Sabbatical
I'll be away from my keyboard for a week, while we see the Grand Canyon and the surrounding environs. Just to let you know.
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I'll be away from my keyboard for a week, while we see the Grand Canyon and the surrounding environs. Just to let you know.
I follow the politics forum on the Well, where I also get my email service. On the whole, the group is outspoken, intellectual, and liberal, a lot like me. It’s my echo chamber, although I assuage my conscience with the fact that one of the virtues of an echo chamber devoted to critical thought is that it does, on occasion, turns that critical thought on its members. That’s a good thing on the Well politics forum, because, unchecked by demands for evidence and historical context, several members would drift off into baseless assertions and even conspiracy theories.
One of the regulars (johnmorris) recently stated that he views the whole rise of the right in American politics over the past thirty or forty years as a backlash against what the upper class perceived as the chaos of the sixties and early seventies. I’m not so sure how far I’d agree with that—I think the upper class has always been rapacious, and merely used that chaos to win over the rural south, and with it, political control in the nation. But the statement isn’t really subject to testing, so, right or wrong or somewhere in between, I’m going to let it lie. But if johnmorris has a useful grip on events, if his view could somehow be tested and found applicable, there’s a huge irony in considering the rise of the right a backlash against the hippies.
The craziness of the sixties and early seventies was itself a backlash against an establishment that had clearly abandoned the American people and their interests. Our politicians built their careers by ruining helpless and insignificant people for hoping workers could live a better life. Our generals were engaged in a bloody senseless war with poorly armed peasants over a part of the world which held no vital American interests. Our ministers railed against allowing a black child to enter the same school as a white child. Our media did everything it could to transform us from producers into consumers. Our scientists had built a bomb that could wipe out all human life, and continued to develop more thorough, more certain methods of annihilation.
And the establishment lied. Big, unabashed, damned lies. Obvious lies. Our scientists told us, in the event of nuclear holocaust, to duck and cover. Our media told us that the Indians were evil, and deserved what they got from the cowboys. Our ministers told us that marijuana turned people into psychopaths, although liquor and cigarettes were still okay. Our generals told us victory in Vietnam was certain while we could see the war grinding to an embarrassing loss. Our president told us he was not a crook after everyone knew he damned well was. The establishment lied so often, and so badly, that people began to deprecate what few truths it offered.
The more obvious the lies became, the more people began to look around and complain about all the lies, the crazier the establishment became, until it started turning on its own people. Tear gas in Harlem. Attack dogs in Selma, Alabama. Rifles in Kent State.
Is it any wonder that so much of the youth of America, privileged to enjoy the advanced education which had become available in the post-war boom, began to question, and then to reject damned near everything the establishment embraced? Taken to the extreme, this was pretty silly, since the establishment believed, among other things, that people should work for a living, and that regular bathing was a good idea. But emphatic and widespread denunciation was understandable. If the establishment was terrified by the chaos of the sixties, it was terrified by a monster of its own creation.
It turned that fear into a powerful political weapon, profiting off the chaos it had created. But the policies that created chaos have been around a long time, well before the craziness of the sixties and early seventies.
Spoiler alert!
Geeks that we are, we watched the premier of the second season to Heroes last night. There is no way to discuss my reactions to what it promised without giving away some major plot points. Even if I limited my comments to apparently innocuous material, there’s no way to be sure it won’t become important somehow, because Heroes is a complex, and very serial, show, with events and characters continually weaving back upon themselves. And frankly, there’s nothing to discuss about the innocuous material.
So past this paragraph, I’m going to make no effort to avoid giving stuff away, okay? If you want to see Heroes for yourself first, go see it. The archives will be here indefinitely. All righty. Let the spoilage begin.
The second series is off to a wobbly start. Whereas the first series began with various characters becoming aware of their powers, and clearly intended to progress through their respective self-examinations, mixed with frequent brushes with bad guys and other menaces, the second series feels like it’s groping for a direction. Everyone’s gone to ground, presumably on the advice of Mr. Bennet, who is convinced no paranormal is safe while the mutant-kidnapping and recruiting organization (hereinafter known as “The Organization”) for which he used to work still exists. At least some of them are keeping in touch; the Indian geneticist shares an apartment with Officer Parkman and Molly, and informs Mr. Bennet when The Organization contacts him. They’re planning some kind of sabotage or overthrow of The Organization, so any character willing to join that crusade might well want to hide out.
It’s less clear why Nathan Petrelli has dropped out of society on a drunken bender. He was (as far as anyone knows) elected to Congress. He’s got a job to do, and he proved the future is mutable by flying his brother up to explode in the sky rather than incinerate New York City. There weren’t any witnesses to his flight at the close of last season who didn’t already know about superpowers. He’d draw more attention to himself by resigning his office than by filling it. Mr. Linderman isn’t around any more to pull his strings, and if he’s part of the resistance movement against The Organization, he’d be a heckuva lot more valuable to it in Washington. For that matter, why isn’t he dead? Didn’t he meet a fiery doom with Peter in the skies over Manhattan? Well, maybe not. Read on.
Similarly, Hiro’s trip to Tokugawa Japan seems a little forced. Yeah, maybe he’s on some kind of journey of self-discovery, but didn’t he complete that in the first season? Meanwhile, Ando and Hiro’s father wait in New York for Hiro’s return. The time-traveling fanboy is already four months late. Hiro’s absence becomes critical when his father receives a death threat—Hiro isn’t around to save him, and there’s no way to get him a message. But…presuming Hiro returns at all, why doesn’t he just return at the time of his departure? The comic relief he provides, so welcome in the general tension of the original series, is redundant in the more generally silly scenario into which he drops: discovering the legendary Kensei is a Brit posing as a samurai, and a flippant, self-involved Brit at that. Both ends of the situation are awkward.
