Author Archives: theusernamewhichismine

How do you read in a language you only half understand?

Whenever I learn a new language, there always comes a time when I start to get good enough at it to recognize and understand certain words, but not good enough to know every word I come across.  I can read half a sentence but not the whole sentence, understand half a paragraph but not the whole paragraph.  This is a difficult time for a learner because you’re just on the cusp of truly using the language to read, but you don’t feel good enough to actually use it because you only understand half of what you read.  How do you get better?

The answer (so I’ve been taught) is you still try to read.  Even if you don’t understand everything, even if you only understand half of it, you try to read what you can so you can get familiar with the language and start learning by using.  Most words we know were probably never defined to us specifically, did anyone ever define to word “anyone” to you?  Instead as learners we pick them up by context clues and other hints, and start using them the way we read or heard them.  This can occasionally lead to hilarity, like how I once heard someone describe a child as homely instead of comely, but it can also lead to learning as you start to use and understand each new word you read.

So if I’m reading something and I come upon words I don’t understand, I was taught not to look each one of them up, but instead to just keep reading and try to figure them out as I go.  I may read a sentence that says “he went to the 餐厅, and after he’d finished his meal he…”.  Although I don’t know what 餐厅 means directly, it seems that “he” ate their, so it must be some sort of eating place.  Now whenever I see that word again I see if it seems to have something to do with eating, and if it does then I can learn by usage that 餐厅 means “a place where you eat.” Through this process I can slowly pick up the language through usage rather than trying to stop and look up every word.

But here’s the secret: this trick also works with scientific writing.  Scientific writing is filled to the brim with jargon and odd definitions.  What is an SDS-PAGE?  What is an HPLC?  And not only are the words difficult, the concepts are difficult, why did they use centrifugation to separate out the nucleus?  Why does electron microscopy not let you visualize the less-rigid parts of a protein?  When you start out as a scientist, you are often told to read scientific papers, and scientific papers can feel like you’re reading a foreign language!  But the same rules apply as reading a foreign language, you don’t always have to know every word when you’re starting out, or even every concept.  It’s more important to develop scientific language fluency so that you can get the big idea out of a paper and understand it when speaking with others.  For example, they used HPLC to separate a protein of interest from all the other proteins in a cell.  OK so HPLC is a purification technique, I don’t need to know how it works if all I’m interested in is that protein of interest.  I can move on to what the paper says about the protein secure in the knowledge that it is indeed pure.  If later on if HPLC becomes more important then I can do a quick search or deep dive to understand more of it, but it isn’t always necessary to know every single word or technique in a paper. Reading scientific papers is a skill, one I’ve had to devote a lot of time to getting better at, but once you develop knowledge of the jargon and techniques it gets a lot easier, and importantly you develop the skills necessary to learn any new jargon or techniques that you come across.  And that is the real skill, not the knowledge of specific things but the ability to learn new things.  That is what truly makes a scientist.

Science has its holy wars too

In my continuing ramblings about what science is versus what it ought to be, I thought I’d touch briefly on a topic that is well understood in the community but doesn’t seem understood outside of it, that is the question of how a scientific hypothesis becomes scientific dogma.  I don’t mean dogma in a negative sense, in my area of science a dogma is simply something that is without question because all the evidence points to it being true.  The “central dogma” of biology for example is that DNA is where genetic information is stored, RNA is the messenger of information, and protein executes the functions that are demanded by the information.  DNA->RNA->proteins is a dogma taught to every aspiring biologist and bored high school student, and it underpins every piece of modern biology we do.

But dogmas don’t become dogmas out of nothing, there must be a mountain of evidence in their favor, and additionally there is usually a prior dogma or competing hypothesis that they must replace.  This last bit is important, it has often been said that you can’t reason someone out of a position they did not reason themselves into, but equally true is that you often can’t reason them out of something that they did reason themselves into either.  People just don’t like changing their mind.  And so when a new hypothesis comes along challenging an old dogma, scientists don’t just accept it straight away, instead they will demand more and more evidence for it while continuing to cling to what they learned in the old dogma.  Science advances not through persuasion but through retirement as these heralds of the old dogma retire and get replaced by people who learned the new hypothesis.  And those people in turn accept the hypothesis fully and turn it into a dogma to be taught to students who don’t yet have the full knowledge base yet to understand why something is true but who can be taught that it is true, hence dogma.

