expressed written not implied oral consent!

An armed gang of four kidnapped one of the world's top RPG gamers after one criminal's girlfriend lured him into a fake date using Orkut, Google's social network. After sequestering him in Sao Paulo, they held a gun against the victim's head for five hours to get his password, which they wanted to sell for $8,000. And yes, the story gets even better.

Surprisingly enough, after five hours the hostage wasn't talking. The group leader had a gun against his head all that time but the guy didn't say a word. At that point, the crooks gave up and decided to let him go. The brazilian police then caught the four suspects, aged 19 to 27.

According to the police, the captive is the world leader in GunBound, a turn-based RPG-style multiplayer online game. Developed in South Korea, in this artillery game you get more experience points, offensive and defensive capabilities depending on your skills during battle, as well as money to buy more weapons, armor and all kinds of gear for your multiple avatars. You can only play with one of your avatars each time, but all of them belong to a single account.

The game looks to be quite popular, so the four gangsters decided they could make some quick cash if they kidnapped him to steal his user. Their plan: use one of the criminal's girlfriends, called Tamires, to get him into a date using Google's online social network Orkut, which is also extremely popular in Brazil. After contacting and seducing him, she told the GunBound wizard to meet her in a shopping mall.

But she never appeared. Instead, Igor the boyfriend did. Gun in hand, he abducted and held the player prisoner, planning to rely the password to his mates using a cellphone. Against all odds, our hero (or very stupid guy) resisted. Probably using some Stamina +357 spell. Or a Big Cojones +577 mana potion.

Whatever he did to resist the torture for a stupid game password, boys and girls, there's a moral to this story: if you live in Brazil, keep playing Tetris

Neil Tyson on exploring space

Posted at 7:59 pm in Politics, NASA, Astronomy, Piece of mind

Astronomer Neil Tyson wrote a pretty good article for Parade magazine this week about why we explore space. He hits a lot of the right points, and he says something that I wind up hammering when I give public talks as well:

    How many times have we heard the mantra: “Why are we spending billions of dollars up there in space when we have pressing problems down here on Earth?” Let’s re-ask the question in an illuminating way: “What is the total cost in taxes of all spaceborne telescopes, planetary probes, the rovers on Mars, the space station and shuttle, telescopes yet to orbit and missions yet to fly?” Answer: less than 1% on the tax dollar—7/10ths of a penny, to be exact.

    […]

    So, with 99 out of 100 cents going to fund the rest of our nation’s priorities, the space program is not now (nor has it ever really been) in anybody’s way.

The short version: space exploration costs us very little. Need I remind you that we are basically setting fire to $11,000,000 per hour in Iraq? When I talk on this topic, I make an analogy: when your disk drive is full, do you go through and take hours to delete thousands of small text files, or do you delete that one big 3 Gb video file you never watch? NASA is a text file on the hard drive of the government.

Amazingly, even after Neil made his case perfectly clear, people took the time to post incredibly ignorant comments on the Parade website, making me wonder if they read what Neil wrote at all:

    How much longer will vital funds needed for crucial projects here on earth, such as bridge inspections and repairs, be squandered on the space program?

This doesn’t even deserve an answer, since it’s plain as day in Neil’s article.

Another person wrote:

    I am avidly againt [sic] wasting money for outer space exploration. […] We have so many needs here that there doesn’t seem to be money for.

Yup. Same thing. A third wrote:

    He sites [sic] pride as a nation and the science that accidentally results from NASA’s projects. I would feel much more proud of our nation if we were known for caring for our own people and not for putting another rover on mars or another person on the moon. We should fund research for cancer directly and not hope for an offshoot of something that we accidentally discovered with the Hubble.

This person has it precisely wrong. We didn’t hope to find a help for cancer using astronomical imaging techniques. It just happened; a happy outcome. In fact, astronomical and medical imaging techniques are very similar; so similar that years ago I considered switching fields, knowing that my imaging knowledge would transfer easily. But anyway, this misses the point: we don’t fund these avenues because of serendipitous results; we fund them because it’s the right thing to do. Knowledge always benefits us. Always.

Or maybe these people are just really big fans of Katie Couric.

If you are laughing or ruefully shaking your head at the woeful pig-headery displayed by those three people, then consider this: those are real people with real (if utterly wrong) opinions. They are your co-workers, your neighbors, maybe even your relatives. Most people have no clue why we fund space exploration; in fairness most people probably don’t have an opinion about it. But I bet most people also think it’s very expensive (every single time something goes wrong with a NASA mission, the first thing reporters comment on is how much it cost, but they never seem to compare it to, say, the cost of a bridge in Alaska that goes nowhere).

This is why we need to speak up. People don’t get it. If you hear someone making these arguments, send them to Neil’s article, and tell them not to skim it, but to actually read it. Maybe we can get a few people at least to understand the real issues.