Mr. Bennet’s new job as an assistant manager for a copy shop is also played for laughs before comic relief becomes necessary, and in a way that made me uncomfortable. Putting up with a petty tyrant boss could broaden the character, and highlight how the family is suffering from being on the lam, if they weren’t still living in a big, rich-looking house. Assaulting and bullying the boss is just creepy in a supposedly sympathetic character.
Several new characters are introduced, including a brother-sister pair trying to hop the Mexican border to find help in the US for her condition, an unexplained and as yet uncontrolled ability to kill people around her. Their development should be interesting to watch, although not every superhero needs a sidekick with which to discuss the angst of superpowers. There’s also a guy with the power of matter transmutation, who reinitiates The Organization’s attempt to recruit Suresh, and a teenager at Claire’s new school who flirts with her, divides the world into drones and weirdos, spies through her bedroom window at night, and flies. I’d like to see a real mix of new characters, but I doubt we’ll get much of a change-up, given how many old characters remain.
The list of return characters includes Peter Petrelli, who presumably died in an uncontrolled nuclear explosion over New York. Peter is amnesiac, shorn, and inexplicably locked in a freight cabin, but he’s still decidedly not a radioactive cinder. I won’t say that’s unrealistic; in a world with superpowers, anything can happen. But it is unfulfilling. Reincarnating Peter negates, at a stroke, the pathos of his own death and his brother’s redemption at the end of the first series. After Sylar’s survival and escape to the sewers, I shouldn’t be surprised at the show’s refusal to close off plot lines, but I am. Each individual decision to keep spinning out some fanboy’s favorite character or plot line pleases the fanboy, but the collective effect is to cheapen the story for the rest of us.
Much of the fun of the original series lay in knowing the major characters were playing for keeps. Claire survived death, but that’s okay, given that her lone power is indestructibility. Isaac Mendez and Eden McCain and even super-healer Linderman died and stayed dead, along with a host of minor characters. Plans that got upset stayed upset. This kind of finality is only possible when the writers know where they’re going.
The second series needs a clear sense of purpose. The first series began with the characters seeking to understand and master their powers, along with their various personal issues; only later did the core motivation of preventing a nuclear explosion in New York emerge. Perhaps the plan to overthrow The Organization will fill this role, although clearly many of the major characters aren’t yet on board. Maybe it will be the genetic plague which, unchecked, will kill the mutants prematurely, although it looks like only Suresh cares about that at the moment. Maybe it will be something entirely different. I trust the second series of Heroes to deliver another central purpose, and, with its emergence, to anchor these disparate and generally disappointing elements into a compelling whole. So far, however, none has emerged, and the show feels a little lost without existing crises to keep the characters occupied in the meantime.
(Postscript: I’ve written before on the current era of fan-driven television, fueled by internet chat rooms that make it easy to monitor what the fans like, and what they don’t. The second series’ wobbly start makes it hard for cynics like me not to suspect the writers don’t quite have a plan in mind yet, and are waiting to see what stirs up the liveliest response.)
I received some noteworthy email this morning. It was for some kind of penis enlargement gimmick, and took a surprisingly unfriendly tone, moving beyond “Men! Do you worry about your penis size?” into flat accusations: “Change your tiny and flaccid penis...”
I couldn’t take such accusations personally, even though it came from a personal address, and even though the sender would be in a position to know.
The sender was me.
Yes, I got insulting spam from my own frickin’ email address at the University of Illinois. Unless somebody else in Champagin-Urbana has taken up a prairienet account with my own name (It’s remotely possible), that account hasn’t even existed for over a decade. There was another grad student there at the time named “Michael David Lake,” which caused a bit of confusion now and then, but since he has no particular reason to belittle my manhood, I’m going to have to assume that the spam was sent under a false name.
Spammers commonly use the technique, posing as one user in order to bypass various spam blockers. Sending email under the name “spammer@spam.com” is a dead giveaway for automated engines, but email from “real person@somewhere.org” is less visible. More sophisticated blockers could check up on whether there was a real account still there to send it, but apparently my mail server doesn’t employ those. I suppose employing addresses to match (or half-match) the recipient is fairly cunning, if spam blockers make exceptions for near-matches on the assumption that a single user is copying material from one of his accounts to another, but I suspect this was just a funny coincidence.
It’s either that, or my past self has worked out the secret of time travel, decided to use it merely to vilify his future selves, then promptly forgotten the secret again—because I certainly don’t remember having the secret of time travel at any point in my life. This wild scenario better not be the case. That would mean I could be living in the lap of luxury today, had that tiny-dicked bastard not blown it all in a fit
I want to relate a story I once heard about archaeology. It is a perfect example of what Martin Gardner calls an Aha! moment. Like all Aha! moments, it’s interesting for the moment of inspiration, but this particular story sticks with me because it has twice the payoff.
The subject is archaeology, and specifically an unexplained class of Mesolithic artifacts, which can be found littering Eurasia, from France to Indonesia. They are flat, chipped stones, about the size of a dinner plate, and varying in size about as much as dinner plates do, maybe eight to twelve inches across. They’re not quite round, but more like a fat teardrop or almond shape, with a broad point jutting out at the edge. And nobody knew what they were for.
More than anything else, they resembled some kind of chopper, an adaptation of the stone hand axe to a particular purpose requiring a point. But what was it made to chop? It was meant for a specific purpose; by the Mesolithic era, people were shaping specialized tools for specialized tasks instead of settling for one all-purpose chopper. The disc was too large to use comfortably as a cutting tool; it was heavier than more generalized hand axes, large and heavy enough to wobble uncomfortably in the hand for tasks like slicing meat and skin. Yet it was also too thin to work well as a heavy chopper for something like wood, prone to snap under the strain. Besides, specialized tools had already been identified for these functions, and, compared to the large quantity of faultless stone necessary for the teardrop tools, much easier and cheaper to produce. The relative effort required to make one of these awkward choppers was especially difficult to explain given how many could be found; stone age users would not simply discard such stones, but continue to reuse them, possibly reshaping them as smaller tools as they wore or broke. Whatever the fat teardrop was meant to do, it was something archaeologists hadn’t yet realized our distant ancestors did at all. It was a tantalizing problem: figure out what the tool could do well, and we’d know something entirely new about stone age people.
