Panglott's Garden

Election Day

2011-11-08T20:38:00.003-05:00

The Republican candidate for attorney general lost tonight to Jack Conway; his name was Todd P'Pool. It's a strange name, sure:

To be sure, his name is a bit of a distraction. Turns out he is from an old Kentucky family named Petitpool and the name got hyphenated along the way.

Neat!

Gatewood Galbraith made another great showing for an independent or third-party candidate. Independent candidates are best when running to bring attention to issues, not necessarily to win. It's now a time when half of Americans favor legalizing marijuana. And as the two main candidates are trying to outdo each other on who can be the most meretriciously pro-coal, at least there's one person in the race talking about the external costs of mountaintop removal mining that we all have to deal with.

Ruins of Dunnottar Castle

2011-10-24T12:52:00.004-04:00

Dunnottar Castle is an incredibly picturesque ruined castle on the eastern shore of Scotland. It isn't a classic motte-and-bailey or concentric castle with an elborate keep, but rather a well-fortified natural site surrounded by steep coastal cliffs, which adds to the drama of its present appearance.

UndiscoveredScotland.co.uk and Wikipedia have some great history and images of the castle, but an easy way to see the layout of the ruin is to look at Google Maps or some other images (1, 2, 3, 4).

Blog lifecycles

2011-10-17T10:17:00.005-04:00

It's sometimes frustrating that 95% of blogs are abandoned after their authors lose interest:

The home run scenario for blogging is incredibly alluring -- thousands of ravenous fans fawning over your next thought-provoking or comedic masterpiece -- but time and time again I fail to meet these expectations or manage them more appropriately. I enter the same cycle each time:

Blog Lifecycle
1) Euphoric moment of inspiration
2) Pseudo-maniacal and self-indulgent perusing of domains
3) Careful consideration of theme and design
4) The inaugural post - "Hello world!"
5) The 2-4 post honeymoon phase
6) Waning and changing interests
7) Feelings of desperation and apathy from low engagement
8) Inevitable abandonment :(

It turns out that this cycle may not be uncommon. Surveys have shown that 95% of blogs are abandoned within 120 days and 60-80% of them abandoned within the first month.

Panglott's Garden has been running for some two and a half years, mostly because I think of it as an infrequently- and irregularly-published public commonplace book of interest to few, more than a blog of the Twitter Age.

"Risk" on Hexagons

2011-09-27T22:52:00.007-04:00

Some time ago, I was talking with a friend about the board game "Risk", and ventured into the world of alternate maps for the game as an introduction more complex rules variants. I'm still interested in putting together a more involved variant based on Sengoku-era Japan using a map of the ancient provinces of Japan. I still remember the ads for "Shogun" in my "Axis & Allies" box; I really wanted to play that game as a kid, which I see Avalon Hill/Hasbro has just re-issued as "Ikusa".

In any case, I wanted to explore whether symmetrical, abstract alternate maps based on hexagonal tilings would be interesting, which led to the project of translating the original "Risk" map onto an abstract hexagonal map. It doesn't work perfectly, though, since some territories take up two or three hexes.

Estimating the metric weather

2011-08-11T17:12:00.006-04:00

Americans really have no need for metrification, since we use the same system everywhere. Most of us have to travel across an ocean, or at least to another country, before we have use for the metric system in everyday life, outside of specific contexts. And so I never really learned to make small talk about the weather in the metric system, even when I lived in a metric country for a year and a half.

But it's probably not all that hard to convert mentally~~: 5°C is 9°F~~. So a Celsius temperature in the low teens corresponds to a Fahrenheit temperature in the 50s, while a Celsius temperature in the high teens corresponds to a Fahrenheit temperature in the 60s.

Celsius	Fahrenheit
0-5°C	32-41°F
5-10°C	41-50°F
10-15°C	50-59°F
15-20°C	59-68°F
20-25°C	68-77°F
25-30°C	77-86°F
30-35°C	86-95°F
35-40°C	95-104°F
40-45°C	104-113°F
45-50°C	113-122°F

More broadly, around here in Kentucky, temperatures in winter are usually in the 00s, spring in the 10s, summer in the 30s, and fall in the 20s. In Louisville it very rarely breaks 40°C, but when I was a kid in Oklahoma it sometimes got over 45°C, I remember seeing a record high of 49°C (120°F).

OTOH, the metric system is very useful in cooking, since a cup is 240 mL, a tablespoon 15 mL, and a teaspoon 5 mL.

EDIT
It occurs to me the reason I never learned to estimate the temperature in Celsius, while living in a metric country, was that I spent much time precisely calculating the Celsius-to-Fahrenheit conversion. A simpler conversion, like "double the Celsius temperature and add 30" would have been better: quicker and easier and nearly as accurate.