During the upwelling of a new hypothesis though, holy wars can happen.  I don’t mean fighting and purges, I instead mean the kind of holy wars that nerds engage in, the kind of demeaning of those on the “other side” in the sense of “oh you have a Gamecube instead of a PC? I should have known you were a console peasant.”  These holy wars infect science too, scientists try to be nice for professionalism of course but they will spend enormous efforts undercutting each other’s theories and at times even undercutting each other’s professional trajectories in their bid to garner support for their own theory.  This may seem needlessly cruel but there is an element of rational self-interest, if you think your theory is true then supporting the truth against the false is good praxis, and in more base terms there is only so much funding to go around so ensuring that your dogma or theory is held in higher esteem will ensure your side is the one receiving the lion’s share of scientific funding.I know this all sounds like pointless waffle, but I was specifically reminded of this when I recently saw a few talks on Alzheimer’s disease.  The holy war over Alzheimer’s can’t be summed up in a short blog post, but some people think Alzheimer’s is caused by a protein called “A-beta” and some think it is caused by one called “tau”.  A few hold a compromise position that perhaps both proteins are necessary but most of the scientists I’ve seen presenting talks hold to one side or the other, and both sides are competing to become the new dogma.  For the most part these two sides talk past each other, if you think that A-beta is the cause of Alzheimer’s disease then there isn’t as much a point in researching tau, and vice versa.  But occasionally you’ll find both sides present at a symposium and there they will feel the need to defend themselves to the audience and slyly denigrate the opposing position.  Never to the level of insults (in public) but instead to the level of “I respectfully suggest that those other scientists have grossly misunderstood the evidence.”  Which is a very kind way of saying fuck you.

When science becomes engineering, it ceases to be science

I just wanted to talk about the pitfalls of science for a moment.  We all know what science is “supposed” to be, you take evidence and create a theory about the world, then you test your theory rigorously to see if it is true, incorporating the new evidence from each round of testing to create a better and better theory.  But although that’s normally what science is in a macro sense, in a micro sense it isn’t always.  Science in a micro sense is the work done by students and researchers at labs all across the globe.  They don’t always have a theory, they don’t always do a good job testing their theories, and importantly for today, they don’t always incorporate new evidence into their theory to see if it is really true.

I worked in a lab before that didn’t incorporate new evidence.  We were trying to make… something.  It isn’t important what that something was, but it was pharmaceutical in nature.  We didn’t know exactly what it would look like, but we would know it when we saw it.  Our science day to day was to do large experiments, and in the experiment look for our special “something”.  If we didn’t find it this time, then we’d change our parameters and try again to run the experiment and look for our “something”.  Each time we failed to find our “something” we would use the evidence to change our experiment,  we would think that maybe some part of our process is destroying the “something,” maybe the “something” is in very small quantities and we can’t detect it, maybe we just ran the experiment improperly and we should try again.  What we would never do is think that maybe our “something” doesn’t even exist, maybe we’re doing experiments and collecting data searching for a mirage, and we should take our repeated null results as evidence that our hypothesis just isn’t true.

We didn’t think that because our minds had been set that this was an engineering problem, not a scientific one.  Scientifically we felt the something *must* exist, everything we’d ever studying said it must, and yet time after time we found it conclusively *not existing* despite our best efforts to find it.  If we could just get the engineering right: tweak the experiment, alter our detection methods, make sure to do it all correctly, then surely we’d find it.  But maybe that was all a lie and it just never existed.

I left that lab, and to this day they still haven’t found their special something.  They still work on it, and I’m sure many labs around the world still work diligently looking for a something that may or may not be there.  But on a micro level I feel that that lab had stopped doing science.

I’ve got to stop staying up so late

So no real post today as instead of writing for my blog I stayed up super late goofing off. This isn’t some deep meditation on the modern world but it really is too easy to get trapped in a spiral these days, there’s more words on the internet than any one man could read in a lifetime. So even while I find myself pointlessly scrolling through social media, I mostly end up just rereading the same things I already know, written by a different person. And when it’s not that it’s reading things I don’t really care about and will forget in a week. The breaking news cycle is the hardest to break out of, recently there’s been a lot of news about Ukraine liberating more and more of their territory, I find myself scrolling through news like an addict looking for any new information even though I know nothing happens in minutes or hours.

