dkimball

On the other hand, difficult now doesn't mean difficult forever; an eighteen-wheeler would have been written off as requiring impossible amounts of energy to use, if someone had described it in the 16th Century. ("_How_ many horsepower?!")

"The same day as an article on the subject" is probably a little premature for any theories about its utility, too, although I'll certainly be interested if anyone who knows what he or she is talking about with physics thinks that this could be used to build an ansible or something...

You have a very good point about the dangers of zooming in, especially on self-selected subsets; but I didn't mean that LOLcat fans are less intelligent. I think that simpler forms of humor indicate, not lower intelligence in those enjoying them, but tensions and stresses that are nearer to the surface of their lives. (Did I mention that "All Your Base" still cracks me up?)

By my theory, Monty Python's "wide accountant sea" is the product of a civilization that is largely content with its lot in the world; but if a civilization finds it adequately entertaining to observe that I are serious cat and this are serious thread, then there are problems somewhere near the surface of that civilization, and the civilization is aware of them.

As an example: at least as far as I know, East Asian (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) humor is much simpler than American and English; East Asians are more intelligent than Americans and Englishmen on average (at least as measured by IQ testing), but they have social stresses that are _much_ nearer to the surface.

I also doubt that low intelligence limits comprehension of refined humor. G.K. Chesterton thought that the English peasantry, who were at the least uneducated, were better at telling and at understanding jokes than their social betters; my own -- admittedly just anecdotal -- experience also seems to suggest no correlation between intelligence and sophistication of humor, but a high correlation between low social class and low education on the one hand, and good comedic style on the other.

I haven't seen theories of "philosophical anthropology" independently verified by MRI very often, so it's very interesting to see this -- confirming that all human beings experience humor and find it in incongruity, and thus, among other things, that we learn where a civilization finds a lot of incongruities by looking at the subject matter of its jokes. (It's also refreshing to see something like this with science, not culturally insular pop psychology, behind it.)

So, I'd predict that a civilization with more, stronger stresses should have simpler forms of humor, and one with an easier mental life should range further afield in its search for laughs. This looks like it's confirmed in the contrast between, say, Monty Python and Seinfeld on the one hand, and Restoration English, classical Greek, and Golden Age Spanish comedy on the other; does anyone know enough about East Asian or, say, Aztec (properly Mexica) humor to be able to say whether the pattern holds there, too?

This also suggests that LOLcats reveal intensifying pressures in American social life. Of course, such pressures do exist, so the question is whether we can plausibly suspect causation...

I'm kind of disappointed that Steve Krug didn't think up something like this for _Rocket Surgery Made Easy_ (http://www.sensible.com/rocketsurgery/index.html); this would be a very convenient source of manpower for his model of "hallway usability testing," and would allow even larger numbers of even more easily set-up tests than the model he describes.

It's good to see how usability testing is becoming de-mythologized these days; all of us should keep in mind, for current and future program development, that you really don't need a very sophisticated apparatus.

That's almost certainly true, and it may be less than 40 years. Northrop-Grumman has already produced a 100kW solid-state laser capable of being mounted on a fighter or a small ship (http://articles.latimes.com/2009/mar/19/business/fi-laser19), and apparently they think that vehicles mounting it are ten years or less away. Serviceable, ruggedized laser rifles are probably 10-20 years down the road from that -- and will mean an enormous increase in infantry ammunition capacity and firepower, probably on the order of magnitude of the introduction of the automatic rifle. (Manufacturers of rechargeable batteries suddenly sound like a very good investment.)

US infantry tactics as they currently exist will not be well-suited to wars involving such weapons; a retired Marine gunnery sergeant, H. John Poole, has written a number of books on the need for the US to develop autonomous light infantry, and has pointed to the prospect of laser weapons as one of the reasons for this need.

For what it's worth, the W3C has always reminded me of the United Nations. It doesn't really have a power base or coercive abilities of its own, and its authority is dependent on the willingness of its member organizations to sacrifice their objectives and their resources for its sake -- with the result that it's more a theater for proxy wars (Sun versus Microsoft historically, Microsoft versus the open-source movement today) than than an organization with a purpose and a goal.

Like the United Nations, though, the W3C has accomplished some of its purposes, and done a certain amount of good; but I think the author of this is expecting too much out of the W3C in a very Westphalian Web.

