srehn's blog

What I did
I’ve been speed-running high-sec anomalies.  This is possible with the "new" (almost a year old) scanning mechanic because, in most systems,  you only need to use the on-board scanner once to find all anomalies.  (If you see any planets more than 64 AU from your location you may need to warp closer to those planets and scan again.  Anomalies can spawn within 4 AU from any planet.)  By “speed-running” I mean that I just warp in, shoot the rats and warp out.  I do not loot/salvage any wrecks except for faction wrecks.  This is why I can run 13+ sites/hour, including the time to jump around from system to system finding the sites.  In an effort to get an idea of just how good this is, ISK-wise, I’ve been keeping track and doing this for a lot of hours.

I’ve been doing this mostly in low-end highsec (0.5-0.8) in Sansha-rat regions (Domain, Tash-Murkon, etc.).  I also spent a little time hunting Blood Raiders' anomalies.

Fitting
I decided that a cruiser would be best for this since it can tank more than enough and the guns can still hit frigates pretty well.  90% of the rats in these anomalies are frigates and destroyers.

Omen Navy Issue

Low
2x Centii C-Type Small Armor Repairer (Yes, really.  They’re cheap enough and light on the power grid.  This also gives a better tank than a medium repper would even if I did have the PG to spare.)
2x Energized Adaptive Nano Plating II
1x Damage Control II
1x Heat Sink II
1x Tracking Enhancer II

Mid
1x 10MN Afterburner II
2x Capacitor Control Circuit II

High
5x Heavy Modal Pulse Laser I (Imperial Navy Multifrequency M)
1x Salvager I (only for faction spawns)

3x Medium Capacitor Control Circuit I

5x Hobgoblin II

Tank: 131dps (omni)
Gank: 341 dps (plus drones, if I launch them)
Speed: 605m/s

Results
So far I’ve run 301 sites, made 53 million from bounties, 50 million from T2 salvage from the faction spawns, 24 million from the high-meta items that faction rats sometimes carry, and 221 million from the faction modules they carried.  This works out to 15.7 ISK/hour at my pace of 13.5 sites/hour or 1.16 million ISK/site if you run them faster or slower.  Most of the money is in the faction loot and that is a very hit-or-miss thing so if you try this be patient.  It takes a lot of repetition before it’s worth it.

Good Parts
ISK!  This works out to be somewhat less than I can earn doing level 4 missions (I’ll post my numbers on that later).  It also has a bit of a “treasure hunt” feel to it since sometimes you make very little and then every once in a while you hit a jackpot.  Example: one day I killed a True Sansha Misshape which dropped a True Sansha Energized Adaptive Nano Membrane, a True Sansha Small EMP Smartbomb, and a True Sansha Warp Scrambler.  In total, this drop was worth about 180 million ISK.  All of this came from running a Sansha Refuge site in a 0.8 system.  Of course, I did 61 other Sansha Refuge sites before that and only one other of those sites gave me loot worth mentioning (a True Sansha Medium Pulse Laser ~30M ISK).
Also, it’s in high-sec so being attacked is less of a worry (suicide gankers are always relevant though).  Scanning for anomalies is quick, compared to scanning for deadspace plexes which takes a long time.
For bounties, the Dens as well as Hidden/Forsaken/Forlorn hideaways give much better bounties than the other anomalies.  This is mostly because you fight more cruisers in these sites.

It’s also easy.  You could run these sites in a T1 cruiser with only meta modules.  I wish I’d thought of this back when 15 million ISK/hour sounded like a lot.

Bad Parts
It’s a tedious way to spend your time and you’re not guaranteed to make more than the very small amount of ISK from bounties.  You won’t make nearly as much as you could running anomalies in low-sec or null-sec either.

It’s also quite frustrating to finally get a faction spawn, open the wreck, and see a tag and a faction laser crystal.  ISK value: diddly squat. There are also lots of faction modules that really aren't worth much, such as the "True Sansha Reflective Plating".

Strategies
Many systems will have zero or only a few anomalies.  This is because anomalies mostly respawn when someone runs them, and they could respawn anywhere that gets the same kind of anomaly.  The result is that the most trafficked systems stay close to zero anomalies and the dead-end boring systems often have over a dozen.  It’s worth your time to go places where nobody else goes.  Remember that system with one gate and no stations?  Go there.

Run the sites quickly.  Most of the ISK comes from the rare faction spawns, so your goal is to finish the site and “roll the dice” to see if you get that spawn.  If you don’t (and you usually won’t) then you move on and do it all again.  Work out what the ideal warp-to distance is for each type of site you run.  Some of them are better to snipe and for some you want to be right in the middle of things.  You’ll run the same few sites (Hideaway and Refuge mostly) over and over so you’ll have no shortage of practice.

