Elephant in Space

Found this while cleaning out my room. I wrote it sometime around second grade or so.

An elephant named Andrew escaped from the zoo. He ran away when the zookeeper chased him. Then the zookeeper got tired and stopped. In a few seconds Andrew the elephant was out of sight. When Andrew stopped he found himself by a launch pad in a space center. He walked into a space ship. The people from the mission control center saw him and said "GET THAT ELEPHANT OFF OF THAT ROCKET SHIP". But none of them could hear him because Andrew was to loud.
5 4 3 2 1 BLAST OFF! After 1 hour Andrew looked out the window and

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On Experience Awards

The point of this post is just to discuss some issues I've been pondering regarding how to run a Dungeons and Dragons game. I'm going to start with a brief background which probably won't be necessary, but could be if anybody other than Mike ends up reading this.

I played Dungeons & Dragons for several years in high school. Goes without saying that I loved the game and regretted never getting into it again up here. This semester I've started up again with a small group of friends. They're all new to the game, which means I need to be the DM. So it's my responsibility to plan the adventures, describe the environment, control the monsters and other characters, settle rules disputes and enforce group cohesion, award treasure and experience, and teach these n00bs how the game works. I can name about 35 things I've done poorly in the couple months we've been playing, but supposedly the mere fact that I'm paying attention to such details is a good sign. Or hopefully I'm getting better, at least.

So far in this campaign, I've followed the standard experience award rules pretty closely: A certain amount of XP is assigned based upon the difficulty ("challenge rating") of a given encounter, and everybody who participated gets an equal share. I've trimmed down the combat rewards a little bit and made up the difference with story awards (for completing particular tasks, such as the capture of an escaped prisoner named Lien). I keep track of it throughout the session and assign it once the adventure is complete.

I'm not sure this is quite ideal; I used to do it somewhat differently. For a given encounter, every character would still get about the same amount of XP, but there might be a small bonus for whoever excelled. Similarly, I would give meager roleplaying awards for those players who consistently acted in character. I like the general idea of this, but it never seemed to work out in practice. I still totaled and announced the XP earned at the end of an adventure, by which point many of the smaller awards would have balanced each other out. So if it happened that Finrod had earned 128 more XP than Aruwyn that session, nobody would really know why. And since there were so many different contributing factors, even I couldn't explain it. Then the players receiving less feel gipped, and no clear benefit makes up for that.

The current technique, where everyone shares evenly, eliminates that problem. But I don't think it's using XP awards to their best potential. Experience awards serve two main purposes in a D&D game: The first is to facilitate character advancement. Simple enough. But the other function involves their status as awards - they reward and encourage the sorts of behavior that enhance the gaming experience. This is the whole reason roleplaying awards are sometimes given out- It doesn't make much sense (in-game) for a character to level up faster because the player takes it seriously, but many DMs will overlook that detail if it's an effective incentive. And similarly, story awards (at least in my games) seek to encourage heroic or at least goal-oriented character actions, rather than the senseless slaughter that many games end up with.

So my goal, then, is to reward those players who act in-character and mind the more distant goals of the party. XP might not even be the best way to do this; sometimes in-game rewards such as simple treasure are more appropriate, and they're certainly easier to tie in. But is there a way to effectively use XP in this manner? The somewhat obvious solution is to award it after each encounter, in which case it will be clear when a particular character excelled. But I suspect that would too frequently interrupt the flow of the game. It could also engender even more jealousy than the previous method. (XP awards will always be somewhat arbitrary, but this becomes a much bigger problem when it seems to favor some players over others.)

I set out to write this hoping to find a way to reconcile these issues, to reward characters for exceptional successes in a meaningful and unambiguous way. I've just about convinced myself now that XP awards are just not the way to go about that. In-game incentives should work even better. Not just gold; the interactions with NPCs will probably work even better. When the players know that their actions determine whether the city guard will back their characters up or throw them in the dungeon, they'll take their characters' decisions seriously. Since I have a relatively well-developed environment this time around, this shouldn't be too difficult to implement. Then XP will (continue to) take a backseat.

