May 2001 Archives

I finally broke down and did it last night. I trimmed my eyebrows.

It's an admission of aging. Hair may grow sparser, especially on top ? not me yet, thank heavens ? but it gets longer and coarser as we approach geezerhood. After the nose hair started to sprout in earnest, and the hair in my ears turned all bristly, I suppose eyebrows were the next logical step. But I wasn't even aware there was a problem until a few months ago, when my new barber asked if he should trim my eyebrows while he was at it.

Rr? Eyebrows? Why would anyone bother cutting eyebrows? No thanks. I've always had long eyebrow hair; using a fingertip, I could press it down to prick my eyeball since I was a teenager. (The overhanging brow helps, of course.) At the time, I figured the barber just didn't recognize I've always looked this way, and I feared I would look odd if he fiddled with them.

But I got self-conscious. I started checking them in the mirror, and had to admit they are longer than they used to be. The tips snag in the skin of my forehead, raising the brows in shaggy arches. If I greased them, I'd look like Eddie Munster. If they were gray, I'd look like Mr. Venske, my seventh grade science teacher.

Or my grandfather.

Grampa Roth left me with three legacies, it seems. Grampa was a curmudgeon's curmudgeon, and so am I; that's old news. He was a hermit, too, and I've been turning into one for several years. The eyebrows are news. It's all downhill from here, I suppose: turning into a sour old man in brown corduroy. I hate corduroy. Demanding brightly-lit restaurants. Refusing to listen to the doctor. I feel like Gene Wilder in Young Frankenstein, thrashing about in nightmare, chanting, ?Destiny! Destiny! No escaping, that's for me!?

But not just yet. Not so long as I have this pair of scissors, my trusty blade to fight off the ravages of time for a little while.

I just want to relate a story of the Soviet space program today. There's no original thought here, but that's okay; it's a story worth hearing.

While the Viking program was zipping about Mars, sending back celebrated discoveries, the Russians were having a much harder time of things on Venus. I don't know why they decided to work on Venus, particularly, but I suspect the decision was as much one of pride as anything. Perhaps they didn't want to be upstaged in the implicit competition of simultaneous exploration of Mars; perhaps they wanted to prove they could handle a more difficult target.

The fact that nobody really knew what Venus was like until the Russians went and looked didn't make the target any easier. It took the destruction of Venera 1 through 5 just to learn what was killing the landers. Despite the comparable mass and orbit. Venus is not Earth's twin, as astronomers of the day guessed. Surface temperatures approaching 500°C, pressures near 100 atmospheres and an atmosphere of sulfuric acid play merry hell with electronics, and mechanical control systems are doomed to a painfully short lifespan. In theory, one could protect the gear with heavy plating and pack in an over-powered antenna to signal past it, but the practice of space exploration is way behind theory. Heavy plating and a huge power plant would add a lot of mass to the craft. Even small weight increases demand exorbitant fuel expenditures, due to the diminishing returns of thrust: fuel itself has mass, requiring even more fuel to lift it. So building a craft capable of surviving on Venus was impractical. Scientists were reduced to one-way trips onto the surface, hoping the craft would survive long enough to send back meaningful data.

When Venera 7 finally made it to the surface intact, Russian astronomers were surprised to discover that Venus seemed to have a viscous surface, at least where the probe was unfortunate enough to touch down. All the pictures had a peculiar, gloppy distortion. It took a while to realize the lens cap had melted onto the camera lens. Back to the drawing board. The new lens cap was made of a more heat-resistant substance, and given a mechanism to pop it off before it could gum up the works, just in case. Designers began to rely on redundancy and variety. If something went wrong with the camera, Venera 14 had an X-ray spectrometer. And a seismograph. And a mechanical arm to collect soil samples for on-board analysis.

The arm collected and analyzed the ejected lens cap. Venera 14 travelled tens of millions of miles to learn the electrical conductivity of heat-resistant plastic.

There's an object lesson here. The ways in which our space probes, removed from immediate human guidance and cut off from all hope of repair, can screw up are awesome in their variety. Engineers can plan for rough conditions, like acidic atmospheres, but how can they anticipate ridiculous difficulties like collecting the ship's own lens cap? The Challenger's O-ring, the Hubble reflector, the Apollo 13 air filtration, are single components in mind-bogglingly complex machines, individually crafted, which must be made perfect with one attempt. The wonder is not that so many space projects return unsatisfactory results, but that so few do. I lose patience with critics who lose patience with NASA.

Things are getting mighty unfriendly out there.

