The Early Wish

I forget which science fiction writer talked about time travel stories as an expression of that regretful wish of a child who’s done something wrong: “Make it didn’t happen!” Maybe Larry Niven, maybe Frederick Pohl, I read a lot of SF and can’t keep it straight any more. Anyway, I’m currently reading The Demon Under the Microscope and over and over I’m wishing for a time machine. Sometimes we fantasize about going back in time to get rich from some insider knowledge of the future (as, for example, in Replay) but this time I want to go back in time and tell the chemists at Massengill, “Holy cow, don’t use antifreeze in medicine that’s to be taken internally! You’ll kill people!”

Oh yeah, and I just finished reading The Alchemy of Air: A Jewish Genius, a Doomed Tycoon, and the Scientific Discovery That Fed the World but Fueled the Rise of Hitler, a book whose subtitle reads like an SRL performance (e.g. “A Calculated Forecast of Ultimate Doom: Sickening Episodes of Widespread Devastation Accompanied by Sensations of Pleasurable Excitement”). That book, while also fascinating, has reset my context for the Nazis. I was thinking about that this morning when I read this story about the pope, comparing his resignation to Nixon’s. I mean, are these people serious? Nixon broke the law and tried to subvert the political process and then tried to cover it all up. The pope, as CEO of the Catholic Church, has certainly tried to keep the lid on scandals, but did he direct all the pedophile priests to go forth and molest? His Holiness doesn’t have a G. Gordon Liddy to do time for him. Will young Catholics be urging him to resume his role in fifteen years, wearing T-shirts emblazoned, “Benedict for Pope: He’s tan, rested, and ready!” I doubt it. He’s not like Nixon. And: the idiot you’re arguing with on the Internet? He’s not like Hitler, either.

Make Room for Love

I got an email from the Sundance Institute suggesting six films for Valentine’s Day. This is the marketing blurb from the email:

What better way to perpetuate the quixotic romantic desires that reside in our partners’ minds than by watching films that validate those delusions of love? This Valentine’s Day, we’re offering a short list of Sundance-supported love stories as a remedial to such lofty figments—unfortunately, the reality is not quite as attractive. From an idyllic summer love that concludes with an acerbic breakup in 500 Days of Summer to a lingering, albeit passionate romance that traverses drug abuse and other pitfalls in Keep the Lights On, these six stories of (not always mutual) affection will jolt even the most deluded lover from their reveries…

You know what? I think this is terrible. I reject, with blasphemous obscenity, this assertion that love is something to be destroyed. I get that there are single people out there who are unhappy that they are single and bitter about messages of love. I get that there are people who resent marketing messages telling them how to celebrate love (frankly, I’m one of them). I get that there are sad, angry, bitter people in the world, people who see romance and professions of love as things to mock, to deny, to tear down. I am telling you, though, that that is not the way to feel better. Anger, resentment, bitterness, and cynicism are not desirable states of being. They are instances of suffering. Don’t cling to suffering, relieve it. It’s one thing to feel hurt and betrayed and angry and sad because your life is not going the way you’d hoped; it’s another thing entirely to reach out to other people and suggest to them that they, too, ought to feel cynical and hurt and alone.

I want to reach out to people and say that hurt and anger and cynicism aren’t final states. You can move away from them. It’s okay to celebrate love. Love doesn’t make me want to belittle people, it makes me want to embrace people. Love is good. Stories about love are good stories.

Let’s Play a Game

I like to play games. Who doesn’t? But not just any game, I’m actually kind of particular about what games I like. I happen not to like zero-sum games; my favorite games are those where, by careful maneuvering, the players can achieve a win for everyone. I also like games where there’s complexity, because that tends to mean there are multiple ways to win. In this group are such games as Fluxx and Civilization. The complexity is fascinating in its own right, though, and I have spent more time than I can calculate just watching kinetic sculptures. I suspect that the complexity is why I even like trade games like Tradewinds and Escape Velocity, and even Pirates! had my attention for a few years at the end of the eighties.

I’ve always found, though, that whatever game I’m playing is interesting but it emphasizes the wrong thing, or glosses over some aspect of the scenario that I would like to explore. For instance, most games give the player instantaneous access to all available information at the same time. Think of Risk: imagine you’re in control of North America and you manage to send troops across from Alaska into Siberia. Your armies march onward, but get mired in conflict in Ukraine. But in the same turn that Ukraine stops your westward advance, you manage to break into South America and someone else comes across to invade Nova Scotia. You know all these results at the same time. Similarly, in Civilization, your warrior in 300 BC makes contact with another player and you know right away, even though it will take that warrior 15 turns to get back into territory you actually control. Information doesn’t have a speed of propagation in these games, and I have been thinking about that for a while, now, trying to come up with some game that would be interesting to play and that would involve a variable speed of information.

