Brynna status update

Today our cat Brynna is in for dental surgery, extracting a rotten tooth. She turns 16 next month so she's pretty old for this, but it's still not a high-risk operation.

We also discussed a thyroidectomy, but that's higher-risk, and also very high cost, and brings with it the likelihood of increasing her kidney dysfunction. Its primary purpose would be to avoid having to give her pills; it's hard to medicate a cat since you can't catch them regularly enough when it's several times a day, and particularly one like Brynna who doesn't eat reliably, even if you sneak something into her food.

Instead, however, we're going to be getting her a cream that we apply twice daily in her ear (should be a lot easier than a pill!) that'll give her the thyroid suppression transdermally. This will provide a more steady flow of the drug for better regulation, should last longer for less times of high blood pressure, and avoid the stomach upset effects that the orally administered pills cause.

Good roleplaying looks like this

To some extent it's subjective what constitutes good roleplaying, particularly as you get into the distinction between really good and supremely good. However, I think when it comes to the distinction between good roleplaying and not-so-good (or even bad), that can be defined clearly enough.

1. Your character's behavior always corresponds to what that kind of person would do in that kind of situation in that kind of world. Always.
   
   
2. You can play a character who is not merely a simple variant on yourself, or a simple wish-fulfillment version of yourself, without violating rule #1.
   
   
3. What you do doesn't just conform to the world, setting, theme, and tone, it also helps build it up and establish it.
   
   
4. Your actions are always done in a considerate way that enhances, or at least does not detract from, the enjoyment of the other participants, always. You manage to do that without conflicting with rule #1.

I think that pretty much covers it. If you do all of these things all the time you are probably a good roleplayer.

Amusingly, in my 25 years roleplaying, without exception, every time I've met someone who believed themselves to the best roleplayer they knew, one who would "show the rest of you how it's done", they were invariably bad roleplayers who regularly violated at least one of these rules. The best roleplayers have always been people who considered themselves about equal with most of their peers at roleplaying.

What's so bad about small dogs?

Dogs of all sizes have their charms, don't get me wrong. But it seems there's some strange cultural stigma about small ones which annoys me.

Large dogs are stereotyped as being drooly and dumb but always good-natured and friendly. Small dogs are stereotyped as being yappy and uptight and annoying, and are called "little rat dogs". Neither stereotype is particularly accurate.

Any purebred is likely to be uptight, regardless of size, compared to mutts which tend to be laid back and friendly by comparison. There are of course exceptions, but the rule of thumb works. Size, however, doesn't enter into it. One of the most uptight breeds of dog is the greyhound, because of how it's been bred for racing, and they're by no means small. Other large breeds known for being at least as uptight as any poodle include pit bulls and collies. Of course individual dogs of any breed, even purebred, might be laid back... but that applies just as well to poodles or cockers as larger breeds. Still, small dogs get all the bad rap without being any more likely to have the problem.

And mutt small dogs are just as drooly and just as friendly and good-natured as big dogs, except they can do it on your lap (without crushing you and your sofa). Plus they're a lot less likely to knock someone over in their enthusiasm to be friendly and hurt someone. But these traits are overlooked. Instead, little dogs are dismissed as "little rat dogs" summarily, and so unfairly.

People who appreciate smaller dogs are rarely prejudicial against the big dogs, but not vice versa. It's not fair. More power to cuddly, friendly little pooches everywhere!

The Four Foods Theory

Consider the veracity of the following assertion:

Any good food goes with at least one of the following: chocolate, cheese, garlic, onions.

Note that the converse is not asserted, so beware of the excluded middle.

Logically, one can conclude that if this is true for a set of ingredients S, it will also be true for any set S' where S is a subset of S'. For instance, if it is true for "chocolate, cheese, garlic, onions" then it's also true for "chocolate, cheese, garlic, onions, spaghetti sauce". So the challenge is not to find a set which makes a true assertion; it's to find the smallest possible set that does so.

Clearly we can't eliminate chocolate or cheese since it's trivial to find examples of "good food" which do not go with any of the others. However, garlic and onions have a lot of overlap. I think at some point I had come up with one good food that goes with onions but not garlic, and one that goes with garlic but not onions, which requires the set to contain both; however, I can't think of one right now.

The trickier question is whether this set really is broad enough to work. Some people might claim that lobster proves butter must be added; however, lobster is not good food. (And even if it were, garlic goes with it.) Corn on the cob might be a better argument for butter needing to be added to the list, however.

Please don't make me say I'm just kidding, please...

Boogers!

I haven't gotten a cold serious enough to stay home for, in about two years, if I remember right. This one came on very abruptly. Friday afternoon I had a slight cough as we drove up to Burlington to our anniversary dinner, and my back was more achey than I expected. My throat stayed dry and scratchy all evening, and by the time I got home I was blowing my nose and coughing. By Saturday morning, it was a full-on cold, and stayed that way bad enough to stay home Monday and Tuesday.

So far it's all been that sniffly, occasionally sneezy, too-wet stage which is not really that bad; just kind of tired, and the feeling that your head is bigger on the inside than on the outside. But I'm just starting to come into the dry cough stage, which I really really hate. I'm not as tired, so I can go to work, get things done, and that's good -- I'm not good at sitting around doing nothing. But that cough just gets so tiring and painful so quickly, and then it starts robbing me of my sleep, and then it just stretches on and on and on. I would take two more weeks of sniffling to avoid that, no question.

Is there a name for this kind of person?

This person is always smiling and saying superficially pleasant things, but there's a profound undercurrent of malice and spite just millimeters below the surface. Every single thing she says can be taken by a bystander as innocent, or at most, just a joke. She always retains plausible deniability against any complaint about her attitude or behavior, because each individual element of her constant, comprehensive, exhaustive campaign of malice is, taken by itself, so trivial and petty as to make the complainer look like a fool making mountains out of molehills. Yet collectively, if someone sticks around long enough to see it and makes even the slightest effort to pay attention, they accumulate into a vicious stream of self-centered belittlement and ridicule that speaks of a profound darkness of the soul.

Every word is sweet and soft, a perfumed silken caress, with a slender pointed dagger behind it. She cuts so cleanly you almost can't feel it at first. By the time you realize you're bleeding, she's flouncing away, and no one else would believe it, either.

She has a bevy of other ways to deflect criticism. One of her favorites is to put on airs of indignance at being judged. This one is especially popular if the objection is not to her, or her actions, but just their appropriateness to a particular situation. You're really trying to oppress her. Any criticism of anything she does or says is never actually what it says it is; it's simply a symptom of your personal, and irrational, dislike of her. She never actually answers any comment, criticism, or accusation. Never. She may respond, she will certainly speak afterwards, but she will never actually answer.

All of this should be of little import, because it seems like such an obvious ploy, such an obvious strategy. And such an easily recognizable pattern to anyone who looks for it for the tiniest amount of time. It oozes, after all, from everything she says. She thinks she's very very clever to have invented it; she's positively smug, smirking all the time. You want to laugh at her for being so proud of inventing something so obvious and so recognizable.

But... somehow, almost everyone doesn't recognize it. Doesn't realize it. Falls prey to it, over and over. So much so, that anyone who does recognize it and tries to say something gets not only ignored but marginalized. They get seen as the troublemaker for complaining about such petty matters, in the eyes of all the people who fall for it.