Like many archaeologists before her, Eileen O’Brien had a collection of modern reconstructions in various sizes and shapes—the originals being too valuable to chip or break in use—and tested them in a trial-and-error fashion, using them on whatever tasks he could think up: splitting branches, stripping pith from grasses, smashing grain, gouging logs, scraping clay from a riverbed, whatever. The teardrop stones were not especially suited to anything she came up with.
She was literally turning one over in her hands, niggling at the question, while inspiration struck via the television: the set was tuned to the Summer Olympics, and the discus throw came on. And she had to wonder…
She employed two students on the track team to test her theory. Thrown as a discus, the teardrop flew in a low arc, tipping as it spun, so that it struck the ground vertically…point first. Repeated throws ended up point-first forty-two out of forty-five attempts, traveling 100 feet within two yards of the target. Ta-dah! Ancient mystery solved: the teardrop stones were missile weapons, probably used for hunting before spears and arrows replaced them. So many could be found because prehistoric hunters kept losing them in the underbrush. Others had suggested the stones were missiles before, but the theory got no traction, because the stones threw badly. The discus-throw inspiration did the trick.
The best part about this story is that the student simultaneously solved another ancient mystery: why the discus throw was part of the Olympics. Although the modern Olympics include a number of sports for sport’s sake—figure skating, the parallel bars, curling—the original Olympic events were all skills of the hunter and warrior: running, jumping, wrestling, spear-throwing. The discus seemed out of place in classical Olympic competition. The sudden insight simultaneously made sense of both previously inexplicable artifacts and previously inexplicable traditions, from two subjects that seemed to have nothing in common.
I came across a copy of Nemesis today, Greg Stolze’s adaptation of the classic Call of Cthulhu RPG to the “one roll engine” (ORE) mechanic he developed originally for a superhero game. I’m not in the market for a horror game, but I’m always interested in new rule mechanics, so I read the salient parts of the rules.
The basic intent is to produce two axes of variation from one roll of a set of (ten-sided) dice—in this case, the highest number rolled on at least two dice and the quantity matching that number. Singletons are ignored, and if you get no matches at all, you fail. So if you roll five dice and get 1, 2, 4, 4, 8, the final result is “two 4s.” Rolling 3, 3, 3, 9, 9 gets you “two 9s.” Rolling 2, 4, 5, 7, 10 is “nothing.” From a single roll, you get one number ranging from 1 to 10 (the “height”), and another ranging from 2 to n, where n is the number of dice (the “width”).
I found the potential for this dual result intriguing, but didn’t immediately understand what uses it could be put to, so I read on. Unfortunately, the examples provided look like Stolze didn’t really know what to do with it, either. As a default, he presumes the height is the measure of success, while the width determines the time it takes to get that result: an occult researcher with a pair of 10s would find a lot of information after a week’s work, while a set of five 2s would find a vague clue right away. That makes sense. Other ideas, not so much, especially when the activity doesn’t really produce two degrees of success. If the occult investigator above needed to find the information before some evil cult did its thing that night, speed is important, but if the investigator is operating at his leisure, the extra effort of rolling lots of dice at once and counting the individual results and trying to find something meaningful to do with the width is wasted. If you dodge a bullet—or fail to—it hardly matters whether you do it with a tenth of a second or a hundredth of a second to spare, or whether you look really cool while doing so. Confusingly, if speed is the point of the exercise—a foot race, for example, or trying to snatch up the gun lying on the floor between you and your foe—then the width is the real measure of success.
Like me, Stolze is an incurable rules tinker, perpetually looking for better ways to simulate the adventure environment, or at least novel ones. He is particularly attached to dice. Some of his ideas include the hunch (set a roll aside for your next use, good or bad, simulating your character’s sense that something is about to go right or wrong), the flip-flop (reversing percentile dice), the matched roll (magnifying the result, good or bad, when the digits of a percentile roll match), simultaneously using a positive and a negative die, and the ORE system described above.
I just wish his ideas worked better at the table. Dice and die mechanics, and even mechanics generally, are widely considered a necessary evil in role-playing games. Overly involved mechanics can become a distraction from the narrative structure which is the whole point of role-playing games. Players can get so involved with applying complicated rules, or accumulating bonuses, or trading plot cards, or separating the 1s from the 6s in a fistful of dice that they pay more attention to numbers than to what those numbers mean. Some players don’t mind such distractions, but most of us do. Stolze’s creative dice conventions produce a little more information for a lot more fiddling. A straight sum, compared to a target number, usually is all the variation players need.
Suppose the occult investigator were rolling percentiles, as in the original Call of Cthulhu game. If he needs to roll between 1 and 30 to find a clue, while a roll between 31 and 100 is a failure, then a 2 would mean he finds a really good clue, or with a lot of time to spare, according to the needs of the plot. A 28 would mean finding just enough information to move forward, or finding it with mere minutes to spare—no time to pick up that shotgun at home before heading to the graveyard. You don’t get two entirely different scales of success, but usually one is enough to fill in the gaps, with a lot less hassle. Like the bullet-dodging example, usually all you need to know is whether the action worked or not; there’s no need to say, “You dodged the bullet! Uh… and, uh… you look really cool doing it!” Or “… and you suddenly remembered where you left your car keys, too!”