So yeah I need to stop.

Random thought: push Zhuge Liang for Summerslam

As I stated earlier, one of my favorite pieces of Chinese-language media is the Three Kingdoms TV show.  The more I rewatch it, the more I remember one of it’s stand-out features: they REALLY want you to think Zhuge Liang is cool

Anyone anywhere who is at all a cool guy is consistently shown up by Zhuge Liang, who is not only the wisest and most capable general but is able to predict entire battles before they even happen.  Several characters outright state that Zhuge Liang is the Coolest Guy and Best Strategist, and those who think they’re better are always shown to be wrong before the episode is finished.  

Now in stories, this isn’t a bad thing, it makes the audience know that Zhuge Liang is a Cool Guy, and when well-executed it makes the audience like him BECAUSE he’s a Cool Guy.  But by necessity it can lead storylines down weird paths

Is wrestling there’s something calling “pushing” which is basically where you take a character and give them a lot of victories so the audience starts to like them.  Although audiences can root for underdogs, most underdog stories end in the heroes’ victory (just see every sports movie), so giving a character a bunch of wins lets the audience know that they are Cool and Competent and will definitely be important in the future, even if they’re still an underdog.  Conversely, characters who always lose are clearly not as special and good, unless the story focuses on their defeats and how they grow from those defeats (and start getting victories). When this is done well, the audience roots for exactly who you told them to root for and everyone is happy. When this is done poorly, sometimes a character can feel “overpushed,” when the audience gets sick of seeing them win all the time and wants to see someone else in the limelight instead.

When I watch Three Kingdoms, it feels like Zhuge Liang is being pushed for Summerslam.  He’s the smartest, he’s the best, and he needs to get a bunch of wins in a hurry to make up for lost time since he’s only just been introduced.  Not only does Liu Bei go through great lengths to recruit Zhuge Liang (indicating he’s super special and important), several characters all outright state that as a strategist, Zhuge Liang is far superior to any of the cool and competent characters we’ve met up until now.  He is routinely shown outsmarting Lu Su and Zhou Yu (his “rivals” from the Southlands) and masterminds the defeat of Cao Cao (his “rival” to the North). Zhou Yu in particular is shown to be a petty, insecure jerk constantly trying to one-up Zhuge Liang and then getting outsmarted like a mean principal in a kid’s show. To be blunt, I’m a bit tired of Zhuge Liang already, which makes me worried since I know he’s going to stay super duper important for a long time yet, I mean I visited his shrine in Cheng Du (the WuHouCi if you’re ever in the area).  I’m not sure why exactly I’m already tired of him, maybe it’s because he’s just too smart and it gets boring, or maybe I just perennially root for underdogs.  But while it’s still fun to watch the show and see what Zhuge Liang will get up to next, I’m a tiny bit more interested in the stuff I’m not seeing, but which I know happened in history.  I’d love to see more of Cao Pi (Cao Cao’s son who everyone agrees isn’t half as smart as his dad but eventually inherits everything anyway).  But everyone agrees Cao Pi is a moron so he’s not cool enough to get much focus yet.

The American Challenge Part 7: Building an economy by predicting the future

I’m still going through The American Challenge by Jean Jacque Servan-Schreiber, the 1968 book which opines on what Europe needs to do in order to not be economically dominated by America.  A consistent theme for Servan-Schreiber is that European governments should direct investment towards key industries which he thinks are important for the economy of the future.  In some cases he was incredibly prescient, he urges Europe to invest in semiconductors and computers years before they hit the mainstream.  In other cases he seems woefully misinformed, claiming that all future air travel will be supersonic and the Concorde will be surpassed by American supersonic planes.  And in some places he’s oddly silent, saying little to nothing about the future need for renewable energy and global reductions in carbon.

