I’m always fascinated by diseases that alter a person’s perception so convincingly that they see or hear a world different than the rest of us. Damn Interesting has an article on Capgras’ Syndrome, a mental disease where people believe close friends / family / pets / objects are being replaced by duplicates - and the originals taken away. As if this wasn’t eerie enough, sometimes sufferers even think their own reflection is a copy of themselves.
Add comment February 5th, 2007
Damn Interesting has a disturbing article about The Terrifying Toothpick Fish - a parasitic fish called the candirú that rivals the Piranha in notoriety in the Amazon. Makes you think twice about peeing in the water ;)
Add comment January 31st, 2007
Damn Interesting has a fascinating true tale of an Incident on Niihau Island right after the attack on Pearl Harbor, which lead to the subsequent internment of many US citizens of Japanese origin.
Add comment December 4th, 2006
Pingmag has a neat article about the Top 10 ad-tricks in Tokyo’s train stations.
Add comment October 16th, 2006
Having played World of Warcraft for some time now, I’m curious about the seedy underbelly of the game’s virtual world. One of the shady things that is very interesting is gold farming, where underpaid workers - usually in Asia - spend 10 hours a day playing a WOW character just to make gold for a company - typically by killing the same monsters (mobs) over and over again. These players are pretty obvious when spotted by normal players as they are often killing monsters that are too low for their level, and when approached, don’t respond or speak poor English. A common name for gold farmers is “Chinese Farmer”. Obviously this virtual gold is worthless in terms of dollars so the gold ends up being sold on Ebay and the like. Read more at Anatomy of a Gold Farmer and Times Online.
Add comment October 2nd, 2006
Pingmag has yet another interesting article, this time about the hand drawn typography that can be found on signage in Bali. I’ve always found amateur or non-designer representations of type to be quite fascinating.
Add comment September 29th, 2006
Radar has an article on a crazy dude called Winter who has made it his mission to visit every Starbucks and drink coffee at each one. I think he’s wasting his life away, but hey, if that floats his boat, more power to him.
The primary rule is I have to drink at least one four-ounce sample of caffeinated coffee from each store. The store has to have actually opened for business; I can’t get there the day before, when they have friends-and-family day and they’re giving drinks away—in many ways that’s kind of arbitrary. It has to be a company-owned store, not a licensed store. I have to drink the coffee, but there is no time limit on when I have to drink the coffee. But the longer I go without drinking it, the greater the risk that I might lose it. There are two stores I need to go back to in Washington State because I didn’t finish the coffee—I lost it. I took it out of the store, I had it in a cup, and in the middle of the night I forgot I hadn’t drank it all and I used the cup to relieve myself.
Add comment September 29th, 2006
I have a level 56 Night Elf Hunter on a PVP server in a fairly new, mostly raiding guild. It’s my first ever character in World of Warcraft, and it’s been a challenge, super fun, irritating, and fascinating. The world is so detailed and complex, and the player - player interactions never cease to astound me. So when I came across PlayOn and Terranova - projects that seek to examine the development of virtual worlds - needless to say I was quite fasincated by the accured data and analysis they had done. They cover all sorts of topics from how a new AH in Stormwind & Darnassus affect city population to discussion of avatars & Orcs. One day I need to roll characters on PVE servers and RolePlaying servers to get a feel for how different the game becomes given those fundamental changes in game structure. I’ve tried Second Life but it just didn’t cut it IMHO. Anyone remember The Palace from back in the late 90s?
The PlayOn project at PARC is an investigation into the social dimensions of massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) and virtual worlds - extensive, persistent 3D environments that are populated by thousands of players at any given moment. We have explored several virtual worlds including Star Wars Galaxies, EverQuest Online Adventures, Second Life, World of Warcraft, and EverQuest II. These and others represent the most successful virtual worlds to date and are laying the foundations for future environments which may be used for more than entertainment and sociability. In our studies, we are generally concerned with three basic issues: community, interaction, and culture.
Add comment September 22nd, 2006
It might be quite appropriate just after the 5th anniversary of 9/11 to link to this interesting article about the right of American citizens to fly without government issued IDs. It might seem that showing your ID at the airport is unavoidable, however this might be one of the lies the government is feeding us, along with the corporations/airlines. I’d really like to learn more about this issue and what the real dirt is. It is scary that in our increasingly controlled society we are fed BS and so many accept it without question. I’m no conspiracy theory nut, but the grip of the government on the masses of deluded seems to be growing stronger.