You might want to skip drone sites.  Their “faction spawns” are sentient drones which drop drone parts, most of which aren’t worth much.  Also, since the drones don’t give bounties and you aren’t picking up loot there’s no equivalent of a bounty payoff.  I’m not sure yet whether the faction rats from the higher-level sites (Refuge and Den) give better loot than the low-level ones (Hideaway and Burrow) but the data imply that that’s possible.  I’ll need a bigger sample size to be sure, so stay tuned.

Data Porn
Here's the spreadsheet.  It also contains my data on deadspace sites and mag/radar sites, which I might eventually write about if I feel like it.
I ran 301 sites and got 17 faction spawns (5.65%).  260 were Sansha sites with 13 True Sansha spawns (5.0%), 31 were drone sites with 3 Sentient dronw spawns, and 10 were Blood Raider sites with 1 Dark Blood spawn.
Of those 14 faction spawns (I don’t count the sentient drones; their drops are droppings), I got 6 faction modules.  This works out to 0.428 modules per faction spawn but they don’t drop that way.  Instead you’ll get 5 “empty” faction spawns (just tags and ammo) in a row and then one with 3 modules.  It’s very hit-or-miss.  This is part of the reason I want to run more of these to shore up the numbers.  I don’t think my sample size is big enough yet.

Etc.
Are the Faction tags (True Sansha Brass Tag, Dark Blood Copper Tag, etc.) good for anything?  I can’t find a use for them beyond selling them on the market.  Do the people who buy them have a use I don't know about?

Update 1:

I ran sites for a few more hours.  I got a quite nice drop (see the pretty picture) and this increased the average to 24 million isk/hour.  That's still less than I can make running level 4 missions, but it's competitive.

One meme common to many religious groups is to try to get people who aren't in the religion to obey its rules.  Working from the idea that a religious person thinks his or her religion is true, it's obvious that they'd think it's good to obey the rules.  They think good things will happen.  If they want what's best for other people, they'd want them to obey the rules too.  The problem is that they don't seem to understand the basic flaw here: other people don't believe that the religion is true (obviously, since they're not members) so they don't think these good things will happen.

This is one of the most infuriating memes from an outsider's perspective and one that makes it very difficult to live side-by-side with a religious community without conflict.

Examples:

Proposition 8: The campaign for California's recent law banning gay marriage was largely financed by the Mormon church.  But then, Mormons wouldn't marry someone of the same sex (would they?) so the law must be intended to keep other people from getting married.  The usual dogma that it "protects" marriage is spurious and only said to distract from the point.

Abstinence-only sex education: This one has even been enshrined into US law lately.  The idea that kids will be taught about sex, but not taught anything about condoms, birth control, or the other practical safety-related information they need to know is promoted by many religious groups (particularly Christians, but this one is very broad-based).  The fact that most people who eventually do get married will have had sex first regardless of what kind of sex ed they they had is the first red flag here.  The further research that people who only had abstinence-only sex ed are far less likely to use a condom when they do, nearly inevitably, have sex would put the final nail in the coffin if this were a science-based proposal.  It's not.

Blue Laws: Laws denoting what you are and are not allowed to do on the holy day of one religion (usually Sundays and Christianity, respectively, in North America) are sometimes called blue laws.  Can you buy beer on a Sunday at your local liquor store?  If you're in the midwest or substantial fraction of other states, probably not.

Pictures of Mohammed: One of the rules of most forms of Islam (and it is NOT a single religion by most definitions, whatever the proponents say) is that followers can't depict Mohammed.  The idea is to prevent idol worship by preventing the idolized person from having a physical form you can point to (which obviously worked so well...).  This would only be mildly strange on its own, but the sheer venom and violence shown by Muslims toward other people who depict their "prophet" is obviously an attempt to keep other people from disobeying their rule.

Respect the Koran/Bible/Torah/<Insert Holy Book or Object Here>: Many religious people get offended at disrespect toward an object their religion reveres, regardless of who owns this object.  The recent "Everybody Burn the Koran Day" is an example of the sheer stupidity that comes out.  Granted that the people behind this are idiots who were doing it for bigoted reasons, the fact remains that they were threatening to destroy their own books on their own property.  Who cares?  (Quite a lot of people actually, but they shouldn't.)