Another thing that has bugged me about Civilization (and other games with lots of units, whether turn-based or RTS) is that the player who is the autocratic despot of a large civilization nonetheless gets to micromanage every factory, every platoon, and every diplomatic meeting, as well as running the treasury and performing a lot of civil planning and engineering. Golly! Back in, oh, 1996 or 1997, a friend and I talked about what a game might look like wherein the player could give any instructions he chose, but each instruction cost some number of points and there were a limited pool of instruction points per turn. Go ahead, micromanage all you want, but you’ll never be more effective than just one or two guys. Delegate intelligently, though, and you can achieve great things.

Personally, I’m not so good at delegating. I’ve always been most comfortable as an individual contributor rather than as a manager. I feel like I would delegate more to the AI in video games, if I had any faith that the AI would be at all smart about what to do and when to do it. It’s really hard to write a good AI, though, and I think it’s really unreasonable to expect that from a video game.

So I keep thinking about games, and what I like, and what I don’t like. I keep trying out, in my mind, different scenarios and different types of games, trying to see what might be interesting when you play with information propagation speed, or limiting the amount of control you can exercise in a given turn. And all the time wondering, “How could this be set up so that everyone can win?”

Four More Years?

Barack Obama will be the president of the United States a year from now, and I think that’s great news. I’m happy about that.

Last night, Junglemonkey and I watched some of the live election coverage on the Beeb and they had a couple of American dipnuts on, I guess to explain U.S. politics to the British audience. The Republican they had was saying that, having lost the bid for the presidency, the Republican party needed to spend some time in introspection to figure out how they could reach out to more people. I think that’s true, but I’m a little doubtful. It feels to me as though the Republicans have become the Taliban. I’ve seen several people tweet comments along the lines of, “Okay, now we’ve finished with the election, can we please talk about climate change?” (or whatever issue they want to talk about that was ignored during the campaigns). I think that’s a little naive, as well. If the issue wasn’t something the candidates thought was important enough to get people to vote for them, how will the winners think it’s important enough to talk about now? This election seemed to be all about enfeebling (or not) the federal government, allowing (or not) women to control their own bodies, and giving (or not) medical care to Americans. What’s to be said about climate change? It’s real, it’s happening, and major campaign contributors don’t want the government to do anything about it. Nobody’s talking about it because, what is there to say?

For the last four years, the Republican strategy has been to oppose any legislation proposed or supported by any Democrat. This isn’t a secret; heck, Republicans started out Obama’s first presidency saying this exact thing to any news organization that would listen. The presidential election and the senatorial election look to me like a slap to the right wing crazy talk, but the house looks like it could be more of the same. I consider this Republican house and then I think about the crazy signs up and down the central valley of California claiming that it’s the government’s fault there’s not enough water, and I think about the scared old rich white people we’ve met. I worry that we’re still in the midst of a national temper tantrum and desperately need a time out.

Next Homework Program: Ratio Exercise

The Badb just had a couple of weeks of reviewing ratios. This was a good limbering-up exercise, since the problem sets were all about converting between different units and manipulating fractions. After all, ratios are just a different way of writing fractions. The general form of the problems wound up being, “Given that the ratio of thingumbob : doohickii is γ, how many doohickii are there if there are N thingumbobs?” She’d have to set up the equation and solve for the doohickii quantity.

In the evenings, this was really not a problem (until she got really tired) but first thing in the morning it was a tough job, converting from decimals to fractions, simplifying fractions, and doing other straightforward (at 4 in the afternoon) operations. So let’s think about fractions for a minute. There are really two major operations one performs on fractions: multiplication and addition. Multiplication is easy (numerator times numerator, denominator times denominator, simplify, done) but addition is kind of a pain; you have to have a common denominator. Finding any common denominator is easy (heck, just multiply each denominator by the other) but we would prefer to work with the smallest whole numbers we can get away with, because smaller numbers are easier to handle and because humans, at least the smart ones, are lazy and hate doing extra work. So what we want, given two denominators A and B, is to find the least common multiple (LCM) of the two numbers.

Let’s say we want a program that lets you input two fractions as four integers (numerator A, denominator A, numerator B, denominator B) and it will output the original fractions, the required multipliers, and the multiplied fractions which have common denominators. That is, it’ll take something like this:

5/6

7/10

and give you

5/6 * 5/5 = 25/30

7/10 * 3/3 = 21/30

It should accept improper fractions (but not decimals and not mixed numbers). We’ve already got code that will spit out the prime factors of a number; I bet it will be useful here.