Add comment September 13th, 2006
Stephen Levy has an article about World of Warcraft: Is It a Game?
“My girlfriend—who actually bought me the game—was ready to kill me,” says Alex Rascovar (Level 60, Gnome Mage), a New York City actor who often binged with eight-hour sessions before he went cold turkey a few months ago. There are parental controls available, but most parents haven’t a clue. (Only when embarking on this story did yours truly learn that his son [Level 60, Troll Shaman] had hit the level cap in WOW.)
Read the article after the jump. Image from Molten Core raid video.
Is World of Warcraft a game, or is it a harbinger of virtual realities that we all might inhabit? Only a Night Elf knows for sure.
By Steven Levy, Newsweek
Sept. 18, 2006 - Two years into the history of World of Warcraft—an online game that accommodates 7 million players around the world—no one had successfully ventured into the dungeon to slay a group of computer-generated villains known as the Four Horsemen. But four experienced “guilds” of players—one in Europe, two in America and one in China—were coming close, posting updates on separate Web sites they maintained. Finally, a 40-person contingent from a U.S. guild conquered the last beast—and its members became instant international celebrities in a massive community where dragons and Druids are as real as dirt.
In the physical world we vainly scrounge for glory. Bin Laden still taunts us, the bus doors close before we reach them and leave us standing in the rain. But in the fantasy realm of Azeroth, the virtual geography of World of Warcraft, the physical pain comes only from hitting a keyboard too hard, camaraderie is the norm and heroism is never far away. In simple terms, Warcraft is the most advanced and popular entry in a genre called Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games, or MMO. “I call it the Technicolor, Americanized version of ‘Lord of the Rings’,” says Chris Metzen, VP of creative development for the game’s maker, Blizzard Software. But for millions it is more than a game—it’s an escape, an obsession and a home.
Engaging in this orgy of sword-swiping, spell-casting and monster-slaying generally involves a $50 purchase of the software and a monthly $15 fee thereafter to play online. Players in Asia—a clear majority of the WOW population, despite the fact that the game was created by digital dudes in Irvine, Calif.—buy cards that allow them WOW time for a few cents an hour. Then there’s the merchandising: T shirts, jackets, hats, a nondigital (!) board game. In China, 600 million Coke cans were festooned with WOW figures. There are seven novels based on Warcraft lore. And Blizzard recently inked a movie deal with the studio that produced “Superman Returns.” Games-industry analyst David Cole estimates that Blizzard (part of Vivendi) has made more than $300 million from the game so far. Blizzard COO Paul Sams says only, “We are an incredibly profitable company.”
What distinguishes Warcraft from previous blockbuster games is its immersive nature and compelling social dynamics. It’s a rich, persistent alternative world, a medieval Matrix with lush graphics and even a seductive soundtrack (Blizzard has two full-time in-house composers). Blizzard improved on previous MMOs like Sony’s Everquest by cleverly crafting its game so that newbies could build up characters at their own pace, shielded from predators who would casually “gank” them—while experienced players continually face more and more daunting challenges. The company mantra, says lead designer Rob Pardo, is “easy to learn, difficult to master.” After months of play, when you reach the ultimate level (60), you join with other players for intricately planned raids on dungeons, or engage in massive rumbles against other guilds.
“Ninety percent of what I do is never finished—parenting, teaching, doing the laundry,” says Elizabeth Lawley (Level 60, Troll Priest), a Rochester, N.Y., college professor. “In WOW, I can cross things off a list—I’ve finished a quest, I’ve reached a new level.”
Like many WOW players, Lawley is active in a guild. Some of the high-ranking guilds, like the one formed by noted Japanese venture capitalist Joi Ito (Level 60, Gnome Mage), are mini-societies with their own Web sites, online forums and private lore. First Ito invited people he knew professionally, like Ross Mayfield (Level 60, Human Palladin), CEO of an Internet company on whose board Ito sits. “Warcraft is the new golf,” says Mayfield. “I actually closed a deal with a company I met through WOW.” But as Ito met others in WOW, the roster diversified. There is a priest whose character is … a priest. There are soldiers, bartenders, truckdrivers, lawyers and Goggle engineers. The guild’s “raid leader”—who organizes the twice-weekly ventures into the feared Molten Core to slay the powerful “boss mob” monsters—is Jamie Ray (Level 60, Night Elf Druid), a night-shift nurse in Parkersburg, W.Va.
