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It must be spring. For starters, the sun came out today, a rarer occurrence in New Jersey winters than readers who don’t live near the coast might think. I took my daily walk without a coat. Lawns are showing a bit of green that doesn’t look like it’s left over from the previous year. Our attic bedroom was too uncomfortably warm when I took my laptop up there to write away from Eileene’s videos. And we bought some potting soil and tomato seeds last weekend.

This will be my fourth year at it, and I’m not very good. The first year, an animal stripped our meager crop. The second year, we got two tomatoes, the size of a golf ball and a tennis ball. The third year, we got a huge crop, but they refused to ripen; all were green when harvested around Halloween. Though we get a better return each year, my expectations for this year’s performance are low.

Each year, we purchase ever more equipment for my tomato patch. What began as a bag of potting soil and a trowel is now three plastic tubs, plastic wrap, three kinds of fertilizer, four garden tools, a bale of chicken wire, gloves, kneepads, specially designed plastic stakes, permeable cups meant for easy transplants, and two bags of soil. I estimate each tomato costs us roughly $12, not counting labor. If we could get them in the depths of February, it might be worth the cost, but naturally our few tomatoes arrive when tomatoes that taste like tomatoes arrive in the supermarkets.

Still, hope springs eternal in the human breast. Maybe this year, I’ll get a full crop of beauties. Maybe the Cubs will win the pennant. Stranger things have happened. I may never understand the enthusiasm of gardeners, but I'm beginning to understand the sheer doggedness behind the hobby.

Posted by at 8:50 PM | Permalink

Some years ago, one of the networks ran an experimental crossover between all their evening sitcoms. The premise was that all the shows set in the same neighborhood, and that characters from each show met others at the supermarket, at intersections, drop by as neighbors, and so on. A full moon was out in TV-land, providing an excuse for mad things to happen. My dad and I watched one sequence together, wherein Betty White and Richard Mulligan crossed paths in a sort of Burns-and-Allen routine – she the same airhead she played on Golden Girls, he the straight man from Empty Nest. As the routine wound down, Dad observed aloud what a pleasure it was to watch two veterans show their stuff. His comment stuck with me; ever since, I have been hyperconscious of the virtuoso performances the elder statesmen of comedy produce.

Comedy may be a young man’s game to the extent that coming up with new material every week takes extraordinary intellectual stamina. Comedy is hard, good comedy even harder. Small wonder stand-up comedians all look forward to movie careers, where they can cull their best material from a year’s inspiration, instead of a mere week. On the other hand, an old pro can slip on a role like a pair of old sneakers and be off and running before the applause acknowledging past performances has died. Theirs is not the comedy of shock, but of human observation.

Carl Reiner is a great example. My favorite scene of the Ocean’s Eleven remake is the one where he stands before a mirror and warms up to his part in the con, working out just how to say “My name is Lyman Zerge.” The DVD commentary for the same movie says the actors often had to be pulled away from him to get to work, and I believe it. He’s still funny as hell on the radio, even without Mel Brooks.

I don’t watch much TV, but when I catch a stray episode of “Everybody Loves Raymond,” my attention is riveted on Doris Roberts and Peter Boyle. Bob Newhart’s perpetually uncomfortable nebbish was the only funny thing in Elf.

That’s not to say that aging alone makes comedic actors great (Redd Foxx should by a genius by now) but for those who have talent to ripen, ripening works wonders.

Posted by at 7:50 PM | Permalink

Like all MMORPGs I know of, World of Warcraft uses a steady increase in character abilities to help maintain interest in continued play. Some of these abilities take the form of “talents.” Most talents provide a small upgrade: a 1% chance for each blow to do double damage, for instance, or a 10% reduction in the time it takes to perform a combat maneuver; a few talents provide entirely new abilities which can be very powerful in the right circumstances. Because a character can have a maximum of 51 talents (one per level, beginning with level 10, and ending at the maximum level 60), and there may be a hundred twenty or so talents available, no one can have every talent. Different choices help customize characters, another source of interest in the game. One hunter may make his marksmanship even deadlier, while another could improve his control over his trained attack pets. The cumulative effect of several talents can have a big impact on play style, and a small but telling impact on what a character does well.

Some combinations of talents are more effective than others. A talent that increases the damage of fire spells, for instance, becomes even more useful when paired with another talent that speeds the casting of fire spells. Much attention in the World of Warcraft community is lavished on finding particularly effective talent sets, called “builds.” Forums are filled with threads asking others to evaluate another attempt at creating the ultimate build.