Friends who know my tastes in RPGs know I love Greg to death, but I love him for his plot hooks, the really twisted people and situations I can spring on my players for a visceral kick. The hobby is aging, and we’ve got dice rules that work. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. At this point, the solution to whatever shortcomings dice have as story-telling tools can only come from a complete replacement by another mechanic, as Stolze does with a token-trading system of plot control in his lowbrow comedic “…In Spaaaace!”
That mechanic is brilliant, and deserves more attention than it’s getting. But that’s a story for another day.
So. The Blackwater Group, the private organization performing military functions on behalf of the U.S. in Iraq, finally stepped over some invisible line between crimes to which everyone turned a blind eye and crimes serious enough to get someone angry enough to decide to start enforcing the law upon even them. Sorta.
Prime Minister al-Maliki isn’t willing to go so far as to try any one for war crimes, or indeed to try anyone for anything at all. He has merely decided to revoke the Blackwater group’s license to operate on Iraqi soil. This should be simple enough for a sovereign state, a government operating with the firm support of the U.S. president. Even Condi Rice got on the phone to apologize for the latest incident, so you know Blackwater has been very, very naughty indeed. But ejecting them isn’t so simple. Apparently, the Blackwater Group, which for years has insisted that it is not answerable to military law because it is not, technically, a military organization, now insists that it is also not answerable to civilian law because it is working with the American military, and, as such, is covered by an American law to the effect that American military personnel in Iraq are not subject to Iraqi law under any circumstances. Blackwater has even argued that, as a private contractor, it is free from Senate inquiry.
The claim echoes Cheney’s insistence that, as president of the Senate, he is not subject to limitations on executive authority, while as Vice President of the U.S., he is entitled to all executive privileges.
One wonders just which laws, if any, the Blackwater Group feels it is subject to. None, clearly, but I want to hear the question put baldly to them, and repeated until a clear answer is received. Sadly, that will never happen: Blackwater is a private organization, and doesn’t have to answer questions put to them by the pesky press. But we could ask any American official who speaks in their defense. Go on: ask. “What laws is Blackwater subject to?” Keep asking. No politician would ever say “none;” that would sound illegal, and dangerously similar to an embarrassing truth.
A few officials might try the dodge of claiming they’re responsible to the executive authority, as part of the general war effort, the execution of which is properly a function of the executive branch. I don’t suspect this is, in fact, true, and that Blackwater would really submit to prosecution if even Bush decided to, but suppose it is. Can such officials go on to defend the idea of a heavily-armed task force subject to no law but the personal decisions of the president himself? Think about this. A large, heavily-armed military body, answerable only to the president, and loyal only to the person of the president, is seven different flavors of scary.
But if they aren’t the president’s personal army, what’s left? They claim not to be answerable to the American military, or to the Iraqi courts, or even to their employers in Congress—who, after all, sign the checks—who, really are they answerable to? Nobody. Nobody at all but their stockholders. And yet they have the gall to insist that no one call them mercenaries. “Mercenaries” has such an ugly, lawless ring to it.
I went to the dentist earlier this afternoon to have a cavity filled. It was a quick and easy job, no more than 25 minutes from the moment I sat in the chair to paying the receptionist. Couldn’t have been more than three minutes’ drilling. Quick and easy for me, too; hardly felt a thing, though of course that distant sense of pressure and vibration carried into the jaw is always disturbing.
Unfortunately, the novocain is wearing off as I type, and my mouth is really starting to hurt, enough to make me wince and hold my cheek. I’d whimper audibly if I weren’t in a library.
Strangely, the pain doesn’t seem to be in the tooth itself, or even in the surrounding gum and jaw. Those are perfectly fine. No, the pain is high up in the fleshy part of my cheek, right where the needle carrying the painkillers went. This strikes me as highly ironic, and makes me wonder whether filling a cavity might be better without any painkillers at all on occasions where the cavity is small and shallow, as mine was. Maybe not. Getting down into the pulp might be excruciating, if only for an instant. Possibly excruciating enough to justify hours of post-operative pain from the hypodermic needle. Perhaps it’s a necessary safety feature: even an instantaneous pain might cause a patient to jerk dangerously in the presence of a diamond drill. Quite probably I’m overlooking other problems; I’m not an expert in any sense.
Beside me is my dinner: a roast beef hoagie to gobble just before the writers’ group begins its weekly meeting. A few experimental flexes indicate that both biting into the sandwich and chewing it afterwards will be agonizing. My appetite is fading; the tummy wants food, but the jaw rebels. Perhaps I’ll wait until I get home and have some soup instead, although 8:15 (when I get home) is a long way off.
Despite all this discomfort, however, it’s important to keep this in mind: If the worst thing you have to gripe about after treating a cavity is the sting of a needle, count your blessings. Think of your caveman ancestors—or even your grandparents—for whom keeping teeth into old age simply didn’t happen, never mind the lingering agony of a tooth not yet ready to come out, or the dangers of an infected jawbone and other horrors.
I get to keep my teeth--all my teeth—in exchange for a couple hours’ pain every few years? Fuckin’ awesome. I’ll take the miracles of dentistry over the miracles of television or nuclear power or the moon landing, hands down.
Listening to the history of China, I’m struck by the frequency with which events there mirrored events in the history of Europe, and earlier in the eastern Mediterranean, despite the way that the two regions were separated—culturally as well as geographically. At least, the parallels are there when painted in the broad strokes unavoidable when one collapses thousands of years into a nine hours’ lecture.
China under the Tang underwent a classical revival comparable to the European Renaissance. The Han empire struggled with issues of land reform as the Greco-Romans did, and with the tendency of wealth (even in the relatively illiquid form of land) to accumulate in the hands of the few, with consequent peasant unrest. Ming China enjoyed an economic boom as newly uncovered silver flowed in from Japan, just a little before Spain enjoyed a similar windfall from the Americas, followed by a comparable ruination of economies and initiative when the emperor overtaxed the newly rich merchants, killing the goose that laid the silver eggs. Buddhism, initially dismissed as an alien philosophy was embraced as a tool for uniting disparate imperial elements of empire, as Christianity was.
