Many male pandas in captivity are generally uninterested in mating and will often spurn advances from female pandas. What to do, then, to increase the population of these endangered animals? Panda porn!

When male pandas reach maturity, zoo officials are showing them videotapes of pandas mating.

(Don’t let Catharine MacKinnon find out — this is probably inherently oppressive to female pandas).

No point in adding to the litany of comments on both sides about the Pledge of Allegiance except to note that when immigrants become naturalized citizens, the ceremony involves saying the Pledge of Allegiance (the “under God” version) as well as the Naturalization Oath of Allegiance which ends, “so help me God.”

Ars Technica has a silly rant about the cost of computer games.

People often write me with their worries about the state of the gaming industry. No topic is more prevalent than how expensive the hobby has become over the last decade. Jason D. wrote to me last week and had this to say:

“Can you post an article about the INSANE pricing of games lately. I went to the local EB here and found out the selling price with tax for Warcraft 3 and NeverWinter Nights was a McDonalds meal short of a $100CDN! That is bloody insane! I can buy 4-5 DVD’s of 90 million dollar budgeted movies for that price! I have written a few of the offending parties with no reply if you can imagine. Game companies wonder why piracy is rampant well it’s because a game is not worth for the average Joe a days worth of after tax pay. Thanks in advance if you can publicly respond to this.” – Jason D.

I thought his point about a $90 billion movie costing $25 was an interesting analogy.

No, it’s a stupid point. How many movies spend 4-5 years in filming? How many movieslast 40 or 60 hours? Good computer games are a great value — piracy is rampant because so many gamers are cheap bastards.

What we have to remember is that a movie keeps making profit after the box office. Merchandise from baseball caps to action figures and DVD rentals help to keep the price of purchasing the movie down. When a game has passed its peak, it heads to the bargain bin and then eventually into gaming history, with a few exceptions like Starcraft or RollerCoaster Tycoon. So developers and publishers need to score big profits off early sales numbers.

Nope, sorry, try again. Games are priced where they are because gamers will pay high prices. Jesus, these geeks can go on at length about watercooling processors but have never even heard of something as basic as a demand curve or marginal pricing?

On the other hand, how many people would pay $60 to sit in a movie theater and watch a two-hour film? How many would pay $60 to buy the DVD for a two-hour film? Not many, I suspect, and the market price bears that out. If anything, the $25 price for a new release DVD suggests that computer games might be under-priced (the difference being that the total consumer base for a computer game is far lower than for a DVD or movie release — if the audiences were similar in size, I suspect that computer game prices would be similar to those of DVDs).

The idea of piracy being rampant because games are expensive is a two-sided affair. Prices are bolstered to offset losses from piracy, so it comes down to this: Piracy will become more prevalent as prices rise, but as piracy becomes more prevalent, prices will rise…ad infinitum.

I don’t buy this argument for a second. If piracy is so rampant, how come millions of people ponied up to buy The Sims and Diablo II when they could have just pirated the games?

I suspect piracy plays a very limited role in denying sales to computer companies. Instead, pirates are likely those people who would only buy a game at say $20. If a game company optimizes its revenues by pricing at $65, then the person who would have bought the game at $20 but pirates it at $65 isn’t really a lost sale at all.

Not that the company wouldn’t prefer to sell to that consumer at $20 rather than see him pirate a copy, but the constant technological change makes it difficult to price discriminate to capture that customer.

With a DVD, after a couple years the manufacturer can lower the price to maximize revenues. With a computer game, two years later the game is so dated that even drastic price cuts seem unable to motivate people to buy (in many ways, the computer game market is similar to the music industry in that today’s hot thing dates very quickly).

Celestia is the successor to the excellent OpenUniverse program.

Celestia bills itself as,

a free real-time space simulation that lets you experience our universe in three dimensions. Unlike most planetarium software, Celestia doesn’t confine you to the surface of the Earth. You can travel throughout the solar system, to any of over 100,000 stars, or even beyond the galaxy.

All from the comfort of your desktop.

Cory Doctorow wrote an interesting article for O’Reilly.Net on why he blogs which pretty much mirrors my own reasons — as a knowledge management tool to keep track of things he runs across. Doctorow writes,

Blogging gave my knowledge-grazing direction and reward. Writing a blog entry about a useful link and/or interesting subject forces me to extract the salient features of the link into a two- or three-sentence elevator pitch to my readers, whose decision to follow a link is predicated on my ability to convey its interestingness to them. . . .

Being deprived of my blog right now would be akin to suffering extensive brain-damage. Huge swaths of acquired knowledge would simply vanish. Just as my TiVO frees me from having to watch boring television by watching it for me, my blog frees me up from having to remember the minutiae of my life, storing it for me in handy and contextual form.

Some writers talk about/recommend keeping a journal on topics of special interest. I could never stand doing this, although it is indeed useful. But a weblog makes it easy to do this as well as — at least in my case — find patterns, make connections and (most importantly) quickly find that article that really impressed me two years ago.

This is what I think most of the professional journalists who have criticized weblogging fail to understand. Newspapers and magazine are great. I still read plenty of dead tree publications. But a weblog allows me to link disparate news stories together over a long time period.

Professional media criticism of how non-journalists uses the Internet to communicate is a constantly shifting ground that seems more opportunistic than principled. The first wave of criticism was that people were wasting their time on the Internet with trivial things like porn, games and Mahir fansites. The second wave of criticism was that, okay, people were talking about politics, religion, etc., but they were insulating themselves from any view that didn’t disagree with their own. The third wave of criticism wonders who exactly these webloggers think they are to be reading dozens of different news outlets and comparing, contrasting and criticizing the coverage.

Some of these folks seem to be holding on to their profession as special in much the same way that religious figures claim exclusive access to God. I have a lot of appreciation for friends who are editors and journalists and being an excellent journalist/editor is a lot more work than being a good blogger. But, on the other hand, it is not exactly rocket science either.

The biggest problem I have with webloggers is a tendency to be overly-credulous, but journalists are hardly immune from that as any number of high-profiled journalistic hoaxes attest to (anyone remember Janet Cooke?)