The ninety-five year partnership between Ford and Firestone hasn't just ended; it's spiraled into vicious feud. A willingness to break the alliance in the face of negative press over vehicle rollovers is understandable, but you would expect the break to happen quietly, way down on page 38, while both companies did everything possible to keep the specter of unsafe products hidden away. Instead, Ford and Firestone are firing off press releases as fast as possible, smearing one another as viciously as they can. A successful campaign may, barely, deflect an expensive lawsuit or two, but it seems to me that hammering the message ?unsafe? into the public's mind will, in the long term, be even more expensive. Even if Ford, for example, bears the entire technical responsibility and Firestone gets off scot-free from suit, would you go out and buy a Firestone tire next week?

Vermont Senator Jeffords is expected shortly to defect from the Republican party over Bush the lesser's tax plan. The repercussions of such a decision when the Senate is split 50-50 will be enormous, even though US politics doesn't toe the party line so closely as in other countries, thanks to the shuffling of positions of influence: committee leadership, for example. Independent of Senate politics, the defection is a very visible and therefore extremely embarrassing reflection on the proposed tax program. Bush holds the theory that one gains political capital by spending it; using influence to push a bill through wins authority which may then be spent on a larger program, in a building momentum. Political power is sensitive to embarrassment, even if it carries no technical impact, and a strategy of snowballing is terribly vulnerable to an early reversal. Even if Jeffords fails to stop the tax bill, he may have hobbled Bush's presidency indefinitely, and Jeffords will lose a lot of face with his Republican colleagues. I have to respect his voting on principle ? especially since I agree with the principle ? but it's a vicious blow to the fledgling president.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is nothing new, of course, but Sharon has given up all pretense of a desire for peace, at least as far as the rest of the world understand the term. His response to the Mitchell report, which called for, among other things, an immediate cease-fire, abandonment of terrorist attacks, and halting Jewish settlement of the West Bank and Gaza strip, was to agree whole-heartedly ? to everything except that part about settlements. Apparently, Sharon considers ?cease-fire? to mean ?license to do anything you like, free of violent repercussions.? One can almost picture him waving the report at Arafat and shouting, ?See? The US says you should stop shooting at us and that the fighting is all your fault!? He can't possibly expect the world to swallow that line; we can only read this as an open endorsement of continuing conflict.

Nobody likes anybody today. More fun to make enemies than friends. I think I'll just stay home today, and play things safe: write, surf the net, play a computer game. With luck, I can conquer a few neighbors.

Something has long bothered me about the adoption of gunpowder weapons. I have a hard time believing they were used at all, much less accepted so quickly in the advancing Renaissance.

Everyone has seen historical programs or reenactments demonstrating the muzzle-loaders of the (American) Civil War and the Napoleonic era. The first time anyone sees them, usually some time in grade school, the reaction is invariably surprise at how slow the rate of fire was, and how close the soldiers had to stand to the enemy to get a decent effect out of their weapons. And the old European weapons, c. 1300-1500, were much, much worse in every way: clumsier, heavier, slower, less accurate, and shorter ranged.

The earliest handarms were metal tubes, without stocks, firing likely-sized rocks picked up on the field. Lest he burn his hand with the fuse, the firer had to look at the touchhole rather than his target. Successive improvements, like the matchlock and manufactured ammunition, helped enormously, but even as late as the 18th century, firearms were only comparably lethal to the English longbow and Mongol composite bow, as measured in range, rate of fire, penetration, and mobility. Further, bows were silent, and neither advertised the firer's position nor obscured his vision with a cloud of gunpowder smoke. Benjamin Franklin seriously urged the adoption of the longbow in the fledgling US army.

That leaves around five hundred years in which European armies had armed its infantry with second-class weapons while the technology caught up with its potential. Why?

Gunpowder had only one advantage over high-powered bows. Archers had to train more or less continually for several years to use the bows effectively. Just building up the strength to handle a bow was a formidable task. Archaeologists have turned up corpses of longbowmen with scoliosis, their spines twisted by their own asymmetrical musculature. Preparing a company of archers was therefore expensive: not only did the king have to pay their salaries for several years, but the yeomen also weren't available to work the fields or otherwise join the rapidly-expanding economies of western Europe.

The expense of archers was important to kingdoms which hovered perpetually on the verge of bankruptcy. France, Austria, and Spain habitually launched a new round of border wars the moment they recovered solvency from the previous round. Wars were ended by bankruptcy more often than actual military defeat. ?Victory goes to him who has the last escudo.? Even countries seeking to keep out of expensive wars rarely had the choice, since almost everyone bordered at least one aggressive neighbor.

So for that one reason ? the extra trouble and expensive of really good archers ? armies limped along with underequipped armies for five hundred years. As much as I appreciate T. N. Dupuy's military histories (upon which this essay relies!), it does sabotage his claims of the ascendancy of infantry in status as well as killing power throughout the period.