Rarely are such evaluations helpful. They are filled with statements like, “Arcane explosion is totally worthless. Why waste points on it when fire/arcane builds rock?” but with more spelling and grammatical errors. Insufficient explanation makes these critiques useless, and undermines the poster’s credibility, since every talent is useful for particular jobs, and different builds peform different tasks particularly well. Arcane explosion may indeed be totally worthless for, say, intercharacter duels, but could be equally useful against a horde of low-powered computer-controlled enemies. Self-appointed critics all too often fail to explain just what fire/arcane builds rock at.

As vacuous as these replies are, blame lies as often with the original poster. If, in offering his build for examination, a poster explains that he wants a build fine-tuned for use with small groups pursuing quests, or for quick kills, or for bringing down enemies with a ranged attack, the rest of the forum could evaluate the build properly. But, more often than not, the discussion opener reads, “What do you think of this build?” proceeds to list the included talents, and ends.

I’ve touched on this pet peeve before, but it bears repeating: the more specific you are in asking for analysis, the more you’ll get back. This principle stretches from amateur gaming, here, to very serious, important, and expensive projects, like fighting a military campaign. Skillful consultants can provide incredibly accurate answers, but not if they have to guess the questions.

Posted by at 10:39 PM | Permalink

“The case of Terri Schiavo raises complex issues. Yet in instances like this one, where there are serious questions and substantial doubts, our society, our laws, and our courts should have a presumption in favor of life. Those who live at the mercy of others deserve our special care and concern. It should be our goal as a nation to build a culture of life, where all Americans are valued, welcomed, and protected – and that culture of life must extend to individuals with disabilities.” -– George W. Bush

Terri Schiavo is dying. Yes, we can keep her organs functioning with elaborate medical hardware, but whatever made her a person, instead of a lump of flesh, is gone. Let her die. Let her husband grieve and move on. Her parents have no right to ruin his life, or to keep their daughter suspended on the cusp of death just because they are unable to grieve and move on. All living things die. When people die before living a full life, we are saddened, but keeping a life-sized Terri Schiavo doll in a hospital bed to help ignore her death is deeply unhealthy, and wrong.

I was sick of the political circus raging around her death while it remained in Florida. The decision to take her body off life support was neither rash nor selfish; it was confirmed by considered, impartial court ruling. Yet politicians were willing to trample the separation of powers, and force themselves into what was already a painful event for Michael Schiavo in order to trumpet their devotion to life at all costs, including human dignity. Now that the dispute has entered the national forum, it seems only to get more bizarrely rhetorical and less coherent as senators try to twist it into a touchstone for unrelated national issues.

But the quote above has to be the height of hypocrisy, if only because it comes from the highest office in the land. This opinion comes from the same man who insisted on executing a death sentence on convicted murderer Johnny Paul Penry, despite Penry’s mental retardation. Did this not raise complex issues? Were there not serious questions and substantial doubts? Was Penry not an individual with disabilities? “I like the law the way it is right now,” said Bush, and Penry was put to death.

Mr. Bush has a long track record of ignoring complex issues, serious questions, and substantial doubts. He has no call to raise them now, when the simple decision is also the right one.

Posted by at 10:26 AM | Permalink

A recent Economist had a striking photograph on its cover. A young boy, maybe nine or ten, wearing distinctive African garb and a big grin, is holding a lump of clay to his ear. The clay is shaped in an oblong rectangle with rounded corners and a tiny projection, a perfect image of a cell phone. The picture is meant to illustrate an editorial inside, decrying a UN program to help launch sub-Saharan Africa into modern prosperity through grants of cell phones and internet connections when illiteracy, hunger, and social chaos prevent (claims the editorial) any meaningful use of these gifts.

The cover, of course, proves nothing. The boy could be grinning for any number of reasons, including the fact that a magazine photographer is recording him for posterity. The boy’s attitude toward the clay phone is entirely ambiguous. Did he shape it himself, and, if so, why? Could it be meant for some kind of artistic or advertising display instead? Is it simply a prop for a game of “let’s pretend,” or did he fashion it in a desperate attempt to imitate the status to which cell phones attach, or does he carry it around to impress his friends? Is he honestly proud of the clay phone, or is he just joking around, or even posing at the encouragement of a photographer with an agenda?