Maybe that's how it should be handled? I'm still not quite sure, though, and would be open to suggestions...

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Independent In Name Only

Hey, all. I took some time today to look into who's running for offices other than the presidency, and here are the candidates I expect to vote for. A brief explanation is given in each case.

U. S. President: Barack Obama (D)
Obvious choice. I've talked enough about this one in the past, so I won't bother going over it again. I'm rooting for Wesley Clark for VP. GObama!

U. S. Senate, MI: Incumbent Carl Levin (D)
He seems to have done a pretty good job so far. And his opponent, Jack Hoogendyk (R), carries nearly all the typical Republican problems: lower taxes for the rich (budget deficits be damned), focus on more drilling rather than alternative energy, oppose abortion and gay marriage, chip away at the church-state separation, don't give [suspected] terrorists habeus corpus... Yeah, I'll stick with Levin.

U. S. House, MI District 08: Challenger Bob Alexander (D)
Here we have the incumbent, Mike Rogers (R), who I swear is Jack Bauer incarnate. He's a former FBI agent who is much too cavalier in going to war and trampling civil rights. He's been touting a plan to achieve energy independence, but it depends much too heavily on domestic drilling rather than shifting off of oil. Vote for the other guy! Vote for Bob Alexander!

MI State House, District 69: Incumbent Mark Meadows (D)
I actually don't have a major problem with either candidate in this race, but the challenger, Frank Lambert (R), doesn't seem to have much of a campaign going. I can't even find a website. The weird thing is that it looks like he put forth a similarly lame run in 2006, got creamed 70-30, and didn't learn his lesson. *shrug*

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The Science (Fiction) of The Happening

M. Night Shyamalan has a new film in theaters right now, The Happening. Quite simply, people start killing themselves for no apparent reason. I'll not bother with most of the plot and simply focus on the event itself: Is it possible? How could it have happened? I don't actually think Shyamalan had a detailed explanation in mind; looking for one is simply my idea of fun.

(A side note: As tacky as the central premise sounds, I really liked the movie. Shyamalan does suspense well, and it obviously got me thinking. Of course, nearly every professional film critic hated it. Guess I should expect that by now.)

Also, you know, SPOILER ALERT.

What We Know:

--The event was caused by a chemical, seemingly a sort of neurotoxin.
--In most cases, the first symptom observed is loss of speech. The victims then becomes disoriented, occasionally saying utterly nonsensical things. Soon after that, they kill themselves, typically showing no emotion or sensation of pain.
--The victim takes his or her own life by the most convenient means available. There is no apparent physical impairment, and complicated machinery may be used if the victim knew (or could figure out) how to operate it.
--The initial outbreak was limited to New England, but it would not be the last.
--The initial outbreak lasted a little longer than a day. Though almost everyone in the affected area was by then dead, those remaining were now safe.
--The toxin first emerged in large parks, and it spread from there.
--Traces of the toxin were detected after the fact in plants.

What Appears to be True:

--The toxin responsible is airborne and absorbed through the lungs.
--Symptom progression is observed within minutes of exposure to the toxin.
--A small subset of the population is not affected by the toxin. (I'm referring to the man in the final scene. It is possible that his symptom progression was simply delayed, rather than absent.)
--Dogs are not affected by the toxin. We can reasonably assume it's limited to humans, or perhaps primates.
--Large groups of people are preferentially affected; isolated individuals did not show symptoms until relatively late.

The first scientific question to consider is one of physiology - Could a neurotoxin make people kill themselves? The suggestion is that it reverses the normal human impulse to preserve life. It sounds implausible, but I can't personally say anything authoritative on the issue. Neurochemistry is complicated, and I haven't studied it nearly enough.

I see one major problem with the presentation: There is an all-or-nothing response to the toxin. Not a single person starts to become disoriented because of it but doesn't kill himself. But if it were caused by a neurotoxin, there would be a certain amount that would be needed in order to have fatal consequences, and lesser doses should still have some noticeable effect. I can only imagine this is an oversight on Shyamalan's part.