Now of course, he shouldn’t be dismissed for not correctly predicting the future, should he?  Who knew that supersonic flight would never take off?  And how accepted was the idea of global warming in 1968?  Yet this is exactly my problem with his economic model, he can’t predict the future, and no one can.  So his claim that the cure for Europe is to decide which industries are “the future” and invest heavily in those industries above all others doesn’t strike me as very sensible.  Instead of the government choosing which industries to invest in, why not create an economic system which allows good industries to start up and flourish?  A government is by its nature a centralized organization, and that centralization comes with both costs and benefits.  Notably, the people directing the government’s economic investments can’t always be experts in every industry they want to invest in, it’s just not possible for a few hundred government workers to include an expert in everything.  So what if you panel on government investment doesn’t include anyone familiar with computers?  Do you pass the idea up?  And what if your panel does include “experts” in cold fusion, do you redirect all efforts towards a futile project?

This to me isn’t an idle criticism, I don’t think a centralized entity can replace a decentralized market with the same kind of efficiency.  I’m not some harebrained anarcho-capitalism mind you, I’ll try to write later about where the government should get involved, but the maxim of “the government shouldn’t try to choose winners and losers in the market” is one I think has merit, the government just can’t be expected to have enough people and enough breadth to be an expert on all the decisions a market can make.

I think there’s more to this “can’t predict the future” argument too.  Servan-Schreiber has what I have called before a “Sid Meier’s Civilization” view of technological progress.  In essence, this viewpoint is that technology costs a certain amount of “something,” be in money or man-hours, and once you discover a technology it’s yours to use while your opponents don’t have it.  Technology thus progresses as a race where countries need to either catch up to the techs their opponents have (by spending money and man-hours) or find new techs their opponents don’t have (so they can have a decisive advantage).  The problem with this view is that there are many technological paths that prove to be a dead-end where you’d have been better off not spending your resources, and we don’t know which are dead-ends beforehand.  I said last week that the Concorde jet was one such dead-end, it costed billions of dollars with not a lot to show for it, and that was money that could have been invested in the NHS or other government services.  The idea was that if we just keep pouring money into Concorde, eventually we’ll create supersonic flight and it will be just as profitable and useful as we’ve always dreamed it would be. Or at worst we’ll learn a lot of lessons about what we need to do in order to create profitable supersonic flight and our next project will be the one that works.  That wasn’t the case, it turned out supersonic flight just couldn’t compete with moving a massive amount of people slightly more slowly.  Another dead end would be fusion power, an area where we still don’t know if we can do it with modern tech let alone tech from the 20th century.  Many many people predicted that fusion was The Future, and urged governments to invest in it.  But fusion wasn’t the future and it’s probably a good thing that a lot of money wasn’t spent on it.

You can’t predict the future, so a government can’t reasonably be expected to know which opportunities to invest in and which to avoid.  A market uses the wisdom of crowds to decide, and so can be relied on to provide at least some of the efficiencies a government board lacks.  It’s easy to look back 50 years and say “if only Europe had invested more in computers!  We could have had European versions of Apple, Google, Microsoft and Amazon!”  But it’s hard to sit where you are today and decide which of the many investment opportunities are “the one” to invest in.  For example, if Europe should have invested in computers in the 60s, what should it invest in right now?  What is the game-changing area, with returns equal to or greater than the computer industry of the 60s, that Europe should throw all its money in?  3D printing?  Genetic modification?  Robotics?  What is the “investment of the future?”  I’d hazard a guess that no one can agree, and so it’s probably better to rely on the wisdom of the crowds than the political decisions of a government.

Weekend venting about video games part 5

I’m finishing my sort-of review of Great Ace Attorney 2 with it’s final case, Case 5.  Note that as always, there are total spoilers for this case and this game.  BUT ALSO I had a lot of thoughts about this case that related to previous games in the Ace Attorney series, so there are also spoilers for Ace Attorney games 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5!  If you plan to play any of the Ace Attorney games, please do as they are on Steam and very good!  Here is the Ace Attorney Trilogy and here is the Great Ace Attorney Duology. But with that said, spoilers ahoy!

I’m gonna be honest, the ending of GAA2 Case 5 was kinda underwhelming  I felt like a lot of the mysteries that had lasted two whole games were solved with wet thud.

