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?