An on-line essayist I know only as ?Columbine? has a catch-phrase relating to computer puzzle-adventure games: ?Give the tuba to the ostrich.? It describes a response to frustration peculiar to the genre. In puzzle-adventure games, one travels about various locations, generally collecting a miscellany of tools to act as keys to get past various obstacles: use a key to unlock a cabinet, which contains a steak, which you can use to distract a guard dog, past which is a notebook containing passwords for? and so on. At some point, the player eventually reaches a conceptual dead end. He only has a few obstacles that he has yet to pass (and can reach), say, an ostrich perched on a huge ruby which it believes to be an egg. He has a handful of items he hasn't used, which makes them good candidates for dealing with the ostrich. He's tried scaring the ostrich, feeding the ostrich, petting the ostrich? no soap. He's out of good ideas. In desperation, he starts doing things no sane person would consider in a real life.

He gives the tuba to the ostrich. Probably doesn't work, but what has he got to lose? The only reason he tries is the fact that he is playing with a puzzle, with a finite number of explicitly defined components (keys, guard dogs, tubas, and so on). He knows a solution exists, and that it must revolve around his finite collection, so he tries to solve the puzzle by brute force. He just goes down the list of verbs and objects he knows exist in the game: give the tuba to the ostrich, play the tuba at the ostrich, tickle the ostrich, count the ostrich?

Sometimes it works. Sometimes the reasoning behind the solution isn't clear even after it works. Badly designed games, whose puzzles don't make sense, or which offer too little in the way of suggestive descriptions, have many such moments, but even the best will stymie a player on occasion. It's as much a function of the player as the game, or really a relationship between the two. A player thinking on the same wavelength as the creator can breeze through a puzzle adventure, while an equally capable player thinking on a different wavelength stumbles along, wondering what to do next. Like abstract art, sometimes you ?get it;? sometimes you don't.

I'm playing Exile (Myst III) now, and I thoroughly fail to get it. The game has taken a step backwards from Riven (Myst II), which went to great lengths to blend its puzzles into the background. Like the original Myst, Exile confronts the player with explicit, obviously artificial puzzles: rather than turning off furnaces to permit crawling through vents, you must push elaborate and arbitrary sequences of buttons using codes found elsewhere. I find myself wondering how a guy smart enough to create self-consistent microcosms could think the best mechanism to open his bedroom closet would be a series of hoops and wooden balls in his front yard, the balls to be thrown through the right hoops in the right sequence.

Since I don't understand Exile, I've given many tubas to many ostriches; it's worked twice so far. Eileene, on the other hand, whipped through the game in just over a day. An opaque puzzle is frustrating. An opaque puzzle that someone else solves within a minute is maddening. It proves the failure is on my part, after all.

Last Saturday, I had the pleasure of reading A. K. Dewdney's Yes, We Have No Neutrons, describing eight celebrated ?scientific? blunders, results of earnest but deeply flawed scientific method. The failures behind cold fusion, Freudian psychology, and Biosphere 2 are entertaining until you realize that similar mistakes are endemic to science; science may be reliable, but the scientists are only human.

One of Dewdney's case studies is J. Phillipe Rushton's infamous treatise correlating race with intelligence: Mongoloids are (supposedly) more intelligent than Caucasoids, who are in turn (again supposedly) more intelligent than Negroids. I don't defend Rushton's Race and Behavior; as Dewdney points out, it's bad science. On the other hand, it bothers me that Rushton was defeated in the court of public opinion, booed off Geraldo Rivera's stage, rather than broken on scientific grounds. Scholars and the daytime-TV rabble alike rejected Race and Behavior, not because it was poorly reasoned, but because they didn't want to hear the conclusions. ?I've already made up my mind; don't confuse me with the facts.?

There is nothing inherently implausible in the idea that different races may have different brain sizes, different tendencies toward violence, different degrees of sexual drive, or even different intelligence ? whatever that means ? on a broad average. We can see that behavioral as well as physical traits can be carried in the genes by looking at dogs. Golden retrievers, for example, are widely praised in dog books for their sweet tempers. Collies who have never so much as smelled a sheep, nor seen a farm, nonetheless herd small children as they would sheep; I've seen it happen, myself. German shepherds are notably more intelligent than the average breed, bulldogs notably less. Whatever mechanism can code behaviors into dogs can code it into humans, too.

But before my friends panic and think I've gone racist, I need to point out some big obstacles in actually discovering what the racial differences are.

One: while foot length, melanin count, and brain weight are easily measured, but more nebulous concepts like intelligence, aggression, and sexual desire are so poorly defined as to defy measurement. (The history of the intelligence quotient is another chapter in bad science.)