Though WOW is a fantasy world, the interaction between guilds and individuals relies on human choices and morals. The first thing one does when joining the game is to choose an avatar from one of eight “races,” split between two factions: the human-looking Alliance and the more bestial Horde. Edward Castronova (Level 42, Priest), an Indiana U professor and author of “Synthetic Worlds,” once roiled the WOW community by a blog posting entitled “The Horde Is Evil,” in which he charged that only the antisocial at heart would pick that darker side. Castronova believes that if someone behaves badly in the game—an example would be the WOW equivalent of spree killing, where someone ganks a character of a much lower level, just for the hell of it—that person should be judged harshly in the real world as well.
Another example of questionable behavior is viewable in a video that more than 80,000 people have accessed on YouTube. When one guild member died (in real life, not Azeroth), his grieving friends decided to hold a funeral for him inside the game. The solemn affair was disrupted when a rival guild burst upon the unarmed mourners and slaughtered them mercilessly. “It’s unfortunate that someone would do that to people trying to honor one of their guild members,” says Mike Morhaime, Blizzard’s president. Another event that bothered Blizzard’s management was an in-game protest march, when hundreds of naked Gnomes gathered to call for more powers.
Generally, though, players of the game enjoy a form of com-ity rarely seen in the real world; higher-level players go out of their way to tutor newbies and accompany them on quests. Deep friendships are forged. Relationships begin that flower into marriage, with Tauren brides and Undead grooms tying the knot in some virtual tavern in Thunder Bluff.
Warcraft even has its own economy, as the gold and exotic armor and weaponry that players accumulate are much coveted in trade. Despite the opposition of Blizzard (which thinks that using real money to gain an edge in the game violates WOW’s egalitarian spirit), a thriving industry makes tons of real dollars by “gold farming” (accumulating in-game currency and selling it) or “power leveling” (borrowing someone’s avatar and grinding through the game to gain experience). Most of the manpower is supplied by Chinese workers like Zhang Hanbin (Level 60, Rogue), a 24-year-old dropout who works in a grim apartment-cum-sweatshop in the provincial town of Wuxue. An eight-hour day collecting game loot can yield 100 gold pieces, worth about $30 on the black market.
Are you getting the idea that “Warcrack” (as some call it) eats up a lot of time? “Of all the games that my [addictive] clients are involved with, World of Warcraft is the most popular,” says clinical psychologist Kimberly Young. Mostly, trouble comes in the form of kids who fall asleep in class, and furious spouses. “My girlfriend—who actually bought me the game—was ready to kill me,” says Alex Rascovar (Level 60, Gnome Mage), a New York City actor who often binged with eight-hour sessions before he went cold turkey a few months ago. There are parental controls available, but most parents haven’t a clue. (Only when embarking on this story did yours truly learn that his son [Level 60, Troll Shaman] had hit the level cap in WOW.)
In China, a competitive society where real life is becoming as freaky as anything you’d find in Azeroth, players seem even more prone to go overboard. According to the Xinhua News Agency, one girl died of exhaustion after playing WOW for several days without a break.
Even those who dropped out will be tempted to return later this year when Blizzard releases its long-awaited update The Burning Crusade. The key features include two new races, a new continent to explore and an increase in the level cap from 60 to 70. Hundreds of thousands will jam the WOW servers until they once again reach the peak.
Edward Castronova sees all this as an early indicator of what will become a vast participation in synthetic worlds, with fuzzier and fuzzier lines between virtual and physical realms. “In 20 or 30 years the technology will be here to create incredibly more realistic and immersive worlds,” he says. “There will be a world that fits the fantasy of any life you want to lead.” Those deep into WOW, of course, are already living that future. “Yes, it’s just a game,” says Joi Ito. “The way that the real world is a game.”