I think the most charitable review I can give of GAA2-5 is that it’s an Ace Attorney Final Case.  The series has fallen into something of a formula where in roughly half of the games the final case presents you with an impossible murder (here the murder of Detective Gregson) with seemingly no motive behind it.  Yet as you unravel the tangled web of lies you find that this murder ACTUALLY occurred because of an unsolved murder that happened 7, 8 or even 15 years ago (here the previous murder is “the Professor case”)!  Unraveling your present case necessitates you unravel the case from the past, which usually results in the protagonist solving two murders at once on the same day.  And sure I get it, this formula is pretty strong, but I never felt like GAA2-5 did anything to rise above formulaic.  

And that’s not the only way this case feels like Ace Attorney formula.  Pretty much every Ace Attorney game since the first one has had to have “the Edgeworth” arc.  So spoilers for a 20 year old series, but in the very first Ace Attorney game Edgeworth was an eeeeeeeeeevil prosecutor who acted as the game’s primary antagonist.  He forged evidence, coerced testimonies, and overall acted like a dick.  But halfway through the story, the game starts to humanize him a bit more, until the last case involves him being accused of murder and you having to save him.  This allows him to go from being an evil antagonist to being a good protagonist, and now he’s one of the franchise’s most beloved characters.  This character arc of 

be evil->get accused of murder->become good

Is repeated surprisingly often in these games, and even when they’re not directly accused the prosecutor character for the game has a tendency to start off evil but turn good halfway through.  So I wasn’t really surprised when the GAA duology’s antagonist, Prosecutor Van Zieks, ended up on the docket and had to be defended, he was just going through the necessary motions laid down by Edgeworth.

The only thing that isn’t really formulaic is the tropes this game pulled from other animes, where the childhood friend of the hero gets separated from the hero and turns into an antagonist with their own secret motives.  This happened with Kazuma, who was your protagonist’s mentor in the first game before dying in that game then undying in this one so he could come back as a new prosecutor to replace the Edgeworth-ified Prosecutor Van Zieks. Yes Kazuma was a cool guy, but I don’t think his de-dying between the first game and the second was cool enough for the job he does in GAA2-4 and 5.  He’s nice to have, but not overwhelmingly positive.

With all that, I kinda didn’t like this case.  And it’s hard to put down my feelings in a coherent structure so bear with me.  

I think one thing that keeps making me dislike this case and this game overall is how it undoes the good feelings I had for what came previously.  I really did like Case 2 of GAA1.  It had a bit of a flat ending with the underwhelming “murder” but it worked well enough with the emotional drama that I gave it an 8/10.

  In a way that case reminded me of Case 5 from Trials and Tribulations.  In T&T you had a man who was fundamentally justice-seeking (Godot aka Diego Armando) but who was filled with rage for the one who “killed” him (Dahlia).  He saw Misty Fey channeling Dahlia’s spirit and despite knowing that it was wrong, despite knowing Dahlia was already dead and couldn’t be harmed, he couldn’t help himself, he killed Misty Fey.  Misty Fey for her own part was not a bad person, she had her flaws but was trying to save lives, using Diego’s plan no less. 

This collision between two fundamentally justice-seeking individuals, and one killing the other for a terrible reason, played a lot into the emotion of that trial, and is part of why I hold it in such high regard. 

Case 2 of GAA1 also had some of this.  Kazuma was a good man, and the Ballerina who killed him was motivated by fear rather than hatred, so her feelings could be sympathized with.  A miscommunication between the two of them led to fear and anger and ultimately death.  It was an ok end to Kazuma as a character, even if it was somewhat underwelming.  Then this game comes and undoes all of that.  All my good feelings for Case 2 are completely washed away because now that case is *meaningless*.  Nothing happened, there was no tragedy, no hurricane of emotions, Kazuma didn’t actually die he was just hiding.  It turned one of the first game’s top 2 cases into a joke of IT’S ME RYUNOSUKE, IT WAS ME ALL ALONG RYUNOSUKE.

I felt the same way with this game’s Case 5 and how it altered Case 4 as a matter of fact.  Case 4 was not that good to me, it felt like nothing happened.  Some will try to compare it to Case 4 of Dual Destinies, but I strongly disagree with that. 

