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Seeing death as a problem, and possessing a discomfort or fear of all the suffering death causes is often dispelled by gaining a fuller perspective over time.

Not many years ago, when I was that age, death and human suffering seemed to be the most fundamental problem to apply myself to solve. In fact, I was obsessed with biotechnology for very much the same reason.

Now, I think death the least of my concerns, for the most important and exhilarating parts of life come independently of the time spent here. For those things, like life, are fleeting, and lingering for an eternity would not bring them back.

The concepts outlined are pretty good, but I want to make a counterpoint against heuristics in general. Distilled ideas like these are certainly useful for trying to grasp a complex system, but they do not, for the non-expert player, represent game knowledge. Let me explain why.

The pitfall for the average viewer/player is to take these mantras and apply them directly to what they see. They see a game where T apparently overcommits after winning an engagement at his 3rd, and wonder why he didn't take a 4th instead. Surely, this is a mistake of not getting more ahead!

An expert player might look at the same scenario and see an entirely different picture. The problem was that he scanned a 15m timing instead of a 17m timing for the Hive, so he was actually behind in that engagement (he should have decisively won with the Z's gas locked up elsewhere!). And that Broodlords would be due out in 2 production cycles, but it takes 3m for him to break-even on the new mine, and he would miss the window to secure enough of an advantage to push the game into a low-econ trade phase.

My point is that real game understanding is extremely specific. It's all about the actual state and timing. To go back to the article, that's where the marginal advantages are gained - by understanding and controlling how these extremely specific scenarios play out. The larger ideas about strategy that everyone loves fall out from the analyses of these interactions. But "getting" the general idea isn't the same as actually _getting_ it when you work out these scenarios and timings yourself from extensive playing/testing. So heuristics are really only part of the picture, the much larger part is a precise understanding of the system at work.

I know someone who might be interested in chatting with you. Do you mind throwing up your email in your profile?

The general sentiment about the TEAL classes (the ones with the clickers) is that they are really gimmicky. Supposedly, it gives the professor some feedback on what concepts are unclear and pushes the students to be attentive.

The problem seems to be that it's just unnecessary structure for something that's typically dynamic. It at least partially devolved into an attendance system - students used to just press in for missing friends, until recently when they had each student buy their own clicker.

When analyzing systems, we typically look for a transient response and the initial conditions. Extending this analogy, it would seem natural that even if we knew the characteristics of a system, the behavior of the system would be largely controlled by the inputs.

I'm not sure either element can be excluded when trying to solve this - my guess is that it's the need to fit things into our own frameworks and understanding that pushes people to grossly oversimplify.

I worked on designing something along these lines in a bioengineering design class I took for fun freshman year.

The idea (for us) was motivated by the work that Ram Sasisekharan had done in his lab along these lines:

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2005/nanocell.html

Some food for thought: There's a lot of control that wrapping stuff in nanomaterials could offer (targeted delivery/delayed delivery)- but the issues that you run into include material compatibility (the biggest problem) and difficulty getting to especially tricky organs like the lungs.

I don't mean to imply that I think all the points the article makes are bogus because there are some insightful things that are said, especially near the conclusion.

I do think the format is extremely poor, granted that it's an opening speech, and not a real paper. My only concern is that when people just see the abbreviated version (like what we have here), it can breed as much haywire logic as something blatantly false.

Also, in my shameless defense, here is a (not/credible) blurb about the value of psychology, which is a separate topic.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology#Controversy_as_a_sci...

This article is more informative for what it implies about the writer/audience than its actual contents. It dabbles in a mess of pseudoscience (plus a generous dose of bolds and underlines) and ends up drawing an absurd amount of conclusions out of paragraphs smaller than a fist.

If anything, this article just plays on the what we already know/read to pander some trite preconceptions.

If you think engineers can get carried away on tangents, I don't think you will find much better out of marketing and sales geniuses (whatever this means). Maybe it's better to save your money and invest in people that are more grounded instead of those who sling the most buzzwords around.

It's hard to build a nanotechnology social networking viral space play without engineers.