Seeing history repeat itself this way seems to suggest that a certain pattern of history is inevitable, just as the Aztecs and Incas seemed to be gearing up to repeat the Mesopotamian cradle of civilization act in the Americas when Spain showed up and spoiled the whole thing. (If Europe hadn’t gained a 10,000 year head start while Americans migrated across the Bering Strait, we might have seen history repeated again.)
To be sure, there are differences, as well. Or perhaps, one huge difference: China was (and is) a massive central power, surrounded by smaller peripheral kingdoms in what we now call Manchuria, Korea, Vietnam, Tibet, Mongolia. Occasionally, order broke down, and China fragmented into rival fiefdoms, but a central order reasserted itself fairly quickly. Europe is just the opposite: it has spent most of its time as a balancing act between roughly equal rivals and partners of convenience. Occasionally, some great conqueror would seize a hegemonic block of territory, but it soon dissolved into national or even sub-national units, often immediately upon his death.
If history is so dependent on the conditions in which it grows as we are taught in classes, this kind of massive contrast should lead to a radically different history. Perhaps early China, in the Yellow River valley, should resemble Mesopotamia (and it does), but imperial China should—intuition demands—be radically different from Renaissance Europe. The massive difference of united empire and fragmented kingdoms should produce a radically different set of issues. But it doesn’t. Historical differences begin to look like a crock.
But hang on a minute.
If history is deterministic, and independent cultures will repeat the same history, then there shouldn’t be a massive dichotomy of central empire and rival states between China and Europe. That’s a big difference in power-political terms which can’t be waved away with geography. Yes, north China is a plain, and easily penetrated by steppe nomads, but south China isn’t. It’s rocky and fragmented like Europe, and especially southern Europe; if history is a constant, the Chinese of the Yellow and Wei Rivers should not have been able to absorb this territory any more than the Egyptians could absorb Asia Minor. Clearly a more sophisticated view of history’s broad outlines is called for.
The best I can do is by way of analogy to a deck of cards. Sooner or later, often spurred by changing technologies, rising civilizations all have to deal with the same issues. Cyclic qualities of climatic change—population swings, for example—mean they must often deal with the same issues repeatedly; each time, a civilization can try a variation on the last solution, trying to preserve what worked and fix what didn’t. Perhaps human nature demands that we adopt the same solutions to these repeated challenges, but we might try them in a different order. Foreigners pressing on our borders? Kill them. When that doesn’t work entirely, and a new generation returns some day, try assimilating them. Or hiring them as permanent second-class citizens. Or some combination of these ideas and others. For bronze-age classical civilization, the great challenge was iron weapons, and barbarian soldiers with the right tools and tactics finally to bring down armies of chariot archers. For the Shang, the great challenge was the satellite Zhou state, which had learned all too well from its patron-overlords. Later, Rome would face Goths who had learned Roman fighting too well, and China would face the superior weapons of Britain. It’s like a story told out of order, but all the elements are there, dealt by some arbitrary cosmic process. Because there’s only so many variations available, sooner or later everybody has to play the same hands. Just not necessarily at the same time. Often, similar responses to historical imperative produce similar new problems to solve. Perhaps that’s why we see so many patterns in history, just as an ace follows a king in a hand of bridge.
I’m currently listening to a series of lectures on Chinese history, part of the Great Lecture series.
(I heartily endorse this series. The Learning Company selects professors for their reputations as classroom teachers as well as academics to deliver lectures on their respective topics. This is important; as a former MIT student, I know first-hand that some very accomplished researchers are dreadful speakers. Some lectures come in a video format, others audio only. The humanities comprise the bulk of the series, but astronomy, economics, and other technical topics are available, too. We especially enjoyed the Roman history lectures, but the American Civil War, impressionist art, and an analysis of the Odyssey were all excellent, the kind of class you’d remember as one of your best, the I-don’t-usually-like-philosophy-but… kind. The only clinker so far has been the Egyptian history lectures, whose speaker behaves as though speaking to six-year-olds: “Did you all try writing your name in hieroglyphs?”)
The Chinese history lectures are audio only. It’s a pity for us that this is so, because Eileene is a very visual learner; without a picture to focus her attention, she isn’t very interested in listening together. On the other hand, it does mean I can listen to the lectures on the kitchen CD player, a decided improvement on the radio host who is usually on while I wash dishes.
I bring up the fact that this series is audio because it led me to a moment of cognitive dissonance. The speaker has a high, tight voice, I’d guess New England. He speaks precisely, and has a nerdy little vocal tic of ending paragraphs with a half-spoken “N-kay?” to make sure his students are following along. My mental image was of a small, slim man, either balding or with thin, dark hair, clean-shaven, with a reluctant smile. Instead, his portrait (on the back of the box) is of a guy with a mane of curly, gray hair and bushy mustache, grinning broadly. He looks like Mark Twain, and should have a round southern drawl to match. Even with the photo in hand while the CD plays, I have a hard time matching the two together. Eileene, who saw the picture before hearing the voice, experienced the same cognitive dissonance in reverse.
This is particularly funny coming on the tail of third-hand information about myself. I play World of Warcraft online, and, like most players, I find it helpful to use the Ventrilo voice chat utility while playing with my guild, so we can speak directly to one another, instead of typing furiously in the heat of battle. Between my voice and the text in my guild forum posts, my guildies have formed a mental image of me, which image came up in conversation a month or two ago while my face-to-face friends Jen and Greg attended a small get-together in Michigan. My online friends imagine me to be tall, thin, and hippie-looking, probably to match my center-left politics.
(Yes, only center-left. I rail so frequently here because our country is spinning wildly and dangerously right. But I digress.)
