Jon Cogburn's Blog

Siri philosophizes!

This made my day.

Just wait for the thirty eight second mark, when the interviewer asks Siri about the inverted spectrum.

I don't know if the answer would pass the Turing Test. Certainly we've all had students in our offices who don't do much better, but I'm honestly not sure they pass the Turing Test either. . . Whoah, Dude! Like what if all our students are robots and stuff.

In any case, I know that much of the answer is just plain weird, but we should still all be happy that the liar paradox got in there somewhere.

Tonight I found out that I exist

In graduate school my dear friend Roy Cook used to say that to be was to be the value of a footnote.

I (and my other dear friend Mark Silcox) actually exist now!!! Check out footnote 7 in the awesome Wikipedia article on Mona Sax.

And here is a video of me reacting to the good news.

for Robby Burleigh

One of the weirdest things about Asteroids for the 2600 is that the asteroids only traveled vertically. I think by the 7800 version they went side to side, but even then I'm pretty sure that the asteroids running into each other was beyond the physics of the game. That's weird too because you only control the shooting in two dimensions, but if they are not running into each other they must be layered in three dimensions.

I forgot where I read that a patent court determined that Atari had the copyright on side scrolling interfaces, since the game Defender introduced it. Supposedly the only reason Atari stayed in business after the failure of the Jaguar console was that other game companies were paying them royalties for all their sideways scrolling games. What a strange conceit! It's like giving the Duchamp estate copyright on bringing some ordinary object in off the street and calling it a work of art. [Bad example! One might argue that modern art would be improved if artists and museums had to pay a fine whenever someone did that.]

I never had an Atari 5200 (actually the Atari 2600 is the only console I've ever owned). Note from bothe of the above the awesome periodicity of the "How To Beat Video Games" VHS series. everythingisterrible is brilliant at exploring this world of the strange 1980s video aesthetic. I think I realized that I could never be an art critic when I realized that I could not for the life of me describe what it is that makes this medium look so odd. It was revolutionary at the time because you didn't need all the expensive lighting that film requires. But it looks so much worse than film.

Maximum RAWK and Roll

Mark and I got interviewed by the completely awesome website Grinding To Valhalla, and its HERE.

This is like the coolest thing ever, because Randolph Carter has also interviewed so many writers that I cherish (e.g. Robin Hobb, Brian Ruckley. . .) Their interviews are on the website too.

We also got to push the D&D and Philosophy anthology that we are going to pitch within the next two weeks.

nice article

On the philosophy through video games blog we are going to start a discussion of a recent article by Lara Parker for gamespot on ethics in video games. Our discussion is HERE. Please read Parker's piece (linked to at the top of the discussion) and then contribute over there.

[Full disclosure: Silcox and I are quoted in Parker's piece.]