Indoctrinating Children: Teaching your religion to credulous children falls into the same category here.  It may annoy some people that I point this out, but it's true.  Nobody is born religious; it's something that happens to them along the way.  This almost always starts by telling kids to obey the small rules (dress up for church, say your prayers, etc.) before they're old enough to have any sort of opinion on the matter.

What's wrong with all of these?  They're affecting people other than those who believe in the religious ideas that the rules came from.  They're forcing one group's rules onto another group.  That isn't the sort of thing a free society should do.

I've finally started getting comment spam!  Keep 'em coming, bots!  I feel like I've made it.

Seriously though, if you have a real comment and I delete it, I'm sorry.  I'm deleting thousands (literally) of fake computer-generated comments and I might miss a real one.  Let me know if you have a problem.

An interesting note: after I didn't allow the spam comments to be published for a while, they all changed.  Now all of the comments are along the lines of "Great post!  Thanks-a-mundo.  Keep 'em coming." or similar nonspecific sucking-up.  I suppose some bloggers wouldn't delete those.  Not me.

I still read slashdot because every once in a while one of the stories really catches my interest.  The latest such story is about Bitcoin, an attempt to create a decentralized currency system.  If it, or a similar system, works it could create a whole new, and perhaps even more structurally sound, monetary system for the world.  More likely it will die with a wimper, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

It works a little like freenet, in that it is based on a lot of clients sending packets to one another to achieve some emergent objective.  Instead of transmitting data, the objective here is to keep track of the transactions going on.  There's also a distributed computing aspect in that the transactions in each "block" (roughly 10 minutes) are all combined together into a hash which is very difficult to compute.  Any client set to do so will spend its spare compute cycles to try to compute the hash for the current block.  It's pretty random which key works, so the more compute cycles you have the more likely you are to get the correct key first..  The client taht gets that key also gets a certain number of Bitcoins as a kind of prize or incentive.

When you make a transaction it goes out to all of the other clients yours is connected to, and spreads out within the network.  When a block is computed, it combines all of the known transactions into it to prevent "double-spending", the idea of the owner of a Bitcoin spending it with two (or more) recipients.  In a sense, the main objective of all of that computing above is to keep track of the owners of bitcoins and prevent double-spending.

The original concept of the system should deal with the problem of an attacker trying to gain control of the network.  The one who computes the next block has a certain degree of control, and that's distributed pretty much randomly according to computing power.  That means that an attacker would have to have as much power than the entire network to have an even chance of taking over, and more power to be guaranteed of doing so.  If they have that much power they'd be better off just generating keys and keeping the Bitcoins than just destroying the whole system to steal the current value fo the bitcoins.

There are likely some less obvious flaws with the current concept or implementation.  It's important that these get dealt with before the network gets too big, or when someone finds a major vulnerability in the (future) big network the whole thing could collapse due to shattered confidence.  Since it's an open-source project, many of them will be worked out over time.  Another key way to find flaws is for there to be a financial incentive to do so (which is starting to be true, since you can trade Bitcoins for real money already).  Of course, since this is based on public key cryptography, if a quantum computer with enough entangled qbits to tackle keys of this size are ever created, the whole thing will fall apart.  Of course if that happens, much of the rest of the financial system will die too, so it will be the least of our worries.

The current implementation is essentially designed to be deflationary in the long run.  New coins are being created, sure, but that's intended to be phased out over time.  Coins will certainly be lost as hard drives crash and files get lost.  If the system is successful, the current limit of BTC0.01 per transaction closer to the coded limit of BTC0.00000001 as the finite number of coins get spread out over a larger number of owners.

One potential attach system I haven't seen addressed yet (and I've done quite a bit of reading) is exactly _who_ decides how hard it should be to calculate the next block's hash?  I know it's automatically adjusted to take 10 minutes on average, but who does so?  If it's a single decision-maker, then that's an attack point.  If it's a collective decision of all of the clients, then maybe that could be manipulated by a sizable, but not overwhelming, population of dishonest clients.

For now, however, I've got a client running and I'm playing with it.  If you're bored, send me a bitcoin at 1DUXcZoYtKwbETc8GMDnhvWSqmNVW5pfE5 !  They're only worth about a penny.  So far...

As those who follow science news should know, it turns out that the climategate scandal was utter bunk.  The whole thing started when a group of climate deniers managed to steal the email logs from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.  The emails appear to have shown that the researchers had (Gasp!) an opinion about whether their research was correct or not!  They did not, however, show that they'd faked any research or lied about anything.  Anyway, the folks who stole the emails sent them around to various news organizations, who obligingly blew them out of proportion and manufactured a scandal.