With Melinda Liu in China and N’gai Croal and Peg Tyre in New York
Add comment September 11th, 2006
Add comment September 8th, 2006
Add comment September 1st, 2006
Crazy story about a World of Warcraft player who lost his iPod down a plane toilet, and ended up being interrogated for terrorism. Story confirmed by passenger on plane.
They asked me why I was visiting Canada. I was to visit a friend I met on World of Warcraft, Cara. They took down her name and what I could remember of her address. They asked me how we met.
“In an online game.”
“What online game?”
“Umm … World of Warcraft,” I responded meekly.
“What kind of game is this?”
“It’s a fantasy game … it takes place online.”
“Fantasy … like it’s got wizards and warlocks?”
“Well, it’s got warlocks.” (And they need to be nerfed.)They asked me to describe my relation to Cara. I told them that people meet up in the game and go on adventures together, and that Cara and I were in a guild together that I was the leader of. They confused the concept of a guild with the game, however, and I had them believing that I was the Lord and Leader of all of WoW until I was able to correct them, and explain to them what a guild was.
1 comment September 1st, 2006
Wired news has an article on a new line of TVs by Philips which use an innovative technology to make 3-D TV work without weird glasses
“I entered a conference room in Manhattan and a woman on the TV tossed a handful of rose petals out of the screen, where they floated in the air before my eyes.
At least, that’s what I saw. In truth, the image resided on a perfectly flat, 42-inch LCD screen. But the 3-D illusion was fully believable, and I didn’t have to wear a dorky set of polarizing glasses.
A new line of 3-D televisions by Philips uses the familiar trick of sending slightly different images to the left and right eyes — mimicking our stereoscopic view of the real world. But where old-fashioned 3-D movies rely on the special glasses to block images meant for the other eye, Philips’ WOWvx technology places tiny lenses over each of the millions of red, green and blue sub pixels that make up an LCD or plasma screen. The lenses cause each sub pixel to project light at one of nine angles fanning out in front of the display.”
Add comment August 25th, 2006
The Question of Chile Addiction
by Kellye Hunter and Dave DeWitt
The power of chiles is enough to inspire mythology and folk tales, so it is not surprising that some people believe in its ability to control our minds–or at least our bodies. While it is true that many chile lovers exhibit distinctly druggie habits–we’ve seen people who always travel with a stash of hot sauce, Texans who carry tiny chilipiquin pods in silver snuff boxes, and Californians who indulge in the “pink fix,” which is chile powder mixed with cocaine–chile is not a truly addicting substance.
According to Paul Rozin, Ph.D., a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania who has done extensive research on the acquisition of chile preference, chile does not meet the criteria for true physical addition, which involves the following symptoms:
* Craving: for chile, this exists to a degree, but it never becomes a physical necessity.
* Loss of control.
* Withdrawal: we miss it, but we don’t get sick without it.
* Tolerance: we adjust to higher heat levels, but we don’t need increasing amounts just to feel normal.
Rozin also says that people who do not like chile do not reverse their preference as the negative taste of chile wears off (which is what happens with addictive substances such as alcohol and nicotine), and conversely, there is no evidence that the preference for chile wears off, even after long periods (weeks to years) of not eating it. Former smokers, for instance, can become ill if they try a cigarette after having not smoked for a certain amount of time.
Additionally, a study at Duke University Medical Center found that in smaller doses, capsaicin and nicotine induce some of the same physiological responses which include irritation, secretion, sneezing, vasodilation, coughing, and peptide release; however in larger, injected doses, capsaicin destroys many of the neurons containing its receptors, while nicotine actually increases the number of nicotine acetylcholine receptor. What this means is that large doses of capsaicin result in the body becoming less responsive to capsaicin, but that large doses of nicotine cause the body to become more responsive to nicotine.
While people definitely do not develop a physical addiction, they do become habituated to chiles because of their flavor, their stimulating properties, and their healthfulness. In his 1980 book, The Marriage of the Sun and Moon, Dr. Andrew Weil related a story from Santha Rama Rau’s book, The Cooking of India, where an Indian woman visiting London became ill from the bland food and craved chiles so much that she poured three-quarters of a bottle of Tabasco® sauce, plus sixteen red-hot South American chiles over her omelet before she was satisfied.