Well, I’m not tall, thin, and hippie-looking. I’m five foot six, squarish, clean-shaven, and could pass visual inspection at the fuddy duddy convention. People who see my picture before seeing me imagine a large, bearish guy, but that’s because the photos are taken by my even shorter girlfriend, feature me in the heavy sweaters I favor, and often cut my skinny arms from the photo. I sing baritone, but I speak tenor; my voice rises on the phone, or over voice chat, when a lack of direct contact kicks my politeness reflexes into gear.
I wish I could offer a lesson to be learned from this, but I don’t have one, apart from noting the great symmetry of ignorance and misperception. Our first impressions are often right; we have evolved to make big decisions very quickly from insufficient evidence. But when the mechanisms behind the snap judgments we make fail, they fail spectacularly. I can understand why people might imagine me looking like a hippy, just as I imagine a tweedy voice being attached to a tweedy little man. Wrong on both counts. That’s why we have a responsibility to stay conscious of our prejudices: we can’t eliminate them, so the best we can do is stay aware and override them when they overstep their proper place.
I had occasion recently to return to some freshman-level physics. As the player most concerned about technical details in my role-playing group, and as the most scientifically literate, I’ve inherited from the GM much of the responsibility for designing the spaceship we’ll use to hop from planet to planet in our science fiction adventures. One of the questions raised in the process is: what substitute for gravity will we use?
We have several options, well anchored in the literature, but most of them suffer from associated problems. Living in freefall sounds fun, but it’s uncomfortable and even unhealthy over the long run, and wouldn’t fit the mental image of science fiction ship life—made unshakeable by television shows and movies shot on sets with gravity. Traveling under constant acceleration is expensive; the fuel costs are enormous, and it’s unlikely that the fastest, shortest, or most fuel-efficient path connecting point A to point B will match a constant-acceleration trip at 1g. Turning on an “artificial gravity field” inside the ship is about as convenient as it gets. Unfortunately, it’s also pure science fantasy, which isn’t the brand of science fiction we’re aiming for.
Bearing these shortcomings in mind, I naturally gravitated towards spinning the crew quarters about a central axis, replacing gravity with centripetal force—not a perfect match, but close enough for daily life. Sitting on the outer ring, you’d feel something akin to gravity pulling you outward, like a weight swung around on a string. Climbing “up” toward the axial tube connecting to other parts of the ship, this force would decrease until you are once again “weightless”—that is, in freefall—at the center. This method is simple, low-tech, and cheap. It doesn’t require complicated explanations, and doesn’t require scientific fudging.
That is, until you look at the numbers. Fool that I am, I calculated the spin we’d need, and got an answer I didn’t like. According to classical mechanics, a equals v squared over r for a point spinning about an axis, where a is the acceleration, v is the angular velocity, and r is the radius at which it turns. Put another way, v is the square root of a times r. We have a; that’s the Earth gravity we hope to mimic, 9.8 meters per second squared. We have an approximate r; that’s half the width of the crew quarters. Since we’re presuming a very generous space about the size of a two-story house for a crew of 6, that’s about 8 meters after shifting things around to a single-story disk. At these values, v is just under 9 meters per second, or twenty miles an hour, for those who prefer English units. You can wiggle these values around a bit by settling for a lower centripetal force, or by spreading the quarters farther out and paying for the lost space, but it doesn’t help much.
Twenty miles an hour is a problem. For one thing, if you stand up, your head moves in a smaller circle, resulting in less acceleration, less “gravity.” How much less? A 1.75 meter tall person would feel earth gravity at his feet, but only 78% of earth gravity at his head. That’s a big difference, enough to feel it, and enough to get disoriented. Another problem is trying to travel through the door from the axis to the revolving quarters. If that door is at a meter radius from the center, it zips by at 2.5 miles per hour, the speed of a brisk walk. Passing through would be risking your life; lose your footing, and the revolving door frame, backed by the mass of the entire crew quarters, pinches you right in half, or chops off stray appendages.
Suddenly, mimicking gravity with a rotating section looks a lot less attractive. The technique only works with much larger spaceships, with a very large r, where the outer ring spins faster, but the inner ring, where the revolving door of death is set, spins slower, like the axle of a large wheel turns slower than the axle of a small wheel, for a given ground speed.
Now, using the theoretical phenomena while ignoring the actual calculations measuring those phenomena is an old and respected tradition in science fiction. Ships in the books accelerate at rates that would, in reality, turn the occupants to jelly. Computers solve problems which would, in reality, require astronomical calculation times. Medicines delivered at the last possible instant before fatality would, in reality, leave a person pretty messed up, instead of instantly cured. I could similarly ignore the hard facts of math behind rotating ship parts. But I won’t. Dave is counting on me for some technical honesty, so I’ll provide it. Besides, the best of sci fi starts with the technical assumptions. Sometimes, playing fair with those assumptions causes a story to evaporate. But other times, you just get a different story. And that, too, is an old and respected tradition in science fiction.
As is so often the case with popular culture, I’m late to the party. Thanks to the wonders of YouTube, I just became aware of a comedian named Demetri Martin. (I hope that’s his real name. As you know, I find cross-national names like “Federico Hayashi” funny. But he’s a comedian, so he might have chosen that as a stage name to be funny. In which case, it isn’t funny any more. Martin would appreciate that sentiment.) He’s already appeared on Letterman and the Comedy Channel, written for Conan O’Brian, and held a regular spot on The Daily Show, but I’m just getting to him now.
His humor is very smart, and rapid-fire but soft-pedaled; there’s very little in the way of setup material, so he just goes directly from punchline to punchline, all in a tone that suggests he’s just hanging out and strumming his guitar—only by accident is he doing it up in front of a lot of people. Because of his delivery, I’d like to call his humor quirky, but I’m not sure the label applies, because he owes a lot to Steven Wright and George Carlin: humor built around self-negation and wordplay. The material is original, but the act as a whole is so much like these legends that Martin can’t properly be called quirky, if only because someone else got to that territory first. (He’d appreciate that sentiment, too.)