I’m Worried about Truth

This morning I saw this headline: “Samaras advierte de que la situación de Grecia es similar a la que permitió el triunfo del nazismo en Alemania.” Hard on the heels of the presidential circus wherein Mitt Romney lied his way to “victory”, this has got me thinking about style versus substance. One of my friends tweeted in the aftermath, “Stop talking like fact-checks after the ‘big event’ are meaningful. Show up and play the game or go home.” He’s got a point as far as debates go, where the event is all about thinking on your feet and presenting a facile argument. I’m just not sure that it’s a good idea to set the fate of millions on a course determined by glib statements not founded in reality. I believe that “think” is an important component of “think fast. The love of my life reminded her Facebook friends that, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” and when I said I thought it disingenuous for Republicans to claim Obama was not bipartisan after they refused to vote for anything he proposed, observed that all politics is disingenuous.

Back to Greece, then: the Greek government did not engage in a big war which they lost and were then forced to pay huge reparations for. The Greek government begged to be admitted to the EU and their economy has not been up to the task. The Greek people feel let down by their government and oppressed by the austerity measures, so if I were a Greek government minister, sure, I would probably look at the seething unrest, the horrible inflation, the massive debt, and think, “Man, I am one demagogue away from being thrown out of office and shot.” But I’m not at all sure that this is a real and valid parallel. I reckon that it’s important to call people on their bullshit. To that end, let’s invoke a corollary to Godwin’s law and say the Greek government has ended the discussion and lost.

Miscellany

A lot of things have been going on, but I don’t have a lot to say about any one of them.

On Saturday I played at the Dixon highland games. Dixon is about two hours away from Boulder Creek, so rather than driving out the night before and getting a hotel room, I figured I’d just get up at my normal time and drive out on Saturday morning. I didn’t know when I was supposed to compete but I saw that the games were supposed to open at 9. I got there at 8:30, only to discover that I was up at 8:45. Quick, warm up, tune up, then bang bang bang, slow air, 2/4 march, and piobaireachd. None were my best performances, (the less said about the 2/4 the better) but I was disappointed not even to have placed with the piob. or the slow air.

On Sunday Junglemonkey and I spent a lot of the day shopping and then watching movies. “Fargo,” “Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” — these are movies that we can’t watch without remembering the early days of our relationship. Feeling nostalgic, I started thinking about the music we shared with each other. Junglemonkey gave me Cake and Pepe and the Bottle Blondes. I gave her Deep Forest and Afro Celt Sound System. We shared a lot of music, with occasional duplications but mostly different albums by the same artists. Now, many years later, she’s still discovering cool music that’s fun to listen to. I’m discovering cool music, too, but I feel ambivalent about sharing it. Take, for instance, this piobaireachd performance. These pipers are amazing and they make the music beautiful. I find Barnaby Brown’s performances particularly amazing. There’s this modern tradition of playing this music and the competition scene has really sidelined other piping traditions. And yet, as Brown demonstrates, these other traditions have some amazing and beautiful art to them. My neighbors say they love hearing me practice my pipes, and I love hearing these performances, but I still have a hard time believing that non-pipers want to hear this. Why? Probably because there’s not a single radio station within a hundred miles that will put bagpipe music into the rotation. That should totally change. Another album I recently found out about is “Drokk” — I also feel self-conscious sharing that, since ambient dystopia is really not the mood I want to evoke when I’m hanging out with the people I love.

With the Badb’s return to school, we’re once again doing arithmetic homework. She’s actually good at math even though she doesn’t like it. This year she’s going to be tackling some of the interesting bits of pre-algebra and dimensional analysis. This year may be the last time for a decade that my daughter will admit that I know anything, so I sure want to be available to help her out. She’s been reviewing exponents and roots, fractions, division, and factorization. The past couple of weeks have been full of her asking, “Daddy, can you help me with this…?” and me saying, “Sure, now here’s the process you can follow to get the right answer for this and any other problem like this, and you don’t need to worry about getting confused…” For my own sanity, I rewrote my BASIC prime factorization program in Java. I started doing that back in May but only did a command line version; now I stuck a GUI on it with validation and looping and so on. At the time, I set it up with a Mercurial repository. Last week I was looking once more at revision control systems and found this blog entry comparing git with Mercurial. Together with the work I did on dumbster this got me thinking about what I really want in a “how to use git” reference. I think I’m going to have to write it myself, so maybe that will be my winter software project this year.

Vacation Hallucination

We are vacationing in Phoenix. Nutjob politics, crazy heat and humidity, reminiscences of years past, and hidden object games are all giving me these weird waking dreams without even having to take drugs.