Two: humans make poor test subjects for the scientific method. You can drop a billiard ball from a given height onto a given surface and see how high it bounces hundreds, even thousands of times in an afternoon. You cannot grow a child from birth hundreds of times; one shot is all you get. Setting up a ?control? for comparison purposes is horribly difficult for most of the interesting questions, and doing so would, 99% of the time, be horribly unethical. Want to keep a thousand people isolated in blank rooms for twenty years to ensure they all experience the same environmental stimuli?

Three: humans are intelligent. We react to their environment in enormously complex ways, thereby clouding the data a scientist might hope to gather, often to the point of white noise. Worse, we can recognize that we are being studied and ? perhaps deliberately, perhaps unconsciously ? behave differently than we would unobserved. Physicists think they have it rough, with observation affecting the observed subatomic particle; psychologists have to contend with a subject that may willfully attempt to ruin the experiment.

So the jury is still out, and is likely to remain so for a long, long time. I'll listen respectfully to the hypothesis that whites are, on the average, fractionally smarter than blacks, but I'll listen with equal respect to the hypothesis that blacks are, on the average, fractionally smarter than whites. I've seen some suggestive evidence that primitive humans are more intelligent than civilized ones. Soft living preserves our stupid genes, while nature kills off stone-age morons. That's another trait we share with dogs, who are dimmer than their wolf ancestors.

Soooo sleepy today. I'm at a loss to explain why. Sure, I had some trouble getting to sleep last night; I got up around midnight to eat some pineapple and read a bit before trying again. I didn't check the time, but it must have been before 1:00 am. Getting up at 7:00 might not quite be a full night's sleep, but I shouldn't be groggy like this. I haven't been performing mighty labors recently, nor getting an excess of fresh air and sunlight. (A day of hiking puts me right out.) I haven't had any caffeine for two days, since we need to get groceries, but I'm not a heavy drinker anyway, so that can't be it.

Or can it?

Like I said, I'm not a heavy drinker; I usually have a mug of tea with breakfast or some Pepsi with lunch, sometimes both. But never after 6:00pm, never second cups, and no coffee or Jolt or similarly heavy stuff. Some days I skip caffeine entirely, if it's one of those natural high-energy days with plenty of sun.

On the other hand, thinking about it now, I can imagine drinking a glass of pop. Pepsi sounds very good. Caffeine-free Pepsi doesn't, especially. And there's the headache.

If I've got this right, and am not buying somebody's quackery, migraines are not merely intense headaches; indeed, they can be quite mild. Rather, migraines are caused by an entirely different set of symptoms, most notably low blood pressure in the head. Vasoconstrictors, like caffeine, often relieve them. I've had a headache since last night that won't go away, even with aspirin ? and I take aspirin so rarely that I have no built-up resistance; one tablet clears up just about anything.

It's DT's! I'm a junkie! Ahhhh!

Okay, Mike. Deep, healing breaths. That's better.

Just a reminder, I suppose, of what we burden ourselves with, the habits we develop, the hot coals we heap on our own heads. I don't like the idea of depending on any chemical, (That's why I resist taking aspirin, among other things.) but somehow, I think eliminating caffeine from my life would have more negatives than positives.

Besides, I can quit at any time.

Heard something intriguing on the radio yesterday: book stores have had a sudden run on The Art of War, Sun Tzu's masterful military analysis. Though it was intended for the weapons and tactics of China in the 5th century B.C., most of the work addresses broad strategic truths which have endured the revolutions of iron, gunpowder, rifled artillery, mechanized warfare, and air forces.

A brief excerpt captures the spirit of the book. This is from Samuel B. Griffith's translation, minus the secondary commentary:

All warfare is based on deception. When capable, feign incapacity; when active, inactivity. When near, make it appear that you are far away; when far away, that you are near. Offer the enemy bait to lure him; feign disorder and strike him. When he concentrates, prepare against him; where he is strong, avoid him. Anger his general and confuse him. Pretend inferiority and encourage his arrogance. Keep him under a strain and wear him down. When he is united, divide him. Attack where he is unprepared; sally out when he does not expect you. These are the strategist's keys to victory.

Fight dirty. Attack where the enemy is weak; avoid him where he is strong. Use spies and scouts. Know the terrain, and use it. Know the enemy, and manipulate him. This all seems self-evident, but it was a blockbuster when it first appeared, an era when warfare was chivalrous and generals gentlemanly. Generations of generals have forgotten and rediscovered these lessons innumerable times, and will no doubt continue to do so.

What I've quoted is the second half of the first chapter; there are twenty-seven chapters in all. Together, they are an invaluable primer on military theory, literally the best there was for millennia. Though the best of Western generals understood Sun Tzu quite well without reading him or even suspecting his existence ? consider Hannibal at Trasimene, or Lee at Fredericksburg ? no text in the West even came close until the MOSSCOMES* doctrine developed around the First World War.