I wish there were a nice simple name you could use for this kind of person. Something along the lines of "passive-aggressive" or "anal-retentive", something that sums up the whole pattern of behavior and thus makes it more readily recognizable. But if there is one, I don't know what it is. But most of all I wish more people would learn to recognize this pattern. It's depressing that such a simple and obvious tactic works so darned well.

A public service announcement

Apparently, there's some confusion on this point, so, as a public service, I'm here to settle the matter.

The toilet paper goes on so it goes over the top.

You may now go back about your lives knowing that this question need never confuse anyone again. I'm glad we got that settled.

OOC reference or just a word?

I was asked about the appropriateness of using the word "hell" in a literary work within a world like Lusternia which doesn't have a place called Hell. It's an interesting question and hard to answer briefly.

It's clear that a reference to, say, Microsoft, or Beowulf, or biochemistry, does not belong in a work written and set in Lusternia (the same could be said for most fantasy worlds). In the same vein, a reference to Hell, the uppercase one, is inappropriate. (Of course, you could have a fantasy world that has a Hell in its mythology or as an actual place people visit, but Lusternia doesn't happen to have one; the nearest thing is the plane of Nil.)

However, the word "hell" has become genericized by use, and now has senses which do not allude to that particular bit of our culture. The only connection between the word hell in the phrase "I had a hell of a time" and the Christian concept of Hell is a very indirect connection, one rooted in etymology. (Most idioms started as metaphors or similes, but eventually through repeated use came to mean directly what they had formerly meant only by indirection through that metaphor or simile. Thus, the original metaphor is nothing more than an etymology.)

But in the case of "hell" the etymology is fairly evident. Perhaps it's evident enough to jolt the reader out of any immersion in the fantasy world that she had been able to achieve, and if so, that's enough of a reason to avoid it right there. The question is whether it has been genericized enough that one can read it and get the generic meaning in mind without even a flicker of the etymological original meaning.

Personally, I'd avoid it because while most people would not get the "wrong" meaning and be jolted out, a few people might. However, if it was really the best word to fit the spot and nothing else would do, I might go ahead and use it anyway.

One might say as a matter of principle to never use a word like that. But ultimately, almost every word turns out to be a "word like that" once you dig into its etymology far enough. The difference is that the original meaning is obscure enough that you either don't know it, or only think of it if you make a conscious effort to do so.

And when you get right down to it, every word of English has unshakeable origins in one or another language that never existed in Lusternia; we assume that Lusternians are actually speaking their own language, and it's being translated for us. (Because it's an impossibly ridiculous coincidence to expect that they have a language that actually happens to have the same words in it as English.) So ultimately, even "Hell" might be assumed to be a translation of something that is appropriate in Lusternia.

Aggressive driving

I first encountered the blue Oldsmobile Alero about a quarter of the way along my drive in to work, in Barre. It was right in front of me going across Main Street onto Route 62 heading up the hill to the Interstate. The driver, a blonde woman I couldn't make out, seemed to be in a big hurry, soon weaving in and out of lanes and racing up to traffic lights.

Traffic was heavy in both lanes which were moving at about the same pace, but since there were more cars on the left, she darted into the right lane and raced ahead (and I don't mean a mild racing ahead, I mean a Smokey and the Bandit racing ahead) the half-dozen car-lengths until she was stopped again, then put on her left turn signal. No one let her in, and she stayed that way five minutes until she ended up two cars behind me before she could finally get over.

Farther up the hill she passed me again by weaving lanes, got caught by the light, and this kept repeating the whole trip.

When I finally turned onto the small road on which my office is located, she was still there... right back to where she started, right in front of me. Turns out she's one of my coworkers. I am so tempted to go ask her if all that reckless driving was worth it, to end up gaining precisely zero time.

Making a gaming keyboard on the cheap

I don't spend a lot of time on computer games -- hardly any, in fact, compared to most people. Well, let me be more clear: I spend tons of time on games that involve computers, such as pencil-and-paper RPGs that happen to involve computers as game aids, or more prevalently, MUDs. And tons more time using computers in fun ways that aren't games, like chat. But actual computer games, I don't do a lot. And if you take away the idle playing of solitaire games like Sudoku on my Palm, even less.

Some of the games I enjoy on those rare times I play are things like FreeSpace2 and flight simulators, which unfortunately, require a fairly large amount of learning about to play well. You can't readily just jump in and start playing; you have to learn how the controls work, how to operate your craft, and a lot of technical stuff. Perhaps the most annoying part is learning the scores and scores of keyboard combinations necessary to effectively pilot a ship in FreeSpace2, which you really have to know by memory. Having a joystick with a zillion buttons on it helps a little, but too many buttons there and it gets just as bad.

Hardcore gamers are all drooling over the Optimus keyboard, which, if it ever actually becomes available, will provide a fantastic help both for the casual gamer like me, and the hardcore gamer. Though, maybe a kind of expensive solution for the casual gamer. In any case, since it's "coming soon" and has been for at least a year, it's just a pipe dream.

But thinking on this made me come up with an idea. A simple, basic USB keyboard can be had for a few bucks, if you wait for a sale at somewhere like Woot. Most techies probably have a few lying around somewhere not being used. So why not print labels, stick them on the keys, and go ahead with that? If you only play a few games, like I do, you only need a few keyboards. A FS2 keyboard will let me jump into that game when I have some time to kill without feeling like I have to start from scratch. Cool beans.

Specious reasoning behind some truth

My brain likes finding connections, and I've noticed another connection between a lot of my blog posts, and in particular the least successful ones. It goes like this:

Specious reasoning can, and often is, used to support something that has some truth in it. This does not significantly diminish the danger inherent in the specious reasoning, nor the imperative of pointing it out.

Often I find myself pointing out how some particular argument or line of reasoning is faulty, in spite of the fact that the conclusion that argument reaches may well have some truth in it. It's tricky. People want to assume I'm arguing against the conclusion, not the argument itself, and jump to defend it.

Using bogus reasoning to support a truth is almost as bad as using bogus reasoning to support a lie. The ability to recognize bogus reasoning is key. It's more important than the truth of any one particular thing. Give a man a truth and he'll be right for a day; teach a man to think and he'll be right for a lifetime.

Besides which, the conclusions under consideration are not usually "right" or "wrong". They have some truth in them, but are also overstated, oversimplified, understated, or deceptive.

Here's an example. I recently read a forum post in which someone tells about a man he saw in a supermarket talking on a cell phone. The man said, "I need to concentrate on shopping, I'll call you back from the car." The person posting, naturally, was rolling his eyes at this.

Fair enough: people abuse cell phones, both in cars and out of them. I'm not disagreeing with that. However, this situation is not that unreasonable. Consider the same situation only instead of a cell phone you have the man's son there, asking him a string of questions about why the sky is blue. He says to his son, "I need to concentrate on shopping, I'll answer you when we're in the car." Would you roll your eyes at him for unsafe driving practices? Would you groan at the idea that he can spare more concentration to talk to his son while driving than he could while shopping? Probably not. Talking on a cell phone isn't identical to talking to a person who's there, sure, but are the differences relevant?

The fact is, cell phone use in cars has been demonized. Yes, using a cell phone in the car reduces safety for you and the people around you. It also leads to more rude driving. But someone using a hands-on phone during rush hour in a busy city habitually, and someone using a hands-free phone to make an occasional call while driving on simple, uncrowded, familiar roads, are completely different cases. And changing the cassette in your car is also distracting, but no one has proposed (so far as I know) banning cassette players. A knee-jerk reaction to something typically produces a conclusion that's just as wrong as the one you left, but simply in a more publicly acceptable, and perhaps safer, direction.

