Recent discussion of the 4X game Eclipse reminded me of a responsibility. I’ve just shipped VMS Empire 1.9. This is a close descendent of the original solitaire Empire computer game that was the ur-ancestor of all 4X computer games, including Civilization and Master of Orion.

I’m a big fan of the game genre called “4X” – “explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate.”. I’ve been playing these ever since the ur-progenitor of the genre in the 1980s, Empire, and I actually still maintain an open-source C version of that game. Civilization is my favorite computer game ever, and by what I hear of it Master of Orion – the game “4X” was coined to describe – would have hooked me even harder if I’d known of it when it came out.

I particularly like SF-themed 4X games. I have previously posted a favorable review of Twilight Imperium (hereafter “TI”), a big sprawling epic of a contending-galactic-empires 4X game. But now I write to report on a game that effectively makes TI obsolete – a new design called Eclipse which I think is going to permanently raise the quality bar in 4X games.

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I’m thinking about writing another book. I won’t disclose the title or topic yet, but there’s a bit of research for it I think can be usefully crowdsourced, and may also give a clue about the book for those of you interested.

I’ve written before about the difference between descriptive and generative theories. To recap and simplify, a descriptive theory accounts for what is; a generative theory finds causal regularities beneath a descriptive account and predicts consequences not yet observed.

Now I want to zero in on a parallel difference among entire sciences. Some scientific fields – like, say, evolutionary biology – are tremendously productive of models and insights that can be applied elsewhere. On the other hand, some other sciences – like, say, astronomy – seldom export ideas or models.

Note that while it is appropriate to think of sciences that export lots of ideas as ‘generative’, the class of sciences that don’t are not merely descriptive. Astronomy, for example, has lots of generative theory inside it; astrophysics, for example makes predictions about stellar spectra and elemental abundances. But astronomy as a whole is not generative because none of its theory really informs anything outside astronomy.

So I’m going to start with a (non-exhaustive) list of scientific fields, indicating roughly how generative I think they are and what if anything they export. I invite additions and corrections from my readers.

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I’ve settled on Brad Thomas’s “Admired” with the light white skin as the new theme for this blog. It’s a relatively new theme and is being actively maintained with a support forum. which relieves my main worry about my old Live Steam theme – it’s not going to fall out of sync with the WordPress engine any time soon.

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Regulars: If you’re seeing the blog’s main page with a blue bar across the top, directly below the title, then you’re probably seeing the “Admire” theme. It’s an improvement over TwentyEleven, and I’ve figured out how to disable comment nesting. Let me know what you think: is this an improvement over the old Live Steam theme?

UPDATE: Aha! I found an even more minimalist skin, a bit closer to the look of the old Live Steam. No more blue bar, and no more boxes around comments.

I’m reverting to the old theme to see if I can fit some of the new features in it.

I agree the new theme was too whitespace-heavy, and comment nesting was not working out as well as I’d hoped. I haven’t been able to figure out how to get rid of the huge right margin on comment lists, which is the misfeature that annoys me most. By contrast, the serif font would have been easy to fix.

A significant reason comment nesting wasn’t working for me is that the administrative page doesn’t do it even when the main theme does. Thus, when commenters reacted naturally to the nesting by leaving out quotes, I could no longer follow threads.

The main reason I changed themes was to be able to support modular theme widgets, which is the newfangled way in WordPress to lay out sidebars and footers. Also, I was beginning to fear that changes in the underlying WordPress engine would break my theme, which is a custom variation of an old one called “Steam” from the 2.x version. (I changed it to be flexible to the browser size rather than having a fixed bounding box and padding, a design style I hate for both practical and philosophical reasons.)

Now I’ll try retrofitting widget support into my old theme (I call it “Live Steam”; the new one was a stock WordPress theme called TwentyEleven). Or, I might try finding a theme that already supports widgets and has a similar look and feel. The management regrets any inconvenience.

Mobile phone carriers have a crappy record of strategic planning – the history of the industry is rife with massive overinvestment in services consumers didn’t actually want, partly redeemed by massive unanticipated revenue from accidents of technology (I’m looking at you, SMS!). I’ve explained elsewhere that inflation-adjusted carrier ROI is negative.

Even so, the latest news from the analysts is pretty mind-boggling. Remember all those carrier execs rhapsodizing about how iPhone is the awesomest invention since sex? Well, it seems Apple is sucking all the profits out of the carriers that went for it. That has interesting implications for the future. Like, what happens when the carriers decide they’re done being conned?