This brings me to a much more interesting question - the toxin's origins. Through the film's dialogue, we're led to believe (although much of it's coming from the rantings of the questionably sane owner of a plant nursery) that the toxin is being produced by plants as a defense mechanism to resist the human domination of the planet. It's suggested that it is the product of a rapid evolutionary change, and that the reason smaller and smaller groups were targeted is because the plant's sensitivity to human presence was improving.

First of all, no. Evolution does not work anywhere near that fast. Just no.

So if this hypothetical toxin really were a plant defense mechanism, how could it have emerged? One possibility is that they've had the capability all along, but something recent finally triggered it. There would need to be a positive feedback loop, where the presence of the toxin promotes its production. That could explain why it arose so quickly and was confined to one region, but then why did it stop the next day? Perhaps the death of all the humans removed another stimulus crucial for the production of the toxin.

The biggest problem with this hypothesis is how we could have never witnessed an outbreak before. Perhaps the defense could have evolved before recorded history, but what prevented its activation for the last few millenia? And if this were the case, what prompted its evolution in the first place? Prehistoric humanity wasn't nearly the threat that modern humans are. We'd also expect only one or a few closely related plant species to be responsible, and it must something found in parks. A certain type of grass?

So this scenario has some major inconsistencies. Here's a better one: a contagion.

A new virus could cause the plants to start producing an entirely new compound, and if virulent it could almost explain the rapid emergence. (I say "almost," because this is still extraordinarily fast.) Since the death of humanity wouldn't help the virus in any obvious way, the obvious assumption is that it was not developed by natural means. The most plausible idea seems to be that it was developed for biological warfare. The possibility that the deaths were caused by an attack of some sort was discussed in the film, but it was largely abandoned when the illness's spread didn't seem to fit. Fair enough; where the effects would not have increased in intensity throughout the day had the toxin itself been released in the attack. A contagion that was introduced in the parks and moved to more remote areas could satisfactorily explain the pattern, though.

One thing that jumps out at me regarding this hypothesis is the expectation that illness in the plants would be observable. That needn't be the case, though, depending on how aggressive the pathogen was and which tissues were attacked. It is quite possible that it was engineered to minimize damage to its host organisms. (I admit that it would be surprising for the newscaster at the end not to have mentioned the virus, though. Surely the investigators would have discovered it, right?) This can neatly explain the geographic limitations of the event if it only spread as far as the host organism(s) already were found.

Anyway, the events of the movie, however unlikely, needn't be as inexplicable as they initially seem. I'll point out that the film portrayed plants as much more intelligent than they could possibly be (although much of that was coming from the kook nursery owner). It's not even a certainty that plants were the source of the toxin; it could just have entered through the stomata and for some reason was retained by their tissues but not elsewhere.

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How Atheists Argue

In case you hadn't heard, Ellen Johnson was recently forced to resign from her position as president of American Atheists. Everything I know about the affair is either contained in or linked to from one of Hemant's posts. I don't actually care too much about it; I think Ellen was too reactionary and often antagonized believers over irrelevant issues, which somewhat gives us a bad rep. So it'd be nice if the organization took a more moderate stance under new leadership, but I won't get my hopes up.

Anyway, there's been a big argument in the comments over here regarding why she was fired. You can read that if you want. (It's not worth the time unless you're really curious.) Amidst the flames I was able to pick out a few rather amusing quotes:

"It is a good thing to question authority. Anything less is very un-atheist-like."

"Your angry response to my post reflects a very un-atheist-like devotion to this extremely dysfunctional board of directors."

"I read Arthur’s post above. I can’t believe that several Atheists accepted Arthur’s post like it’s gospel. Any of you who think Arthur’s post answers questions are as much suckers as the people that followed Jimmy Jones and drank the Goofy G(r)ape."

I really hope I never sound like that. *slinks away, tail between his legs*

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Even in Academia?

PZ Myers recently referred to a study from 2002 in which the sociologists concluded that men tend to be less religious than women for physiological reasons. Specifically, it's driven by the same propensity for risk-taking that leads to higher crime rates.

