Monopoly

The ironically named Monopoly Live takes some of the human element out of the (in)famous board game, by having a computer adjudicate all the rules — something Dark Tower did in 1981, when computers were novel.

The computer also tracks how fast or slow play is going, and may intervene to make it lively. If, say, very little property is getting bought, it will announce an auction in the middle of turns.

Monopoly was intended as an anti-monopoly propaganda piece — specifically an anti-land-monopoly piece — but the interviewed expert doesn’t seem to know that:

Mary Flanagan, a game designer and distinguished professor of digital humanities at Dartmouth, said that games tended to reflect the societies that they were played in. For instance, the original Monopoly, issued in 1935 by Parker Brothers, now a subsidiary of Hasbro, reflected “American ingenuity, the sense of needing to have hope, and reinforcing capitalism in the face of real economic despair,” she said.

Rick C: Nonetheless, you’d be smart to make an attempt to protect your hearing whenever possible. I fired a .357 revolver once outside in the country at a friend’s house, and the sound was loud enough to set my ears ringing and effectively deafen me for a few minutes. Every other time I’ve fired a gun I wore earplugs.

Ross: Isegoria, I agree with your comment. The key word is self. The second key word is us. What we do and how we manage education as adults is quite a bit different than what I’d want sprayed on pre- and elementary schoolers. What I mean to say is that while the InterTubes are really almost a miracle and I am thankful every time I use it, I also still recall a time where actual research, thought, growth, creativity, etc. all happened successfully without it. I would have a hard time, as an adult,...

Isegoria: Certainly classroom IT projects have been appallingly bad up to this point, but most of us here have been using the Net for self-education to an amazing degree.

Isegoria: I think the Human Genome Project had — and still has — plenty of potential; it’s just going to take a lot of time and effort to extract useful knowledge from the raw data — and I don’t necessarily think it’s the current medical experts who are going to lead the way. The task is one for information-coding experts, informed by “old school” medical experts. Also, is there any way around dishonesty in funding, when those with the funds — and...

Isegoria: Silly Kalim, that’s what the Internet is for — finding that tiny sliver of the population that finds the same things interesting and impressive that you do.

Isegoria: All Gates really needed to know was that getting the Goliath of the mature mainframe market to hand over the nascent microcomputer software market was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Ross: With apologies for not reading past the first paragraph. You should probably not waste a further second on an ignorant comment, but, here goes: Is someone still saying the solution to education is more IT? A WATSON for every budding Sherlock? We are truly in the End Times. Ray Kurzweil, I surrender: Take me. I am ready for assimilation into The Singularity. (Whispering: Maybe, just maybe, the problem is not how quickly we acquire and exchange data, but how well and deeply we develop and share...

Bruce G Charlton: Indeed. So dishonesty was built into the project. Many of us knew from its inception that the Human Genome Project was either ignorant (because the scientists knew virtually nothing about medicine) or dishonest (because the scientists did know about medicine, but wanted the money anyway) and would not yield what was promised. The Human Genome Project was ‘sold’ on the basis of generating rapid and significant progress in the treatment of human disease, and that was a false...