Our simulations have been good enough for a generation

Two old stories have been rattling around in my brain lately, so I figured that's a good sign I should write this down.
A Wired story for 2010 about Madden jumping into the real world. The gist (emphasis mine):

Just before he reached the end zone, with 17 seconds remaining, Stokley cut right at 90 degrees and ran across the field. Six seconds drained off the clock before, at last, he meandered across the goal line to score the winning touchdown. For certain football fans, the excitement of a last-minute comeback now commingled with the shock of the familiar: It's hard to think of a better example of a professional athlete doing something so obviously inspired by the tactics of videogame football.

 Stokley said. "I think everybody who's played those games has done that" — run around the field for a while at the end of the game to shave a few precious seconds off the clock. Stokley said he had performed that maneuver in a videogame "probably hundreds of times" before doing it in a real NFL game. "I don't know if subconsciously it made me do it or not," he said.

And an Ars Technica piece from last year that brought this back up:

The maneuver happened at...[Martinsville Speedway]...well known for its tight, shallow-banked turns that usually require heavy braking to negotiate.

Instead of slowing down on the turn, Chastain shifted into fifth gear and gunned it, riding the outside wall and passing five cars to finish the race in fifth place.

In a post-race interview with NBC Sports, Chastain said, "I played a lot of NASCAR 2005 on the GameCube with Chad [Chastain's brother] growing up, and you can get away with it, and I never knew if it would actually work. I did that when I was 8 years old."

We call them games, like Madden NFL and NASCAR–they are made for play. And they succeed at that! And in that play, players can experiment in ways that would be impossible in the real world, even unthinkable. Stokley's wall ride, to even conceive of it, requires treating a race car as borderline disposable. You have to separate yourself from the car in a way that is basically the opposite of how we are taught to drive in the "real world."

Anyway, in a nice bit of synchronicity, a line from what I'm reading right now seems relevant:

[Learning] does not consist only of knowing what we must or we can do, but also of knowing what we could do and perhaps should not do.”

Simulation, games, play in general–expand our sense of the possible. 

Spreadsheets & Slot Machines

Have you ever hit a point, playing a video game, where you get bored of the game itself? I don't mean the story gets boring, or the game getting to hard it loses fun. When the actual mechanics of the game loses its je ne sais quoi and play become rote, and, well, mechanical. 

This is how it happens for me: my mental model of the game abstracts away almost everything and the whole game devolves into an optimization problem. At first, I'll feel clever, like I "solved" the game. But the game hasn't ended, so what have I solved for? I've solved for the how, how to min-max my way to the fastest most efficient win condition. For me, I've come to to refer to this as seeing the spreadsheet behind the game (it's particularly strong phenomenon in strategy games, which is a bummer because I used to love strategy games).

On the other side of this spectrum would be games of purely random numbers with no place for human influence, like slot machines. Which I've noticed seems to be the core mechanic of–and I don't want to overgeneralize–about 99% of the mobile game market, god help us all.

Oh ugh now I get crypto

 It’s a fiat currency. 

Maybe “fiat” accompli?

Facebook content report reportedly lacks content

Facebook released their Widely Viewed Content Report yesterday. My advice, take it with a grain of salt. Or better yet, take it with a overstuffed warehouse full of salt via Charlie Warzel's write-up in Galaxy Brain:

The quarterly snapshots distort timescales and obscure the context, which is crucial for understanding what on earth is really happening with a piece of content.

Also, the list of the most popular domains people are sharing I thought was interesting: 

As a window into what people actually do with Facebook, what do we have? There's memes, music, news which, fair, everyone watches YouTube. Next up, it's off-platform transactions and fundraising in Amazon, Unicef, and GoFundMe. 

Cool(ing) World

NASA is listening to Mars, and finally getting a picture of its interior:

Its crust is split into two or three layers of volcanic chocolate. The mantle below has a surprisingly sizable and rigid toffee-like filling. And the planet’s core is surprisingly light — less nougaty center, more syrupy heart.

I also love this simple explanation of plate tectonics:

A planet’s major volcanic and tectonic activity is essentially powered by the movement of heat from a planet’s inner sanctum to its outermost shell. 

It’s just cooling off! That’s how planets cools off. This swirling detritus around a sun coalesces and compacts into an “infernal engine” at the bottom of a gravity well. The heavy stuff sinks but not all the way, the light stuff floats but not all the way. And all that heat radiates back up and bakes the surface dry. Or, if there’s liquid there, the surface churns atop the rolling boil of the mantle.