In Dual Destinies, Case 4 focused on Apollo and his relation to Clay and Starbuck, Starbuck was the defendant.  Apollo’s sorrow was not “fixed” by any means, but at the end Case 4 at least had a conclusive ending with Starbuck being found not guilty and saying that he would continue what Clay wanted to do: be an astronaut. 

Case 5 in Dual Destinies by contrast focused on Athena and Blackquill, with Athena as the defendant.  Although Clay’s  murder entered into it, it was primarily about the murder of Metis Cykes.  Dual Destinies had a Case 4 that led into Case 5, but it gave you a conclusion and an ending to Case 4 on the way.  This game by contrast felt like NOTHING HAPPENED in Case 4.  Nothing that happened or was discovered in that case felt in any way related to what happened in Case 5 because the entire murder scene and cast were completely different for the second case.  The closest connection you could make between the two cases was the prison warder who was hiding his identity, but he was a completely different character between cases 4 and 5 since his disguise was revealed. 

Case 4 didn’t end with a verdict or anything decisive whatsoever.  In Case 4, my only highlight was the bit at the end with Sholmes, Iris and Mikotoba, where the game SEEMED to be implying that Professor Mikotoba, our friend of two games, was secretly Iris’ father. But even that emotional ending is undone in the same way that GAA1 Case 2’s ending was undone. 

The emotional weight of “Iris found her dad and it’s Mikotoba” is undercut so we can have that same “Iris’ parentage” dramatic reveal a second time, only now with different parents (it’s Van Ziek’s dead brother).  Her new Van Zieks backstory adds really nothing to the emotional weight except to undo my one and only highlight from the previous case.  Instead of Iris’s dad being someone I’ve spent two games with (Professor Mikatoba), and the emotional connection between Iris and Susato (Mikotoba’s other daughter), Iris’ dad is someone I’ve never met (Van Ziek’s brother), and she doesn’t have any siblings or living parents now. 

We turned a tragedy from the first game (Iris’s dad was supposedly killed in the first game’s first case) into a less emotional tragedy (Iris’ dad was killed before the games even began).  All the fun misdirection in the first game, Iris straight up saying that her dad worked with Sholmes, that he went to Japan, all of that stuff made it seem like her dad was John Wilson. But the evidence COULD ALSO have worked if her dad was Mikotoba.  But nope, all of that was complete lies, her dad was someone we never even mentioned until this game, Klint Van Zieks. 

It reminds me of WWE in a way, you have a story that is careening towards an obvious and much anticipated conclusion, and so you change it to a different conclusion just to throw people off.  It may seem dramatic but instead it’s just emotionally unsatisfying.  Her accepting Sholmes as her new father figure is fine and all but feels incredibly strange when all of Game 1 was treating them like co-workers instead of family.  In fact, this revelation of her deciding to treat Sholmes as her father would have been much better served by being a part of THE FIRST game rather than THIS one. In the first game they had a sort of emotional distance, so becoming closer would have made a happy ending. In this game their relationship is changed without warning and the game treats them more like they already are a family, with Sholmes going out and doing odd-jobs to pay for her (despite Game 1 implying she was the primary breadwinner due to her writing the popular Herlock Sholmes serialized detective stories).

From the moment I saw him, I knew Mael Stronghart was a Damon Gant type of villain, someone who is powerful with the police and prosecutors but secretly kills people to maintain that power.  That’s not a knock on the game, it was satisfying to have been able to meet and talk with this major antagonist for two whole games before taking him down.  And this Mael Stronghart storyline is something that was done well, the opposite of how I felt about the Iris stuff.  These games were careening towards a dramatic confrontation with Mael Strongheart, and when we finally got to take him down it was satisfying. 

My biggest issue with Mael was his goofy animations, he was clearly drawn and animated for his role in the first game where he is always standing up.  But in this case he is sitting at the judge’s bench, so every time he needs to do one of his animations he has to first stand up in order to do it because they only programmed the animation for a standing character model.  Just kind of goofy overall even if his theme is badass.

The ending of this case was kind of my only highlight again (so if they somehow undo this in a hypothetical next game, I’mma be real pissed).  Sholmes wasn’t as wacky as I would have liked, but seeing Strongheart’s side of things, the things he did and the reasons he did them, it all made sense and was nice.  The investigation section before that was very underwhelming however. 