Despite the cover’s ambiguity, my first reaction to it was strong and very clear: it put me immediately in mind of the cargo cults of the Pacific Islands. In World War II, American soldiers went to the Pacific to fight Japan. They brought with them a great deal of equipment and rations, some of which went to the natives, whether gifts or carefully scavenged artifacts. When the war ended, the GIs left, and the wondrous gifts went with them. Dismayed, the natives sought to imitate the magic that brought the cargo planes by building mock landing strips, conn towers, and Quonset huts out of bamboo and similarly pre-industrial materials. The story is at once laughable and piteous. The boy on the cover of the Economist looks delighted to have an inert chunk of earth at his ear. He seems, like the cargo cultists, to have missed the importance of telecommunications to the global economy so badly that he feels good things will come to him just for holding something with a precisely imitated shape to his ear.

My immediate willingness to jump to the conclusion the editors wished of me is disturbing, because it seems the bulk of political advertising employs just the same device, an image accompanied by words which may have nothing to do with it, but which together yank the attention firmly to a desired conclusion. Beware. Propaganda lurks everywhere. Including online journals.

Posted by at 9:05 PM | Permalink

I learned something new yesterday, beyond a new approach to pasta. I received email thanking me for donating blood the previous Thursday. The Blood Center made a special note that my blood was CMV negative; that is, it lacks the antigen labeled CMV, which appears after contracting a particular illness. This absence is important for two reasons: first, that only ten percent or so of the population are CMV negative, and second, that all blood transfused into newborns must be CMV negative. The letter didn’t go deeply into technical detail, but I gather that newborn children haven’t had exposure to the original virus, and are likely to have a negative reaction to CMV positive blood.

Knowing that my blood is even more useful than I had originally thought – O+ is in particularly strong demand – gave me a moment’s cheer. It also got me wondering whether blood banks make dozens, or even thousands, of biochemical discriminations of blood type, the better to find a special plea to make when it comes time to remind a donor that eight weeks have passed since the last donation. “Dear Mr./Mrs./Ms. Doe: in this time of depleted blood reserves, your blood is especially important, because it has a low XYZ count. We hope you will consider…” Perhaps a donor can’t fail to be noteworthy in some way.

The thought didn’t really dampen my enthusiasm for a distinction I did nothing to earn. I’m saving baby’s lives.

Larry Niven explored the possibility of advanced donor matching in a series of alarmist stories, including “The Jigsaw Man,” “The Long Arm of Gil Hamilton,” A Gift From Earth, and The Patchwork Girl. In these stories, he proposes a world in which transplants are fantastically cheap and reliable, and in which a voting public eager for a chance at life-extending transplants call for ever broader definition of capital crimes, the better to harvest criminals’ organs. They’re all fun reads, if sociologically implausible. But if you do read them on the strength of my endorsement, don’t let them dissuade you from anything.

This is important. We need more blood. If you’re eligible – and many more are eligible than donate – it’s your civic duty to help out. One hour every two months isn’t too much to ask for saving lives. Think about it: all you’ve got to do to save a life is endure a puncture no more painful than a shaving cut, while somebody else does all the hard work. And you get a cookie afterwards. Forgetting is not an excuse. Once you’re on the rolls, the blood center will send you reminders. But you’ve got to go in on your own, the first time. Google your state’s blood drive page right now, and make an appointment, or find out when you can drop in, and mark your calendar.

Go on, you can do it.

Posted by at 8:53 PM | Permalink

I had some fresh basil to work with tonight, so I thought for a while, and tried this. It worked, big time, and it’s so easy that I had to share.

1/2 lb. spaghetti
2 T. olive oil
2-3 cloves garlic, finely sliced
2 or more stems fresh basil, chopped – about 10 large leaves, and attached smaller leaves
fresh-ground pepper
pinch salt
¼ c. grated parmesan cheese

1. Boil the spaghetti. While you wait, get everything else ready; it cooks quickly. When the noodles are done, or ideally a couple minutes before they’re perfect, continue with step 2.
2. Heat oil in large stainless steel skillet on medium high.
3. Add garlic to oil, give oil a stir. Add basil, grind in pepper, add salt. Give oil another stir.
4. Quickly drain spaghetti, then dump it into skillet. Toss quickly so oil covers noodles.
5. Spread parmesan cheese evenly over dish and stir in with tongs.
6. Eat. Serves two as a side dish.

Comments: I specify a large skillet, because it has to hold the noodles. I suggest a stainless steel skillet because a heavy pan is likely to burn the garlic and basil. The olive oil is meant to draw the flavor out of the garlic and basil, not fry them. If you must use a heavy pan, lower temperature to medium or medium-low. Quantities are very approximate. Feel free to vary to taste, or even to what looks right to the eye; I suspect the recipe is quite forgiving of anything but mistreatment of the herbs.