To show you what I mean, let me repeat three of his jokes, one that would make Wright proud, one that’s pure Carlin, and one that either one might have come up with:
“I want to make a jigsaw puzzle that's 40,000 pieces. And when you finish it, it says ‘go outside.’”
“It’s weird how ‘finger puppet’ sounds okay as a noun.”
“She was amazing. I never met a woman like this before. She showed me to the dressing room. She said: ‘If you need anything, I’m Jill.’ I was like: ‘Oh, my God! I never met a woman before with a conditional identity. What if I don’t need anything? Who are you?’ ‘If you don’t need anything, I’m Eugene.’”
Martin’s humor is playful, built around the silly idea itself, pared down as finely as he can get it. I really enjoy that style of comedy, and it’s far better than the general run of stand-up, which is all too often dependent on insults, vulgarity, and general abrasiveness. Unfortunately, comedy careers in Martin’s vein tend to be short, because producing that much material is damnably hard. You can stretch a sit-com setup into a half hour, and you can harangue about the opposite sex or government or bad drivers indefinitely, but ideas nobody ever thought before are hard to find, and the laugh lasts only five seconds, even if you’re good. Fifteen, tops. So original stand-up comedians burn out fast, or, more often, move up to television and movies, where the work is easier and the pay better.
I bring this up because, according to Wikipedia, Martin is already working on three movies: Will, Moonpeople, and Kids in America, in various capacities of writer and actor, and is in line to replace Conan O’Brien when he leaves in 2009. Bummer. I only found this great stand-up comedian four days ago, and his career as a stand-up comedian is already over. (Martin would appreciate that sentiment, too.)
A while ago, I described methods I used to encourage my players to be more proactive. At the time, they seemed to be working. Basically, the idea was to reward activity lavishly, conditioning players by Pavlovian methods to be active, and to make answers less cryptic than one might at first think appropriate for a campaign of mystery, thus giving players a direction to act. Sadly, I must report that the operation was a success, but that the patient died.
For a while, the players were doing well. They started out tentatively with their magic, which was appropriate for teens just discovering wondrous powers, then began to really open up when it became clear that I’d allow them to cast very powerful spells. Players got more aggressive about talking with NPCs for information once they learned that simply asking could get them answers. Unfortunately, they now persist in looking for more NPCs to give them answers even though it is now clear that there is no one left to help.
The climax to the campaign in which I’ve employed these methods is a confrontation at Warehouse 23, where security measures have broken down and a powerful artifact has taken over the Sinner net. (Warehouse 23 is a GURPS setting inspired by the final shot of Raiders of the Lost Ark, a warehouse full of all the amazing, terrifying stuff the mysterious THEY don’t want you to have.)
My players know full well that’s where the action is. Every lead they’ve ever followed has either reached a quick dead end, or led back to the warehouse. The PCs have found two crates labeled “SRO 715,” for which they can find no record, but suspicious holes in the records link it to a spot in north-central Nebraska. There’s a blacktop road unmarked in any map leading right to the place. Scrying the Air Force base in that location gives views of an odd-looking reception area, and powerful magic static beyond that. Scrying for missing people or items produces a signal coming from the warehouse. The umbra, the magical plane lying alongside our own material world, is full of signs. Great root systems of wires and cables stretching over the umbral neighborhood are breaking into the umbral reflections of banks, courthouses, power plants, etc., and all lead back to the warehouse. The artifact wants to employ the PCs (among others) as warehouse staff, so it hasn’t been subtle about its presence: magical beams have visibly struck the junkyard the PCs call their sanctum, fired from somewhere near SRO 715. One PC teleported into a holding tank on a botched teleport roll; though she soon got out, the PCs had time to get a fix on her location first: north central Nebraska. Telepathy attempts have actually let the artifact talk to the PCs. It said, “Come.” About all I’ve left out is a giant neon sign blinking “PCs go this way!”
Nor is there anything else going on to distract them, no side plots other than those the PCs generate themselves, usually by screwing up in some dramatic fashion, and even there I’m implausibly forgiving. Like I said, everything else hits a quick dead end. I haven’t even written any adventure material for two months, for fear of side-tracking them. Two months. Nothing is happening anywhere but the warehouse.
Nonetheless, the players persist in taking every possible excuse, no matter how flimsy, not to investigate the warehouse because it’s too dangerous, even if they have to make the excuses up themselves. Typically, the PCs persist in chasing obviously unproductive leads, hoping against all evidence that someone knows more than they do. They keep at it, refusing to take “I don’t know nothing” for an answer until the situation gets ugly, and someone sustains another small wound, which justifies a refusal to go to the warehouse now, while someone is wounded. Maybe they can get some more information from someone else. Repeat the cycle. So desperate are the players to do anything but go to the warehouse that last session they chased down the Mother of Spiders, who they’d never met, and who they only learned of as a stray thought of a minor PC whose mind they were reading. That happened eight months ago. But rather than explore the warehouse directly, the players talked themselves into thinking that the Mother of Spiders, who knows none of them by name, and lives in another state, and is quite mad, will provide them with a foolproof plan for storming this warehouse of which she’s never heard.
Part of the problem is that we’re using the Mage system, where botches for spell rolls are painfully common. Mostly, though, the problem is that the players persist in using tactics so tentative that they get nothing if they succeed, forcing them to keep trying until someone botches, then taking another session to lick their wounds.