It was nice to play as Mikotoba for a hot second, he has a very different style to Ryunosuke, and a different relationship to Sholmes.  But the “Great Deduction” they did together was the second worst of the two games, only better than the one in GAA2 Case 3’s waxwork museum.  Mikotoba does a little dance every time he gives an answer, which was cute the first time but annoying by the 4th, and it’s always the same dance. 

Then the whole POINT of a great deduction was also undercut here.  The reason I liked them as a game mechanic was that Sholmes would make some insane logical leaps that were actually halfway on the way to the truth, and your character had to nudge him back towards a proper answer. 

Notice this: the things Sholmes says at the START of his great deductions area always true, he just goes off the rails.  In GAA2 Case 3 at Drebber’s hideout, Sholmes says “The device in the center of the room is genuine” and “Drebber is the reason for the upturned furniture.”  Sholmes deduces that the device is a gravity machine and Drebber flipped the gravity of the room.  In fact the device is a bomb and Drebber flipped the furniture to find the safe code.  But finding those little connections between the absurd and the dramatic-yet-true are the fun parts of a Great Deduction.  Sholmes does nothing like that here because instead Mikotoba just gives the right answers. It’s less wacky and a lot less fun.  The logic of it was nice and the character work was ok, but overall this was not my favorite investigation section by a long shot.

Then there was court, starting with Judge Jidoku and ending with Mael Strongheart.  You know, Ace Attorney has had every other character be the villain at some point, the Prosecutor (Mannfred Von Karma) the Defense (Kristoph Gavin) the Detective (The Phantom/Bobby Fulbright) the witness (most of them) and even the defendant once (that guy from 2-4).  Finally we had the judge kill someone (Jidoku and Mael Strongheart).  Now we just need one of the hyperactive female assistants to kill someone and these games can finally walk off into the sunset, having used every possible twist.

I thought the court sections were also underwhelming.  I felt like a lot of things that should have been proven with evidence were instead just told to us by Strongheart and Jidoku, it felt like the game was running out of time and rushing towards a finish line.  And because of that several things didn’t even feel explained despite all the exposition.  Sholmes claims he removed Kazuma from the boat in GAA1 and told everyone that Kazuma is dead because he wanted Kaz to stay in Japan and be safe (he thought Kazuma was an assassination target). 

But Sholmes also believed that John Wilson had been an assassination target, and John Wilson was killed in Japan.  Clearly the assassins were in fact operating in Japan and Sholme’s attempt to stick Kaz in Japan would have just put him in even more danger.  They try to say “oh Sholmes’ plan worked since Kazuma wasn’t forced to become an assassin” but Sholmes didn’t know about the assassin exchange, he thought these were assassination targets. 

Finally, a lot of animations just undercut the seriousness for me.  Van Ziek’s animations were obviously made to look good for his profile shot, they kind of don’t look so good when seen face-on.  Mael Stronhart’s animations were made for him standing, so he kept having to stand up to perform his animation instead of sitting down like the judge normally does.  Jidoku and Strongheart’s breakdowns also didn’t look great to me in general.

I think these two cases were just done in completely the wrong way.  Case 4 should have completely been about the murder of Gregson and the murder should have been solved in that case.  We should have had a lot LESS about the red-headed league and the street vendors, and instead had the ship section and convicting Jidoku be part of that case.  Then at the end Kazuma should have indicted Van Zieks as the “reaper of the bailey” and claimed that Van Zieks gave the order to kill, so case 5 could then have focused entirely on the professor, Strongheart, and Kaz’s father.  As it stood case 4 felt slow as molasses and case 5 rushed way too fast.  

So wow, that’s a lot of words about Ace Attorney.  And I have more words ahead!  I’m going to go and replay the first game some so I can talk about it.  I hope you don’t mind my ramblings, but it was enjoyable to write.  And do play the Ace Attorney games!  They’re great!

Coming soon (hopefully): More programming

So a while ago I discussed a tiny tiny Unity programming project that I wanted to work on.  I wanted to make it so I could create little boxes using a button, then have those boxes all explode outward depending on how many boxes were on screen.  I am proud to say I successfully did it, and am now looking to expand my Unity knowledge.