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Hold on to your hats, I’m going to be experimenting with some theme and sidebar changes for the blog. Don’t be surprised if it looks different than you’re used to…

Got a query from a journalist today working on a major story about a certain large corporation that’s been much in the news lately. Seems the corporation’s founder has been talking up his organization’s allegiance to “the hacker way”, and she not unreasonably wanted my opinion as to whether or not this was complete horse-puckey.

So as not to steal the lady’s thunder, I won’t reveal the identity of Corporation X. I will, however, repeat a version of my answer with its identity lightly obscured – because I think these are questions we should ask any corporation that talks like that.

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Two bits of science news appeared on my radar today with not much in common except that they’re both exceedingly bad news for the political class. That more or less guarantees that they’ll get poor or nonexistent coverage in the mainstream media and is a good enough reason for me to write about them.

First, the British Meteorological Service and the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia are now admitting that global warming stopped in 1997 – there’s been no net rise in the Earth’s temperature in 15 years. And no, this isn’t an illusion produced by the 1997 El Nino peak – if you look at the chart accompanying the article you’ll see that GAT has dropped to pre-el-Nino levels.

The source makes this a particularly difficult pill for AGW alarmists to swallow – for of course, the CRU is the home of the infamous “team” whose work has been at the center of the panic. If they’re wrong now, what warrant do we have that they weren’t equally wrong then?

And, actually, it gets worse. Solar observations suggest we may be headed for an insolation minimum ever deeper than the one in 2008 that wiped out the entire 20th-century GAT rise – in fact, some NASA meteorologists are muttering darkly about a near-term recap of the Maunder Minimum and the Little Ice Age!

This of course, is bad news for the political class because AGW panic was so useful for raising taxes and increasing central control of the economy. The general public has been increasingly skeptical of late, but popular reaction so far has been nothing compared to what will be unleashed if it turns out the real climate problem of the next two decades is how to keep our crops from freezing.

Our other news today is of a study apparently showing that the heritability of IQ increases with age.

IQ, and its heritability, has been a major irritant to would-be social engineers. Because – no matter how much propaganda they sponsor to the effect that IQ is meaningless, or multifactoral, or the tests are culturally biased – IQ assessments done in the traditional way aimed at approximating Spearman’s g keep turning out to be about the single most valuable statistical measure for predicting not just academic performance but all kinds of other interesting things like lifetime earnings and propensity to criminality.

This new result is another turn of the screw. Because now it turns out that while you can raise childrens’ measured IQ with all the usual nostrums (better family circumstances, intensive schooling, etc) the effects of such interventions vanish in the adults that the children become. A particularly strong finding is that while adoptive children tend towards the IQ distribution of their foster families, the adults they become revert to the IQ distribution of their biological families.

This matters because poverty is correlated with and often caused by low intelligence. This is even more true today than it used to be, because we have a whole meritocratic apparatus aimed at scooping up poor-but-bright kids and tracking them into good schools and good jobs so they don’t stay poor. (And, as cynical as I sound in the rest of this post, be in no doubt that I think this meritocratic apparatus is a good thing and among the proudest achievements of our civilization.)

But: Our political class is heavily invested in the ideology that all the factors driving poverty are environmental. Because that means we can social-engineer our way to an egalitarian utopia by methods which – surprise! justify raising taxes and increasing central control of the economy. It’s bad news for them that adult IQ is genetically heritable and intractable to the sorts of interventions that employ thousands upon thousands of bureaucrats and busybodies.

To be fair, neither the prospect of a cooling earth nor the intractability of IQ are good news for the rest of us either. It would be nicer, in many ways, if we really lived in the political class’s fantasy world – the place where all our troubles are self-created, there’s always someone to blame, and always a political fix.

But at least, since we don’t live in that fantasy world, we can tell the political class to stuff its coercive utopianism up its own ass and demand our liberty back.

Friedmann Friese’s Power Grid is one of the acknowledged classics of the modern Eurogame genre. It embroils 2 to 6 players in a simulation of running power companies, competing to light up the most cities. Strategy involves a mix of positional play, resource management, and (most entertainingly) competition for new plants in an auction every round.

