» Friday, 17 July A.D. 2009
recent reads
In blatant imitation of Glenn Reynolds, but with less money to spend: Checked out from the library:
- Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System by
Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost. My curiousity was piqued by this post:
The one section is about Pitfall, in fact, and it covers the ways the hardware design of the Atari 2600/VCS facilitated and limited the advantages of the game (and, indeed, all games written for the VCS). Through one particularly enlightening sequence, the authors demonstrate in basically clear language how the entire level design for the 255 rooms in Pitfall was compressed into 50 bytes. Woah, hey there cowboy, I didn't write that wrong. They clearly and contextually explain to you how David Crane, the designer of Pitfall, encompassed the entire design for all 255 rooms of Pitfall in 50 individual characters.
For those of you doing the math at home, that's somewhat less than 1.5 bits per room. Good read, really drives home how creative programmers had to be within the seemingly ridiculous constraints of the 2600. The above explanation was good; another favorite was the programmer who used the binary code for his program as graphics for the game.
- Dear Mr. Buffett: What an Investor Learns 1,269 Miles from
Wall Street by Janet Tavakoli. The book title and opening chapter
or two promise a lot--lessons learned from talking to Warren
Buffett--but the rest of the book is an extended explanation of What
Went Wrong in the recent financial crisis. The one lesson repeated
throughout is “Don't invest in things you don't understand,”
and I suspect a lot of participants in the financial meltdowns would
have been well-served by said advice. The other reasonable lessons are
how to get rich with hedge funds (run one!) and buy things from other
people when you understand the pricing better than they do. Lines that
grabbed my attention:
The Fed is counterfeiting dollars, but we call it debasing the currency because the Fed is behind it instead of gangsters.
Dustin Hoffman once remarked on a story he read about how he and Tom Cruise were holding up shooting because they were a couple of prima donnas. The story was fabricated: “but if I wasn't making a movie with and I just picked up the paper, I'd believe it. That's interesting, isn't it?“ There is a reason we call it the “Information Age,” not the “Age of Wisdom.”
It's great to have an open mind, but don't leave it so open that your brains fall out.
posted by Nate @ 11:49PM