But I can't say that without someone saying, as if it were relevant, "Hey! People abusing cell phones are rude and a menace, so shut up!"

Compound words

And now it's time for another in our ever-unpopular series of Grammar Rants.

If a word is formed by joining two other words, that does not mean every time those two words appear in sequence, they get replaced by the one word. This is obvious in a few cases: "I was so frustrated at my attempt to bake cookies, I started throwing things. You should have seen that butterfly into the window." But too often it gets mixed up when the meaning isn't quite as different, but is still different.

Don't walk into that room. Above all, don't give in to those demands.

My computer's last backup was out of date, so I decided to back up all the data on it.

There are some times that don't work for meetings here, because the boss sometimes has to go to headquarters on short notice on Mondays.

Here's the handout for this week's class. Please hand out copies to everyone in your group.

Your login ID and default password have been placed into the envelope; please log in to the system and change your password as soon as possible.

Drat, I had a bunch of really good ones I saw in news articles recently, but I didn't note where they were and I can't find them now. I'll edit them into this post as I find them again.

Incidentally, am I just getting grumpier, or is proofreading in the newspapers really plummeting? I've seen some overt grammar and spelling errors in headlines lately that are so awful that even Microsoft Word's spell checker and grammar checker could have caught them. And that's in the headlines. Today I saw one use the word "cache" when it meant "cachet"; they're not even pronounced the same. And it's not just in my local papers, it's in Reuters News feeds just as often. What's going on?

Which privacy is technology taking away?

I read today in an article in Reuters news called Amid privacy backlash, Web publishers turn inward, the following quote:

"If I am a corporate lawyer by day and a Level 10 Elf by night, I am not sure I want everyone to know my different identities," says David Holtzman, author of a forthcoming book "Privacy Lost: How Technology is Endangering your Privacy."

I've seen this argument made a lot of times, that technology is taking away your privacy. And there are ways that it's true, to be sure. However, almost every time I see the argument, most of the focus is on things (like misuse of "cookies", or the linking of profile information between Yahoo and eBay, etc.) which are a completely wrongheaded approach to the problem.

So by day you're a corporate lawyer, and at night you go online and enjoy complete anonymity and privacy as you are a level 10 elf. Or, more interestingly, a participant in online chat rooms about kinky sex, or a trader in illegal copies of MP3s. Or something else you want to keep separate from your daytime identity. And now some new feature of some system, like the Facebook feature to track your friend's activities, threatens to undermine that anonymity.

Ummm... who gave you that anonymity in the first place?

I'm not saying we shouldn't be sensitive to its erosion, but to go out making technology as the villain, to blame the Internet, is so foolish and wrong-headed that it amazes me that this argument is made so regularly. Before the Internet gave you the opportunity, precisely how were you able to indulge your interests in orc-killing, kinky sex, or copyright infringement without the risk of being discovered, anyway?

All in all, technology, and the Internet, have made available to their users the biggest increases in privacy in all of history, hands down. It's true that the pendulum is swinging back slightly. And when I think of all the bad things people have done with that excess of anonymity, from the mild irritant of flamewars to the crimes of cybervandalism to the practice of pedophilia on the Internet, I don't know if it's a bad thing to have the pendulum swing back just a little bit. But don't castigate the Internet as the great anonymity-thief when it's only taking back a tiny bit of the immense, unprecedented bounty of privacy it gave you in the first place.

Stable guys in chick flicks

Many chick flicks have a guy in them, who is, at the start of the film, the current romantic interest (often fiancee) of the heroine. He's stable and boring and reliable. He is rarely romantic; perhaps his idea of a grand romantic gesture is cleaning the fridge so she doesn't have to. He pays the bills, mows the lawn, keeps the cupboards stocked, and makes sure she gets to work on time. He wears his glasses to bed. He'd never cheat on her, mostly because it just wouldn't occur to him to do anything so outré.

Then there's the flamboyant hero. He wafts in, called by whatever zephyr grabbed him most recently. He's entirely unreliable, governed by whims and passions of the moment. He probably has no idea how to mow the lawn, but even if he does, odds are he'd get distracted and run off to buy a bouquet of flowers and then drop it from a hang-glider instead.

Invariably, the film's end happens right in the narrow gap in between when she dumps the poor stable loser, and when Mr. Flamboyant's lack of focus starts to become annoying, and well before another zephyr spirits him off to some other movie.

What's amusing to me about this, though, is the fact that conventional wisdom says that it's guys who are prone to instability. Avoiding commitment, clinging to the "wild life", out with the boys. Buying unnecessary sports cars. And that it's women who don't like this, and want a guy who'll always be there, who's responsible and mature and settled down, ready to commit. Who's stable. Just like the poor shlub that gets the boot for no good reason in almost every chick flick.

Though I'll give them credit for one thing: you are, at least, allowed to feel sorry for him. He's rarely demonized; he's always "a really nice guy".

Marco Polo and spaghetti

The back-and-forth of yesterday's blog post reminded me of another thing I wanted to write about: noodles.

Everyone "knows" that noodles were invented in Italy, since that's where pasta comes from.

But then, everyone hears that, no, they weren't. Like so many things, they were actually invented in the Far East first. Marco Polo, on his historic trip to the Orient, brought them back from China. An amazing fact, and that's why everyone hears it.

Too bad it's not true. Oh, Marco might have brought some noodles back with him. China sure had noodles by the 14th century. However, Marco also brought noodles with him (dried, in baskets) when he left. The fact is, they'd been making noodles in Italy for more than a thousand years by that point. Depending on your definition, perhaps the first Mediterranean noodles were the flat bread used in a layered dish with meat and cheese, called "lagane" (and surprisingly similar to today's lasagne, sans tomatoes of course), made by Etruscans in the first century AD.

The fact is, depending on how broadly you define "noodle", they were invented in many places independently. The Chinese get full credit for inventing them, but so do the Italians.

(Incidentally, the account of Marco Polo's voyages is a fascinating subject in itself. It includes a few things that one would have to go to China to know about, that were not known in the west. However, large parts of it were also lifted verbatim from a fictional account written long before Marco's travels. And there are other reasons to doubt his story. I guess that's another reason to invent time travel or at least FTL.)

The long tailpipe

The first reaction people have to the idea of an electric car (setting aside questions of cost, technology, etc., and assuming a basic respect for and awareness of the environment and associated issues) is exultation: "Zero emissions? Not just low, but zero? Sign me up!"

However, this proves to be a superficial analysis. How can a car produce zero emissions? Simple: the energy conversion processes which produced the energy that drives the car, and consequent pollution, were done somewhere else. If you consider only the car, you have a 100% improvement in pollution rates, but if you consider the entire system, it's not so clear. Now a power plant somewhere is producing more electricity to make up for the gas you're not pumping into your car. How are they doing?

Most power plants will be able to convert energy far, far more efficiently than you can in a car, because they can build much more sophisticated devices, thanks to economies of scale, both to convert energy more efficiently, and to better filter and reprocess the pollutants that result. Furthermore, some of the energy is being produced using methods that generate little or no pollutants into the air, such as hydroelectric, solar, and nuclear (yes, nuclear). So it would seem like they are bound to win the comparison.

