The hot news today is how a team of American scientists have managed to create a bacterial lifeform using nothing but synthetic genes. This is, essentially, artificial life.

To say that this is a big deal would be a monumental understatement. We likely won’t be seeing any real world applications of this biotechnology any time soon, but the implications are mind-boggling: from cells that eat carbon dioxide and shit petroleum to customised cancer-eating bacteria, this technology has the potential to radically change our lives.

Of course the technology has its critics. As usual the loudest voices come from religious organisations who, without a hint of irony, shout down the progress of science from the comfort of their air-conditioned homes with HDTV and broadband internet connections.

And then there are the environmentalists denouncing everything even remotely reeking of biotechnology and genetic engineering. These are just as bad as the religious nutcases, because likewise their entire argument is based on disinformation and ignorance. If these eco-hippies were really serious about not using any artificial biotechnology, they’d all starve to death in a matter of weeks and die horribly of all kinds of diseases.

Because, you see, the moment humans started cultivating crops and breeding animals, we started to artificially engineer life. From mixing stronger types of crops for better harvest yields, to breeding sturdier and more milk-producing cows, biotechnology has been around for as long as agriculture has.

On top of that biotechnology has given us some monumentally important medicinal advances, from penicillin to aspirin, from vaccines to heart-transplants.

So denouncing biotech is a pretty fucking stupid thing to do. Instead we should embrace it and ensure that whatever we end up doing with this type of new technology, it doesn’t just end up as the playthings of the rich and powerful. We should strive to make it benefit those who need it the most: the invisible masses of poor and starving people across the world that with their low-wage slave labour enable the privileged west to live its decadent lifestyle.

Airport security event:

Customs Official: ‘May I know your name?’
Passenger : ‘Batman’
Customs Official: ‘What’s your name?’
Passenger : ‘My name is Batman’
Customs Official: ‘Trying to be funny? What’s your surname?’
Passenger : ‘Superman’
Customs Official: ‘So you’re telling me your name is Batman Superman?’
Passenger : ‘Yes’
Customs Official: ‘Arrest this guy’

When they had him in custody, he was asked to show his identification card:

(I know this is an oldie but it’s still so damn funny.)

Last weekend I spent about 10 hours playing Mass Effect 2. I won’t bore the non-gamers out there with superlatives on how fantastic it is, what a totally immersive gaming experience it provides, and how utterly compelling the story is.

Except I just did, but that’s not the point I’m trying to make today.

For most of videogame history you as the gamer didn’t have any moral choices to make in a game. You were the Good Guy and the goal of the game was to defeat the Bad Guys.

This gradually changed as gamers grew up and videogame designers got more comfortable with moral ambiguity in a game’s storyline. Now a lot of games allow the player to make choices that directly or indirectly affect the plot and outcome of the game.

Back in the day when these types of games first came out, I always chose the ‘evil’ options. In any Star Wars game I was the Sith Lord, choosing the Dark Side of the Force while betraying friendships and killing good guys.

In the first Fable I was so thoroughly evil that halfway through the game my character had already spawned horns and caused entire villages to evacuate at the first sight of me.

When World of Warcraft came out I only chose an Alliance Night Elf because my buddies played Alliance, but I really wanted an Undead Warlock to wreak havoc with. (I’ve since become totally committed to my NE Druid but that’s mostly because of the class’s überness.)

And don’t even get me started on one of my all-time favourites: Carmageddon.

But games got more refined, and what started out as simple black & white choices between good and evil has now turned in to a landscape of shades of grey. The Bioware game studio is considered a master of games with moral choices, and their latest product has left me feeling rather, well… confused.

The game I’m talking about is of course Mass Effect 2, and the confusion stems from a sudden inability on my part to make ‘evil’ choices.

Mass Effect 2 is a sequel (of course), and I played the first Mass Effect twice - one as the ‘good guy’ and one as an evil bastard. I thoroughly enjoyed both versions. The ending of the game wasn’t affected too much, but the whole feel and mood of the game changed. Overall I wasn’t too bothered by the choices I made, I just wanted to play the game to its full potential.

