Re: "China Blames Online Games for Drugs, Murder, Teen Pregnancy"

Reposting for posterity here a comment I made on this article in response to some guy asking "When did your children were listening to Chaikovskiy or Shopen LAST TIME?" - implying that it's a positive and appropriate step for China to dictate how the people should entertain themselves because of some cultural degeneration that has taken place in the Western world due to our poor choice in music, computer games or whatever else:

@Kolyan:

There would be no Tchaikovsky, Chopin, Scriabin, Dave Brubeck, Debussy, Yoko Kanno, Freddie Mercury or other clever and creative composers if governments decided and enforced what everybody should enjoy or create.

People DID commit murders, take drugs, get pregnant as teens and of course, piss their lives away, long before the age of digital computers. There were stupid, psychotic and unwise people among us throughout history - if you want to improve that then improve the education system (rather than making it a soulless rat-race) and improve social conditions (not least, healthy freedom of speech).

And re: family life being damaged - are you kidding? The internet has served to bring people closer together that may have otherwise grown apart. I chat to cousins, aunts and uncles on Facebook who live in other countries and who I might not otherwise see for years.

Sure, people get sucked into rubbish games and waste their lives, but this is a fault of the person, not the games (or pornography or whatever you want to blame). Perhaps without the social outlet of gaming, some of these people would end up addicted to heroin or committing suicide - what good could banning online gaming really do? At least these people have some sense of community and friendship.

China, stop micromanaging the people and trying to tell them how they should (or should not) entertain themselves. It's absolutely none of your business, and a very inappropriate step into personal liberties.

PicArt

This video forced me to leave the room and crouch in the kitchen, doubled up and crying with laughter, for about 3 minutes. Even thinking about it is threatening to set me off again...

Desk Topography

The general arrangement of my desk:

• The z-axis (which passes through the gravitational centre of the earth) is ordered such that, on average, higher items are more recent. Papers at the bottom of the z-axis are sometimes partially chemically bonded with the desk. (That is to say, new shit is randomly piled upon old shit which is stuck to an eight month-old coffee stain)


• Although the x-/y-axis positions of items are extremely noisy, there is a tendency for locality to correspond with the degree to which papers are topically related. (This means that everything is scattered all over the place, except for things that I had piled together for some unknown reason some months ago)


• Rubbish follows a Gaussian distribution from the central boundary of a disc 10cm from the keyboard and ending at arm's reach... (This implies that the rubbish bin is slightly out of arm's reach and is thus underutilised)