However, the transmission of energy from their plants to your car's movement involves quite a few conversion steps, and each one of these involves a loss of energy. There's a considerable loss moving the energy down high-tension lines to your house, then more as it's moved into batteries in your car, and still more as it's moved back out of those batteries. If you calculate how much energy has to be generated to move your car, and how much pollution is generated doing so, compared to how much your car would have if it was gas-powered, the result is so close that you will find an electric car is a breakeven proposition in some parts of the country, a gain in some, a loss in some.

However, even this comparison is entirely unfair. If you are going to treat the electric car as part of a system and consider the pollutant output of the whole system, you have to do the same for the gas car. That means you have to add into your comparison not just the pollution your car produces, but also all the pollution produced by the drilling process, the tankers that move the crude oil, the refineries, and the tanker trucks that move the gas to your local gas station, and so on. And that makes the calculation tip heavily in favor of the electric car.

So after a lot of flip-flopping, we end up finding out that the first assumption turns out to be right. But that's only by luck. We still have to consider the question systemically; considering only one part of the system in isolation can easily lead to incorrect answers.

Menacing reubens caught on film!

Took some pictures with the cell-phone camera of the menacing reuben at Friendly's. There was a great one I hadn't noticed before, with a monstrous cheeseburger lurking in the shadows of a covered bridge, but the picture didn't come out. (Even these aren't so hot, bad lighting).

So without further ado, here are a pair the demonstrate what I was talking about:



Doesn't that make you want to just quick run down to Friendly's and have a big meal... before it's too late?

Popular science

Science isn't complex and difficult because freakish scientists like to make it that way. It's complex and difficult because the universe is complex and difficult. More accurately, because our minds, tailor-made for dealing with the comparatively super-simple everyday world and everyday life to which we are heir, must strain to function on the vastly different level of complexity that is required to understand even the simplest parts of the universe's workings.

Popularizing science means finding a way to bridge that gap. There are many good examples of this; Carl Sagan's works are the outstanding gem amongst them, though many others have done excellent work in the field. But what rankles me is a particular kind of bad way to do it that is perennially popular, one which I think is best typified by the "Tao of Physics".

Now, the book of that name may indeed have an insight or three in it worthy of the printed page (and if you go to your local bookstore and look at what's worthy of the printed page, that might not seem like a very tough criterion). However, while it pretends to offer an insight into physics, it not only does not, it gets in the way of such insights. And it is just one of a whole class of attempts to make science accessible by taking a metaphor far too far. (If I seem to be picking too much on that particular book, it's not because it's the worst example, not by far; just the most recognizable "banner" for this approach.)

Because that's what the Tao of Physics is: a metaphor that has been mistaken by its author, or at least by most of its readers, as something more than a metaphor. (Well, probably, it's more like a simile, but you get the point.) Along the way, the actual science got lost. Instead, the reader is left making spurious and entirely inaccurate conclusions about science and scientific concepts, conclusions predicated entirely upon mistaking the metaphor for an actual equivalence.

To me this is a disservice to science, to the reader, and probably to the concept of tao (or whatever is on the other side of the metaphor). The genuine insights in the book could just as easily have been expressed without having to be mired in the morass of a metaphor gone awry. And now any attempt to clue in the reader to what's actually amazing in science, already a daunting task, is now far harder, as these mistook metaphors provide so many paths by which the reader's mind can easily slip away from the path of understanding.

The selfish parasite on the steering wheel

A new development adds a mind-boggling twist to the question of the biological side of the unity of the organism. Toxoplasma infections in the brain can cause rats to lose their fear of cats, which helps the parasite continue its life cycle by infecting cats. It might influence, or in part determine, the personality of humans carrying it. And rates of infection in different nations and cultures, and their change over time, can explain cultural personality aspects such as prevalence of machismo, rates of neurosis or confidence, and interest in novelty.

How much of both our collective cultural personality, and our individual personality, is the sum of influences of organisms dwelling in our bodies? The selfish gene is only the beginning of the reductionism of free will. Sometimes I think the brain's biological purpose isn't to think, but merely to rationalize. Not only aren't we single organisms but committees of billions, even our thoughts, personalities, and identities might, in a very quantifiable sense, be formed in large part by a committee of chemical causes that are determined as much by individual happenstance as by species evolution.

Where, then, is identity? We already knew, if we were willing to, that much of what we consider our free will consists of unpredictable chemical shifts whose causes can be internal and external, and rarely have any relation to the reasons we come up with. All this discovery really does, or could do once it's expanded upon, is expand yet further the gap between what we think our reasons are, and what they may actually be; and add to that gap a new purposefulness, the purpose of an organism that may be shifting our personality merely to allow us to live or die in a place convenient for it to spread. The answer lies not in our stars but in our selves; but is your self your body, or the things that live in your body?

But I have to stay in character!

In the eternal principle of "meden agan (nothing too much)", we turn now to the question of whether a roleplayer must remain true to character, world, genre, and feel at all turns or not at all, or somewhere in between. Can you guess which answer I'll end up picking?

On the extreme right we have the metagamers. They come first because they came first in roleplaying, which evolved out of wargaming, and which routinely recruits people from the worlds of card and board and other tactical games, computer games, and other media which primarily focus on tactics, and offer a means to "win" (or at least keep score) which is paramount. Roleplayers constantly bemoan the abuses of metagamers. Those who admit they're only here to play to win are looked down on, but it's the ones that claim to be roleplaying, but who always bend to fit the tactical advantage, whose characters always somehow end up after the greatest gear or magic items or piles of gold or (most commonly) highest experience level, those are the ones "true roleplayers" really despise. Twinks, minmaxers, power-gamers, they're a stain on the hobby and a perpetual obstacle to those sincerely seeking character exploration and development.

So we've got an easy villain to rail against, and what does that mean? Sure enough, it means people overreacting and going too far the other way. And when they do, criticizing their excesses is an uphill battle, because they're defending their banner of True Roleplaying from the elitist stand of someone opposing an obviously villainous opponent, the Twink. But being opposed to a villain doesn't make you a hero.

Those who elevate character motivations, genre conventions, game feel, etc. to an Ideal, make them an end, not a means, are making almost as serious a mistake as the Twinks. Metagaming has its place; what matters is how it's used, not whether. The fact is, while you're pursuing your character's internal motivations wherever they lead, it still falls upon your shoulders to make sure that somehow, they lead in a direction which:

• is fun for you
  
• is fun for the other people in the game
  
• is fun for the GM
  
• doesn't screw anything up for anyone else
  
• doesn't make anyone else waste a lot of effort and time unwillingly
  
• doesn't make your fun come at the expense of others involved in the game

That means you have to metagame enough to help your character find a reason to go on the adventure the GM has prepared, and that obligation is just as important as the GM's obligation to prepare an adventure that your character could have a reason to go on; it's a two-way street. It means you can't screw up the fun of other players and then insist that you were only doing it because your character would; find a reason why your character would do something else, or arrange some event which will change your character's mind, or get a new character. It means you may even have to go so far as to twink your character's skills in order to fill a niche the party needs to be able to survive; if the group's going to die or fail, unless it has a face man or a healer or a fixer, someone had better be sure they fit that role, even if it means minmaxing to make it fit.

All in all, you have to remember that Not Metagaming is not some sacred trust. It's simply a means to an end. What you're really after is Not Sacrificing Roleplaying In Favor of Metagaming. When metagaming goes against roleplay and fun, eschew it. When it facilitates roleplay and fun, embrace it.