I hope no one turns this into an argument about the United Nations. My position on them is the same as Emperor Otto von Habsburg's on them and on the European Union: imperfect, but better than nothing. In particular, I hope no one wants to talk about which or how many countries (I count at least ten major powers plus any number of minor ones) have attempted or achieved real-world counterparts to Internet Explorer 6.

I know that using a political analogy for software is risky business, but the UN's dynamics and the W3C's are almost identical; so I hope that the insight we might gain from the analogy is worth the risk.

I see from other comments that this may not be true, but if it isn't, I'd advise that Amazon should start doing it as soon as they can. It would be an application of the "Gilette model" of sales -- sell the razor, or the printer, or the video-game console cheap, and make your money back on selling blades, cartridges, or cartridges respectively.

For a book-delivery platform like the Kindle, this strikes me as a natural model -- a user is likely to buy a large number of books over his lifetime, and the margin of profit on a $10 e-book makes the margin of profit on a music CD look humble.

There's also the point that the Kindle is not an obviously useful sort of device. Making it widely available will overcome customer reluctance to try it out it, ensuring that it either proves its worth and spreads quickly, or proves its worthlessness and fails quickly, and minimizes the amount of time that Amazon spends in new-product limbo either way.

Then here we part company: as a Roman Catholic, I believe that human beings come first -- although we are to be stewards of the earth rather than masters of it.

That's a good point, but I think that that lesson would be better learned in the core-knowledge curricula (which the child's going through whether he/she likes it or not) than by wrecking his/her enjoyment of computer programming or violins or model-building or first-person shooters or whatnot.

I agree that any system that fails to provide growth is in a certain amount of danger. For what it's worth, I try to remain objective in appraising China's situation; I'm not exactly delighted with them, but I try to avoid being actively disgusted, or at least to avoid letting my disgust get in the way of my appraisal of the situation.

I continue to think, though, that "postmodern authoritarianism" (my phrase, but I'm sure it's been coined elsewhere) is more vulnerable than most other systems of government, because the whole implicit promise involved here is that the people will sacrifice certain desiderata in exchange for certain others. When a medieval state failed to provide prosperity to its people, they weren't happy and often became restive, but the damage was mitigated by its being the judgment of God; when the United States faced extreme difficulties in the Great Depression, the rate of crime went down, not up (with some obvious fedora-wearing exceptions), as most of the population was loyal to itself and saw the government as an extension of itself; when Imperial Japan instituted strict rationing and drafted large numbers of soldiers in the Second World War, their credibility was not at risk at all, since all these were sacrifices for a cause, for the will of Amaterasu.

But a postmodern authoritarianism doesn't have a reason for its citizens to remain loyal, it doesn't have a higher goal for them to work for, and it doesn't have an external cause (or an external enemy: I didn't mention the Nazis above, but I could have) to be blamed for its problems. Its whole social contract is "give up on certain freedoms and you'll be rich!", so when that's no longer the case, the government is in trouble.

In fairness, though, this may not be the case in China as much as in Russia. The United Russia party's platform has been more or less explicitly this: "let us stay in power and we'll restore the prosperity, military might, and international prestige of Russia." Communist China doesn't really have a "platform" of this sort, especially now that they're "CINOs" (Communists In Name Only) in the post-Deng Xiaoping era; so economic failures might not discredit them as much or as quickly, but, on the other hand, they're still not going to have much of a flag to rally around.

@old-gregg:

> "Ever heard of soil erosion/degradation? Check out what happened to Easter Island. It takes thousands of years to turn a desert into a jungle, so in practical terms forests are non-renewable."

On forests, my point was that a forest is not the same kind of thing as a coal mine: it can regrow as well as fade out. Incompetent forestry can destroy a forest, of course; but forests can be managed, as was done in Europe historically, or enriched.

Archaeologists and ecology-oriented companies have recently begun to popularize a soil-enrichment technique, "terra preta do índio," which was first practiced by the Amazon Basin civilization of South American Indians, and which uses charcoal and fertilizer (or any source of bioavailable carbon and nitrogen; the Amazonian Indians used fecal matter) to transform barren soil into a rich loam that regenerates at a rate of about a centimeter a year. This is a process that can be done very quickly -- especially with contemporary technology -- and the soil is usable in a more enriched form in about a year, requiring no further fertilizer or other forms of enrichment. See _1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus_ for details; its author goes so far as to argue that the Amazon forest as we think of it is a product of the now-lost Amazonian civilization, and is essentially an overgrown garden rather than a wilderness.

> "on a practical timeline clean fossil water is unreplenishable: where do you think it comes from? And what do you think happens to a lake near an abandoned gold mine?"

