First Draft

Winning the internet, all of it

It's not often, lately anyway, that we read a story that makes us want to fistbump the whole interwebs and shout, "Fuck yeah humans!" 

But this is one of those stories. 

Video-game players have solved a molecular puzzle that stumped scientists for years, and those scientists say the accomplishment could point the way to crowdsourced cures for AIDS and other diseases.

"This is one small piece of the puzzle in being able to help with AIDS," Firas Khatib, a biochemist at the University of Washington, told me. Khatib is the lead author of a research paper on the project, published today by Nature Structural & Molecular Biology.

The feat, which was accomplished using a collaborative online game called Foldit, is also one giant leap for citizen science — a burgeoning field that enlists Internet users to look for alien planets, decipher ancient texts and do other scientific tasks that sheer computer power can't accomplish as easily.

"People have spatial reasoning skills, something computers are not yet good at," Seth Cooper, a UW computer scientist who is Foldit's lead designer and developer, explained in a news release. "Games provide a framework for bringing together the strengths of computers and humans."

Elder-Wii

This is awesome:

Youngster giving Wiis to seniors

A Christmas trip to visit his great-grandmother in a nursing home sparked an ongoing service project for 10-year-old Lorenzo Little.

His trip to Heartsong Nursing Home in Belleville left an impression.

"(Residents) always look so bored," the Janesville boy said.

"So I thought that at home, if I enjoyed my Wii, why wouldn't they enjoy a Wii?" he said.

He talked with his parents, Greg and April, about his idea during the car ride home.

With their help, Lorenzo's goal is to raise money to put Nintendo Wii gaming systems in as many area assisted living and senior centers as possible. The "Elder-Wii Project" already has raised enough money to buy and deliver one Wii to the Heartsong Nursing Home.

Lorenzo started by calling family and friends to explain his project and seek donations.

"I ended with about $300 in a month," he said.

He's also been a guest on The Stan Milam Show on WCLO radio and has a Facebook fan group with more than 150 fans.

Lorenzo delivered the Wii to his great-grandmother's nursing home last month and showed her how to bowl and box on the gaming system.

He's raised more than $600, and a second Wii soon will be delivered to a yet-to-be announced senior home in the area. He's working on plans for his third donation.

Lorenzo and his parents are planning fundraisers to start in spring. GameStop in the Janesville Mall is working with the family to supply the Wiis.

A.

Resenting the Youth

Amanda comes close to articulating the thing that always trips my wires about Those Kids Today stories:

As much as it defeats the desires of curmudgeons to believe that kids these days are somehow losing their way, the truth is that IQ scores have been rising steadily over the generations, a phenomenon known as the Flynn effect.  Science writer Steven Johnson wrote an entire book, Everything Bad Is Good For You, where he effectively argues that the very "overstimulation" that people like Farndale resent is probably why people keep getting smarter.  Having spent the past two days deeply immersed in the newest version of Super Mario Brothers, I can safely agree with Johnson that video games actually worked my brain pretty hard, with no noticeable decline in my literacy skills.  After all, a good video game is a rapid fire series of problem-solving situations.  Shouldn't we want kids to spend their leisure time working on that? (Scientist friend on hand wants it to be known that video games are used as therapy for ADHD kids, to retrain their brains to concentrate.  Also that it works a lot better than boring kids to death in public schools.)

[snip]

Not that I think any of this reality will cause the curmudgeons of the world to lay off complaining about kids and their video games.  Once you give yourself permission to resent kids for having access to pleasures that baffle you, you're probably not going to be in the mood to applaud them for also being better at problem-solving and having greater comfort with rapidly changing technology.

Emphasis mine, because it is resentment, and the reason it makes me crazy is that it's unproductive. Look, man, I'm sorry I don't have to walk uphill both ways to school, but that ... what ... I mean, what does that even DO? If I apologize for not knowing how hard you had it, can we move on to cure cancer and end poverty and shit now? We have things to DO here.

I pull this shit, too, I'm not immune, I wear 1940s dresses and write about local history and this is my current favorite movie, but let's not pretend it's a dodge. For example, my telling you all about how I used to go home from my job at the paper with line tape in my hair and six bandages on my fingers from Xacto knife cuts and covered in wax from doing paste-up may be funny to us both, but it doesn't actually help you get the paper out your own self. Living in the world we live in, what are we to do? Memory lane is awesome, I live there part of the time. But memory lane starts being a destructive escape the moment you start acting like it's a year-round hangout and using it as a way to avoid worrying that somebody is passing you by.