*ahem*

Yes, he does explicitely make the atheism-crime connection. Repeatedly. Yes, I'm offended. But in a case like this it's always the person's reasoning, not conclusions, that you should be criticizing. So I decided to take a closer look and found it to be just as flawed as expected. I should point out that I'm working from a press release, not the full paper, so there could hypothetically be some masterful redeeming justification that's missing from this source. But I doubt it.

The study itself just involved looking at responses to surveys which showed that women self-reported as being more religious than men pretty much all over the world. Because it does not seem to vary between cultures, he assumes that this is mainly a product of biology - not an unreasonable suggestion. But where's the connection to risk-taking? It comes off looking like one huge non sequitur; here's the closest thing we get to any evidence for the link: "Recent studies of biochemistry imply that both male irreligiousness and male lawlessness are rooted in the fact that far more males than females have an underdeveloped ability to inhibit their impulses, especially those involving immediate gratification and thrills." I can't help thinking he must be stretching in order to draw that much specifically from biochemistry. What does irreligiousness have to do with it?

Then we get the following, which is painfully reminiscent of some bad apologetics: "The upshot is that some men are shortsighted and don't think ahead, and so 'going to prison or going to hell just doesn't matter to these men,' Stark said." Wow. Okay. So I'd been wondering how he ties godlessness to impulsiveness at all, and there it is: Hell. But the trend between sexes held up across the globe, despite the fact that many religions don't have any concept of hell. It also relies on the assumption that most people adhere to religion simply because they're afraid of damnation, which is observably false and should be offensive to the religious readers. (So he's not lettin' anyone get off uninsulted. Yay!)

So it really sounds like the author just has an axe to grind with atheists and hasn't been able to adequately justify his conclusions. But if that were the case, it should never have passed peer review. So... WTF am I missing?

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GObama!

As you're hopefully aware, Obama pulled out another sizable win Tuesday, and has an even firmer lock on the nomination than expected. I've been watching the primaries much more closely than I should be, but my thoughts on that showing are still limited to the obvious. (...except for one: I would love to see Obama triumphantly proclaim that he has slain the Hildebeest. In those words. Probably shouldn't get my hopes up.)

I recently finished reading The Audacity of Hope. (Brief review: It's like an Obama speech, except 362 pages long.) The bulk of this post is just going to be a large excerpt from the second chapter, "Values," which serves to illuminate why I've chosen to support him.

Unfortunately, too often in our national debates we don't even get to the point where we weigh these difficult choices. Instead, we either exaggerate the degree to which policies we don't like impinge on our most sacred values, or play dumb when our own preferred policies conflict with important countervailing values. Conservatives, for instance, tend to bristle when it comes to government interference in the marketplace or their right to bear arms. Yet many of these same conservatives show little to no concern when it comes to government wiretapping without a warrant or government attempts to control people's sexual practices. Conversely, it's easy to get most liberals riled up about government encroachments on freedom of the press or a woman's reproductive freedoms. But if you have a conversation with these same liberals about the potential costs of regulation to a small-business owner, you will often draw a blank stare.

In a country as diverse as ours, there will always be passionate arguments about how we draw the line when it comes to government action. That is how our democracy works. But our democracy might work a bit better if we recognized that all of us possess values that are worthy of respect: if liberals at least acknowledged that the recreational hunter feels the same way about his gun as they feel about their library books, and if conservatives recognized that most women feel as protective of their right to reproductive freedom as evangelicals do of their right to worship.

The results of such an exercise can sometimes be surprising. The year that Democrats regained the majority in the Illinois state senate, I sponsored a bill to require the videotaping of interrogations and confessions in capital cases. While the evidence tells me that the death penalty does little to deter crime, I believe there are some crimes—mass murder, the rape and murder of a child—so heinous, so beyond the pale, that the community is justified in expressing the full measure of its outrage by meting out the ultimate punishment. On the other hand, the way capital cases were tried in Illinois at the time was so rife with error, questionable police tactics, racial bias, and shoddy lawyering that thirteen death row inmates had been exonerated and a Republican governor had decided to institute a moratorium on all executions.