So general and so valuable were Sun Tzu's ideas that there have been attempts to apply them to other fields of conflict, such as the campaign trail, the diplomatic table, the boardroom, and even Wrestlemania. I don't entirely trust such interpretations; the metaphor gets stretched too far to be reliable. Rules on the uses of hilly, swampy, or open ground, for example, don't have any meaning for the stock exchange, and trying force the issue is sloppy thinking. Still, there is useful ore to be mined from the work for a careful reader.

Which brings me to my original point. Apparently, someone feels Sun Tzu has valuable advice even for Mafiosi, because the book has appeared prominently in the Sopranos on television. Suddenly, everyone has to have a copy, to learn what's in. Well, good. It's nice to see popular culture spark an interest in the classics once in a while. As long as it's the real McCoy, and not some hideous hybrid like ?Hooked on Classics.? Three cheers for Star Wars, Harry Potter, and the Sopranos!

* The MOSSCOMES doctrine is an acronym for nine principles of war, the basic doctrine of today's US military, and another praiseworthy distillation of theory. J. F. C. Fuller first articulated seven principles, these were later slightly redefined and expanded to nine: mass, offensive, surprise, security, command unity, objective, maneuver, economy of force, simplicity. Sun Tzu addresses all but simplicity. In his era, armies did not reach tens of millions of men, nor battlefields stretch hundreds of miles. The modern fog of war and variety of units intensify the need for a reminder to keep strategic objectives simple.

The word for the day, boys and girls, is smugmost. Credit where credit is due: Eileene coined it with a slip of the tongue as we passed through an upscale shopping district on the way home.

A few blocks from our house is a small knot of stores serving the Upper Montclair crowd. Some patrons are the well-to-do from the other side of the train tracks. Others are students willing to travel the mile or so from Montclair University in search of a Starbucks. Of course there's a Starbucks. There's a Starbucks on the moon, fer crissakes. The main drag handles a lot of traffic, and once the parking spaces start filling up, things get pretty tight. It doesn't help that drivers are more than willing to back up traffic while dropping off or picking up an errand-running passenger. "It's just a few seconds!"

So it irks me when a pedestrian just strides out into traffic on that stretch, effectively demanding cars stop for him. Jaywalkers who hover on the curb, waiting for a window of opportunity, or who confines their habit to low-traffic periods, are fine by me. Jaywalkers who interfere with rush hour are not. It's doubly irritating when they pause in front of you, to wave "Thanks for letting me through," as if you had any choice. It's more a "Hi! I'm being rude; don't run me over for it" wave.

"Run him over," I told Eileene as we waited. "Him and his cappuccino."

She grinned. "Nothing wrong with cappuccino."

Not normally, but in the hands of a smug-looking yuppie, waving thanks at several dozen tons of glowering steel backed up on Valley road for his convenience, it is. Like his golf-casual outfit and wire-frame glasses, it's a small badge of privilege, a projection of a sense of entitlement to get in the way. We made fun of the area clientele a bit.

It was when I voiced pious thanks that at least I am not smug that Eileene cackled, "You're the smugmost person I know. Uh 'most smuggy' 'Smugglest'?" (Slander, malicious and gratuitous slander! See if I let her share in the next pearl of wisdom to fall from my lips.) We laughed over our new vocabulary for a bit, too.

"Smuggest" may be proper grammar, but don't you agree "smugmost" has a nicer ring to it? Let's see if we can't work it into general usage. I'd be proud to be the inspiration for a coined word, vicious lie though it may be.

After a long wait, we now have our chance to try out Black & White, the new and heavily hyped god-game from Lionhead Studios. Something about processing power in our home-assembled computers ? B&W is a pig about processing. Anyway.

B&W has elements of RTS in the conquest of new worshippers from what you hope will soon become old, feeble gods. It also has elements of puzzle-adventure games in the collection of detritus and manipulation of the environment to complete short-term goals for the reward of a tool better to handle the next puzzle. Neither is very satisfying, taken on the terms of past successes in these genres, but, of course, that isn't fair; B&W is neither RTS nor puzzle adventure. B&W sells itself on two major points: the moral compass and your creature.

The eternal struggle of good and evil, for which the game is named, is reflected in the graphics of your game. Provide for your villagers, water their crops, save them from illness, and they worship you from gratitude. Your countryside will turn rich and verdant, and villagers laze around, enjoying the good life. Exploit your villagers, however, sacrifice them for their life essence, punish them for small infractions or just for your amusement, and they will worship you in hopes of appeasing you. Your countryside develops an unhealthy fire-and-brimstone appearance, and villagers abandon important jobs to flee at your approach. Many scenarios have at least two solutions with different moral directions and different rewards for their completion ? one way or the other. The treatment of moral issues is rather shallow, but no more so than in other computer games. Lionhead has at least tried to confront you with moral dilemmas. If the extra mana from a human sacrifice means the difference between saving your sheltered people from or losing them to an aggressive and brutal god from the next valley over, could you call it right? Your countryside won't think so.