Variations: Slice five or six white mushroom caps thinly and add to the oil just before the basil. Add half an onion, chopped, with the garlic. Try different seasonings, but be sure to use fresh herbs. Use pepper-infused instead of plain olive oil.

Posted by at 9:21 PM | Permalink

I borrowed the first season of the X-Files from my sister-in-law, to learn just what I’d missed by ignoring the show when it aired. Didn’t miss much. While the show has some nifty moments, which can be mined for playable material, the general production elements are uniformly B-list: artificial dialogue, stories that substitute vagueness for mystery, and dubious acting.

Gillian Anderson is six times the actor David Duchovny could ever dream of being. For a while, I thought Duchovny’s legendary lack of expression was at fault, and he does indeed lack something in the emote department, but eventually I noticed an even stronger reason why he seems to be reciting his lines rather than acting. He is. Watch the timing of his lines and watch his expression – such as it is – when someone else is doing the talking. He adopts none of the natural responses to the novel and unpredictable qualities of another person’s speech: he doesn’t fidget, he doesn’t watch hand gestures as much as the flapping of the mouth, and he doesn’t wait that necessary beat we often take to absorb what someone says to us. Duchovny is only waiting for his fellow actor’s line to end, so he can take his turn in proper sequence. He behaves as though the audience can only see the current speaker, and nothing else on screen matters.

I don’t pretend to know much about acting, but I can say this point is worth noting, because the mistake is widespread. Ever watch an amateur (or even semi-professional) theater troupe perform? I’ve seen four or five. Their dialogue is often stiff and unconvincing, because amateur actors, too, all too often merely recite their lines, making sure they get the words right instead of getting the meaning of the words right.

Posted by at 7:51 PM | Permalink

1. The universe is populated by entities seeking to exterminate us, even if the attempt is doomed and means certain death for themselves. Empires seeking a peace agreement want only sufficient time to rearm.
2. Any being from another planet, another plane of existence, or an experimental scientific facility is irredeemably evil.
3. Pick up everything you see and carry it with you until used as a critical element in a problem’s solution. This includes lawn tools, other people’s personal mail, autographed photos of Jean Harlowe, and anything stripped from a corpse.
4. The more complicated an object’s acquisition is, the more valuable the object will prove.
5. Immediately push any button you see. You may push it repeatedly, but be sure to press it an odd number of times.
6. In a desperate situation, look for the nearest crate and smash it open. Crates typically contain weapons, ammunition, medicine, and other survival gear. Be careful, however, not to smash any crate you can climb to reach an otherwise inaccessible location until you have explored that location thoroughly.
7. A hearty meal will cure any ill, including gunshot wounds.
8. Evil people can be identified by appearance alone. Telltales include sharp, pointy features (peaked eyebrows, superfluous equipment spikes, slanted eyes, thin smirks), red backlighting, and outfits similar to, but perceptibly darker than, others nearby.
9. Few things are more important to the long-term health of a state than an efficient transportation system.
10. Upon discovering a successful tactic, use it repeatedly and indefinitely. An enemy will never, ever adapt to it or employ new countermeasures.

Posted by at 5:02 PM | Permalink

Eileene introduced her sister Ella to World of Warcraft last night, and was rewarded with much enthusiasm. Ella duplicated Eileene’s excitement over every element of the game, inspired by nothing that I could see apart from the element being in the game. The following exchange illustrates this inexplicable excitement perfectly:

Eileene: [Ella’s character] starts off on the eastern continent. That’s cool. Why are you laughing?
Me: What’s cool about it?
Eileene: I didn’t know that.
Me: Well, yeah. She’s an undead, and they start off on the northern end, north of the dwarves.
Eileene: That’s cool.
Me: If she had started in the western hemisphere, would you have thought that was cool, too?
Eileene: Yeah. [I start to laugh again.] What?

There’s only two hemispheres. Everybody has to start on one of them. How can both possibilities be cool, when there aren’t any others?

But there sit the two sisters, bubbling over not just abilities and functions, but over the names of cannon fodder monsters and what outfits characters wear. They’re having far more fun with the game than I ever will. I’m tempted to feel envious, until a thought strikes me.

They’re having more fun now, but in two months, both will be looking for something else, no matter how good World of Warcraft is. I might be looking for something else by then, too, but that depends on what the game has to offer. If it’s a good game, with plenty of strategic (or at least tactical) depth and interesting decisions, I can happily pick away at the underlying engine for years, long after Eileene has decided that she’s seen everything, or that getting to any new areas isn’t worth the trouble.