The most immediate desire would be to make these boxes act more like particles of explosive material, IE they should explode in directions that are away from the densest cluster of themselves.  Then I’d like to see if I can make the explosion start in a particular place and travel along the length of the material until all the material has been exploded.  I’m not sure at all how these would work, but they’re part of an idea for a game I’ve been having for a while now.

The American Challenge Part 6: The future will not be supersonic

As readers will know, I’ve been reading The American Challenge by Jean Jacque Servan-Schreiber, a book written in 1968 about the problems Europe will face competing economically against America.  It’s always a joy reading through old books and seeing their predictions for the future, and while this book has definitely been a doozy as we’ve seen, I feel the author was WAY off was his predictions about supersonic flight and the French/British Concorde jet.  At a glance the Concorde venture seems to be an example of exactly the kind of public/private partnership that Servan-Schreiber says will be necessary and useful in the economy of tomorrow.  I didn’t take note of it but in discussing the “post-industrial” economy of future-America, he envisions that “private enterprise may no longer be the major source of scientific and technological development” and “the free market may take second place to the public sector.”  Essentially he envisions even the governments of capitalist countries taking on more of the burden of economic risk and development.  He even lays this out as part of why American companies are so successful: they grow to a sustainable size and then get big government contracts that launch them into international relevance.

Yet for all that, Servan-Schreiber spends most of his time griping about how the Concorde is an inferior product to what he expects Boeing will produce with the 2707.  He lays out all the ways Concorde has fallen behind: the Boeing will use titanium because an American public/private partnership has made that economical, and the Boeing will use a swing-wing design which the Concorde’s engineers in their risk-aversion did everything in their power to avoid.  The Boeing will even carry almost twice as many passengers as the Concorde, so while Concorde will get to the market first, Boeing will certainly gobble up its market later with a better, more efficient plane.  All in all, the author claims that Concorde will be the last plane of an old era, perhaps in service no more than 10 years, while the Boeing 2707 will be the first plane of a new era with a longer lifetime and much more to build off of design-wise.

My older readers will already be chuckling.  The Concorde lasted a quarter of a century from 1976 to 2003, while the Boeing 2707 was canceled before Concorde even entered service and Boeing never released a supersonic passenger jet.  Yet Servan-Schreiber’s griping about Concorde may have been vindicated for the exact opposite reason he envisioned: because the future was not supersonic.  The Concorde, for all its technological marvel and prestige, was regarded by the private sector as little but a technological boondoggle.  It costed about 2 billion pounds in R&D and only 20 were ever made.  Inflation adjusted, the tickets for a New York to London flight would cost about 13,000$ today, and they’d have almost zero amenities since every ounce of weight needed to be saved.  You were paying super-premium prices for economy class seats, and no recliners!  To the private sector, the Concorde was a failure and no supersonic passenger jets have followed it.  It was a government prestige project built partly on fear of missing out and losing to the Americans, and was sustained even after the Boeing 2707 was canceled due more to political than economic arguments.  The amount of investment never justified its return, and if you traveled back in time to tell Harold Wilson’s Labour government what it’s future would be, he might have been justified in dumping all that Concorde money into the NHS instead. The Concorde was an example of exactly the kind of public/private partnership that Servan-Schreiber thought Europe needed more of, yet most of his gripes were that the French and British weren’t playing nice with each other and they needed more unity to make the thing work. 

But alas, the future was not supersonic, the future was 747.  The Boeing 747 was introduced in 1970, over 1500 have been produced, and it still flies today.  And the development costs were comparable to the Concorde, total cost of 3.4 billion dollars for the 747 (in 2004 dollars) vs 2 billion pounds for the Concorde (in 1976 pounds), if someone wants to check my math with the inflation and conversion go ahead, but that looks pretty comparable to me.  And in some ways Boeing did succeed for a few of the reasons Servan-Schreiber defined, they had more capital than their European competitors, and better access to management and technology that would allow for big developments in engineering and design.  Having a bigger number (the biggest plane, or the fastest plane like Concorde was) is very important for national prestige and so always invites government investment, but sometimes just making something good and economical is better, and from 1970 to today American companies have been very good at doing just that.