(Lionhead promotes the game as a window into your own soul. Of course, it isn't really. B&W only reflects your treatment of little pixilated people, rather than true altruism. Until computers start passing the Turing test, and these villagers certainly don't, it's hard to feel real ethics are at issue. Besides, the moral tests are no more a window on your soul than those mini-quizzes you find in teen magazines, since the answers are obvious well ahead of time. Smashing a house to see what happens is ?bad;? collecting stray sheep to see what happens is ?good.? One gets the feeling that, were there no pre-programmed quests with fixed rewards for niceness, there would be no reason to be good at all. There must be an awful lot of hellish countryside in multiplayer games.)

The other big selling point deserves the press it's getting. You have a creature, a giant animal with an endearing desire to please. He (or she) wanders about the land doing all sorts of things, depending on what you train it to do. Using the same slap-or-tickle mechanic of Creatures, you can rapidly teach your gigantic pet that eating people is wrong, or that moving trees to the village lumber store is desirable. Add three leashes which impose varying levels of aggressiveness on your creature and can focus his attention on objects of your choosing, and you can direct him in specific behavior, rather than waiting to reinforce what he does on his own. Lionhead has provided a vast number of variables for the creature to consider, and you can, with patience, train him in behavior as specific as collecting only fully-grown trees for timber, while replanting seedlings in a separate pen. Complex lessons are not easy, though. If you want your creature to learn to eat male villagers of enemy gods, preserving famales for rapid repopulation, and he eats a female, do you stroke him to reinforce the eating of ?enemy villager,? or slap him to discourage him from eating ?female?? Teaching by steps, like encouraging your creature to pick up all villagers, then just children, then just female children, can produce schizophrenic behavior as you start to punish the poor thing in later steps for actions you earlier encouraged.

There are material rewards for training your creature. He can do the grunt-work of sustaining your villages. He can smash enemy villages, destroying an enemy god's source of power. Helping villagers and terrorizing them wins worshippers for you by proxy. He can reach the point of winning an entire village over to your side without your lifting a finger. You can even train a creature to methods of the opposite ethical alignment, allowing a ?good-cop, bad-cop? approach to village conversion.

More important than the material rewards, though, is the raw fun of seeing your creature learn. I'm only in the first world, pursuing quests that can be done with training wheels, and already my ape knows to poo in the fields, collect food for villagers, and refresh himself from streams when he's thirsty. Often, he finishes these tasks by grinning broadly out of the screen at me, hoping for approval. ?Look what I did!? (He also, thanks to a badly-timed click, likes to poo on miracle dispensers, but we're working on that.) I haven't yet got him collecting wood or exercising by lifting rocks when he's too fat, but those lessons are underway. Honestly, I dread the advancement into competitive play, when I'll have to stave off enemy attacks when I'd rather watch my creature, or perhaps teach him less-than-admirable behavior to defend my worshippers. The fun of the game is watching the artifical intelligence at work. Well, AI coupled with adorable creature expressions. It's a pity there's no way to play without going through the tutorial once you've learned how the engine works. I expect starting fresh with a new map and all the tools at your disposal would be more engaging than all the fixed scenarios a CD can offer.

I've had a curious thought tonight, concerning how to predict national elections.

This is the information age, and news services are giving us increasing down-to-the minute election coverage. If CNN is to give us 24-hour reports, they have to have something new to report all the time. Fueled by this demand, and backed by ever-beefier computers, predictions of the eventual winner are more finely calculated every year. We at last have the computing power to handle what statistics has always been theoretically capable of, and the connectivity to draw on the necessary balanced samples.

But the predictions themselves are getting no more accurate, even the exit polls which catch their samples minutes after the actual votes. (*cough* *cough* Florida *cough*) The true predictions, the ones coming weeks or even months in advance, aren't worth anything at all; the campaigners have the same statistical tools at hand, and adjust their platforms to accommodate, even as new results are calculated. Add the general ignorance of the average voter. (Oh, no, not me! Or you, of course. Just those other people over there.) Add the increasing centralization of the two parties to pinch the elusive swing vote. Add the escalating complexity of today's issues, or at least the seeming complexity as we gain more access to factoids. Small wonder so many voters shoot from the hip.