A hole in history

Pretty much every year from first grade to my senior year, I had a Social Studies class that went through history chronologically. Each year would focus more on one thing or another. The history of the Americas, or systems of government, or wars, or kings and queens, or local history, or the role of religion in history. But each time we'd start at some point and progress forward through the years.

And every year, as summer loomed, the teacher would find that we were behind schedule, and as we hit the 20th Century, things would get covered more and more scantily. As a result, I find I learned a fair amount about the American Revolutionary War, the Age of Exploration, the Holy Roman Empire, the Industrial Revolution, the British monarchy, the Civil War, and a host of other subjects, but I know almost nothing about the latter half of the twentieth century.

World War I was always covered fairly well, and I got a moderate exposure to the temperance movement, the Roaring Twenties, and Prohibition. The Great Depression and the New Deal always got covered quite thoroughly, as did the League of Nations. After that we got very hazy. World War II, and the events leading up to it, were always covered only in broad strokes. I knew who was on which side, the leaders, the Nazi atrocities, and Pearl Harbor, but beyond that, very little. I'd heard of D-Day, but I don't think I ever had a history teacher or text tell me what it was; I only knew what little I'd picked up by osmosis from popular culture.

(In fact, what prompted this post was reading about Peter Jackson's plan to make a remake of the movie The Dam Busters. The article mentioned a little about the military action upon which the movies are based, but didn't say how it turned out. I had never heard of this operation, not at all, and I soon realized, I'd never heard of any military action in WW2 except for those I heard in passing from wargamer or historian friends and associates, or picked up in movies and books and TV shows, with the one glaring exception of Pearl Harbor. Based on my schooling, I know more about Drake's actions against the Spanish Armada than about all of WW2.)

As for after World War II, it gets even worse. Not once in any of my history classes did we talk about anything after WW2 except a brief discussion of the formation of the United Nations. Never did we cover the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, the atrocities in Africa and Oceania, tensions in the Middle East, the Kennedy assassination, the Cold War and McCarthyism, the Watergate scandal, the Space Race, Cuba and other spreads of communism, or anything else going on between the end of World War II, and the "current events" things we were studying as they happened. The first major historical event after World War II that I learned in school was the Energy Crisis.

Naturally, I've filled in this gap somewhat outside of, and after, school. I wouldn't do very well on a trivia category covering the third quarter of the twentieth century, but I wouldn't be hopelessly lost. Even back in elementary school I probably knew more about the Space Race than my teacher did anyhow. But there are still unfortunate gaps. It's not like I really need to know those things particularly better than I do; but it's still odd that I know them less than I do other times that I need to know about even less.

Do you see the same colors I do?

I still remember when I first encountered this mind-blowing question. I was in elementary school, and it stunned me.

"How do you know we see the same colors? Maybe when I see red, you see what would look like green to me. But since we were both taught to call what we see then "red", we'd never know if we saw it entirely differently!"

An important step in one's philosophical development, in understanding the relationship between name and thing it names, and the vagaries of perception. But ultimately, when you get right down to it, it doesn't really make sense.

What would it mean to say that you see what would be green to me when you see red, on a physical level? When you see red, certain parts of your eye, your optic nerve, and your brain all have particular electrochemical reactions. If those same electrochemical reactions were to happen in my eye, optic nerve, and brain in the same places...

Wait, same places? My eye, optic nerve, and brain aren't even wired the same as yours. The neurons are in entirely unrelated places. One of us probably has more rods than the other, one more neurons in the optic nerve. They don't have analogous functions on the individual scale, only collectively.

It's like saying, if you took the electrical state of the photoreceptor in a Samsung digital camera and put it onto a Kodak digital camera, would it produce the same image? Well, the two cameras probably have a different number of components which are connected in different ways and serve different purposes, so how could you even figure out which bit of the electrical state in one to express in which way in the other? And even if you did, not only wouldn't it likely be the same image, it probably wouldn't even be an image at all. The Kodak would probably short-circuit from having voltages in the wrong places.

The sequence of steps that goes from "photons of a particular wavelength coming at you", through all the intermediate steps in the eye, optic nerve, and brain, and that ends with the concept "red", involves a huge number of arbitrary mappings of one thing into another, each of which is unique to each individual's particular biology. In fact, it's not even consistent for a single person. The electrochemical signals in your head that mean "red" today are not the same ones that will mean "red" next year.

House dreams

I rarely remember my dreams and when I do they are often inchoate and formless, jumbles of images or brief scenes that transition into one another without much connection. Of course all dreams are thus to some extent, but mine so much that it's impossible to describe them. Instead of a few minutes of one continuous sequence of activity featuring some settings and characters, which then inexplicably transitions into different activity, settings, and characters, my dreams tend to be just the inexplicable transitions back-to-back, without anything between them.

Of those dreams that I remember, and that have enough form to survive a retelling, the majority of those are house dreams. That is, a dream (or part of a dream) focused on a house, which is invariably my own house (at least in the dream world, though it rarely resembles my real house, or any real house I've lived in), and which I spend some time exploring. Almost invariably the dream spends a lot of time with me discovering rooms or other features in the house I didn't know about. These may range from mundane things like a second kitchen or a wing of extra rooms, to exotic things like a bowling alley, an indoor chicken pen, a locked vault, an entire department store, a subway station, or a room with only a thin strip of normal floor surrounding a rich, fertile garden plot.

I have read that this is one of those common dreams that many people have, almost as common as the "I forgot my pants" or "there's a surprise test" ones. Furthermore, I've been told this dream has a "standard" meaning. The house represents the self, so this dream represents your subconscious mind noting that there's things about you which you need to discover, explore, recognize, or develop.

I am generally suspicious of the idea that dream symbols have any universality to them, especially any universal meanings that do not correspond to similarly universal symbols in the waking world in our culture. However, after several years of having these dreams quite often and struggling in vain to figure out what, if anything, they meant, I heard this answer and it clicked, it felt right. I could tell what it was telling me and why it started when it did and even what the specific things I was finding in my house likely meant. Over the years since, every time house dreams have popped into my head, they seemed to make sense in this interpretation. Sometimes the specific rooms didn't -- they might end up being images from things I was thinking about that day, for instance.

The skeptic in me wonders if it's not a matter of selective perception. Like how horoscopes "work": there's always something in my life or my mind I can match this interpretation to, within the very generous precision limits expected of such a thing. Maybe so, at least for some of them. But the times in my life when I didn't just have house dreams, but had a lot of them, were always times when I had a very clear thing in my self that demanded further exploration or development or application.

Amusingly, the completion of my dream house hasn't altered these dreams at all. My house-dream houses don't resemble my dream house any more than they did any other houses.

Inbound port forwarding redux

I would really appreciate some input on this problem!

My old Linksys router died, so I got a new one. However, I am unable to get inbound port forwarding to work on this one. You can see my settings and there's not much that can be wrong.

One day by accident I stumbled upon a clue: it seemed as if the connection started, and then died immediately. This didn't produce any new insights, nor did anyone suggest any new ideas in response to the blog post.

