Originally:

Here’s prime example of technology without context. What happens when a kid brandishing a fake gun, shooting at enemies only he can see, goes out in public and gets shot by police?

The author of the study had a financial interest in his so called findings. No one could reproduce those findings, though at the behest of concerned parents, many tried. And by now everyone of any integrity has disavowed the entire episode.

By that I mean to say that Jenny McCarthy claims the whole thing is a well orchestrated plot against the good doctor Wakefield who promoted the original autism/vaccine link. Yes, every scientist working for peanuts in terms of public money has decided conspire to ruin the life of one innocent man who stood to make considerable money from his so-called discovery. Brilliant plan! (reminds me of one not-too-bright former co-worker of mine who claimed the whole global warming debate was a devious plot by scientists to make more money).

Is it possible to issue a class action lawsuit against people who cause mass public stupidity leading to demonstrable harm? In my mind, it’s not much different than the fire in a theater scenario, especially when there is no fire.

Apple’s new business plan may be to sue themselves for trademark infringement against the confusingly similar name iPod. Yes, it is pretty much a 4x iPhone/iPodTouch, leading me to wonder if the best name would have actually been the iQuad…

I have an iPhone for now, but I’ll wait a while for any tablet. The form factor isn’t quite right, and I really want a real [open] PC in my tablet, not an overgrown locked-down single-tasking phone. 1024×768 is just not going to cut it as an e-reader when every other display in my life is 1920 pixels or higher. I’m sure people who buy them will swear by the improved calendar and PIM software and maybe even think the e-reader function kicks ass if they squint enough, but that’s not enough to justify inserting a new device into my list of carryables.

I’ve said for a while that Apple is Microsoft’s informal external design arm. But this shows that people can learn both positive and negative lessons from Apple’s innovation.

Let’s start with the word. Cameron subtly reprimands the modern use of the word Avatar (embodiment of a person in a virtual environment: 3D, 2D, or text) in favor of the original meaning (embodiment of a god in human form). The human/god forms in ancient lore were distinguished from mere mortals by their blue skin. Cameron flips that around on us and makes the natives blue.

[Neal Stephenson also played with this idea in his use of the word to imply the users of a virtual world were like gods, or at least the spirits inhabiting the virtual bodies, although it was the virtual bodies that seemed to get all the magical powers.]

I bring this up because the movie, like most mythology, makes no freaking sense on an intellectual level. It must be appreciated on a more mystical/humanistic/experiential level, if at all. That doesn’t mean it’s worthless — just the opposite — but one must significantly disarm one’s intellectual reflexes to appreciate it. For many people, that’s frighteningly all too easy to do, but then there are the rest of us reading and writing reviews…

In this case, the movie plays like the most vivid dream any of us has ever had. People do things for completely inexplicable reasons most of the time (lame explanations notwithstanding), but they do them in such a magical and seductive setting it’s hard to complain. So people complain instead about the tired and timid plot. But it’s not just the plot that’s both confused and unrealistic, it’s just about every human decision in it.

Don’t believe me?

In reality, if giant rocks full of magic superconductor are just levitating for the taking, it would seem to be easier to tow one away than dig the stuff out from under giant self-defending trees (unless the intense magnetic flux in the rock-scapades rips the very hemoglobin out of your blood, in which case let’s not go there in overgrown helicopters either, okay? We’ll just scoop them up from orbit on long tethers…)

In reality, if a rock was worth $20M an ounce, the corporate head honcho wouldn’t leave his billion dollar lump of coal just floating on his desk in a camp full of mercs with guns and spare space shuttles. Don’t tell me they couldn’t sneak it back to earth in some laundry, or at least that they’d try. In fact, how long would it take before the mercs decided their measly cut wasn’t enough and held the planet hostage, declared autonomy or whatnot?

In reality, if the military sent a novice spy into a shiny new body and into the native’s camp where there was even the slightest chance he might give away the secret battle plans after he fell in love with the sexy alien princess, don’t you think they’d be watching his datastream or video memos before the big reveal? In reality, they’d have a real-time kill-switch and round-the-clock monitors watching his every move — through his own eyes and ears no less. In fact, they wouldn’t even have told him the real plans, but probably tested him with a fake agenda early on to see how easily he’d turn.

In reality, if it takes a 1-ton MRI machine to read your biologically-based thoughts and muscle stimuli, then it takes something on the order of a 1-ton MRI machine around the avatar’s biological body to apply the transmitted control signals and send more stimuli back to you. Unless, of course, the avatar’s technology is not entirely biological and yet somehow built into the body itself, in which case one wonders how the signal survives when all other EM fields are perturbed by flux. In reality, if this worked, it would be better to stay in orbit and control the avatars very remotely.

And in reality (and in another Cameron film in fact), given the choice of going into battle with combative natives in a high-risk-zone vs. simply lifting the shuttle high into orbit to drop its bomb, which would real people have done? Nuke ‘em for orbit, it’s the only way to be sure…

Hell, at least in Aliens, Burke had a reason for being so stupidly homicidal — not just the money but covering his bureaucratic ass because he was the one who sent the friggin’ colonists to their deaths in the first place! He’d do anything to not get caught and then make enough money to buy forgiveness from mama corporation. Now that’s some realistic human decision making.