“We need a fix of red or green chile with a side order of endorphins,” said Dr. Frank Etscorn, then an experimental psychologist at New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology in Socorro, and inventor of the nicotine patch, in a 1990 article for the Albuquerque Journal. “We get slightly strung out on endorphins, but it’s no big deal. That year he posed a theory that the warm afterglow and the constant craving for chile are due to capsaicin triggering the release of the body’s natural painkillers called endorphins, which have been called “the body’s natural opiates,” are the cause of the so-called runner’s high, and are capable of turning a painful experience into a pleasurable one.
To establish a link between capsaicin and endorphins, Etscorn used a drug called naxalone, which can reverse the effects of a heroin overdose by blocking brain receptors that respond to the heroin. In one experiment, he had a student eat the hottest jalapeños he could find until his mouth was burning up and perspiration was pouring off his face. The student was then asked to indicate when the pain began to diminish, and was given at that point a naxalone injection, which caused the pain to increase as the endorphins were blocked from the brain.
Interestingly enough, chile is a substance that most mammals (birds and reptiles seem to be unaffected by its heat properties) will avoid as they would a poison. Through a series of studies, Dr. Rozin found that it is practically impossible to induce a preference for chile peppers in rats, and subsequent experiments with dogs and chimpanzees have had limited success. A study he conducted in 1979 states that humans are the only mammals that “reverse their natural rejection” to bitter “innately unpalatable substances” such as nicotine, coffee, alcohol, tobacco…and chile peppers. They can learn to prefer the flavor and physiological effects of these ingredients to the point of choosing to eat them regularly.
In the case of chile peppers, one reason for reversing this preference might be practicality. A 1980 Rozin study found that the most common reason Mexican people gave for eating chile is that it “adds flavor to food.” It also observed that chile might be a digestive aid: “With a mealy and bland starch-base diet, typical of the areas where chili pepper is commonly eaten, chili aids in the ingestion and swallowing of food and may enhance the palatability of food.”
But why do we choose to eat chile in the first place? It does not create physical need, and babies and young children reject it, as do adults who have never tried it. The only animals Rozin found during the course of his studies who exhibited true, laboratory-proven preference for chile, were two chimpanzees and a dog, all of which had strong relationships with humans.
And therein lies the key–socialization. Young people develop a taste for cigarettes, coffee, and alcohol by repeatedly using these substances because they want to be included and identified with a certain group, either family or peers. This is also the case with chile, stated a Rozin study. “No explicit rewards are given for eating chili in the home,” it said. “There is, however, the possible more subtle reward for being adult and doing what members of one’s society do, as well as the less subtle encouragement of parents and peers.”
Another Rozin study asked American college students how they got started eating chile, and the most common response was that they used it at home, or that their parents put it on food. In Mexico, where chile-eating is a part of everyday life, very young children are protected from exposure to it, then allowed to develop their own preference, which usually starts between the ages of four and eleven.
This socialization theory explains possibly why people start eating chile in the first place, but in a non-chile-centered society, the reasons they continue to eat it are less clear. Rozin’s “Benign Masochism” or “Constrained Risk” theory holds that people like chile peppers for the same reasons they like roller coasters, scary movies, and stepping into hot baths. All of these activities provide methods of exciting the body by making it respond to a dangerous situation, while the mind is certain that circumstances are safe. “This body/mind disparity may be a source of feelings of mastery and pleasure, a case of body over mind,” the study said. Additionally, Rozin has found that it is not uncommon for people to like the body’s defensive responses, such as the nose and eye tearing that result from eating hot peppers; and he says that people often eat chile at a heat level close to the highest they can tolerate, which means that liking chile is related to pushing the limits of pain and tolerance.
Having worked in the Fiery Foods Industry for a number of years, we have found that many of the people who like hot foods tend to be a little more outgoing than those who do not. They like traveling, wearing colorful clothing, meeting new people, and trying new things. Perhaps eating chile peppers is the culinary expression of an adventurous spirit and a fun-seeking nature.
Excerpted from The Healing Powers of Peppers, by Dave DeWitt, Melissa T. Stock, and Kellye Hunter (Three Rivers Press, 1998). Available from www.amazon.com; search for author keywords DeWitt, Dave.
Add comment August 24th, 2006
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