I had two services being forwarded; port 81 to HomeSeer, and port 22 to SSH on my Linux box. Neither worked. I had an idea this morning and set up a third, on port 5555, running to a MUD I have on the Linux box (for development purposes; I don't actually host a MUD... obviously, since my port forwarding doesn't work). Then from work I tried to connect to it, and it connected long enough for zMUD to say "Connected to host tricklebrook.dyndns.org", but then I never saw the login screen. Subsequent attempts to connect didn't even get that far. Same as the web logon, really.

So it is establishing the connection, but it only lasts a few seconds. Does that suggest anything?

Frozen lunches

Most frozen lunch things people bring to offices with them say to leave them frozen and cook them from that state. And most people do exactly that. It's conceivable one could be designed in such a way that it did cook better from frozen, but I have never encountered one where it didn't turn out better to put it in the fridge, or leave it out, when I get to work. Partially or completely defrosted by lunchtime, it cooks better, with more even heating, in half the time. Is there any reason other than liability why the manufacturers say to leave it frozen? And any reason other than just doing as they're told why everyone does?

Choosing to be vulnerable to disasters

I recently read an interesting comment in a syndicated column in the newspaper, a comment which keeps coming back to mind as I hear more about hurricane season and the effects of last year's devastating hurricanes. The column is one in which people write ethical questions and they are answered by an ethicist. The question in this particular column is:

We spent countless hours and thousands of dollars over the past two years preparing for hurricanes, even installing a generator. After Wilma, lots of folks came to our home to use percolators, charge cell phones, etc. Many have done nothing to prepare for this hurricane season. What do we do after a power outage when they knock at our door at 7 a.m., Mr. Coffee in hand? (Keep in mind, we plan to continue living in this neighborhood.)

The second paragraph of the ethicist's answer was surprising and a little haunting:

I sympathize. We 284 million non-Floridians ask similar questions every hurricane season when you put in for public money to rebuild. Year after year. After year. While we are responsive to people in dire straits, we think it significant that many of you choose to live in a place called Hurricane Alley.

I found myself recoiling and yet at the same time nodding. Okay, so the answer is a little pat. Clearly people can't just abandon all the hurricane-torn parts of the country en masse and leave them all abandoned. And if you asked them to, what about the places vulnerable to earthquakes, tornados, and other potentially devastating disasters?

But there's still something to what he says. There was, very briefly, some talk about whether New Orleans should be rebuilt at all, last year. I never thought that really had any chance of coming to anything. Too many people have too much invested in the city historically and personally and financially to really seriously reconsider whether it should be where it is. But it's hard to deny this conclusion: if there wasn't already a city there and someone proposed building one, even at a cost of a quarter of what the rebuilding efforts have cost, the proposal would be laughed down in a second. Build a major city below sea level, perched between a huge lake and the ocean, near a river, in a prime area for hurricanes? If New Orleans didn't exist and you saw a movie depicting a fictional city in that situation (presumably being threatened by underachieving villains) you would groan at the implausibility.

Even if we could start over in settling North America, with no history and no prior investment, it's impossible to imagine we could avoid putting millions of people and billions of dollars into the paths of tornados, hurricanes, earthquakes, and other disasters. There's just too much land we'd have to waste, too many areas that have other benefits we'd have to give up. But maybe there's something in saying that a few of the most extreme examples of bad risk/benefit ratios can't be justified, and I think New Orleans is at or near the top of that list.

If I were Supreme Dictator, maybe I would have chosen to relocate New Orleans a little bit inland; build a new, well-designed, efficient city, relocate the most important historical monuments to it, and endure the groans and lambasts of people calling this "a surrender", "cold and calculating", "heartless", etc., in favor of those fifty years from now who will appreciate living in a city with a strong infrastructure, few traffic and parking problems, good support for commerce, minimal environmental impact, a fertile ground for cultural development and preservation, and a reasonable level of safety against disasters natural and man-made.

I don't know if that's really the right thing in this long-term view. Maybe if I knew New Orleans beter I'd know why it's a bad idea. But it bugs me that the question couldn't seriously be asked, because of emotional reactions -- people wanting to live where they used to live, people wanting to feel that they have triumphed over Katrina, etc. Valid emotional reactions, of course. I'm sure if I were in that situation I'd feel the same way. And the historical significance of a place, both personally and culturally, is not worth nothing. But a hundred years from now, will textbooks be praising the plucky spirit that insisted on rebuilding a major city on top of a disaster waiting to happen, or mocking the foolishness of just begging for the next disaster in our refusal to embrace change?

I'd be card-carrying, if someone gave me a card

I had an amusing moment of self-awareness today. After picking up 50 pounds of prime locally grown Blonde Aquitaine beef from a local rancher, I went to the farmer's market. I had gotten my Nature Conservancy magazine a few days before, so I brought it with me to read in the car. So there I was, with a reusable canvas bag full of locally grown organic produce in one hand and the Nature Conservancy magazine in the other, walking to my hybrid automobile. And I thought, if I had set out to make a political statement about myself on purpose, I couldn't've done it better.

An extreme contradiction

I've written before about an odd thing I see in MUDs, where features that are used without problem in one MUD (or many) are forbidden in another, because they would "inevitably be abused", with no rhyme or reason to the inconsistency; and the idea that it's just a "one bitten twice shy" attitude causing it.

One mild but amusing example came up shortly after I started playing Harshlands. In many MUDs and most MUSHes, there's a command that lets you set what you're currently doing, as will be seen by people coming into the room. For instance, pose is juggling eggs and singing. This is good for RP; if you come into a room why can't you tell that Bob is juggling eggs and singing? Harshlands does this especially well, even lets you do this on objects (omote cloak is hanging by the fire, drying) and on your movements from room to room, and I have never seen it abused.

This got proposed in Lusternia, and people went berserk. No way, that would be abused! People posted some absurd abuses, like pose stands here with the Creator God kneeling before him. Who would really do that, and who would get away with it? And why are't people already emoting things like that? But Lusternia would not hear of it.

About the same time, the exact mirror image of this discussion was happening in Harshlands, with regards to the suggestion of being able to make changes in your description. And it wasn't even because the result would be badly written descriptions with grammar and spelling errors (at least half the descriptions in the game now have grammar or spelling errors anyway). No, it was ludicrous abuses. People will completely change their appearances after doing crimes to avoid being caught (doubly ludicrous because people doing crimes do them hooded and/or masked anyway, so you can't see the descriptions). Even the idea of having a single line you could control, to reflect things like "has a freshly shaved chin" or "has red eyes from crying", was summarily vetoed without consideration. Naturally, Lusternia, like many MUDs, allows anyone to change their description on the fly, and while I've seen a lot of spelling errors, I've never seen it abused like that. But Harshlands became convinced this would be unavoidably abused.

Recently, I've been thinking about another matching pair of issues like this in Harshlands which, the more I think about it, the more ridiculous it seems. The Harshlands admins take the most extreme possible viewpoints on one issue, which is bad enough -- but they take both opposite extremes on that issue simultaneously, and I can't see any way to justify that.

The Harshlands rule is that no IC information can ever, ever, ever be shared by OOC means. You may have heard a rule like this somewhere else and think, that's not so extreme, but this version is far more exaggeratedly strict in Harshlands. The assumption -- and I'm not exaggerating here, this is essentially a paraphrase of what admins actually have said -- is that no one, no matter how mature, no matter how good a roleplayer, can ever be trusted with IC information their character wouldn't know, passed from another player; that allowing this will inevitably, unavoidably, lead to changes and corruptions in their roleplay. This goes so far as to not permit people to mention on the forums things their characters have done.