Mass Effect 2, however, has changed things. ME2 offers abundant opportunities to make moral choices, and many choices are pretty straightforward - kill or let live, steal or give back, lie or be truthful.

But some choices you have to make aren’t so monochrome. Do I intimidate and hurt this man to give me vital information that can save lives, or do I go easy on him? Do I kill this repentant bad guy, or do I let him go and trust he won’t commit more crimes? Do I shoot the frightened hostage aiming a gun at me, or do I try to talk him down from his panic?

And those are just the direct choices. The game is rife with choices that have deeper meaning and longer-lasting repercussions. Do I take the quick and often violent way through missions, bullying and intimidating my way around, generating more money for myself and my team members so the better, bugger guns are available faster and I can save the universe more efficiently? Or do I walk the straight and narrow path which invariably makes it more difficult and challenging, but the trail of corpses and devastated lives in my wake will be considerably thinner?

What used to make these choices so easy is the realisation that it really was just a game I was playing. Pixels on a screen, bits and bytes, lines of code, all that jazz. But Mass Effect 2 is such an advanced game, graphically and gameplay-wise, that you don’t feel like you’re playing a game. You become immersed in it, you are part of the game, and the choices you make in the game somehow reflect on you as a person.

And because of this I find myself unable to make any choice in the game that could be considered ‘evil’. Sometimes the morally grey choices leave me almost paralysed because I can’t figure out what the best option is. Occasionally I loathe myself for shooting the bad guys, even when they’re shooting at me, because the game succeeds so magnificently in painting its characters as real living beings. Even the aliens seem real, which is a truly amazing feat of game design.

So I’m confused. As with the first game I want to play Mass Effect 2 twice, making radically different choices in each session.

But I already know I won’t. Not this time. The game is too good, the voice-over acting too convincing, the digitally generated facial expressions too real. A part of me wants to be the bad guy again, rampaging my way through the gameworld, uncaring and unfeeling.

But that’s not who I am in the real world. And because of that, in Mass Effect 2 I can’t be that person in the game world either.

You know, I really want to distrust Google. They’re so pervasive and omniscient, I would really love to see them as the Big Bad Bully of the internet world.

But they keep doing these superb things that make it very hard to conjure even a mild dislike for them. They shower web geeks like me with free tools such as Analytics, Webmaster Tools, Website Optimizer, Conversion Optimizer, Internet Stats, and so much more…. And all for free!

Today Google launched a website aimed not at technophiliac internet addicts like yours truly, but at every day users. You know, people who don’t know what SEO means, how to change the homepage of their browser, or even know what a browser is:

This is undoubtedly part of their insidious masterplan to rule the world, but if this is how they plan to rule it, I say let them!

When I saw this bike today parked outside a pub in Belfast, I just had to take a picture. A Guinness-themed Harley Davidson bike:

Click for the bigger version on flickr

I’m not a fan of Apple. They make bloated, overpriced, overdesigned fashion statements. But that’s not what I hate about Apple - Nike makes similar products but I have no particular animosity towards them.

No, I hate Apple because they make closed, proprietary systems and insist on maintaining absolute tyrannical control over what its users are allowed to do with it.

But closed systems are stupid, counter-innovative and evolutionary dead ends, and anyone who supports that kind of thinking deserves to be punched back into the stone age.

Jason Calacanis, a somewhat notorious Internet entrepeneur, apparently shares my loathing:

I came across this today: Jedi Knight Training Event in Belfast!

A part of me really wants to go to this, just to see what it’s all about…. But another part of me - the part called reason - thinks it’s all a gimmicky scam.