Since the game’s original release in 2004, Rio Grande Games has published an alternate power-plant deck and five pairs of expansion mapboards, introducing minor rules variations and new tactical challenges. My wife Cathy and I own all of these; we have been fans of the game since almost the date of release, and regularly compete in the World Boardgaming Championships Power Grid tournament.

With Power Grid: Robots, the game’s developers take off in a completely new direction. This expansion introduces robot players, assembled at random from tiles that define how they will behave in the auction, resource-buying, and city-building parts of each turn. With six possibilities each for five behavioral slots, one may face almost 7776 robot variations.

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Some new market research says Android tablets have now taken 39% of global market share. There are reasons to suspect that Nook and Fire tablets account for a bit more than half of that, but we’re still left with something of a mystery to explain.

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CyanogenMOD, the third-party, fully-open, bloatware-free port of Android, has recently passed a million installs. And there’s talk of creating an underground Market app for CyanogenMOD to distribute apps that the cell carriers and the MPAA/RIAA don’t want you to have.

Set this against Apple’s mind-bogglingly greedy and evil new Eula for iBooks, and it couldn’t be clearer what the ultimate stakes in the smartphone wars are.

Even in the short term, CynogenMOD’s numbers, and the plan for the Underground Market, and the wideapread revulsion against the iBooks EULA are a big deal – they’re going to crank up the pressure on cell carriers and various other malefactors in interesting ways. But maybe the most important thing CyanogenMOD’s numbers tell us is that there is, in fact, a mass market for freedom.

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Five weeks ago I wrote that direct Subversion support in reposurgeon is coming soon. I’m waiting on one final acceptance test before I ship an official 2.0; in the meantime, for those of you kinky enough to find the details exciting, description follows of why this feature has required such a protracted and epic struggle. With (perhaps entertaining) rambling through the ontology of version control systems, and at least one lesson about good software engineering practice.

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I finally got around to installing a site statistics plugin on this blog, about 20 minutes ago. There have since been 94 views.

I’m mainly interested in the order of magnitude. Do I have 1K readers per day? 10K?, 100K? My wild-ass guess is on the order of 10K. Now we’ll see.

The huge groundswell of opposition to SOPA and PIPA is having some interesting ripple effects. Barack Obama announced he would veto these bills if they came to his desk, and now it seems that Hollywood is pissed off over this.

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This is a shout out to all hackerspaces and engineering schools within easy reach of Philadelphia. I’ve got a nice little design-and-build project that would do the world some good, but I don’t have the skills or facilities to do it myself.

The problem: build a ruggedized special-purpose test enclosure to be mounted on a roof or utility pole and host a bunch of GPS sensors. The tricky part is that it needs to be outside and not under top cover (for good skyview) and thus weatherproof, but also transparent to the GPS radio frequencies. Another part of the design problem is getting data and power cabling back to my development computer.

UPDATE: I’m now pursuing a different path – trying to figure out how to build a GPS repeater on the cheap so I can effectively pipe the RF from a roof antenna to be retransmitted in my office. This has the obvious advantage that the GPS test rack will be able to live inside, near my desk, rather than outside in an enclosure that can only be reached with a ladder. So now I’m looking for a hackerspace frequented by radio hams.

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This is a status update for those of you among my regulars who have been following the saga of Sugar, our cat. She had her 90-day followup ultrasound today.

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Just when you thought the smartphone industry couldn’t get any more soap-operatic, everybody’s favorite pair of aging drama queens – Microsoft and Nokia – may be at it again. There’s a rumor, from a gossip with a good track record, that Microsoft intends to buy Nokia’s Smartphone division.

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Today the New York Times is carrying a story on Chinese fears of “cultural encirclement”.

“We must clearly see that international hostile forces are intensifying the strategic plot of westernizing and dividing China, and ideological and cultural fields are the focal areas of their long-term infiltration,†Mr. Hu said. “We should deeply understand the seriousness and complexity of the ideological struggle, always sound the alarms and remain vigilant and take forceful measures to be on guard and respond,†he added.

This quote reminds us of something too easily forgotten, which is that Communists have always taken ideological struggle seriously. Communist theory teaches them to believe that the most effective way to break the will of the opposition is to de-legitimize its ruling class, degrade its culture, destroy its confidence in its own institutions and its own way of life.

Hu Jintao believes that the West is waging a conscious memetic war against Communist China – because he knows that Communists including himself have been waging a conscious memetic war against Western civilization since the 1840s. Sadly, this is not yesterday’s news.

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