What grinds my gears

There are many common psychological phenomena that I find interesting, from a semi-academic perspective. One of them is the sheer difficulty that some people seem to have in accepting the notion that 0.9 recurring (ie. the decimal representation of a number with "0." followed by an infinite string of 9's) is exactly equal to 1. Both decimal expansions represent the exact same number. Some people will go to incredible lengths to try to argue why they are not equal, up to trying to invent new mathematics, and new kinds of numbers, just to forcefully try to make them unequal. (With very little success, of course, because invariably these are people with very little experience and understanding of mathematics, especially math related to the set of real numbers, and their decimal representations.) There are a few quite simple counter-arguments to their assertion that the two decimal representations are not the same number. For example, if 0.9... is not equal to 1, then by ...

Justin Trudeau's antics aside, there's a rather funny (or sad, depending on your perspective) thing happening in Canada right now, related to illegal immigrants. You see, according to current Canadian laws, if you arrive, from the United States, to an official US-Canada border crossing seeking refugee status in Canada, and you don't have a valid reason to get it (most often because the United States is legally considered a safe country for refugees, so there is no international or national legal precedent for anybody to seek refuge in a neighboring country), you are simply denied access and turned back. And that's what's mostly done, because the border officials generally uphold the law. However, there's this funny loophole in the law. If you then walk 500 meters to the side and cross the US-Canada border illegally, now you will automatically get refugee status in Canada, and you will be taken in. You will not get turned back immediately, as you were at the...

Some people have this notion that when people play video games, they imagine themselves as being the protagonist, the character that they are playing. Thus, they conclude, people feel left out and marginalized when the playable character is completely different from themselves. They also think that in games where you can customize your playable character, people will make it look like themselves as much as possible. Even if we give this notion the benefit of the doubt (ie. that it's being held completely genuinely and honestly, rather than it being self-serving and claimed for political purposes), I don't really understand where it's coming from. Even in the most honest cases it's just a huge misconception. In pretty much the entirety of video game history playable characters have basically never represented the player him or herself, and this has never bothered anybody. People do not identify themselves as actually being the playable character, as in imagining ...

Some days ago Trump gave a speech in which he was talking about the problems of unrestricted immigration in Europe, and one example he gave was about something that happened "last night in Sweden". Of course the media, and the regressive leftists, immediately jumped onto this and started ridiculing Trump for inventing a terrorist attack that didn't happen. It was all over social media, YouTube and even some newspapers. But the thing is, that "terrorist attack" thing was a complete invention of the media. Trump didn't actually say anything about any terrorist attack. Here's an exact quote of what he said: "You look at what's happening, last night, in Sweden. Sweden! Who would have believed that Sweden! They took in large numbers, they are having problems like they never thought possible." There is no mention of any terrorist attack. Trump later clarified that he was talking about a documentary about Sweden and the problems they are ha...

Naruto is/was a long-runner anime series, based on / adapted from (like so many other anime) a manga series. It became really popular in the west (and possibly also in Japan), at least for a time, and became the almost ubiquitous example of "Japanese anime" for most people, even those who never watch anime nor have ever even seen a single episode of Naruto (a status that very, very few anime series get.) Perhaps one of the strengths of the series was that it had a bit of something for everybody. At times it was just a "kids' cartoon" with wackiness and simple, sometimes even crass, humor. At other times it had spectacular battles of epic proportions. At times, however, it could be really deep and touching. After all, it started as the story of an orphan boy who was shunned and avoided by almost everybody in his town, for no reason of his own (the actual reason being that an extremely powerful and dangerous evil spirit had been sealed within him by his father...

I don't think it's necessary for me to go into detail into the Wall Street Journal vs. PewDiePie debacle, because you can easily find all those details with a simple Google or YouTube search, but the gist of it is this: Not one, not two, but three journalists from WSJ, for a reason known only to themselves, decided one day to go on an absolute character-assassination campaign against the internet celebrity PewDiePie. They took small clips from six of his videos, removed completely out of their context, and wrote a hit piece published in the journal about him being an anti-semitic nazi. (One of the examples was so egregious that they took a clip of him pointing at something, and made it look like he was making a nazi salute.) What's even more egregious, not content with just slandering him in a published article, they went and actively contacted YouTube and Disney, his major sponsors, and slandered him, making them severe ties with him. The Wall Street Journal is a reall...

When the VR headsets were released almost a year ago, I presented in some forums my disappointment that basically no existing games were getting VR support, and that even those few that had announced support had quietly cancelled or abandoned it. My disappointment was answered by a really angry mob of early adopter fanboys who insisted over and over and over that VR just "doesn't work" with traditional games because it causes immediate and heavy motion sickness and "projectile vomiting". My insistence that while it may have that effect, it's something that one gets used to, was met with ridicule and patronizing comments. They insisted over and over that I would just have to forget about existing games and game genres, and that VR would need and usher an entirely new and separate form of gaming, completely incompatible with any existing genre. Even back then there existed third-party mods to some games, such as the original Doom (using a modern updated en...