So if we're all ? or a heavy plurality of us ? shooting from the hip, and the proper issues are slipperier than ever, then the real predictor of the election should be the gut feelings of the voters towards the candidates themselves. Heck, that seems to have been the entire platform of Bush minoris. And if that's true, we should get pretty good results from asking questions concerning the ?jerk factor.? Such as:

1. Which candidate can you most easily imagine double-parking on a busy city street?
2. Which candidate do you think picks his nose more often in public?
3. Which candidate can you picture being less popular as a child?
4. Which candidate do you consider more likely to stiff a waitress her tip?
5. Which candidate is less likely to wash his hands after going to the bathroom?
6. Which candidate would more readily talk aloud to friends during a movie?
7. Which candidate is less likely to clean up after his dog?
8. Which candidate would more readily toss cigarette butts out his window?
9. Which candidate would you more readily expect to have been teacher's pet?
10. Which candidate can you more readily picture stiffing a waitress her tip?

Questions on the poll would need to be carefully designed not to tie readily to political issues, or even general party alignments. For example, ?Which candidate would sooner make fun of a single mother on welfare?? is heavily biased. ?Which candidate would more likely try to weasel out of military service?? might be fair in some elections, but wouldn't have been in '96.

I'd be willing to put a buck on this poll being as reliable as anything else out there, including exit polls. Given that the Economist outperformed ABC, CBS, and NBC by measuring hemlines and counting rabbit populations, it can't do much worse.

My parents came to visit from Illinois last weekend, and we took them to see the new, souped-up Hayden Planetarium at the Museum of Natural History, the latest in modern, computer-driven displays. It was a good show, and I was impressed by what the technology can do, but, for me, it was inevitably a little disappointing.

I say inevitably because I was fortunate enough to grow up in Elgin, which has a small planetarium of its own, a publicity stunt for the now-defunct Elgin watch factory. (The idea being that these precision watches had their own observatory to ensure they left the factory perfectly timed.) The planetarium ran an after-school astronomy program for a few kids from every grade school, including regular permission to run the control panel. As an adult, I boggle at the thought that they let kids handle the panel, with enough knobs and dials and toggle switches to rival a WWII-era airplane. Between that program and the Ojai summer camp and a few basic MIT physics classes, I've picked up a lay grasp of astronomy. I don't know much, but I still know more than the ordinary guy on the street, so planetarium programs geared for the general public rarely teach me anything new, though seeing the planetarium itself at work is always interesting. Still, I keep hoping, so I'm always a little disappointed.

After the planetarium, Eileene insisted we check out the butterfly exhibit, as long as we were at the museum. There's a special exhibit stationed in what used to be a hall describing the migration of species about the south Pacific, now a small greenhouse which about forty people can squeeze through at a time. Double sets of doors guard both entrance and exit, to prevent anything but humans getting out. Within is an astonishing quantity of moths and butterflies, with wingspans anywhere between 4 and 19cm. Staff carry orange wedges to attract them for visitors to inspect, but just as often, they land on the visitors, themselves. In a happy circumstance, the butterflies only land on people who don't reach out for them; butterflies see a groping hand as ?predator,? so overeager children don't get a chance to hurt the bugs, and the less restrained adults get a lesson in nature's relations with man. Unless you're a small child, frightened of large butterflies ? and many are, from what I saw ? it's a magical, Disney-esque environment. I kept expecting to see singing marmosets emerge from the undergrowth.

So, much to my surprise, the highlight of the outing, at least for me, was the soft-edged, touchy-feely exhibit where we looked at pretty things, rather than my usual favorite of hard-edged, number-crunching science. I must be mellowing in my old age.

(Actually, the highlight of the outing was the fresh Gung Bao chicken at Grand Sichuan International that evening, but that's another story. I'm still paying for the pepper sauce, but it was worth the price.)

The May edition of Harper's called my attention to an anonymous essay from a British neo-Nazi webpage. The author complains at length, and with considerable justification, that the ?right-wing? (i.e., violent reactionaries) consists largely of social misfits, cowards who will only fight in gangs against lone victims, sickos who relish the idea of committing evil, and alcoholics drawn to the drinking club atmosphere. He blames this state of affairs on open recruiting policies within the ranks; desperate for numbers and membership fees, skinheads will accept anyone who pays lip service to white supremacy.

These he contrasts to ?The people who flocked to the National Socialist cause during the Third Reich?young idealists fighting for what they believed in?? He mourns the passing of National Socialists who then ?were the elite of our race, the cream of European youth.? The modern inheritors of the Nazi mantle, he feels, ?wouldn't have been fit to dig the latrine pits for the Waffen SS??

Well, maybe. Certainly, the hate groups of today do a good impersonation of misfits and losers. But I'm more of the opinion that the Nazis always attracted the dregs of society, and that it was the appropriation of the cream of German youth shortly before the Second World War that was the anomaly.

Let's set aside the mass murder, grand scale theft, and unprovoked warfare which the rest of humanity considers the Nazis' greatest crimes. A neo-Nazi would shrug off such accusations, claiming that struggle (war) is a noble endeavor, and that the crimes were directed against sub- or non-humans (different races being considered other species). Consider instead the central figures of the Nazi party before and during the war, in light of the Aryan ideal: physically and mentally fit, intelligent, rationally materialist, blonde, heterosexual, unafraid, glad to sacrifice their lives to the state.

