Robot Claw – Page 628 – “Life In The So-Called Space Age”

Game Stuff

September 23, 2010

This weekend I’m playing in the pre-release tournament for the new MTG expansion Scars Of Mirrodin. It’s on Saturday, and should hopefully be as much fun as the last one I played in. Or perhaps even more so, since I like artifact decks and Mirrodin promises a scad of them.

Here are a couple of cards from the set:

The one on the left is the promo we’ll get for competing in the pre-release. The one on the right is everything I love about Magic. I hope I get one of them (and I have a good chance I reckon, since I’m buying a box of boosters) and can’t wait to use it in a game. Does that make me a Johnny I wonder?

Anyway I’ll be tweeting during the tourney and blogging the results, so stay tuned.

In other game news I’m still hopelessly addicted to Dragon Quest IX, which is probably the best DS game ever made. I’ve been focusing again recently on killing some of these guys:

To get my character up to a ‘Sage +4’. If you have a DS, then you simply need to own this game (you know who I’m talking to don’t you?)

School has been extremely busy. Much more than ever in fact, and it rarely leaves me with time to just sit down and relax. As such I haven’t been playing many non-portable games recently but when I can, I’ve put time into Infamous on the PS3:

This is a game I’ve had my eye on for some time. It’s a sandbox game that tells the story of a man that gains super powers (related to electricity) and battles against a mysterious group that evil intent. The graphics, gameplay and story are all top-notch, and I can honestly say had I paid full price I would definitely be happy with the purchase. Given I got the game for a mere $18 in the Target budget bin means I got an absolute bargain!

It really is an excellent game, and if you have a PS3 I think you could play a lot worse.

In other news I’ve become strangely addicted to ancient issues of Dragon magazine. I’m reading them cover-to-cover regardless of the content and in the last week alone have learned some fascinating information like how to run court cases in the Top Secret game (a spy RPG that no one ever bought or played…) or what % of hits on a flumph hit the top and what % hit the bottom. Thank god for 27-year-old magazines, else I’d never know such info.

What’s a flumph you ask?

This is a flumph:

Class

September 16, 2010

The semester is three weeks old now and I haven’t mentioned what I’m doing here on the blog.

The course I’m teaching is an introductory physics course, and this semester I have about 135 students. In addition I am managing the ‘discussion groups’ (Australians: think ‘tutor groups’) for all students enrolled in the intro course, about 380 in total. There are nine discussion groups, and I’m teaching one of them as well.

So far I have found things to be quite busy, perhaps busier than ever before. Having such a large class naturally translates to many more students needing of my time.

I decided to go with two innovations this semester: online homework and clickers.

Online homework is a natural evolution of teaching, and it’s exactly as it sounds. The students visit a website where they are presented with the questions and must input the answers. An advantage of the system is the values are different for each student (so they can’t just enter their friends answers) and they get instant feedback. It is very customizable, eliminates the problem of how to grade 380 homeworks a week and I’m liking it a lot so far.

This is a clicker:

It is an wireless electronic voting device. In addition to the on/off button, there are 5 voting buttons (A through E) that the user can push to make a vote. A base station collects and tabulates the votes. I have the base station, and as part of the decision to use clickers I need to structure my lectures around them. This means putting questions to the class periodically (my goal is a minimum of four per lecture) so they can vote on them.

Sometimes they are just for information (“Have you registered the homework yet?”), sometimes they are conceptual questions (“Does a coin flipped coin fall faster going up or going down?”) and sometimes I put actual problems on the screen and give the students a few minutes to work them out and choose their answer.

Clickers give the students a way to anonymously test themselves during the lectures, which is important. It makes them think about the material more than they would in a passive class environment, especially since they know the next slide may be testing them. But I have found the best use of the clicker is to give a question and then wait a while before revealing the answer, or perhaps give a question for them to guess before revealing the information required to calculate the result.

For instance, yesterday I gave this question (click to enlarge):

Everyone (including myself) were astounded to see the voting results. Of the 108 votes registered, exactly 54 said True and 54 said False. 50% each way precisely! This is an ideal result in my opinion, because everyone wants to know the answer much more than had the voting gone (say), 90%/10%.

I made them wait a bit, for the next slide was an informational (ie. beyond the scope of the course) on air resistance, followed by this slide:

So the answer is False.

The last statement though. Previously in the class I had given a problem about firing bullets up into the air (99% of the examples I use in class I make up myself) and the velocity at which they return to Earth. Even considering the effects of air resistance bullets can be lethal upon their return. This may seem unlikely, but in researching the facts I discovered that a 1992 report revealed that the city of LA averaged 1.8 deaths per year between 1985 and 1992 due to bullets falling from the sky. The deaths were clustered around January 1 and July 4, times at which overexcited revelers may find it amusing to put their guns up and fire.

In addition to my classwork I am also striving to get other obligations complete. The other day I completed a paper to be printed in the proceedings of the 2010 SPIE conference (topic: “Modeling complex x-ray optical systems”) as well as a poster for a symposium this Friday at school. I’m also giving a seminar next Tuesday on the same topic, and soon plan to return my attentions to writing my PhD dissertation.

Wish me luck!

Basic

September 7, 2010

I’ve always been enamoured of the basic land cards in MTG. I used to sort my lands so I kept a copy of each unique card separate from the bulk that I used in decks. I valued the more exotic examples, and considered them an important part of my collection.

< Unhinged

So is it any wonder that a few months back I decided to start putting the basic lands – and just the basic lands – together in a binder. I was then bitten by the collecting bug and went out and purchased basic lands (at the price of $0.10 each) to fill the empty spots in the collection. The binder grew, the pages filled. And eventually my ‘land binder’ had become a fairly complete collection of MTG basic land.

< Mirrodin

How many cards is this you ask? The answer is… about 600 cards.

I have every land for each expansion from Tempest onwards, excluding all of the non-full-art Zendikar lands (that were only in premades). I have most of the Ice Age land, except some examples are from Cold Snap. And I have a motley collection of Unlimited lands. As for core sets, my collection of land from 8th Edition onwards is complete. I also have all of 6th Edition but (amusingly) am missing quite a bit of 7th Edition.

< Zendikar

Harder (in some cases much) to obtain are the lands that were packed into the non basic products Wizards has sold over the years. And even then I have a great deal of these. I’m speaking of such things as Beat Down, Portal, Duel Decks or the Un-sets. That said the biggest gaps in my collection are definitely in this area. For instance I have zero Battle Royale lands, and only 2 examples from Portal: Three Kingdoms (not surprising, since it was the expansion with the smallest print run in English).

Speaking of language, I only have 2 foreign language lands (both Japanese). One of these days I’ll make a better effort to obtain lands in each of the 9 languages MTG is printed.

< Lorwyn

Obtaining lands is a bit tricky because few people seem to value them. As such, checking retailers online is rarely successful since they will treat all swamps as the same card irrelevant of expansion. Isolating the gaps in the collecting in the pre-numbered days is also proving to be tricky, and my research has even revealed a few errors on Gatherer. I shall continue though – after all a collection is started to be completed!

< Kamigawa

A benefit of my land-interest is that when a new product or expansion is announced I find myself as interested in the land as anything else! Although I’ve only been back ‘into’ MTG for about a year I have to say the most exciting post on their website in that time was when they showed the Eldrazi lands. Not only did they form a mural, but the fact they even existed at all (new lands for the third in a block?) was something unexpected and delightful.

Scars Of Mirrodin will be out in a few weeks. I haven’t seen the lands yet but since it is a sequel to Mirrodin and that set had some of the most unique and striking land art in the history of MTG I am optimistic that we’re in for a treat 🙂