You had said "clean water," not "clean fossil water." I agree that fossil water is non-renewable, but water in general can be purified. Even sites like abandoned gold mines, and damaged bodies of water around them, can be cleaned up; I'd further add that if water is so cheap that it's not profitable to reclaim polluted lakes, we're not near the limits of the world's water supply.

> "Several of your points have nothing to do with the topic, i.e. having enough resources to sustain the ever growing population: what difference does it make either oil is biological in origin or not?"

My point on oil: if it's not biological in origin, there may be an awful lot more of it than we thought. (And even then, with nuclear, wind, hydroelectric, geothermal, and increasingly solar power, we can survive without oil; its merits are its abundance and its high energy density.)

* Also, for Easter Island, see a New Scientist article on the subject (http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19125621.100-easter-is...); Jared Diamond's account may not be accurate at all. I would also add that the people of Easter Island lost the ability to read their writing system (Rongorongo), which tends to predict a very large range of problems. Maya civilization collapsed shortly after losing the ability to read their script, too -- but it collapsed in an environment that did not have any ecological degradation.

I'm not a libertarian, to say the least, but I think that this writer has a point. I don't know where the saying originates that "a democracy only survives until its citizens realize that they can vote themselves money" -- I believe it was a British historian writing about Athens in the 1750s -- but it's intensely relevant here. Greece, or any country, can only support a large public sector (apparently not overpaid so much as overpopulated) on the back of a large productive sector -- not necessarily a private sector (just ask the People's Liberation Army and its subsidiaries), but something or other that's generating wealth.

I'd also emphasize _delerium's passing comment about a state needing to worry about its future ability to get loans. The combination of the Industrial Revolution and pogrom-proof banking have made this less likely, but as late as the 18th century there was always the possibility of a country running out of money; Philip II's bankruptcy is a particularly famous one. If that (or extreme inflation) starts happening again, it will make everyone's lives harder.

I see. Thanks for letting me know.

This is extremely heartening. I think we always over-estimate the level of threat that we face at a given time, and underestimate the possibility of finding some sort of a solution.

But on the other hand, not needing enormous quantities of rare earths means that human expansion into space no longer gets a kickstart from attempts to mine the asteroid belt... :)

Also, do you have anything to say about changes to brain chemistry and physical fitness as one ages?

On consumption of meat and fish: Americans overconsume meat anyways, IMHO, and the oceans at present are _severely_ depleted due to the use of trawler fishing and the complete disinterest of the world in responsible management of the oceans. I doubt that this would remain the case with better management -- although I neither have statistics in either direction here, nor have a lively interest in maintaining them.

On non-renewable resources: fish populations I mentioned above; forests are renewable by definition, being made up of plants capable of reproduction -- although there's a huge gulf between responsible forestry and slash-and-burn farming. If pure water was a non-renewable resource, the purity of the world's water supplies would not be capable of going up, only down; but water purity in the United States has increased since industries stopped dumping pollutants indiscriminately, and since the discontinuing of, for example, DDT use, so pure water is not a non-renewable resource.

Therefore, and continuing my point about uncultivated lands, unmanaged oceans, and starvation due to political and not economic problems, I do not see any reason to believe that we are at or close to the planet's carrying capacity.

Let me also add that oil is probably not biological in origin (otherwise, how could depleted oil reserves occasionally refill spontaneously?), and that it has no ecological role that I'm aware of to begin with, given that it's generally rather far underneath the biosphere.

And, if the Earth were already at or close to its carrying capacity, shouldn't we have begun to notice trouble with resource availability in situations other than terrible political regimes (and government-induced price bubbles like the reprehensible US maize-ethanol subsidy)?

What I mean is not "physical room for people," it's "exploited versus un-exploited resources." It's not as if we're running out of room for farming -- and even if we were, it's not as if we're managing the oceans in anything that vaguely resembles a serious, competent fashion. Earth is much larger than we tend to think, and much more empty (remember how if the population of the Netherlands lived at New York density, everyone in the country would fit in the "dongle" of southern Limburg that borders on Belgium). In other words, we can afford to worry about more urgent things -- torture, for example. (Not just American; how about the Uzbek dictator who boils prisoners alive, or of course the Chinese?)

Additionally, there may be a difference in my values relative to yours: I believe that people are intrinsically valuable, and that therefore it is better to have more people in the world than fewer people in the world, all other things being equal.