Despite what appeared to be a death penalty system ripe for reform, few people gave my bill much chance of passing. The state prosecutors and police organizations were adamantly opposed, believing that videotaping would be expensive and cumbersome, and would hamstring their ability to close cases. Some who favored abolishing the death penalty feared that any efforts at reform would detract from their larger cause. My fellow legislators were skittish about appearing in any way to be soft on crime. And the newly elected Democratic governor had announced his opposition to videotaping of interrogations during the course of his campaign.

It would have been typical of today's politics for each side to draw a line in the sand: for death penalty opponents to harp on racism and police misconduct and for law enforcement to suggest that my bill coddled criminals. Instead, over the course of several weeks, we convened sometimes daily meetings between prosecutors, public defenders, police organizations, and death penalty opponents, keeping our negotiations as much as possible out of the press.

Instead of focusing on the serious disagreements around the table, I talked about the common value that I believed everyone shared, regardless of how each of us might feel about the death penalty: that is, the basic principle that no innocent person should end up on death row, and that no person guilty of a capital offense should go free. When police representatives presented concrete problems with the bill's design that would have impeded their investigations, we modified the bill. When police representatives offered to videotape only confessions, we held firm, pointing out that the whole purpose of the bill was to give the public confidence that confessions were obtained free of coercion. At the end of the process, the bill had the support of all the parties involved. It passed unanimously in the Illinois Senate and was signed into law. (pages 57-59)

...And yet I find myself returning again and again to my mother's simple principle—"How would that make you feel?"—as a guidepost for my politics.

It's not a question we ask ourselves enough, I think; as a country, we seem to be suffering from an empathy deficit. We wouldn't tolerate schools that don't teach, that are chronically underfunded and understaffed and underinspired, if we thought that the children in them were like our children in them were like our children. It's hard to imagine the CEO of a company giving himself a multimillion-dollar bonus while cutting health-care coverage for his workers if he thought they were in some sense his equals. And it's safe to assume that those in power would think longer and harder about launching a war if they envisioned their own sons and daughters in harm's way.

I believe a stronger sense of empathy would tilt the balance of our current politics in favor of those people who are struggling in this society. After all, if they are like us, then their struggles are our own. If we fail to help, we diminish ourselves.

But that does not mean that those who are struggling—or those of us who claim to speak for those who are struggling—are thereby freed from trying to understand the perspectives of those who are better off. Black leaders need to appreciate the legitimate fears that may cause some whites to resist affirmative action. Union representatives can't afford to not understand the competitive pressures their employers may be under. I am obligated to try to see the world through George Bush's eyes, no matter how much I may disagree with him. That's what empathy does--it calls us to task, the conservative and the liberal, the powerful and the powerless, the oppressed and the oppressor. We are all shaken out of our complacency. We are all forced beyond our limited vision.

No one is exempt from the call to find common ground. (pages 67-68)

This strikes at the core of why I've decided to enthusiastically endorse Obama. His entire approach to crafting policy is such that even on those issues where I squarely disagree with him—and there are plenty—I can be confident he will take the positions of his opponents into account. Eight years of Bush acting as though he had a mandate to spurn the concerns of American liberals has been quite bad enough. But even forgetting my own concerns, I believe his conciliatory approach will help to heal the cripplingly divisive political atmosphere as well as drastically improving our relationship with the rest of the world.

I was considering also posting excerpts in which he tackles some of the more difficult issues facing our government, but most likely the one above was quite long enough. It shouldn't surprise you to hear that he doesn't pretend that there are any simple answers or that the Republicans don't have serious and worthwhile concerns. Guess you'll have to check out the book or his campaign website to see that, though.

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Assassins

This is the book six in the Left Behind series. There won't be full posts for books five and seven, since I simply didn't have much to say about them. I've only a few remarks this time around; a few will be hidden below the fold, since they contain spoilers.

I finally figured out the significance of the number 216 (discussed previously). It's 6 to the third power, or just the digits of 666 multiplied out. I can't believe that took me so long to figure out... (I was under the impression that 666 was considered a quantity, hence the focus on preserving that value rather than its decimal representation. Damned mathematical non-purists...)