So that's a pretty over-the-top extreme thing, no doubt caused by having been once bitten, but at least it's conceivable. I mean, I don't agree with it. I've seen OOC knowledge compartmentalized on a regular basis by far less mature, far poorer roleplayers than Harshlands has. For instance, Lusternians. So you can't tell me it can't happen when I see it happening all the time. And when it slips, it rarely leads to the end of the world, or indeed anything hard to deal with. But it feasibly could have bad results. Okay, let's grant that for now.

I have never seen or heard of any MUD in which admins are allowed to have player characters, because admins don't just have access to a little bit of OOC information that a player willingly offers up, they have access to all the OOC information they want, without the player even being known he's been spied on. People can compartmentalize, sure, but there's a limit to how much you can rely on. Thus, admins with active characters is verboten everywhere.

Except Harshlands. The admins there are allowed active player characters.

Seems the height of hypocrisy and hubris and condescension to me, for them to tell me I can't even go tell someone in IM that I just went wolf-hunting, because that leak of IC information will ruin the game, while they're watching character actions and viewing their hidden stats and checking their logs and spying on them, and then going on to play characters that interact with the people they were just spying on. It's entirely irreconcilable.

Just one of a number of reasons why I have been looking at Harshlands as someplace where the fun is directly proportional to how much admin attention you can avoid. Still trying to figure out if I can make a place for myself that entirely avoids needing any, and how much admin attention I'll have to endure on the way to that place, and whether the result is worth it.

Sounds familiar. Am I just having terrible luck, or is everywhere like this?

Look out for that reuben!

The local Friendly's Restaurant is decorated with a collection of pictures that always make me chortle when I see them. I don't know if these pictures are used in a lot of places; I haven't seen them in other branches, but they can't be made just for one store, either.

Each picture depicts some location -- a farm, a small town's downtown area, a charming suburban home -- with some bit of Friendly's food looming over it in mega-giant-size. I'm not sure what the effect is they're going for. Friendly's food is huge! Friendly's food is part of your neighborhood. Friendly's food is everywhere!

But the actual effect is: Oh my god, that giant Friendly's food is going to destroy the city and devour us all! Run! Run for your lives!

Particularly menacing is the giant reuben sandwich, on a farm around twilight, lurking out behind the barn, peeking around the corner. It's late autumn or early winter, and the whole place looks spooky. This is the kind of setting where, in a movie, someone is probably about to get jumped by a person holding a sickle. And there is the Giant Menacing Reuben Of Doom, trying to hide behind a perfectly functional, if moody, barn. Is that blood, or just Thousand Island dressing? Quick, run, it's coming for you!

I wish I could find a picture of this picture to post. Maybe I'll sneak my camera in next time I'm going there.

A very small rant

The ability to print something on a piece of paper and then tack it up on a wall at the office is, surprisingly, not the same as the authority to actually make rules and proclamations that anyone else has to listen to.

Maybe I should make a sign that says that, and post it above the photocopier.

Sources for the news

Most people who follow the news do so through TV news. Radio news is second, with text news coming in a solid third. To me, this is entirely backwards.

Text news puts me in control of what I read. I can easily skim articles and decide which ones to read, and at what level of detail. Some articles only need reading the headline, some skimming the first few paragraphs, some reading the entire article, some even inspire me to follow links or look things up to read more, and there are whole sections I skip outright. If I missed something I can easily go back and reread it or refer to it.

Radio loses all of this. If I miss something, I can't rewind to it. And I get no choice at all in how much detail I get on which stories. Generally speaking, every single story they'll cover, they'll either give me too much or too little. The odds of them giving me exactly as much as I want are very low. In exchange for that, I get one marked advantage. Text requires me to be paying attention; I can't be doing something else at the same time. Radio lets me catch the news while doing something else that occupies my hands or eyes, but not my thoughts. Like driving, eating, washing, dressing. This is handy, but it's not enough to outweigh the disadvantage for me.

Of course, there's also a difference of content. Radio news doesn't have to just be someone reading the text news in a flat monotone. This factor is probably worth more to other people than to me, since my tone-of-voice-deafness reduces the impact to me. But even I can see times where hearing someone speaking is a notably different experience. While I don't find this outweighs the benefits of text, I can at least understand people who feel it does, and I can even imagine specific stories I'd choose in audio if the choice were simple.

But TV news seems like the worst of both worlds. There's all the lack of control that radio has: most articles are either too much or too little detail. Even worse, generally, since TV news tends to almost universally do a worse job at choosing which stories to cover in detail. I can learn more reading the headlines only than I can watching TV news, and in a fraction of the time. Plus TV demands almost as much of my attention as text. I could maybe watch TV news while eating, though at the cost of missing some of the video (I do need to look at the food now and then). Possibly while exercising, depending on the exercises I was doing. Maybe even while washing, if I had a TV in the bathroom (sounds absurd, but some people do!). But I sure couldn't be watching TV while driving.

So what does TV have to offer to make up for all that? Obviously, video content. However, when I look at TV news, it is virtually always the case that the video content provided is not anything that informs or educates me better than text did. It's virtually always something whose purpose is to engross or entertain. Don't get me wrong: TV news could use video's capabilities to provide a much more educational or informative experience in a number of areas, it just does not do so, save occasionally by accident.

So while TV news squanders its one possibly compelling advantage, leaving itself with nothing but disadvantages to anyone who is there to learn and become informed, let alone to do so in a more efficient way, even when watching the news), the convergence of media afforded by the Internet gradually provides text with all the advantages of the other formats without their disadvantages, as it integrates audio and video into the under-your-control experience of text news.

For the purpose of educating and informing people about what's going on in the world, TV news grows gradually more inferior, and yet it will remain triumphant for a long time. That's because that's not really its purpose. It's primarily geared to people who want an experience. Actually educating or informing them is entirely beside the point.

Throughput

So let's start with a rant and go from there to something more broad.

Lately, someone around my office, probably one of the janitorial staff, has taken to doing something I find not only dumb but infuriatingly so. If the toilet paper is down to a quarter of the roll, she'll take it off, set it on top of the toilet tank, and put a fresh roll onto the spool. (Facing the wrong way, of course, but that's a whole different rant.)

What is the sense in this? Saving me the effort of taking the wrapper off, in exchange for the effort of having to use toilet paper in an inconvenient place, not on a roll? All factors in this equation are so trivial that it doesn't even make sense to make the comparison.

But what it really leads to is this: if I'm away for a few days (since I'm the only one in the office with enough sense, and/or pathetic obsessiveness, to reverse this) we end up with three or four quarter-full rolls piled up on the top of the toilet tank, which no one is bothering to use.

Of course, it all eventually gets used, because I make sure of that, so nothing goes to waste. But I just can't see what would motivate someone to do this in the first place. In a tangential way, it seems like a broader kind of stupidity: not understanding throughput.

Most people don't buy a new can of antiperspirant until the first one is nearly empty, and thus, run the risk of running out. Suppose instead you bought two, then always bought one right after one ran out, so you always had two, and never were at risk of running out. How much more would that cost you, over the years? Amazingly enough many people would say it costs twice as much. But ultimately it costs you essentially nothing more. At most, over the whole period during which you're using this antiperspirant, it costs you the cost of one can, and that's assuming when you stop one day, you can't use up your stock first.