Wait just a second, didn't we have an article about the exact same thing, but about how it was _worrisome_, not _amazing_, just two weeks ago? (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1086492)

What is this, Pravda?

I'm not sure if this was meant to be humor or not, so if it wasn't, I apologize; but if it was, you win an internets.

(Is that an acceptable expression around here?)

Your medical expenses will grow as you get older, even if your thought processes don't ossify.

Sidenote: I don't think "conservative" is an appropriate term here; in fact, I don't like the word in almost any context. Desiring to enrich oneself and/or being careful with one's money do not correlate usefully with, for example, opposing abortion; libertarians and the CDU-type ideology opposed to libertarianism (Roosevelt, Chesterton, Dorothy Day, etc.) are both refutations of that.

As far as population goes, we are not close to the carrying capacity of the planet. The only starvation in the modern world is in extremely undeveloped countries governed by the likes of Robert Mugabe; I don't know what a fully-developed Earth's carrying capacity at American or at European levels of consumption would be, but I'm unwilling to guess, since I'd probably low-ball the number severely.

Malthus was right in one sense, and there are real examples of Malthusian crises in the late 18th century (that's probably where the French Revolution came from, in particular); but these days, land in the Malthusian sense is expanding faster than population is -- _much_ faster. And remember, too, the (very Y-Combinator-y) point that each new person brings a new mouth to feed, but also a new pair of hands...

Note that the Vatican's not the only one saying this. Others have pointed out that a larger proportion of elderly to young population results in smaller amounts of wealth creation, larger amounts of wealth consumption (healthcare and the like); and that old managers who are slow to retire give their companies an unnecessarily hesitant, cautious character. In fact, doesn't Paul Graham have an essay about this?

It's a mangled version of Marvin Harris and Fernand Braudel.

I tried to read _Guns, Germs, and Steel_, and gave up in disgust; Jared Diamond is a Green with an axe to grind. In the case of the American Indians, geography and disease did ruin them (or rather, it ruined the North Americans and the Amazonians; Mesoamerica and the old Inca Empire are predominantly Indian to this very day, and the most recent Maya revolt against the Spanish colonists was in 1911); but most of the time -- more or less all of the time, in the Old World -- ecological factors are secondary to cultural ones. Look at the history of rice: it was adopted as the basic grain of Persia before it was adopted as the basic grain of China (and long before Japan), because good Zoroastrian piety inspired the Sassanids (IIRC) to import this miracle grain and thereby ensure the prosperity of their peasants.

I think that what's wrong with Diamond is best summarized in his book _Collapse_, the only work I have ever heard of that discusses how civilizations disintegrate and makes no reference whatsoever to Rome. His thesis is that civilizations fall due to ecological mismanagement, so he doesn't mention any that don't fall due to ecological mismanagement -- even the Roman Empire itself! (He admits in the preface that not all civilizations fall due to ecological reasons, but that suggests that the title of his book -- _Collapse: How Civilizations Choose to Fail or Succeed_ -- should have been something a lot less authoritative.)

For what I think is actually the case, look up Peter Turchin's _War and Peace and War_, an "old-fashioned" -- or rather, newfangled -- work pointing to the importance of civilizational cohesion (Ibn Khaldun's asabiya, but not the normal Arabic definition of it) in the rise and fall of civilizations. Turchin is a population biologist by training, and tried turning his modeling techniques to history -- whereupon he was astonished to discover that a simulation with one variable and about four rules accounted for pretty much the whole range of human experience. The gory, algebraic details are in _Historical Dynamics: Why States Rise and Fall_; but _War and Peace and War_ is more accessible and has more historical examples.

One other sidenote: guns and steel were not the fates of the two societies that Diamond was probably thinking of (certainly the two that came to my mind). It's a widely-held legend that Cortes and Pizarro defeated the Mexica and the Inca respectively by attacking with massive numbers of technologically-superior forces.

In reality, Cortes was the leader of a band of adventurers that never got over 2,000 men and was normally closer to 150, most of whom carried swords and crossbows (and abandoned their clumsy, hot steel cuirasses for Mesoamerican quilted-cotton armor); he had about 30 horsemen at the beginning of his campaign, and in one of his decisive early battles was down to something like 15. He didn't win by a technological advantage; he won by his personal courage, the courage of his men, an enormous amount of luck... and the fact that the Triple Alliance thought that it was a good idea to leave a small state that hated them like poison, Tlaxcala, independent -- twenty miles away from Tenochtitlan. (This meant that they could fight the Tlaxcalans to collect a lot of prisoners for sacrifice, and give their men a lot of promotions: the _Codex Mendoza_ has a table of Mexica level-ups that would embarrass Squaresoft.) A friend of mine once quipped that any civilization that thinks that _that's_ a good idea, deserves what's coming to them.

