Sid Meier’s Memoir

I was a fan. Of video games. But that was back in the Pleistocene of the computer age.

I did get beyond Pong, all the way to Pac-Man, Bizarro and Tempest, the last my fav. But that was before the RNA of FRP (fantasy role playing) games infected that genre ;-).

At the same time I discovered something even more amazing: basic word-processing, which was then itself infected by HTML.
For a while I was absorbed with the possibilities of hypertexts. Wrote a couple of fortunately unsuccessful grant proposals to markup a corpus of writing in creole languages, create a data-base, etc.
Though I remained vested in Texts, I admit to having passed hours on Flight Instructor with a then young nephew of Nasrin’s, Bob / Babak. Also, used to play Super Mario with another adolescent son of a colleague in Edmonton. The adults would go off into another room and drink their beer.
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On Sep 10, 2020, at 15:06, XX wrote:
Wow–cool!  The ghost-writing by your niece.  I didn’t know you were a fan of computer games.  I guess this is a bit sophisticated for my 12-year-old grandson, but he says he wants to be in the gaming world as a career!

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On 2020-09-10 14:52, George Lang wrote:

I don’t know why I feel the atavistic urge to signal that my niece Jennifer Noonan ghosted Sid Meier’s (the inventor of Civilization) Memoir!

 

 

On Sep 10, 2020, at 15:06, XX wrote:

Wow–cool!  The ghost-writing by your niece.  I didn’t know you were a fan of computer games.  I guess this is a bit sophisticated for my 12-year-old grandson, but he says he wants to be in the gaming world as a career!

On 2020-09-10 14:52, George Lang wrote:

For these with a past or a present or an interest in computer games; myself, but the first. I don’t know why I feel the atavistic urge to signal that my niece Jennifer Noonan ghosted Sid Meier’s (the inventor of Civilization) Memoir!

 

Misplaced Anxieties of Green Ecology?

  • Ecologists should turn their attention from mere global warming to a more frightful threat. What happens to the environment after we humans have our first full thermonuclear war, the chances of which are greater than than most think, according to The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists? Some optimistic specialists argue that in a bad but not worse case scenario several billion, about half of us, might survive. Any way you cut the cake, that catastrophe poses far greater danger to humanity and to the present state of nature than a few carbon-induced degrees of heat distributed across the planet.

Here is a real world game theory problem to work out: how much effort is it rational to put into staving off global warming, whose consequences may be manageable, as opposed to striving desperately to prevent nuclear war, which, if it does happen, will eliminate the very possibility of the game in which this question can be asked?

Or does it make any difference?