Community Gallery - What's New

Mather Campground, South Rim Grand Canyon "This photo was taken on Feb. 28, 2010 in the Mather Campground at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. Snowfall this year has been heavy with about 4 feet on the ground where shaded and only one loop of the campground was barely kept open. The campground loop had two heated restrooms with running water. It was an easy walk to the general store, which is open all year. There were several hardy tent campers present, but sites were cleared to accommodate about 20 feet maximum." ~ Paul More campground photos Submit a photo (photo courtesy Paul) Community Gallery - What's New originally appeared on About.com Camping on Tuesday, March 16th, 2010 at 11:40:03. Permalink | Comment | Email this

View original story : weekly+general+audience+paul+vi+hall Feed : About.com Camping

Chris Paul Spoofs 'Paranormal Activity'

Morris Peterson of the Hornets recently launched a personal website , and on it, he posted a couple of comically-intentioned videos. The first stars Mo-Pete himself, but unfortunately, it's even less funny than the one Roger Mason Jr. attempted a few weeks back. The second one, though, which ... — full article at nba.fanhouse.com

View original story : weekly+general+audience+paul+vi+hall Feed : Top Chris Paul News, Videos, and Blogs - BallHype

Your Review: Indie strategy games

Screen Play's resident armchair general Sam Spackman returns today to pen another piece introducing you to strategy games that you probably haven't even heard of, let alone played. But as the 29-year-old Sydney-sider explains, the independent fringe is increasingly where gamers can find true innovation in the gaming marketplace. Sam today reviews two games produced by one-man teams that can provide countless hours of entertainment. Click below for his Your Review contribution, which is in the running to win a PlayStation 3 console courtesy of Sony Computer Entertainment. Indie strategy games Recent activities at Infinity Ward, as mentioned in several posts on Screen Play last week, have spawned a lot of discussion about the nature of development studios, publishers and the lack of originality that comes with big money. But with the maturity of digital distribution, small scale game developers now have an effective means to get their product directly to consumers without huge development overheads. My previous post talked about Paradox Interactive, a small Swedish company developing (excellent) strategy games. But there are even smaller developers out there, producing and selling great strategy titles. While they may not have all the bells and whistles of AAA titles, these are almost perfectly formed games in their own right, and will give hours of enjoyment to strategy enthusiasts. Today I'm reviewing two indie strategy games; Armageddon Empires and AI War: Fleet Command. Each of these games were effectively developed by one man teams and released on their websites as digital downloads. Armageddon Empires When it comes to AI and original gameplay, this game gets a big tick. In a sentence you would describe it as a Post -apocalyptic, 4X, card game. Like Fallout meets Civilisation meets Magic: The Gathering. It was developed by the one man development team - Vic Davis at Cryptic Comet. There's not much to the map, just hexes and unit cards. There are four factions (Humans, Mutants, Machines and Aliens) and each faction has dozens of unique units, buildings and heroes. Like Magic, you build your deck before playing (there are starter decks to get you going). Cards are worth points, and you add cards until you reach the point cap. If I was playing as the Machines for example, I could build my army in many different ways, either by adding a few massive and expensive Collossus robots or lots of cheap cyborgs (who are weak, but can be upgraded). Once the game starts, you can only hold seven or eight cards at once, drawn at random. You play cards each turn, placing them on the board and moving them around. The game is turn based and at the start of each turn you get 'Action Points' (APs) to spend. When you have used up your APs, the turn is over. The strategic choices multiply exponentially from then on. You can scout (cloaked or de-cloaked), research technology, build armies, research tactics, claim cities and resource points, expand supply lines, assassinate other heroes, lay mines, steal