Pizarro maneuvered his way into a badly confused war of succession, imprisoned/befriended one of the two leaders, murdered him, and then pulled the same trick on the other one -- he won through politics, not through power. Even then, it took the Spanish government forty years of campaigns with regular infantry to fully conquer the Inca Empire (I've always wondered why Spain accepted Pizarro's treacherous conquest as opposed to telling him to stuff it, but his having already shipped back an entire roomful of gold bars and two roomfuls of silver may have had something to do with it)... but, again, it wasn't technology that let Pizarro win, it was politics, the same kind of thing that let the Manchus conquer China.

See _Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest_ for details on both. You may even want to read _Our Lady of Guadalupe and the Conquest of Darkness_ -- an extremely, exuberantly partisan Catholic history of the conquest of Mexico (but still adventuresome, rousingly entertaining, and meticulously researched), which omits not a single detail except Hernan Cortes' five Mexica concubines. (Cortes was married at the time, and was a fairly serious Catholic. As a fairly serious Catholic myself, I have often tried to figure out what on Earth he thought he was doing, but have more or less given up on it.)

What aspect of the 'tribal' spirit, as I noted above and as discussed on historyexplained.com, do you object to? I'm sufficiently fond of freedom, and sufficiently disgusted by cringing, fawning, and gossip magazines, that I find such a social structure admirable, although, on the other hand, I'm also fond of not dying over a point of honor, so there's that too. (And note, part of my premise above is that "tribal" doesn't have to mean "primitive.")

Also, please explain why you think it's important for parents to push children when they run into difficulties. I agree that there is a certain amount of basic knowledge, which everyone should acquire whether they want to or not (I've even found benefit from statistics classes). But we're talking about passions -- that is, recreations, not basic knowledge. I agree that encouraging someone to get through difficult spots -- to reassure them if they fear failure, to provide superior knowledge and skills on an as-needed basis -- is a good thing, but the whole point of a passion is that it's something that the person in question _wants_ to do.

Because Europeans knew that there were civilizations other than their own in the world, Europe had things it needed from the rest of the world, and Islam was in the way (and if you think the Muslims are bad now, you know nothing about the 15th century). Columbus wasn't trying to discover the Americas any more than Da Gama was; he was trying to get to China.

The American Indians, meanwhile, were basically unaware of worlds other than their own. When Columbus arrived, there were at least five distinct civilizations in the New World (the North American Indians; the Mesoamerican civilizational group, which included the Mexica; the Maya; the Peruvians; the Amazon River civilization), none of which had significant contact with, or knowledge of, any of the others -- while the West had known about China and India since the days of Darius, at the very least, and so was accustomed to the concept that there were very different, but accessible, peoples in the world.

I mentioned _1491_ in the parent post; again, read it for more information.

I would add that China faces the prospect of, to say the least, internal political instability. Like all postmodern authoritarian governments, theirs is based on the idea that in exchange for sacrificing freedom and autonomy, the population will get very rich -- so if they don't deliver on the wealth, they'll face a great deal of restiveness.

While a few provinces are doing well (Guangdong most prominently), inland China is still very backwards -- and, reportedly, increasingly disgusted with the government. The one-child policy is still enforced there, brutally; despite the almost complete lack of journalists' access to mainland China, I've heard reports of spontaneous, armed "mutinies" among the populace -- attacks on government officials, on account of the one-child policy, or over taxes, or for whatever reason.

China is less politically stable than it looks; for all we know, the next Liu Bang or Zhu Yuanzhang may have already taken to the hills. And if you think that the Chinese government can't possibly collapse _now_, that we'll never see a period of good old-fashioned Chinese interregnal warlordism in the 21st century, I remind you that we saw one in the 20th, when it was equally anachronistic and inconceivable -- the most chaotic period of the Five Races Under One Union was the 1920s, contemporary with the Wiemar Republic and _The Great Gatsby_.

Of course, China eventually becoming powerful is almost inevitable; sailormoon points out that their sheer numbers argue for that, especially when combined with a culture which, though nominally Confucian-Legalist, has a very real "go-getting" idiom. This is the other side of China: the brash, independent style of the world of mountain and river, ultimately tracing back to the xiá (侠), the knights of the feudal Zhou dynasty. It may be some time before this happens -- their current postmodern authoritarian government has to either reform or be overthrown first, I think -- but it will arrive.