Now, granted, not everyone thrives with the Wii or the Interwebs jacked directly back into their heads, but this is exactly the point. This one-size-fits-all attitude that the future is always scary and entertainment is always suspect and pop culture is always destructive and TV rots your brain and typing on a typewriter is just more virtuous because it's REAL (tm) and whatnot is just as dumb as saying the iPhone is automatically better than anything ever and Facebook is the new Christmas and you old, motherfucker and we should all stop speaking to one another in anything but binary and burn all our books because they take up space in the library. People do not all react the same way to everything.

We all have things that shaped us and we all have values but this turns into an argument not about those values but about brand loyalties. The Internet does not prevent us from working hard or having meaningful interaction with others, not by its own self. Video games by the nature of their existence do not make someone an anti-social asshole, they just help people who are already anti-social assholes reinforce those tendencies; if it wasn't video games it'd be something else. Didn't we have this dumbassed argument after Columbine, already? I don't even play video games, because I'm lazy as hell and it takes work to build up any skill at those things, but I get so nuts when people try to blame the existence of morons on anything but those morons.

And it doesn't really say anything all that nice about the speaker, either, saying that your generation was awesome just because you didn't have all this stuff. Better to argue, really, that it was your superior work ethic and your general adherence to Good Things in The World and your innate power of Great that kept you from sucking, and not a lack of access to Playstation.

A.

Pimpin'

My little brother's fine establishment. If any of you are in the Racine-Milwaukee area, stop by and check it out. The owner personally kicked my ass at air hockey last week.

Tell him you're a friend of his sister's and he may or may not go easy on you.

A.

The Value of Madness

Don’t give me a pill or send me to a shrink. It’s just the Madness. I’m fine.

Each year about this time, I nestle into the couch with an over-sized box of Wheat Thins and 923 cans of Diet Coke. I’ve got the TV, laptop and computer all humming as I scour the monitors for the sign of the next greatest game. Eventually, The Missus will come downstairs and say something like, “For God sakes! Open a window and let some of this radiation out of here! The Midget’s pet rabbit is starting to mutate!”

March Madness cuts a wide path through the workforce each year. A lot of “personal days” get used and a ton of “24-hour flu” hits around this time of year. What other event inspires a full streaming website with every game on it, complete with a “boss button” so you can dodge work without ending up unemployed?

I gave up on filling out brackets long ago. Sure, I’ll pony up for a newsroom league or something, but I usually punch down my picks in about six seconds and move on with life. I learned long ago that there’s more joy in finding a new favorite team every six minutes than there is in hoping North Carolina makes another run to the Final Four. The joy comes from the schools you’ve never heard of putting the fear of God into the blue bloods.

In the here and now, it’s trying to figure out why the Butler mascot  looks the pretty much the same as Gonzaga’s  and yet one is nicknamed “the Bulldogs” while the other is called “the Zags.” It’s pulling for a team from a religious school, even though their belief system irritates you because they're just so damned gutty. It’s wondering what the hell a “Zip” is and why a mid-Ohio team uses a kangaroo as a mascot. Even better, does anyone know what the hell this thing is?

It’s Pete Carrill’s Princeton Tigers unseating the national champs in 1996, giving the old man a first-ever tournament victory in his last-ever appearance. It’s the Richmond Spiders, the Santa Clara Broncos and the Hampton Pirates who give every 15 seed the glimmer of hope it needs to saddle up against Goliath. It’s Western Kentucky’s miracle three last year that came off of the worst-designed play ever. 

It’s still remembering the names: Lorenzo Charles, Harold Jensen, Bryce Drew and Jermaine Wallace.

It’s the social changes brought about by teams like Texas Western. It’s the cultural changes brought about by Magic and Larry. It’s the simple changes we make as we finally get to know the guy in the cubicle next to us by asking, “Did you see what Western Kentucky did to Illinois last night?”

Every year, I watch the first two rounds intently. That’s where the best games are. The 14 seed that refuses to die quietly lives there. The team that never got covered outside of its campus lives there. The guys with three hyphens in their names who tongue-tie Dick Vitale live there. After that, the regular patterns form. The teams that go 10-deep and reside in major conferences squeeze out the American Universities of the world. Still, for that one moment, we hope and pray we’re all one moment away from the next great game.

We can’t help ourselves. It’s the madness