Junglemonkey remembered a feature on a kids radio show where the youthful host tried to explain the lyrics of pop songs. This morning I found myself wondering what the songwriter needed from Biggles last Saturday. A ride, maybe, or the key to his bike lock.

Also, there are grackles all over the place. These are the rattiest looking birds I’ve seen.

Trust Your Kid

Earlier today I tweeted this gem: “I don’t worry about my girls’ future boyfriends. I trust my daughters to be smart and capable.” I’d like to expand on that a little.

This was inspired by a quote I read on the Freakonomics blog:

“I want my girls’ potential boyfriends to think I’m a crazy lunatic,”Haley said.

I’ve heard this kind of thing before from my male friends who have daughters. They talk about getting all weird and scary with their daughters’ hypothetical boyfriends when those daughters are finally old enough to start dating. Just what are all these guys afraid of? Do they consider that their daughters are utterly helpless and are such bad decision-makers that they’ll be dating boys who won’t treat them well? I suppose I could be super uncharitable and guess that they extrapolate from their self-knowledge and think these hypothetical swains will be rapists who will nonetheless be deterred by the idea of a vengeful father. I bet, though, that it’s just that they don’t trust their daughters, and that makes me kind of sad.

Your kids are going to grow older whatever you do. I figure the best thing I can do for my kids is to teach them to be thoughtful and to value themselves. If they think of themselves as precious, they won’t put themselves in situations where they’ll get really hurt. All that remains, then, is to teach them enough to be able to recognize a bad situation, a bad idea, or a dangerous person. That’s hard, but not in the way that calculus is hard. It just requires a lot of time and engagement and trust. You can’t just wake up one morning and think, “Holy cow! My daughter, with whom I last interacted when she was five, is now old enough to be dating boys! I’d better teach her some stuff!” That won’t work. You have to be engaged all along; then when your daughter starts considering dating, she can bring up questions and you can offer insights and it won’t be all weird and fake.

And yeah, no matter what, if Mom or Dad says it, it’s probably wrong. So your daughter won’t believe you and will go make mistakes *anyway*. If she’s got a good sense of self-worth, though, she’ll come out okay. Just like you, right?

Doomed by History

I’ve probably mentioned this before somewhere, but from about five years after I got out of college I’ve felt acutely my lack of education. I got four years of Catholic school (an important four years, too) but otherwise I went to public schools in California. As a result of my time in private school, I can diagram a sentence, conjugate verbs, and use commas, semicolons, and apostrophes correctly. To that school I also owe my ability to perform well on SAT-type tests. To my public school education, I owe my knowledge of the geography of North America and western Europe. So far as my history and geography teachers were concerned, it was of passing interest that there existed some cultures somewhere east of Germany, but I swear, I learned more world geography from playing Risk. I suspect that the cold war had something to do with that, but I don’t see how, “We do not like communists,” translates into, “Our schoolchildren should not be shown maps of any communist country.” How can you be expected to drop a bomb on a country you can’t even find?

Since then, I’ve been eager to fill the void. I’ve read histories of China, of Persia, and of various African regions. I’m a sucker for maps and love trying to wrap my head around the geography of whatever story I’m reading. When I read histories of Alexander, I followed along on Google Earth and on the maps on Wikipedia. Of course, whenever I do this, with whatever region, I wind up with a temporary wish to go there and walk around in the area. It’s not just books, either: in 2009 Junglemonkey and I saw the Afghan gold exhibit when it was in New York. After that, I had to spend hours looking at maps of Afghanistan and its neighbors.

I just finished listening to Edward Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Volume 1” but, instead of going for the maps, I’ve been digesting it in terms of economics and politics. (Okay, I confess, there was my short investigation of when we stopped calling it the “Euxine Sea” as Herodotus and Gibbon did.) For instance, there’s “Why Nations Fail“, as well as “23 Things They Don’t Tell You about Capitalism“. The parallels between the politics of the Roman Empire around the time of Diocletian and the politics of the United States today are pretty obvious. Even more chilling is the thought that prosperity in the U.S. is not predicated on making stuff but on taking stuff from others. No wonder poker is so popular: this culture seems to be in love with zero-sum games.

 

Oh, hey, you know that phrase, “blood and treasure,” our military leaders use when they talk about what we’re spending on these conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan? Yeah, that’s what Gibbon used to describe the expenses of Roman military expeditions on the borders of the empire (I bet he got it from the Romans). Since they’re likely going to be in charge of the country in a few decades, I’m glad that at least our military commanders have read some history. I just hope they have also read some economics.