Scyers who decide to risk the mystic connection necessary to spy on the warehouse don’t send their point of view inside the warehouse, but rather from what they consider a safe distance, hundreds of yards onside it. Yep, there’s a mysterious air force base there. Diviners who ask questions about the warehouse don’t ask “What do the root-like tendrils growing out of the umbral fortress do?” but rather “Is something in the warehouse causing these root-like tendrils to grow out of it?” Surprise, surprise, the answer is “yes.” Was that helpful? Did it tell you anything you didn’t already know, or give you a handle on the problem? I swear, one player decided to rig a force field onto his technomagical umbral vehicle, capable of deflecting any physical attacks short of a cannonball—after discovering the warehouse’s umbral reflection was a fortress with cannons on the walls.
It’s like they’re dealing with a lion escaped from the zoo. They’ve got a small team of people with nets and dart guns and a cage, but insist on creeping up on the lion and prodding it with a stick, just to be sure it’s really a lion, or maybe hoping to discover that it’s already dead, or that this isn’t the right lion, but a tame one belonging to Mr. Dieterle down the block. When the lion doesn’t respond, they prod it a little harder, until the lion is at last provoked into a peevish swipe at the stick. Then the players act all wet themselves and run off to regroup, convinced the lion is too dangerous to approach. When they run out of other ideas, they reluctantly creep up to a safe distance from the lion and pelt it with gravel to see what happens and make sure it hasn’t ceased to be a lion in the meantime, then run away again when the lion snarls in irritation.
I’m out of ideas on how to get the players to get off their cowardly butts and do something. I’ve painted myself into something of a corner, unwilling to let the final, climactic threat not be a threat. There’s nobody left to tell the PCs they need to go in—it being a point of understanding that mages are rare in this world, and busy with their own agenda, in any case—nor anybody the PCs would believe, anyway. With the warehouse staff dead, the PCs are the world’s foremost experts on the warehouse. There’s literally nothing happening that isn’t coming directly from the warehouse now: no distractions, no excuses. And what’s coming directly out of the warehouse is bad: power outages at the nuclear plant, government computer files garbled or stolen, tornadoes, small children disappearing from their homes. I’ve lost patience with the players. From this point, they can go to the warehouse or sit on their hands at home while the world collapses around them. I wish I could say with confidence which they’ll go with.
In the media circus surrounding not-at-all-gay Senator Craig’s restroom hijinks last week, we nearly missed something that strikes me as important, even ominous. The White House came out with its policies on what to do to alleviate the recent melt-down in the housing market: nothing. Somewhere down on page ten, or forty-five minutes into an hour news show, we could learn of Bush’s expression of belief that “lenders have a responsibility to help these good people … to stay in their homes,” but no actual call that that responsibility be enforced. Bush positively refused to bail anyone out of their own bad decisions.
This is not to say Mr. Bush will sit idly by and do nothing at all, however. The homeowners’ loss is his gain.
In an interview with NPR, Secretary of State Henry Paulson elaborated on Bush’s speech. The White House will not ask that Congress help the homeowners directly, or in any substantial way; that would be expensive, and would not enrich our leaders in Washington. It will, however, ask Congress to fight the housing crash indirectly, through—what else?—tax cuts.
Paulson explained that the president and his cabinet “hope to do away with a perverse aspect of the tax code,” by which forgiven loans are considered income. If a bank forgives a bad house loan, the homeowner must treat that loan as income, a portion of which would have to be paid as income tax. Paulson argued that removing forgiven loans from the income category would therefore ease the burden on homeowners hoping for some kind of debt relief.
Think about this. The new law would only benefit homeowners if and when their debts were forgiven. The power to forgive or refinance loans lies with the lender, not with the borrowers, who would love to have their debts forgiven, even if it means paying a fraction of that in taxes. The new law would do nothing to encourage lenders to forgive or refinance loans, because they would still stand to gain nothing from forgiving debts. The proposal only makes sense if we believe that banks are refusing to refinance out of concern for the homeowners’ taxes (in itself grossly implausible) while simultaneously remaining indifferent to the homeowners’ total wealth.
No, rewriting the tax code so that forgiven loans no longer be considered income will not help the “good people” about to lose their homes one whit. So who would it help? Hm… let’s think about this some more.
Ah, yes. That would be anyone who receives a large loan under conditions where repayment is not expected. If the laws were rewritten, CEOs and other fat cats with the savvy to do so (or salaries large enough to justify hiring a lawyer to do it for them) could receive their income as loans which are immediately forgiven. No taxes. Done. Presumably, those of us who receive our income via paycheck would be expected to pick up the slack. The laws Paulson calls perverse are in fact entirely straightforward and reasonable. I’d want to call the proposed changes “the billionaire’s law” as a way to turn public sentiment against it, if we didn’t already have a sheaf of such laws.
Perhaps a different label would serve us better. Someone else already uses large loans without expectation of repayment.
I call your attention specifically to the way unsecured, unrepaid loans are a popular way to offer bribes even as the tax code stands now. If you get caught at it, it’s easier to claim “Yes, we financed the Senator’s new mansion, but we expected him to repay the loan someday, so no value actually changed hands” than to admit “Yeah, we bought him a mansion. So what?” Restructuring the law would mean that this abuse of financing wouldn’t even need to be declared. The new mansion wasn’t bought for me, says the senator, I paid for it with a loan. Yes, admittedly, that loan was never repaid. But it’s not income, so I don’t need to claim it in my tax return. Changing the law would obliterate, or at least go a long way toward obscuring, the paper trails huge bribes leave behind.
Call Paulson’s proposal the “Briber’s Bill.” I don’t think it is proposed primarily to make bribery easier; the real point is to create the biggest possible loophole for rich people who don’t like paying taxes. But we’ve had some hard lessons recently on how to label political issues according to how you want it perceived, rather than how it actually functions. Best of all, we don’t even have to stretch the truth. The proposed tax revision will aid bribery, and far more than it will help anyone in jeopardy of losing a home.