technology, drop nukes, launch air strikes, etc, etc. But you can't do it all, and no one strategy or option will guarantee you victory. Some games will be over in 10 turns because you made the wrong choice, but you can look back and know exactly what that wrong choice was. Each faction is unique and have their own strategies which are more or less useful, depending on circumstances. The artificial intelligence is great. It gets the same resources you do. It gets intelligence on enemy positions through scouting, the same as you do. It also has an aggression factor. If you don't bother it, it won't bother you (for a while). But start killing its units, and it will start harrying you and sending more troops your way. If you're careful, you can avoid early wars and let the AI teams fight each other. Armageddon Empires is strategy distilled into its essence. There have also been two expansions released for it already which are also on the site. There is nothing wasted, no filler or dead weight. Every choice you make or don't make has a consequence, and it is definitely one of the top strategy games I've played. AI War: Fleet Command Like Armageddon Empires, AI War: Fleet Command was developed by pretty much one guy, Chris Park. The game is available on his site here. Troy Goodfellow at the strategy game nerd blog flash of steel (www.flashofsteel.com) characterised this game as a 'massive 4X real time tower defence strategy game'. The most common comparison AI War gets is with Sins of a Solar Empire. But it has similarities to many 4X space games going back to Elite and the Australian SSG classic Reach for the Stars. The game universe consists of a series of solar systems and planets connected by wormholes. Let's talk about the scale in this game, since it's important. Depending on the size of the universe, the AI's will have around 20,000 to 50,000 separate units. Fighters, bombers, missile cruisers, etc. You start off with a grand total of zero. But that's OK because the AI in this game also has a threat indicator. At the start of the game you have a zero threat level. As you gradually take over systems, this level rises and the AI begins to pay more attention to you. Some systems will have high resources, but taking them will result in higher aggression and the AI will send more and better ships at you to deal with. And how do you deal with them? With turrets. The turrets. My god, the turrets! This is where the tower defence element comes in. There are tractor beam turrets, missile turrets, laser turrets, sniper turrets, anti-sniper turrets, etc, etc. The systems you control will get regular waves of enemies, just like a tower defence game that you have to eliminate. The higher the aggression, the heavier the waves. So the game plays like an insurgency. You start off as the rebels (freedom fighters, terrorists, whatever) slowly building up and trying to avoid the wrath of the evil empire who could crush you like a bug. Systems have finite resources so you have to keep expanding, but expansion must be planned very carefully or the game is over. With this gameplay, you don't need a story, the gameplay is a story in itself. The titular AI is tough as nails. It will split its forces, fall back and attack weak points. When 30,000 ships jump into your system out of nowhere and you have only have a few hundred turrets guarding the wormhole and the rest of your fleet of 20,000 ships scrambling in as well; it's total chaos. But chaos that will ultimately resolve itself along the lines of the good or bad strategic decisions you made. So there you have it. Two totally different games that in the end are very similar. Both are great examples of solid gameplay implemented properly that overcome the problems that many other strategy games fall victim to. I can only recommend you try them out and support some indie developers who are doing a great job. - Sam Spackman Screen Play readers can submit articles or ideas for consideration in Your Turn and Your Review using the email address screenplayblog@gmail.com. The best blog post published on Screen Play between March 1 and March 31, 2010 as judged by Jason Hill will win a PlayStation 3 console from Sony Computer Entertainment worth $499. The next prize winner will be announced on March 31. Only Australian residents are eligible and the judge's decision is final. Comment on this Entry | More Screen Play | More WAtoday.com.au Blogs