Like any engineer, scientist, or mathematician, my attention is always focused on the system, and how the parts relate to one another. What techniques produce a desired result efficiently? Which strategies outperform others? How simple can actions be while still producing interestingly complex results? How far can a boundary be pushed before the model starts to break down? Not all games provide meat for analysis like this, but those that do can entertain indefinitely, and mayflies who flit eternally toward the next piece of eye candy will never know the joys of cracking a system, discovering how to win with minimal effort and how to make a game do everything it possibly can.

I have no cause for envy. I’d trade the thrill of enthusiasm for the satisfaction of achievement any day.

Posted by at 3:56 PM | Permalink

As long as I am on the subject (see yesterday’s entry) there’s another technical distinction I would like to air on the meaning of “fact.” We use the word to mean a certain truth, but facts are neither certain nor true.

A fact is an assertion that can be objectively evaluated. “I am five feet, six inches tall” is a fact; we can pull out a tape measure and discover the truth of the matter. “I have twelve noses on my face” is a fact – a false one – which we can test by direct observation. Opinion, not fabrication, is the opposite of fact. A fact is either definitely true, or it definitely isn’t.

The definition, typically for epistemology, allows for some gray areas, because there are so many assertions which are definitely true or false, but aren’t truly verifiable. In theory, we could travel to a distant galaxy to see what it’s like in detail, but the nature of another galaxy, beyond its general shape and the spectra of light it radiates, remains an opinion, until we can start examining it in practice. Similarly, information lost to the past can look like a fact – Napoleon either ate an egg at breakfast on his twelfth birthday, or he didn’t – but since we can’t test it, the question of what he ate remains a matter of opinion.

Paradoxically, this makes the very categorization of fact a subjective matter. For our great grandparents, the chemical composition of Martian soil was an opinion; for us, a fact, despite the constancy of the soil itself over that time.

Posted by at 4:41 PM | Permalink

What is it about embarrassing moments that give them such a latch on memory?

I’m taking the plunge into online gamine with World of Warcraft. At Eileene’s urging, I signed up with The Older Gamers, an Australia-centered group devoted to games despite the difficulties of job, kids, and slowing reflexes.

Membership qualifications are not stringent. Applicants must be at least 25 and must agree not to behave like jerks. Application is a two-step process: signing up for the web site generally, which only requires a name, and signing up for inclusion in the various discussion groups, which requires posting a statement of age and a declaration that the Acceptable Use Policy and FAQ have been dutifully read. The applicant is encouraged to add some information helpful in coordinating group participation, like which games he intends to play, and at what times, but that’s optional. Barring some kind of remarkable glitch, a moderator will have the applicant set up within twenty-four hours.

Simple, right? And yet I managed to screw them up twice. The first time, I misunderstood what we were supposed to do, so I wrote up a more concise second post, with a checklist in another window just to make sure I got it right. Extra careful, I hit the “preview” button, just to ensure that the post looked fine, but on hitting the “back” button on my browser, to confirm the post, I discovered it had been erased. So I typed it in again, but without the checklist, which I’d closed in the meantime, and the second time, I still failed to state my age.

Never patient with my own mistakes, I’m just furious about this one. It's embarrassment that does it. Way to make a good first impression, Mike!

The older I get, the better I get at just letting go of things I shouldn’t get upset about; usually, I can even head off an impending tantrum. But, two days later, I’m still angry about it. Just logging in to a newsgroup – any newsgroup – is enough to get me in a snit for twenty, thirty minutes. All the zen oneness I can muster won’t let the irritation dissipate. Embarrassment gives memory long legs, length second only to those of a catchy jingle. I can still ruin my mood for an hour or more recalling the time I was wrapping up a concert and completely blanked out on a guest group’s name when it came time to thank them. I can remember wetting my pants on the long walk home from first grade one February day as clearly as I can remember last night’s dinner. I remember both words that knocked me out of annual spelling bees (kimono, character), who spelled them properly, and exactly what the room looked like; I can’t remember either of my victories.

How quickly can you recall vividly humiliating moments?

Oh. Sorry. Anyway, you take my point. Why are our brains wired that way? It can’t be just for survival value: embarrassingly stupid mistakes are worth memories to avoid repeating them… but so are not-so-stupid mistakes, which can be far more dangerous yet less clearly recalled. I have a hard time believing that humiliation is more harmful to our breeding chances than, say, getting eaten by a saber tooth, even for a species as social as ours. Maybe we just like to be miserable.

Posted by at 2:49 PM | Permalink