It's like the difference between your monthly income and your current bank balance. In fact, there's really no difference between the concepts of "cash flow" and "throughput". The same concept occurs in lots of situations where there's some resource moving through a system, and has many names. For instance, your CD player's skip protection buffer is the same thing exactly, and the reason a CD-audio player should be 2x is to be able to fill the buffer faster than it empties. And of course, if you don't understand the relationship between throughput and latency, you won't be able to understand how a computer network works.

Yet so many people don't seem to understand it, and I don't know how they can function. How do they budget their money? (It amazes me to think most people don't.) How do they keep from running out of everything? (It amazes me that most people go to the grocery store a couple of times a week or more -- the perfect instance of being penny-wise-pound-foolish.)

That new blog smell

Clearly the new blog smell has faded. It's not that I don't have anything to write about. I have a long list of topics I'd like to write about and I add to it fairly often. It's just that the calculation of comparing the time it'd take to write something, how much else I have to do with the time I have, and what writing something would be worth to me, has shifted. I've been busier; and it's felt less worth it, perhaps because of the paucity of response.

More than that; it's just that some of the more interesting things I wanted to write about, wanted to be part of a conversation, not just a one-sided expostulation. For that fraction-of-a-percent of blog writers who are widely read, a blog is perfectly well a medium for that. But I think there's maybe four or five people who check my blog at all, and there's not likely to be a conversation from that.

I found myself writing a lot of rants. That's an easy sort of fun, and it gets an easy response (relatively speaking), but it's too easy, and not much to it. It's like blog fast food.

I feel a compulsion to write that I'm going to start it back up, and to ask how to get more people interested, and then I wonder if that's just a knee-jerk reaction without any reason behind it. Maybe I'll write, maybe not.

But I do wonder if there's a way to get more people to look. I'm sure 99% of people wouldn't be interested, sure. But most of the few who could be, will never see this. And any way of trying to get them to is just crass and ineffectual, increasingly impactless as information exposure expands exponentially. So I doubt there's really a way.

(That next-to-last sentence just came out like that on its own, I didn't even realize until I reread it.)

An arrogance of mine

I always wonder what's going on in other people's minds because mine is always doing something. The idea of emptying my mind is entirely alien to me. It's hard to keep it down to a level where I can type or talk fast enough to keep up with it. Naturally, most of these ideas are not particularly useful; there's a constant background hum of random snatches of songs with the words jumbled up, meaningless juxtapositions of ideas and concepts, and an endless sequence of detours. Sometimes my mind fills the empty space by working out, sometimes more than once, how I would go about explaining something to someone, or asking someone something, in some extremely unlikely hypothetical situation.

Sometimes I imagine if a telepath ever met me, he'd die of boredom, though not before I died of embarassment. This is so fundamental to my mind's inner workings, yet so hard to explain without sounding bizarre and like I'm just kidding, that I can't help imagining that everyone else's mind does some of the same stuff, and they just don't see a point in talking about it.

All those semi-random juxtapositions of ideas and combinations my mind is trying out, like some cheesy 1980s movie depiction of a computer breaking a password (letters and numbers spinning, settling into place one at a time), produce an awful lot of very weird, surrealistic, and interesting insights which pass before my mind's eye and then move on, displaced by the next one.

Once in a while, I'll hear someone praising some public figure for having remarkably weird ideas. A stand-up comedian whose act explores things people take for granted, or an RPG author who creates surrealistic explorations of real-world phenomena, or the bizarre turns of phrase in a song, or the exotic imagery in a film. And it's not that they're praising the execution, the quality of the writing, the realization of the vision; it's the oddness itself they praise, and wonder what kind of mind it takes to come up with such ideas. And I can't help but think: I have ideas that odd in the shower every day. Ideas that are just as far off the orthodoxy center, but hold together with themselves with just as much jarring internal consistency. Ideas that, if I took the time to write them down, would be just as bizarre and yet just as compelling as any of them.

Whether I could realize them as effectively, that's another matter. I am a pretty good writer, so maybe I could give Kenneth Hite a run for his money, if I could put as much time into it as he can (which, clearly, I can't). But I am no songsmith, so They Might Be Giants have nothing to fear. I couldn't deliver a joke on stage to save my life, so Steven Wright can rest easy. And Terry Gilliam can keep making his films in peace.

My life is plenty full, so I know I'll never have no better use for my time than to put the quality of my weird to the test, and prove whether this is just unfounded arrogance, or founded arrogance; and sometimes I wish I could, just so I'd know. For now, I'm content to observe that, contrary to common opinion, execution, not inspiration, is usually what makes great work; there are far more great ideas than great results. So it really doesn't matter. For all I know (and as some stubborn part of me insists on believing), everyone is secretly having ideas just as weird all the time anyway.

More on the unity of the organism

You look at an apple, and you don't see "an apple". You have no perceptions that can tell you what something is, you can only tell what it looks like, smells like, how it behaves; in other words, all you get about the apple is that part of it which impinges, in one way or another, on your senses. You perceive not an apple but the appearance of an apple.

But so what? Every time you perceive an apple, it's the same thing as other people perceive when they perceive an apple, and the same as you perceive when you perceive an apple. So, when all is said and done, does anything change at all when you amend your definition of an apple to include "the thing which I seem to perceive as..."? No, not really. Since everything is pushed back one level of abstraction together, the result is exactly the same as it was.

Now consider a lump of wax. You can't know what it really is, only what you perceive it as. And yet, what is that? Heat it up, and every aspect of what it looks like changes. The color will thin out, it may even turn transparent. The texture becomes far more shiny and glossy. The shape will completely transform as it melts. The feel is entirely different. So too its sound and smell and even, if you dare to try it, its taste.

Descarte tried to find the "essence" of the wax in his Meditations, a seminal work of metaphysics, but his conclusions are widely regarded by later thinkers as specious. He phrases the question sensibly enough: that which can change about a thing cannot be its essence, and yet everything we can perceive about the wax can change; thus, we cannot perceive the essence of the wax. Yet from this he concludes simply that we must perceive the essence of the wax by some power of pure reason independent of the senses, not really considering the possibility that he does not indeed perceive it at all, or that it is not there to be perceived.

This brings us back to where we started: does there need to be an essence behind the appearance? Perhaps there is, but its absence changes nothing for us, who are limited to our perceptions. As Nietzsche wrote in answer to the question of what appearance is, "Certainly not the opposite of some essence: what could I say about any essence except to name the attributes of its appearance! Certainly not a dead mask that one could place on an unknown x or remove from it!"

It seems plain to me that there is no immutable essence to the wax. Speaking in absolutes, the wax now is not the wax that was there a moment ago. The apple is not the apple you saw earlier. And you are not the same person you were when you started reading this post. Change cannot be divided, save arbitrarily, between small and large changes, changes to essence and changes only to appearance; this is a difference of quantity only. While you're reading this sentence, billions of changes are happening in your body, changes which cannot be reversed. You will never be precisely what you were before those changes. That a particular atom of carbon is a nanometer farther to the left now is a change, differing only in quantity, not kind, from that you had your appendix taken out, or that you decided you don't like art nouveau. Even if you hadn't melted the wax, it still would have been changing, just not as much. There is no unity of the organism, there are only changes that haven't gotten big enough to perceive yet, or that we choose to ignore.

This is not a new idea, of course. Heraclitus put it in its most famous form: "You cannot step twice into the same river; for other waters are continually flowing in."