View original story : weekly+general+audience+paul+vi+hall Feed : Screen Play

Chris Selley's Full Pundit: "Why did the Canadian cross the road?"

Continental drift It appears that Canadians are becoming more conservative … and at least one of us doesn't have much of a problem with outright authoritarianism, either. To those of you decrying the push for random roadside breathalyzer tests in the name of “freedom” and “rights” and such, the Calgary Herald's Naomi Lakritz says the following: “Be thankful you have a life into which the state can stick its nose into.” We would take strenuous issue with this statement — and may yet — but it's going to take most of the day for us to calm down from reading it, so y'all will have to wait. Sorry about that. “Why did the Canadian cross the road?” asks Preston Manning in The Globe and Mail. “To get to the middle.” Yeah … that doesn't actually make any sense. But, soldiering on, Manning's point is that the Canadian political centre is moving to the right. He's got some Manning Centre for Democracy-commissioned survey numbers to back him up, and it says here he may well be right. But along the way he tries to sell the statement that “nothing is more important than family” — with which 89% of Canadians unsurprisingly agree — as an inherently conservative position, as opposed to an inherently human one. And then he tries to sell the popularity of pulling out of Afghanistan in 2011 as a natural result of Canadians' increasingly conservative nature, which is just weird. The whole thing comes off as a bit of a stretch. The Toronto Star's editorialists express grave doubt that former Supreme Court justice Frank Iacobucci will be able to come to a decision on the Afghan detainee documents he's tasked with examining, under the “imposing terms of reference” handed down by the Justice Minister, quickly enough to avoid “the opposition parties [writing] off this process, hold[ing] the government in contempt, and press[ing] for the full public inquiry that Harper wants to avoid.” We agree, although if the Liberals conclude at some point that the issue isn't giving them any traction, it seems to us they might well just lose interest and let Mr. Iacobucci do his work. The Post's John Ivison believes Jim Flaherty is or will soon be considering swinging his giant money-axe at Canada's regional development agencies — which promises, as Ivison says, an entertaining slap-fight between Mr. Flaherty and Peter MacKay. Provincial affairs The Star's Rosie DiManno lets it all hang out, as she sometimes does, in a sort of stream-of-consciousness/standup comedy routine on the subject of Ontario MPP Bill Murdoch's proposal to kick Toronto out of Ontario — and, as usually happens when she lets it all hang out, it all goes pear-shaped rather quickly. To wit, this sentence, in which she tries to affect both a sophisticated urban stereotype and an intolerant backwoods hick stereotype: “Murdoch, who represents Bruce-Grey-Owen-Sound, which I think is somewhere due north, made his comments this week at a meeting of the Bruce Country Federation of Agriculture, which sounds vaguely gay-Commie to me.” Yuck. The Vancouver Sun's Ian Mulgrew seems pleased that charges have finally been laid related to the sinking of B.C. Ferries' Queen of the North, but as it sank four freaking years ago, he's not inclined to hand out any medals to the Attorney-General's office just yet. And there's certainly no guarantee justice will eventually be done. “In the last decade,” he notes, “the province's top prosecutors have botched the Air India terrorism case, participated mutely in an obviously bent process for investigating police-involved incidents, whitewashed the manifestly flawed RCMP investigation of Robert Dziekanski's death and couldn't get a guy caught bloody-handed in an abattoir of body parts convicted of first-degree murder.” Ouch. Duly noted The Ottawa Citizen's Dan Gardner explains why the media, and the general public in turn, are so much more fascinated with Colleen LaRose — aka “Jihad Jane,” the woman, “invariably described as a 'green-eyed blonde,'” who plotted to murder a Swedish cartoonist — than they are with Andrew Joseph Stack, the Texas loon who flew his plane into an IRS building in Austin, successfully murdering someone. Basically, it's because one fits the Islamic terrorism narrative whilst adding “a delightful sprinkle of novelty,” while the other fits an older narrative — that of homegrown, anti-government terrorism — that no one's been interested in since Sept. 10, 2001. National Post cselley@nationalpost.com

View original story : weekly+general+audience+paul+vi+hall Feed : Full Comment

Ousted director’s supporters plot great instauration at Royal Institution

The fight for the future of Britain’s Royal Institution has heated up again, with a group of rebel members attempting to reinstate its controversial former director Susan Greenfield. Greenfield was made redundant earlier this year and has since begun legal action against the RI, alleging sexual discrimination. Now her supporters have triggered a special general meeting at which RI members will vote on a proposal to replace the entire board of trustees (who made Greenfield’s redundant in the first place). However, the Times says that the letter sent out yesterday to members regarding the meeting contains a “unanimous recommendation to members to vote against the resolution”. The RI is in a financially precarious position at the moment and there are fears that potential funders will shy away should the coup succeed. “The wholesale replacement of the council and officers at this time would create further unnecessary instability,” says Chris Rofe, chief executive officer of the institution (Times). A spokeswoman for the RI confirmed that all members would be invited to attend the 12 April meeting where the rebel plans would be voted on. Past coverage The Royal Institution's troubles continue – 12 February Greenfield ousted from Royal Institution – 11 January Royal Institution faces cash crisis – 16 December Royal Institution spat hits the media – 08 December Image: photograph of the RI by Matt From London via Flickr under Creative Commons.

