meatsounds

The computer gets a hell of a lot smarter at Prince. It still builds cities at a bunch of silly places, and doesn't handle bodies of water very well. But it can balance its budget just fine, and later on in the game you need to work a bit to gain a technological advantage or build the wonder you're after. 
 
If I were to push into the hardest difficulty, I'd do it on a standard-sized or larger archipelago map and play a city-state friendly game with a small-to-mid-sized empire. I'm not at that level yet, though, and would like to hear from someone trying out the higher difficulties.

There's a complaint I hear a lot which is just bullshit. All you people complaining about the random or overly aggressive AI, build bigger armies. The AI is a huge opportunist and will attack you when it thinks you're weak. It wonders why it should trade for your resources when it could just take it. Just like you would in their position.  I've finished three games and haven't had any random attacks from the AI. Once two tried to gang up on me but I managed to over-run the one while holding the other one off at a choke point. Let me use this opportunity to say that if there is one type of terrain you want in a choke point, it's marsh, backed up with good ranged units -- I killed a dozen of the AI's units by letting it run in the marsh, get stuck, and then get pin-cushioned by my Babylonian Bowmen and my city with Walls of Babylon on my side. That was satisfying.
 
Some things I have had in spades is the AI's dubious skill at navigating lots of water, the buildings which seem to have been constructed underwater, and occasional crashes. I'll add to the list: the terrible places the AI will build cities at the lower difficulties, the fact that not only is strategic view lacking in information which is on the normal view, there are things you simply cannot do in it (like select a unit garrisoned in a city), and the notification system for trade routes being really janky (with a large empire on an archipelago map, I'd get lots of false alarms about my trade routes being severed, which they weren't). That hasn't stopped me from spending 30 hours on this game over the weekend. God help me. God help all of us.

In today's episode of 'Engineers and Their Crazy Toys', two electronics professors have modded a voting machine to run Pac-Man (as featured on MetaFilter).  
 
I thought you guys might be interested in seeing this as well.

From The New York Time:  Video Gamers Tackle the Complexities of Protein Folding

In a match that pitted video game players against the best known computer program designed for the task, the gamers outperformed the software in figuring out how 10 proteins fold into their three-dimensional configurations.

Proteins are essentially biological nano-machines that carry out myriad functions in the body, and biologists have long sought to understand how the long chains of amino acids that make up each protein fold into their specific configurations.

In May 2008, researchers at the University of Washington made a protein-folding video game called Foldit freely available via the Internet. The game, which was competitive and offered the puzzle-solving qualities of a game like Rubik’s Cube, quickly attracted a dedicated following of thousands of players.

So, anybody who is a part of Western civilization would gain a lot from reading the Bible, because it has/had been a cornerstone of that civilization for well over a thousand years. If you've read it, there are scores of images, allusions and references that will suddenly make sense to you, and most likely you will have a richer experience out of almost every other book you read (especially from the 19th century and earlier). Also, there are large parts of the Bible which are fantastic: the book of Job is one of the great classics of Western literature. Some of it is pretty uninspiring -- the Biblical author/s were inconsistent in their quality --  but the good parts are very good. It helps that the people doing the translating typically have done so with enormous amounts of love and care. I recommend the King James Version. It can be heavy going if you're not used to archaic English, but the quality of the poetry in that translation is simply wonderful.

 NWOBHM = Fuck yeah! 
 
Sabbath aren't NWOBHM, though. But Priest and Maiden are, and if somebody says they're into metal but not into Priest or Maiden, they're lying about one of the two. 
 
Also, Lenny Kilmister is the coolest person on the planet. Exhibit one: his surname is Kilmister. Exhibit two: he's the guy behind Motörhead and songs like 'Ace of Spades'. Exhibit three: he also used to be in Hawkwind. Exhibit four: this is a picture of him (at age 60!): 

I really hate advertising, and how ubiquitous advertising is. I don't begrudge GB their money -- heaven knows I've leached my share of bandwidth off of here -- but I feel the same way about the fact that advertising is an inevitable evil as I do about all the other signs of how messed up the world is.

I'm somewhat distressed by the zombie chest hair.

Well, I'll be mister sour grapes then. 
 
I guess it was inevitable -- they have to make their money somehow -- but to me this to me is the penny dropping. I fucking hate advertising, and I fucking hate that it has finally taken a shit on Giant Bomb's head. Advertising is like an Elder God from the Cthulhu Mythos, except that it doesn't devour you and render you insane as make you want to gnaw off your own limbs in a desperate attempt to be distracted from the asinine invasions into your mental life. And the Elder Gods are awesome, whereas advertising is a bunch of marketing fuckwits doing their best to dehumanise you and en-give-them-money--ise you in return. Fuck 'em, fuck 'em all.