Now that hours and days and months of reading, writing, and, um, “researching” are behind me, let me just air out a few other details from the Civ. piece.

1. You guessed it. The friend who controls foreign cities by starving out the population and repopulating it with his own people is Jonathan V. Last. Let us not forget he once defended the destruction of the planet Alderaan.

2. Joseph Bottum’s strategy of winning at Deity was much more complicated than I let on. There are many conditions involved, such as selecting a single continent, choosing an ancient civ. whose unique unit comes early, building roads in one direction, gambling you will hit pay dirt (meaning you connect with another civ.). You must also reduce all funding on science in order to build as many units as possible. Then you send them out and overwhelm. I think Bottum once won by the year 400 B.C. Also, his wife won’t let him upgrade to Civ. IV until he finishes writing his book.

3. Sid Meier is a very funny guy. When he was explaining the importance of decisionmaking, he says it is all up to the player to decide “Do I go for a barracks or a marketplace?” I asked him which is it. He said, “Yes.”

I am sure there is more but it all seems to blend in now. Unfortunately I can no longer use the piece as an excuse for playing the game. But wait til I tell my wife about the piece I am writing on Vivid Video.

In case you missed it, this little news item about PBS’s tracing Whoopi Goldberg’s genetic ancestry to the impoverished little country Guinea-Bissau on Africa’s west coast is a treat. It is the perfect setup for some goofy Coming-to-America type comedy, but in reverse. The people of Guinea-Bissau are thrilled to claim Whoopi as one their own, but the Hollywood-Square star is apparently loath to fly in an airplane to make their acquaintance.

Back to Africa: The Movie

Matus, who doesn’t write nearly enough for my taste, has written the most important article of the year: The definitive exegesis on Sid Meier’s Civilization.

Don’t miss it.

Jenny sends us to this great headline.

Blog Crush has video short of Joe Rogan ambushing some comic who seems to be unpopular in the stand-up world for stealing other people’s jokes.

If you’re not into the comedy world, you probably won’t care, except for the fact that Joe Rogan makes for a kick-ass avenging angel. But the real, super-fantastic payoff is when Rogan has another comic–some tall, skinny, Jewish guy named Ari–come up onstage. Look closely. Ari’s wearing a “Tap Out” shirt.

Frackin’ awesome.

Sony’s head of sales for Europe has resigned six weeks before the (delayed) European launch of the PS3. I’m just saying.

Some day the PS3 is going to be a brilliant case study for b-school students.

Galley Friends M.G. and M.C. both send along this detailed exploration of the science and physiology of Godzilla:

Godzilla is meant to be something like 100 m tall and between 20,000 and 60,000 tons in weight (his size fluctuates in the various films). Of course lots of people who like doing sums and talking about cubes and so on have used the mathematics of scaling to show why – duh – Godzilla couldn’t really walk, stand, or even exist. Michael Dexter presents the argument here, and also brings in thoughts on blood pressure, circulation and physiology to show that a living Godzilla would variously fall to pieces, tear itself apart, have its organs turn to jelly, explode due to a build-up of internal heat… you get the picture.

I know of two palaeontologists who have made comments on various of Godzilla’s physical properties. Jim Farlow, a palaeobiologist based at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne, and best known for his work on dinosaur trackways, speculated in 1998 on the foot size of TriStar’s GINO. Jim noted that he’d ‘probably have to log-transform the measurements to get [the data from the toes] onto the same graphs with my other data without scrunching the other points into an indecipherable blur near the origin’. He also noted that it might prove difficult to cast even a single Godzilla footprint given grant limitations and the cost of plaster of Paris, silicone or latex rubber. Sadly, Prof Farlow never published his thoughts on this subject and all we have is a message posted to the dinosaur mailing list (here).

Sauropod expert Mike P. Taylor did a bit of science on Godzilla (this time on the original, not on the TriStar creation), but has also – for shame – failed to publish his results. Interested in how much weight can be absorbed by the limb’s cartilage pads, and in how big these pads needed to be in sauropods, Mike threw Godzilla into the data set to see what might happen. Godzilla’s cartilage disks would not, it seems, hold up under his immense weight, and we can therefore conclude that a terrestrial biped of Godzilla’s size and weight is impossible. Mike included this valuable and surprising [joke] data in his 2005 presentation ‘Upper limits on the mass of land animals estimated through the articular area of limb-bone cartilage’, and to his annoyance it was the one brief comment on Godzilla that earned a mention of this presentation in a write-up of the respective conference (Jones 2005). An abstract of Mike’s presentation exists (Taylor 2005), though it doesn’t mention Godzilla, and you can see the presentation for yourself on Mike’s website.

Oh you bet there’s more. Hop to it.

Loathe as I am to do politics here, I have a mean-spirited and probably too-angry-by-half post about Clint Eastwood’s new-found moral relativism over at the WorldWide Standard.