View original story : weekly+general+audience+paul+vi+hall Feed : The Great Beyond

Tasha Kheiriddin: A Page out of history

Is Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page channelling the ghost of a late governor of the Bank of Canada? On the second anniversary of the creation of the PBO, Mr. Page has stared down Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative government on everything from the cost of the Afghan mission to projections on the deficit. The saga brings to mind a political and fiscal standoff of 50 years ago, that of James Elliott Coyne and Tory Prime Minister John Diefenbaker. Mr. Coyne served as governor General from the Bank of Canada (BOC) from 1956 to 1961. A vocal advocate of economic nationalism and tight money policies, he ran afoul of the Conservative government’s expansionist ambitions. Mr. Coyne’s public critiques provided fodder for the opposition and enraged Mr. Diefenbaker, who saw in them the makings of a Liberal plot. In 1961, his government introduced a bill designed to strip Mr. Coyne of his office, after the latter refused a resignation request by the BOC board, allegedly made at the behest of Cabinet. The issue quickly became one of responsible government — just who should run the BOC, its board or the government? — and of the right of civil servants to speak out and publicize information, including letters to Cabinet ministers, about issues which they felt were in the national interest. Fast forward to 2010. The government created the PBO in 2008 under the Accountability Act, to provide independent assessments of the nation’s finances, the government’s estimates and trends in the Canadian economy, and upon request from a committee or parliamentarian, to estimate the financial cost of any government proposal. The office operates, however, as a subset of the Parliamentary Library, which allows those committees and parliamentarians to withhold its research from public disclosure as “privileged” if they choose. As a result, not even six months into the job, Mr. Page began clashing with the government, after the POB publicly revealed that Canada’s mission to Afghanistan will cost taxpayers $18.1-billion by 2011, not the $8-billion forecast by the government. In a strongly worded letter in October, 2008, the Speakers of both Houses of Parliament accused Mr. Page of overstepping his mandate: “Parliament’s intention in establishing the budget officer position … was to augment and enhance the resources available to parliamentarians ... It was certainly not intended to put the Officer at the centre of parliamentary or public debates or to impinge on parliamentarians’ constitutional function of overseeing the Executive.” Mr. Page countered that he cannot do his job under such restrictions, because he cannot make his findings public. He has the support of Liberals as well as a number of Tories, including Senator Hugh Segal. And he has an international precedent: In the United States, the Congressional Budget Office, upon which the POB is modeled, makes its reports public. They currently show President Barack Obama’s deficit projections, like those of Mr. Harper, to be greatly out of whack. The Coyne and Page affairs share several similarities. In both cases, the head of an independent economic entity publicly contradicted the government’s line on the nation’s finances. Both offices faced Conservative administrations that tolerate dissent about as well as a bull tolerates a matador. And in both cases, economic issues rapidly evolved into questions of accountability and responsibility, rather than the original policy debate itself. Certainly, there are differences. The first is the extent of power. Mr. Coyne presided over a far more influential institution than Mr. Page. The BOC held independent authority over national monetary policy, including the money supply and interest rates. By comparison, the POB has very few teeth. The second is perception of political interference. Coyne was appointed under the Liberal administration of Louis St. Laurent, which fed Conservative charges of partisanship. Page was appointed by the Tories themselves, with appropriate plaudits by Government House Leader Peter Van Loan. That fact makes the current standoff particularly interesting; there is no story as juicy as politicians hoisted on their own petards. For his part, Mr. Coyne was named “newsmaker of the year” by The Canadian Press in 1961, and the drama even made the pages of Time magazine. Negative public reaction to the affair contributed to the demise of Mr. Diefenbaker’s government, which plummeted from 208 to 116 seats in the 1962 federal election, before falling to Lester B. Pearson’s Liberals in 1963. It remains to be seen whether the issues with PBO will grow to generate such reaction — or such repercussions. Mr. Page appears determined to establish his office as a serious player in government accountability, much as Sheila Fraser did with the Auditor General’s office. Will he meet the same fate as Mr. Coyne if he continues to speak out? Canadians who care about open government and financial accountability should hope not. National Post tkheiriddin@nationalpost.com

View original story : weekly+general+audience+paul+vi+hall Feed : National Post - Full Comment

Save the Date Puerto Rican Political Prisoners: A Panel Discussion! April 7TH, NYC

Puerto Rican Political Prisoners: A Panel Discussion! Wednesday, April 7th 2010 6-8pm Union Theological Seminary Social Hall The Church and Society program and the Latin@ Caucus of Union Theological Seminary would like to invite the faculty and student community of Union, as well as the wider community, to a panel discussion regarding the plight of the Puerto Rican [...]