It was possible he had been exposed already. How could one know? The end of a traitor is like the end of a star--the result is always seen long after the event has taken place. (p. 67)

Although not really a big deal, it would seem to imply the acceptance of an old earth. It shouldn't really matter; I just have a hard time believing that someone who takes Revelation literally wouldn't do the same with Genesis. (Of course, day-age creationism is still compatible with this.) Considering that I've now gone seven books without an explicit endorsement one way or the other, I'd bet the author's avoided that subject intentionally so as not to alienate readers. *shrugs*

All along the way Mac and Abdullah passed bars, strip clubs, massage parlors, brothels, pagan sanctuaries, and fortune-telling establishments. In a city with a history of religion dating back millennia, and where--like in the rest of the world--half the population had been wiped out since the Rapture, these businesses were not hidden. They were not seedy, not relegated to a certain inevitable section of town. Neither were they operating in darkness behind black doors or labyrinthine entrances that saved the "real" treats for those who were there on purpose.

Rather, while the rest of the Holy City seemed to crumble for neglect and lack of manpower, here were gleaming storefronts, well lit and obvious to every eye, proudly exhibiting every perversion and fleshy evil known to man. (p. 356)

This is a pretty representative passage detailing the continual moral decay of society we're supposed to be witnessing. Ironically, what struck me at the time was how the description fell flat. The harsh words at the end of the passage seemed far too strong for the activities described above, which really aren't that historically unusual. Presumably conservative Christians and I have slightly different ideas of what constitutes perversion.

It was just too awkward the way this was brought up, since little time was devoted previously to showing the gradual decay. It just seemed to crop up out of nowhere; a couple months ago it seemed as though the attitudes of the populace were largely unchanged (apart from the terror and despondence inevitable when there's such death about). So I'm at a loss as to understand why the populace has turned to hedonism and paganism. Carpathia wasn't encouraging it until only recently, and one would expect the massive devastation to push people toward a sort of pragmatic survivalism, which doesn't leave much time for brothel visits. (Do I also need to clarify that I think paganism and sorcery are mostly harmless?)

*SPOILER WARNING*

Finally, he heard the potentate whispering. "O Lucifer, son of the morning! I have worshiped you since childhood." David shivered, his heart thudding. Carpathia continued, "How grateful I am for the creativity you imbue, O lion of glory, angle of light. I praise you for imaginative ideas that never cease to amaze me. You have given me the nations! You have promised me that I shall ascend into heaven with you, that we will exalt our thrones above the stars of God. I rest in your promise that I will ascend above the heights of the clouds. I will be like the most High.

"I shall do all your bidding so I may claim you promises to rule the universe by your side. You have chosen me and allowed me to make the earth tremble and to shake kingdoms. Your glory will be my glory, and like unto you, I will never die. I eagerly await the when I may make plain your power and majesty." (p. 203)

Well that was a romp. A hundred or two pages later, the masses actually bow down and start worshipping Carpathia. Fun as that might be as a tale of fantasy, that was putting some major strain on my suspension of disbelief. I had been under the impression that the authors intended this to be a plausible account of how the end times could proceed, but it was getting so over-the-top that I couldn't help thinking they'd stopped taking themselves seriously.

It took a spectacularly stupid comment by Ray Comfort to remind me of the ugly truth: This is what they consider to be realistic. There is a substantial minority of evangelical Christians who accept every ridiculous premise this story takes for granted--that nonbelievers are inherently hedonistic and selfish, that we anticipate the destruction of Christianity, that we would actually idolize (in a very literal sense) secular leaders, and of course, that we all know the truth but are too proud to accept it. (For the record, Comfort could easily have been quoting any of the characters in Left Behind.)

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The Obligatory Apology

*ahem*
I'm sorry for not writing anything substantial in over a month.

Sometimes I think about just shutting the site down, but it's not like I have some compelling reason to, and sooner or later I'm sure to find something worth posting. This won't make for much of a blog if it almost never updates, but maybe that's just something I'll have to accept. In any case, there should be two new posts up in the near future, each one focusing on a book I finished recently.

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The Greatest GIF Ever

Sorry, it was linked from a fark thread, so I have no idea who made this one either.

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