And lest we claim the environmentalist theme is the one truly believable subtext, are we really going to reduce all of modern environmentalism to simply saving beautiful people in pristine places? That’s so Teddy Roosevelt.

Pandora had (apparently) only six, maybe seven kinds of higher animal life, one of them looking like photoshopped big-eyed blue waif supermodels. The rest of them would sooner kill you than let you mentally rape them with your fiber-optic pony tail that all Pandorean life seemed to evolve with (however, the Na’vi lost their chest breathing and extra legs for some reason, and added breasts for no reason). The plants spend their hard-won energy putting on a fancy light show (to attract the equivalent of bees?) while fickly disappearing with the slightest touch. Lame. And the arguably top planetary species, the mystical tree god that remembers everything and who’s mere gymnosperm knows the hero is a hero before anyone else does, abandons its core religious tenets and gets lots of stuff killed when it simply could have brokered a deal to cough up some minerals and maybe start an astounding eco-tourism / avatar-vacation business to boot — save everyone and make a handy profit. Tell me that’s even remotely realistic!

So let’s face it. The movie was all a dream, a modern myth in graphic form. However it was a beautiful dream. I’d see it again. So good work, Cameron.

 As if that wasn’t concerning enough, Fox out does itself with another greater than 100% scientific poll result:

I’ve finally had a free day to extract my C++ runtime type system and make it stand-alone. I’ve uploaded it here (17KB zip) for anyone interested. Feel free to take it for whatever purpose and improve it. I’m offering it completely "as is," meaning I don’t intend to make changes or offer support.

I did make a few improvements in the macro system though. It figures out the member types, sizes, offsets, array counts, and any derived-from or referenced types automatically. The only thing it can’t get from the compiler right now is the list of members to enumerate or it could probably be completely automatic.

It’s using template specialization and static initializers for all of the magic. All of this happens at static initialization time, which isn’t much of a performance hit, but it’s worth remembering that it’s not 100% pre-compiled information right now. But on the plus side, only the types your code asks about (directly and indirectly) will ever be reflected this way, so the cost almost nothing.

The one downside, apart from having to enumerate the members in code, is that classes must have a static "default" object stored with the RTTI "Type" struct, meaning all reflected classes also need to have a public default constructor available. Singletons are not generally friendly to that idea, so keep that in mind. FYI, none of the data in that default object is used at the moment, but the object sticks around until the program is closed and its destructors are called just the same. It’s needed because it’s very hard to make opaque objects like int and float act the same way as your classes for initializing type info.

It’s a reasonable tradeoff, IMO, considering there is zero per-instance storage and almost zero overhead, apart from a virtual function table if you use normal virtual functions or enable dynamic typing (which uses normal virtual functions).

Take a look at the Reflection.cpp file for some simple simple examples. Templated types should work as well using the supplied macros.

This compiles with Visual Studio 2008. I’ll try it on the new MS compiler soon. The code should work just fine in 2005, but the Solution is for 2008.

Sample Code:

struct Foo
{
  char one;
  double two[4];

  return 0;

}

Outputs:

struct Foo
{
  byte one;
  double two[4]; /* internally: double* */
};
struct Test: public Foo
{
  byte one;
  double two[4]; /* internally: double* */
  int three;
  float four;
  Test* next;
  Foo foo[2]; /* internally: Foo* */
};

Yes, the "public Foo" bit is redundant with theinherited members, but I opted to be verbose for storing derived types. The parentage is there for "isOfType" type operations.

Take South Korea and the famed "Fan Death" phenomena. Cheap plastic electric fans can barely cut off your fingers if you remove the protective grating and stick them right in the blades (don’t try this). But the idea that electric fans can remove oxygen from a room is utterly ridiculous.

The only realistic risk to consider from fans is that they don’t actually lower your temperature. They just increase evaporation rates from your skin to cool you off. In extreme temperatures, they’re no substitute for really cooling down and staying hydrated.

Aside: There’s a trick I discovered as a kid that can turn an ordinary fan into a real cooler, which could be fun for your kids next summer (use your own judgment for safety considerations, and do not try this within X miles of the South Korean Fan Death zone).

Build an air-tent by tucking a large cloth bedsheet (or several sheets duck-taped together, depending on the bed size) around the edges of a bed. Tape the foot end of the sheet around the fan, such that the fan blows in and inflates the air-tent. Leave enough slack in the tent that you can comfortably sleep inside, sit up, move around, etc… I didn’t do anything elaborate for getting in and out, just untuck and tuck the sheet as needed. I think cheap flat sheets work best, but try fitted if you like.

I believe you’ll find an actual temperature drop inside the air tent. I figure it’s because it slightly increases pressure (pV=nRT) for air entering the tent and decreases it for air escaping through pores in the sheet, carrying heat away as it re-expands. It’s a simple heat pump.

In fact, as a kid, I needed to sleep with a winter blanket inside my little air tent all summer, it was that cold. I did not run out of oxygen, but it sucks if the power goes out. And be warned, unlike real A/Cs, it doesn’t pump the heat outside, just away from your bed.

Here’s a great summary of current research (and how it works) by a scientist at the University of Washington.