View original story : weekly+general+audience+paul+vi+hall Feed : VivirLatino

A Hot Mop+A Walk-In Freezer=Recipe for Disaster

My first job was at a greasy all-you-can eat joint. I was a dishwasher with a short temper and suffered from a distinctly foul mouth. The job was horrible: I would scrape plates, wash dishes and bus tables. I was, in general, the kitchen's whipping boy. If Chef King ever moves to the U.K., maybe they'll hire him here.The job took a turn for the worse about three months in. We were having a slow night and I was goofing off in the back. The manager saw me playing pool on the dish table with a wooden spoon and a lime. I was promptly sent to do the worst cleaning jobs that he could think of. I started with the underside of the dish machine and scrubbed off layers of grime that had been building up for years. My second task was to mop up a spill in the freezer. I filled the mop bucket with hot water, grabbed the greasy old mop and headed off to the freezer. As I was heading in, one of the cooks stopped and asked what I was doing. I explained that the manager had told me to mop the freezer. “Oh,” he said, trying to hide a smile. Then he lowered his voice and tried to sound serious “Make sure you do a good job.” As I pulled the bucket into the freezer, it began to instantly fog up, the hot water reacting with the cold air. I took out the mop from the water and plopped it onto the floor. Then I tried to swing the mop in a traditional side-to-side motion. The mop did not move. I yanked hard on the handle and still, it did not move. I tried to take a step and could not. Confused, I looked through the mist and saw that my shoes and the mop were frozen to the floor. At that moment, the freezer door swung open and the whole restaurant crew, including the manager, were staring at me trying to pry myself off the freezer floor. The first laugh was reserved but the following laughs were over the top. Then the flash of a Polaroid went off in my face. We usually used the camera for birthdays, but I guess catching the foul-mouthed dishwasher stuck to the freezer floor was reason enough. For the next few months, my picture hung next to the schedule for everyone to see. Randy King is the Executive Chef at Sysco Food Services of Idaho. He has served as the Executive Chef at several locations in Boise including Richard’s in Hyde Park, Crane Creek Country Club and the Doubletree Riverside Hotel. Randy is a member of the American Culinary Federation and has been awarded the elite status of Certified Executive Chef. He can typically be found behind a stove making a mess ... and something delicious to eat. [ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

View original story : weekly+general+audience+paul+vi+hall Feed : Boise Weekly

Dirty fingertips leave a trail on personal computers

Bacteria lurking on human hands could apparently be used to identify criminals in future, rather than the conventional swirly fingerprints that we all have. So says a paper published online in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science. Biologist Noah Fierer from the University of Colorado at Boulder and his colleagues compared bacteria found on three individuals’ computer mice and keyboards (yuck!) and compared those bacteria to the bugs found on those people’s fingertips. Frierer says that these bacteria from the hands match the bacteria on the specific computer kit that those individuals owned better than on the other two people’s and could be used for identification in a forensic setting. Fierer also did a test to work out whether the bacteria on an object are more similar to the bacteria found on the owner’s skin than to the bugs on the general population. This involved sequencing the bacteria found on 9 computer mice, and comparing the sequences to a database of bacteria from the hands of 270 individuals. In all 9 cases, the bacterial community on each mouse was significantly more similar to the bacteria on the owner’s hand than to other hands in the database. So how does this help forensics? Well, it may not because the study has some limitations. First is the small sample sizes – as pointed out nicely by Ed Yong in his blog. Yong also questions the likelihood of this technique making it to the forensic bench, arguing that “forensics requires a far higher threshold of certainty than skin bacteria are likely to provide”. Nevertheless, the thought of grubby hands and forensics has grabbed the interest of a number of reporters. Wired, NPR, The Beeb, LA Times. But don’t expect to have your keyboard swabbed for bugs just yet. As Martin Blaser, chairman of medicine at New York University, told the LA Times, "this is not ready for prime time." Image: Punchstock

View original story : weekly+general+audience+paul+vi+hall Feed : The Great Beyond - Blog Posts with Comments

'Priest' Behind-the-Scenes Sneak Peek Is So Raspy

This behind-the-scenes sneak peek of Priest is not going to answer the question you want it to answer. That is, you still won't know why Paul Bettany is playing a ridiculous, CGI-vampire-killing holy figure action hero in Priest when he just played a ridiculous, CGI-demonic-angel-killing holy figure action hero in Legion. I have no idea why that's happening. But if you also have the question, "In Priest, will Paul Bettany produce a Clint Eastwood-as-Batman voice, because that's clearly the voice of a priest?" I do have that answer:

View original story : weekly+general+audience+paul+vi+hall Feed : I Watch Stuff - The Best Movie News Ever