Currently everybody who had been accused of wrongdoing has been cleared, and a couple of newspapers have even admitted that they did wrong!  Unfortunately these admissions will never receive the same level of press coverage that the original "scandal" did, so many of those who aren't as well educated about climate change science will think that the previous nonsense proves that it's fake or something.

Hat tip: Pharyngula

Oh, and would you like the recipe for a happy sex life?  Wait to even kiss until your wedding day, of course!

Since religions can't actually deliver on the promises of unreasonable bribes, they have to get around that part somehow.  A very effective way to do that is to claim to make good on the promise only when or where nobody can verify it.

The most common way to "deliver" on a bribe is after death.  Heaven, reincarnation, nirvana, seeing dead family members and some more exotic stuff all "happen" after the recipient is dead and can't tell anybody alive about it.  The human mind, if it has faith, will often convert these failures of religon into successes; e.g. "Grandma's in heaven now," so heaven exists.

One rather exotic case of this meme is the super powers promised by Scientology.  They say that the classes that give you super powers will be available when the building is finished, which will happen when they get enough money.  That has been expected "pretty soon now" for a couple of decades.

A similar category is things are predicted to happen in the future.  Among many Christians, the rapture is an event which will happen in the future and will change the world enough to remove all doubt of their religion's truth.  If you do the reasonable thing and wait until this has happened to believe, they say, you will be too late and won't get the easy access to heaven.  You'll have to suffer through the end times.  And since everybody who's ever predicted the exact date of the rapture so far has been wrong, you should just believe now.  There are similar, though generally less manipulative, issues with other religious timelines.

If nobody you can communicate with has any evidence for or against a proposition, the only reasonable assumption is the null hypothesis; in this case that nothing much happens.  The trouble is that with enough indoctrination and reinforcement, people with faith tend to assume that the less probable option is actually the most reasonable (for reasons I'll post on soon).

This is the first in a hopefully rather long series of posts on memes that some religions have in common.

One of the most common memes among religions is the unreasonable bribe.  By this I mean that if you do everything right, something good and otherwise impossible will happen.  It's the "million dollars" part of kissing Hank's ass.

Here are some examples:

Heaven:  In mainstream Christianity and Islam, going to heaven after you die for the rest of eternity is the classic bribe.  (Whether any place could feel like paradise for eternity is usually not addressed.)  Buddhism and Hinduism add the twist that while various heavens exists, you still live and die there and will eventually use up your good karma, so it's not eternal.  This brings up...

Reincarnation: The belief that after you die, you'll live again in another body seems pretty unlikely to most of the uninitiated on the face of it.  While being reincarnated isn't always a bribe (you could end up in a worse body or on a lower plane than you started if your karma sucks), living your life in the "correct" way is the way to get the good karma which will result in a better life next reincarnation.

Super Powers: Always less coy than other religions, Scientology literally offers super powers if only they can get enough money...  Mormon temple garments are supposed (by some) to offer unusual protections.

Nirvana: While ceasing to exist might seem like the most reasonable thing to expect after one dies to a secularist or most Westerners, it's viewed as an incredibly difficult accomplishment requiring a lifetime (or more than one) by most Buddhists.

Family: While many versions of heaven allow the deceased to be reunited with dead family members, the Mormons get more mileage out of this bribe than most religious groups thanks to their focus on family ties.

Your own planet: It's been reported (though the LDS church officially denies it) that an inner Mormon teaching is that after you die, if you've been one of the very best people, you could become a god or goddess of your own planet.  Seriously.

It should be noted that, regardless of what level of importance a particular religion places on belief, an essential requirement for any of these bribes is that you believe the bribe is possible.  After all, if you don't believe it could possibly happen, why would you bother kissing Hank's ass (or whatever)?

Here's a neat little game that's been around for a long time, but it's fun to play from time to time.  You run a few planets and try to conquer the galaxy.  You do this by clicking on the pictures when you want your planets/ships/etc. to do things.  It's really just a prettied-up forms-based interface.  The trailer on the front page is neat but it has nothing to do with the actual game.  I recommend signing up for one of the "named" universes (Andromeda, Barym, Capella, etc.) rather than the "numbered" ones.  This corresponds to using a server running newer or older software, respectively.

One nice aspect of this game is that rather than the standard mmorpg model which rewards playing more and more hours no matter what, Ogame tends to be most fun if you play a 10-20 minute session many times per day and then go about your business.  That means it's a game you can actually combine with living your life!

Anybody who's followed this site knows that, well... there's been very little to follow for the last few years.  I've decided to change this.  The first step I'm taking is installing this whole new blog software, b2evolution, which should make it a lot more convenient for me to post stuff.  We'll see how that goes.