More Homage: The Outer Worlds

Games are a form of play, they are fun, as are making cultural references and homage, as I've pointed out a bunch in other games. Game-makers make fun things (games), and they put fun things into those games (homage). Most of the homage I've noticed in games is to sci-fi and fantasy cultural objects (this makes sense), but here's a reference to the Beatles in the game The Outer Worlds, specifically the Beatles' song "Maxwell's Silver Hammer".

Edit: Here's more, somewhat of a random Easter egg, referring to Firefly, a nice touchstone series for recent space sci-fi fans. I hadn't encountered this the first time I played through, and it's random and you can't do anything to make it happen or not, it just does (so I had no idea about it until I ran into it). It is... cows. In your cargo hold.

It was so weird I took a screen shot. (Well, of my TV.)

Edit 2: Apparently there is a lot of homage in The Outer Worlds, but I wasn't looking for it during my first playthrough (and you won't necessarily encounter all of it in one playthrough anyways). H.P. Lovecraft is a favorite, although I only recently learned he was a horrible racist (which is a shame, as I was happy he was from Rhode Island). Jordan Peele and JJ Abram's "Lovecraft Country" sounds really great!

Lovecraft's story title is "The Doom that Came to Sarnath." 

"The Years We Had Contageous Deseases"

What we're going through now is indeed unusual, but only in terms of its scale and scope. We're better prepared to deal with it in terms of health technology than previously (for instance we have ventilators, but not enough in the right places). The Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-1919 is mentioned a lot as an example, but that overlooks the much smaller-scale but yet constant contagious afflictions that affected people and destroyed lives year after year. Before vaccines, antibiotics, and a better understanding of human health, death was more of a presence in many countries compared to today. Remember polio? No? Good, you don't want to.

For a child in the first decade of the new century, 1900-1909, to make a list titled "The Years We Had Contageous Deseases", reminds us of what it was like to some extent. (The quoted child happens to be the anthropologist Margaret Mead, in Gods of the Upper Air by Charles King, from Doubleday, 2019, p. 127)

I'd also recommend The Ghost Map, by Johnson, 2006.

US Maps in R

A really great read (it's a chapter) about the use of maps in R (at least, US maps specifically), from Kieran Healy's Data Visualization. What are you trying to show with your map? What is your data? Is it spatial? Or, maybe it's actually about population, so why is Montana bigger than Connecticut?

There are some great projections, there's the standard geographical one, and the weird "geography squished into population size" one (Figure 7.1, lower left), and the electoral college/population one isn't bad depending on what you are trying to do (Figure 7.1, lower right), although I end up liking the one that makes all the states the same size, each a square (statebins, in section 7.3). (Of course, what is a state? They are not all comparable at all! What is Washington, D.C.? Why not Puerto Rico? Etc.!)

No post about maps is complete without XKCD's heatmap comic and another on map projections, as well as a link to the segment from The West Wing about map projections which everyone should watch.