve agents, prevents cells from detecting acetylcholine, causing muscles to relax uncontrollably at high doses. Its chemical formula is C₇H₁₆NO₂.

The skeletal formula for acetylcholine.

Resources and Their Sources

Accounting is a practice that allows someone (or something, in the case of an organisation), the accounting entity, to keep track of their economic and financial details. It involves accounting for their economic resources, as well as the sources from which they are obtained.

In early accounting practice, businesses would keep separate lists of their resources and sources. It was soon discovered that both can be linked. Thus came double-entry accounting, where every transaction that is recorded would recognise both and implicitly relate the two together.

All accounting entities strive to accumulate resources, while being careful of how they finance them. Those resources help to satisfy the accounting entity’s economic wants by providing economic benefits.

Random Ramblings to 17 November 2009

Acidosis
An increase in the acidity (or a decrease in the pH) of blood. The eventual state of highly acidic blood is referred to as acidaemia. The pH of blood must be kept near 7.4 (slightly basic) or the body will not be able to function properly. One type of acidosis occurs when carbon dioxide (CO₂) is not released through the lungs fast enough, causing a buildup of carbonic acid (H₂CO₃). Another type of acidosis (lactic acidosis) occurs from excessive anaerobic respiration, where instead of using oxygen to break down sugar to release energy, the body instead breaks the sugar down into lactic acid. The lactic acid itself does not cause the acidity, but rather the respiration process. This commonly happens when sleeping on an arm, which becomes numb and experiences a pins-and-needles sensation when blood circulation is finally restored.

Of Ladders, Mirrors and Black Cats

Superstitious people may believe that performing certain actions endow bad luck on the one performing them, causing them great misfortune in the future. Are these worries justified?

Inspecting these superstitions further, it becomes evident that they do have substance, even if only a little! Think twice before doing any of the following...

Why should you not step on a crack on a footpath?

• If not careful, you could get your foot caught in one and trip.

Making Sense of Financial Statement Ratios

Many basic features of a business' business can be gleaned from their set of financial statements. However, the more intricate details can be found through ratio analysis.

The financial statement's figures are measured in currency units, which have little value in themselves because they do not consider the scale of business operations. By comparing relative sizes of these figures, this problem with units of measurement are eliminated by removing the units entirely. The resulting ratios are scale-free and can be used in comparing:

• Two businesses of different sizes
• The same business as it grows (or collapses) over time.

Analysts have devised myriad ratios to use in this type of analysis. What do they mean in real-world terms?

Random Ramblings to 8 August 2009

Archivist
A person who maintains the material in an archive. This can involve collecting, organising and assessing the records. Among their skills, they show expertise in preserving the physical media on which information is contained. In WoW, Auriaya is the archivist for the secrets of Ulduar.

Information asymmetry
A concept in economics which suggests that buyers and sellers in a real-world market cannot find each other easily (lacking information about each others' presence). One needs to search for the other before a trade can occur. However, doing extra searching will come at a cost, so these costs should be balanced against the benefits expected in deciding which to do.

How Hitler became Chancellor and Führer

Since Adolf Hitler is a strongly condemned political leader, the circumstances around his rise to power are very interesting. Germany's desperation post-World War I, the Great Depression, hyperinflation and emerging communism promoted this process.

Suffering after WWI
WWI ended when the Treaty of Versailles was signed. In it, the Allied countries required Germany to pay war reparations, surrender territory and reduce the power of its defence forces. These provisions (along with a declaration to surrender) were a large blow to Germany's national pride. Also, the indecisiveness of the democratic Weimar Republic meant that laws took a long time to be passed.


This 1000 Reichsmark note was overstamped to a face value of 1 000 000 000 Reichsmark.

The German economy suffered in two ways during some of this period. The country was required to pay currency as part of its reparations, which was financed substantially by printing extra currency. This caused hyperinflation of the Reichsmark, even during the Great Depression following the US stock market crash. Face values fell well below the cost of the paper, leading to (among other things) persons' burning it as firewood during famine winters. Even though it ended after three years (with the introduction of the Rentenmark), a lack of popular confidence was cast on the financial system (substantially comprised of Jews).

Enter Hitler

Hitler's DAP (predecessor to the Nazi Party) membership card.

Seeking participation in politics, Hitler joined the German Workers' Party (progressing to the NSDAP or Nazi Party), which was notably far-right in the political spectrum. It promoted (among other things) nationalism, anti-communism, economic recovery and abandoning the Treaty (though the anti-Semitism can be observed in the rhetoric). He possessed a demonstrated charisma and easily appealed to most of Germany's citizens. Hitler eventually became the sole leader of the party.

The following circumstances existed for the Weimar Republic:

• The system of government at this time was parliamentary republic under constitution, which made for several political parties to contend for the popular vote. In it, there was a President (elected by popular vote) who ceremonially signed bills into law, and a Chancellor (approved by parliament after nomination by the President) who led the party in government.
• The Weimar Constitution codified civil liberties such as habeas corpus (freedom from unlawful detainment), freedom of expression, freedom of association, privacy of telecommunication and protection of property and home.
• The Weimar Constitution allowed the President to issue decrees (which did not need parliamentary approval) in times of emergency.
• The Weimar Constitution placed limits on the laws that can be made, and any deviation was considered a constitutional amendment requiring a two-thirds majority in the Reichstag parliament.

The fire at the Reichstag
Das Andere Deutschland was rendered verbot (forbidden) under the Reichstag Fire Decree.

On January 1933, Hitler was sworn in as Chancellor after nomination by President Paul von Hindenburg. A month later, a fire occurred in the Reichstag building. Communist Marinus van der Lubbe was found inside after the fire was extinguished, which the Nazi Party used as evidence of a Communist uprising. President von Hindenburg signed the Reichstag Fire Decree into law a day later, which allowed the beforementioned civil liberties to be suspended, so as to quickly arrest communists suspected to be involved and ban the Communist Party. However, Hitler (being head of the executive) also used the Decree to arrest anyone and suppress any publication deemed unfriendly to Nazi ideology.

Enabling Hitler to act

Hitler (wearing light clothing) presents his speech promoting the Enabling Act.

The Nazi Party started drafting an Enabling Act on March 1933, which would allow them to pass laws without needing it to go through the parliamentary process (as required by the Constitution). However, because it would allow deviation from the Constitution, it needed to be passed with a two-thirds majority as an amendment. On voting on the bill later in the month, support was won to achieve the majority, with the Communist Party banned at the time and the Social Democratic Party the only party to vote against it.

The perfect storm
The German people wanted the former glory of their nation to be restored. A communist happened to be found in the burnt Reichstag building. The Decree suspended several basic civil liberties, while the Enabling Act diminished the importance of the parliamentary process. Both could be renewed when close to expiry. Hitler was the sole leader of the Nazi Party and could wield both instruments as a dictator. The senile President von Hindenburg seeked minimal participation in politics, and when he passed, Hitler assumed his powers. It comes to little surprise that Hitler's rise to power was entirely legal and compatible with popular German opinion (however much it contained desperation).


A chocolate model of the Reichstag building, which would have melted under fire.