garry’s subposthaven

The Media Underground blog writes:

How exactly is it that SpaceX can do everything so cheaply? Well, it would seem from this recent interview with Elon Musk that there are a couple of reasons in particular. The first being that there’s a tendency for big aerospace companies to outsource everything to subcontractors who then, bizarrely, outsource work to other subcontractors who subsequently - in what seems to be little more than an utter bureaucratic shambles by this point - outsource to other subcontractors and so on and so forth... ad nauseum. As one commenter aptly points out at the foot of this Wired article: "One reason for all that expensively administered subcontracting is that it pleases exactly those committees [who control NASA's funding]. The large projects they favor can subcontract in many different districts, whose congressmen then have a good reason to vote for NASA's budget. This means the committee members need not trade away any more of their political capital to get the projects that support contractors in their districts."

In short, SpaceX don't engage in this subcontracting farce but do it all themselves from the bottom up.

Wired has a great interview with Elon Musk here.

Anywhere there is some form of ridiculous inefficiency, there is opportunity. 

The power of games is incredible. Games continue to be the most interactive and immersive form of storytelling -- and the most involved these days. 

Christian Donlan at Eurogamer.net writes this fascinating account of a ride out on the town in LA Noire with his father, who knew the streets in person in the 1940's:

Dad just trailed off, really, lost in the texture of L.A. Noire, surfacing now and then to announce a car or a familiar sight. '40 Buick, '46 Olds, '39 Dodge. I remember that restaurant. Rialto? God, that place used to show all the old burlesque stuff. What's the name on that oil pump?

At one moment, as dawn was breaking on the road to Hollywood, he suddenly leaned forward and shouted out "Willies!" and I said a silent prayer of thanks that I had my stepmother's phone number on speed dial. It turned out he was actually saying, "Willys! You almost never see a Willys in old films! It's a lesser make. Not so popular. They did the Willys jeeps for the war, and after that they went broke."

So did my dad find L.A. Noire accurate? Intoxicatingly so, I suspect: he thought the streets were wider than he remembered, but he liked the way they were fairly dark, just like the underlit boulevards he knew when he was a kid. 

Lately I've been playing modern indie takes on the classic 1990's point-and-click adventure games. They've been published by indie studio Wadjeteye Games. 

I recently played both Resonance and Gemini Rue. They are GORGEOUS games (even though they're low resolution) -- the stories are serious dramas in the same vein as higher budget games LA Noire or Heavy Rain. 

Gemini Rue is a Bladerunner-esque sci fi noir that deals with themes of consciousness and memory...

High budget or low budget, these games are the only form of media with the capability to transport us and make us active participants in a vivid and responsive world. They're my favorite kind of game. I hope they keep making em, because I know I'll keep playing. 

In the late 1960s at the University of California, Berkeley, biological psychologist Mark Rosenzweig and neuroanatomist Marian Diamond engaged in an experiment that was pivotal to the field of neuropsychology. They placed rats in different environments (or “niches”) for an extended period of time. Some of the rats were in “enriched environments” consisting of large cages with stimulating activities such as mazes, ladders and wheels. Other rats were put into less enriching environments where they were either alone or with only one or two cage mates and no available stimulation.

After several weeks, the brains of the rats were dissected and studied. Rosenzweig and Diamond discovered that the rats in the enriched cages had more synapses, or brain connections, than those in the less stimulating cages. It turns out that the environmental experiences of the rats directly changed their brain structure.

via "Your brain is a rain forest" (odewire.com)

Unlike rats, we can control the environments we're in. Surely controling our own environments to create the most enriched possible space makes sense. To construct one's own life less as a cage and more as a playpen. 

I know that there is real joy and meaning to be found outside the secular system of wealth, status and eternal youth.  It’s not our fault; it’s our programming.  But the answers can’t be found in accumulating more.  You knew that already.  Well, so did I, but I’m not sure I really believed it.   I do now.  Happiness is reality minus expectations.  And Americans, in particular, have some pretty high expectations.  You do the math.    

via The Puzzle by Christopher Michel, hat tip Tim Ferriss

Totally crazy reportage in Steward Mag -- fascinating Q&A with a photographer who lived with the Yakuza.

http://stewardmag.com/yakuza/