For further reading, look up Boye de Mente's _The Chinese Have a Word for It_.

Preach it, brother! :) That's exactly what's been driving me off from gaming -- vast quantities of filler that just pad out the total play time.

I'd have to add something else: the propensity for filler, especially "filler quests" in RPGs, degrades the quality of the main game. I really enjoyed _Knights of the Old Republic_ and _Jade Empire_, but their storytelling -- especially _Jade Empire_'s -- was a large step back from _Final Fantasy 4_ or _Final Fantasy 6_; neither of the Square RPGs had the hero wandering off to close a dam and kill an inn full of cannibals as opposed to progressing the story and/or interacting interestingly with the other major characters.

I believe the genre that you're looking for, and that I am, is called "hardcasual" -- short, high-quality, high-content games, not casual games at all but completely free of filler, aimed at people with lives and jobs but still a keen interest in games. (For total time to play, expect 3 hours at the low end, 10 hours at the high end -- and note, you can fit a _large_ story into ten filler-less hours.)

Unfortunately, hardcasual games appear to be rare; in particular, the mainstream games industry doesn't touch them...

From what I've seen, at least, it seems that children don't have short attention spans intrinsically; they just have short attention spans for what they find uninteresting.

All aristocrat-peasant societies socialize their population to flatter the aristocracy, including by pretending to be interested in their interests; democratic-market societies like the United States are aristocrat-peasant societies in which everyone is treated as an aristocrat. (See www.historyexplained.com for the theoretical model of aristocrat-peasant and tribal societies; but bear in mind that its model of history is wrong. Read _1491: New Revalations of the Americas Before Columbus_; had the northern American Indians only been immune to smallpox, we'd think of democratic-market societies as a shoddy alternative to the one true way of self-controlled tribalism -- which the Middle Ages, too, had been fitfully evolving into.)

So, the problem is not that children have short attention spans; it's that they haven't learned to fake interest in the manner expected in Western societies. (From your name, I'm guessing that you're American or Canadian.) When a Western child, or a member of most types of tribal societies, is bored, he or she doesn't try to hide it; by contrast, when genuinely interested in something, such a person exhibits a passionate interest uninhibited by concepts of aristocratic reserve.

In short: figure out what a child is interested in -- or rather, let the child figure that out for him- or herself -- and all the rest should come together on its own. Just hope it's not an interest that leads to graduate school in the humanities...

I don't think it's about progress so much as topicality -- the widely-maligned "relevance." A Restoration comedy about vainglorious mercenaries and cuckolded husbands might be better than an episode of Seinfeld on an objective measure, if one could be devised -- but I dare say it would have a fair bit less to say to you or me than it had to say to its original audience.

We find more recent works more interesting than older ones, not necessarily because they're better, but because they speak to us more usefully -- similarly, we can find surprisingly old works surprisingly relevant for the same reason, or can rediscover materials that previous generations scoffed at.

Most of the plays of Shakespeare fall into this last category -- they were hardly ever performed in the late 17th and 18th centuries, and when they were, they were jazzed up with special effects along the lines of fireworks and performing bears. The gulf between the 18thC and our own is an enormous one in general, come to think of it; play _Empire: Total War_ for a sense of just how different even the visual aesthetics of their era were from our own.

Don't look at the art assets that are, necessarily, more or less faithful to the period; look at how the game's developers try to make the era look interesting to a modern. What most stood out to me was the vast gulf between the national flags used in the 18thC and national flags depicted in the game -- in particular Austria, where the red-and-white national flag is replaced by the yellow-and-black dynastic flag of the Habsburgs, and Russia, where the white-red-blue national flag is shame-facedly tacked on to the Romanov coat of arms. (The loading screens are the second most extreme illustration.)

Please tell me that this isn't the general consensus. Of the games he depicts on the first page, the only vaguely interesting one from where I sit is Demon's Souls; in my experience it's rare to get even one good game a year. There's even the theory that the extremely low quality of present-day games is a driving force behind piracy, too -- although if so, it's obviously not the only one.

You're speaking of "sex," not "gender" -- the former is biological and there are two of them; the latter is cultural or social and there could be arbitrarily many.

I say this while being a conservative; the semantic distinction is a useful one, although attempting to blur the distinction between a (biological) sex and a (cultural) gender never does any good.