Hitler was clinically paranoid. He was also consistently hamstrung his able general staff to preserve his position of power, with disastrous results.

Göring was fat, greedy, and had a penchant for sexually ambiguous cabaret.

Göbbels was small, slight, and crippled from childhood polio.

Himmler was superstitious, obsessed with the occult. (It is his predilections which are responsible for rumors that Hitler was also drawn to the occult. There is no evidence that Hitler was anything but a materialist.)

Rudolf Hess also belonged to the mystical Thule Society and was a high traitor, taking it upon himself to negotiate a peace with England against his leader's wishes.

Not a blonde among them.

Only after the Nazi party's rise to power ? a surprise to all but themselves ? with the resources of an entire state to draw upon, and the opportunity to indoctrinate an uncritical new generation free of public contradiction, could the Nazis begin presenting the now-familiar image of the Nazis as the best and brightest of Germany. Even then, I can't imagine the low-lives had disappeared from the Nazi ranks; they merely enjoyed the forcible recruitment of the rest of the country. Naturally, the cameras were turned only upon the apple-cheeked youth. Nazis weren't so much the best and brightest of Germany as the best and brightest of Germany were, of necessity, Nazis. Not even all of those: the best of the German generals ? Mannstein, Runstedt, Rommel, and others ? generally despised Nazism, and, like Robert E. Lee, took arms on behalf of a policy they hated rather than abandon the country they loved. And, of course, many of the best and brightest Germans fled the country rather than join the Third Reich. Some, no doubt, vanished into the ovens at Belsen.

I must, however, agree with the anonymous author's assertion that the only way the neo-Nazi movement could make any headway today is to clean up its overt act, to cast off the misfits who make them look bad even to the most casual observer, and to recruit only outwardly respectable members. (Inward respectability is, of course, an absurdity.) This leaves me ambivalent towards his proposed recruitment policy. On the one hand, I'm not keen on anything which would allow neo-Nazis to make political progress. On the other, so long as they fail to draw the cream of society with such a policy, the rest of us might well sleep easier to know the roughnecks they now draw have been left to their own disorganized devices.

It frightens me to think of a growing fascist reputability. It's not happening now, but it could happen some day, fueled by a rise in fear and ignorance and poverty. Stay vigilant.

I work in a lovely wood-paneled sunroom at the back of my house, the south side. In winter, it's the only place to get any sun at all, and in the summer, though it gets quite warm, it's a glorious spot to ruminate. My better work comes in the summer, when I sit in cutoffs, drink something cold,, sweat, and write. Today was a lovely sunny day, 85°, perfect for a column. I did not spend it in effortless writing. I spent much of the day watching a bumblebee outside my window.

Lurking.

It made no attempt to conceal itself, nor did its hivemates, great fat bugs half the size of my thumb. Mostly they hover, a foot or two from the window, bobbing slightly to draw the eye. Letting me know they're watching me.

They don't like to be watched back, at least not very closely. When I stand at the window, the nearest one will jerk once or twice, rotating in place to peer at me, birdlike, from different angles, then zip away with surprising speed over the neighbor's roof. Three or four are up there now. Only when I return to my seat does another bee return to float a foot or two outside the window, monitoring me once again.

The bees are building a nest. They're watching me to decide whether I'm the type to go after their nest with a can of Raid. I am. I'd use napalm on the filthy things if I had any. Stinging insects frighten me, and I'm happy to get them before they get me, as long as I'm at no risk of being stung. Those fifty-foot range spray cans-o'-poison are a wonder of modern science on par with penicillin in my book. I know the bees are building a nest because there's a dozen or so out in plain sight, ignoring the flowering plants, just scouting the neighborhood, like a six-legged communist menace, seeing if my house is ripe for subversion.

When I came home from my daily walk, I waited in my driveway, hoping to follow one back to the nesting site. Not a chance. The fat little sentry just hovered, watching me for a minute before trying to throw me off by ducking behind a hedge before returning. When that didn't work, he ? sorry, she ? tried the same trick with a fence. But she wouldn't head home, even once I explained what I could do with a butterfly net and a can of Comet. Loyal even in the face of death, like any good fifth columnist. Probably had a cyanide capsule wedged in her mandibles in case I forced her to talk.

Well, I will find out, sooner or later. I've got my larder well-stocked with lunchmeat and carbonated beverages, I have enough poison under my kitchen sink to deserve EPA prosecution, and I've been alerted to the threat of the international apiary conspiracy. My precious bodily fluids are pure. Watch me all you like, bees; I'm watching back.