“Rory, creative thinking expert and creator of Rory’s Story Cubes, will join me to offer Northern Ireland’s most exciting/only Jedi training event of 2009. Rory and I will explain the famous Jedi Mind-Trick by showing how to gain control over and from the minds of others. Rory will explore the subjects of Energy Psychology and Subtle Energy fields to gain modern insight in the mystical Force. I will then walk participants through the films to see those psychological skills Luke Skywalker gained in becoming a Jedi, and those Anakin lacked in his fall to the dark side.”

I wonder what the practical applications are in modern life. “These are not the tax return forms you are looking for….”

Update: Allen Baird, one of the event’s organisers, has responded in the comments. Be sure to read it, he makes a good point.

It’s been a mad week here with little time for individual blog updates. So instead I’ve collected the interesting stuff of last week in one post:

• Ireland Retreats To The Dark Ages
  Not content to join the rest of the world in the 21st century, Ireland decides to make time go backwards and heads for the Dark Ages at full speed by passing a law against Blasphemy. It’s now illegal in Ireland to take the name of the Lord in vain. Well, Goddammit.
   
• Sauron’s Evil Eye Burns In The Night Sky
  Well, it’s not really the Eye of Sauron, it’s just an eye-shaped galaxy with a supermassive black hole at its center. But it’s still cool.
   
• Toygasm Overwhelms Adamus
  I have a new toy to replace my once-slick-but-now-clunky Tytn II: the HTC Hero. Like many of my new toy acquisitions, it is made of Pure Awesomeness until I get tired of it. Which in this case is likely not to happen for a while. Seamless integration with my Gmail, calendar and contacts, loads of cool apps, smooth interface, and most of all: open source. Fuck you, iPhone.
   
• U2 Still Rules
  I went to see U2 on their 360° tour in Croke Park, Dublin last Friday and it rocked.

That is all.

There have been a lot of negative reviews of Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen. And when I say negative, I mean negative:

“Transformers 2 has a shot at the title Worst Movie of the Decade”, “a horrible experience of unbearable length”, “a pile of glittering junk”, “infantile”, “despicable”, and “tumescence”. (Yes I had to look that one up too.)

Transformers 2 even inspired this satirical review on io9 that, while brilliant in its execution, boils down to a verdict of cinematic excrement.

But I liked Transformers 2. Actually, that doesn’t describe my enjoyment of the film accurately. I fucking loved it.

Now according to the prevalent opinions of movie critics around the world that can only mean one thing: I’m an adolescent, intellectually-challenged and hopelessly insecure male geek. Well, two out of five isn’t bad, I suppose. (Hint: it’s not anything before the word male.)

I loved Transformers 2 because it delivers everything it should. It’s got supermassive robots rampaging through industrial cityscapes, sufficient explosions to vaporise the moon, abundant views of Megan Fox’s abundant curvature, a ginormous Transformer composed of multiple smaller robots tearing through an ancient Islamic state’s most holy archaeological sites, and Optimus Prime punching through another transformer’s chest.

Let me repeat that. It shows Optimus Prime punching his fist through the chest of a Decepticon. If that was the only thing the movie showed, over and over, for its whole two and a half hour length, it would still rock.

Yes, the plot is vague, incomplete and rather superfluous, but how many art-house films provoking rave reviews have simple, inane plots you can describe with a single sentence? (”Man has memories of failed relationship erased” anyone?)

Yet the crippled plot seems to be the central issue reviewers have with the film. The plot sucks, the plot is vague, the plot serves as nothing more but a flimsy curtain rail to hang countless over-the-top action sequences from, yadda yadda blah fucking blah.

Yes, we get it. The plot sucks! Guess what? I DON’T FUCKING CARE. Transformers 2 isn’t about the plot, you Merlot-sipping, Camembert-nibbling, pseudo-intellectual elitist movie-critic twit. It’s about robots beating the shit out of other robots and blowing up half the world while they’re at it.

And you know what? Transformers 2 does that VERY WELL. I can’t wait for number 3.

Here’s a sample of a hilarious set of splash pages a web developer considered putting up on his site for every IE6 user:

(Via @danielflorien)