Also, strikethough an egregious error :)

Debt ceiling, the euro, the economy

2011-08-01T20:58:00.004-04:00

So, I guess liberals are supposed to be really upset about the debt ceiling deal that came out of last weekend to be voted on today/tomorrow. Dave Weigel has a guide to debt deal denunciations while Jonathan Bernstein explains liberal bitterness over the deal. But I don't see what the fuss is about.

In the beginning, President Obama wanted a grand bargain for $4 trillion in debt reduction over 10 years along with some small revenue increases. This deal doesn't have the revenue increases, but the spending cuts are also much less than in the grand bargain. The core of the cuts are something that would have been there regardless of whether or not there were revenue increases; the revenue increases were in there to sweeten the pot for even more spending cuts. The deal convenes a deficit commission that is very likely to pass through some revenue increases, or otherwise trigger automatic spending cuts that are mostly defense spending cuts. And defense spending should be cut at every possible chance: the US spends more on the military now than at any point during the height of the Cold War. See this graph from the Center for American Progress (or this one from the Heritage Foundation). The debt ceiling issue was a stupid, fake problem that only became a real economic issue through political hostage-taking over spending. It could impact the economy in several ways: by forcing a protracted government shutdown or austerity during a time of economic weakness that, by reducing government spending, reduces GDP and provokes a recession; by increassing the cost of financing government debt through a downgrade by the ratings agencies; through a (very unlikely) technical default; or via financial panic caused by any of that. All of these were overblown: only one of the three ratings agencies was ever threatening to downgrade US debt (all such companies have lost credibility following the mortgage crisis debacle, and the market prices of US debt, which are what actually matter, are fine). But the spending cuts in the debt ceiling deal are strongly weighted to 2013 and later, giving only a direct 0.04-0.4% drag to GDP. That's not great, but not apocalyptic absent other problems.

Meanwhile, the US economy is on pins and needles, since there was never a recovery from the last recession. Demand is weak, GDP is well below potential output, and employment never recovered, leading to a seemingly-permanent decline in trend GDP and the employment/population ratio. After the end of monetary stimulus in QE2, the softening economic numbers seem to be headed back towards recession.

And the really worrying problem continues to be the Eurozone. The deal announced July 22 to finally bring Greece into technical default, seems to have helped Greece, Ireland, and Portugal, but the Eurofail seems to be infecting Spain and Italy as badly as ever. As US manufacturing hit its lowest level in two years, the Eurozone is still collapsing.

It looks like the Italy-Germany bond spread is 2011's TED spread, but Spanish 10-year bonds are another measure of contagion.

Old Fort

2011-07-13T09:39:00.010-04:00

It's been a while since I posted a dungeon map, but here's an old fort-cum-leper colony I used for some additional encounters in my Pathfinder campaign of The Coils of Set. I actually put this together at about the same time as the Wizard's Bastle, and it's similarly inspired by L-shaped towers. This Old Fort was part of a series of multipath, nonlinear dungeons: It's organized so there are multiple ways to travel between dungeon areas. Each level will fit on a GameMastery flip map; here it is from bottom to top.

Old Fort: Lower LevelsWhen I ran this dungeon recently, this level was warded with an old, permanent guards and wards spell, and patrolled by gas spores, gray oozes, violet fungi, and a mind slayer telepath. In each corner, a stairway leads up to small towers in the northeast, northwest, southwest, and southeast corners of the fort. In the central area of the dungeon, just to the north and south of the large middle chamber, there are two chambers with a large shaft running through them. In these rooms, a small shaft opens in the ceiling that opens to the courtyard above, and a 10-foot-wide pit opens to deeper areas. Below this level, there is just a simple raceway patrolled by gelatinous cubes and other garbage-eating oozes, for waste disposal.

Old Fort 1FGates to the east and west provide access to the fort's courtyard, which is defined by four small L-shaped towers. Each tower has stairs leading up, and down to the dungeon below, as well as prison cells, barracks, and other rooms (There's an error on the stairs on the western towers on this level: the stairs are reversed). Two wells in the courtyard are actually used for waste disposal, and lead through the dungeon below to ooze-pits.

Old Fort 2FSimilarly to the first floor, stairs lead up and down. Most of these chambers have shuttered arrow slits that serve as windows.

Old Fort 3FThe large rooms of the top floor would feel quite spacious if not for the fact that the walls and ceiling of these attics are the angled wooden walls of the roof, so much of the space is fairly awkward. Large windows overlook the landscape of the surrounding region.

RPGs—Kilderkin gnome

2011-06-24T10:05:00.004-04:00

The following post is released under the OGL.

Kilderkin gnomes are an offshoot of the gnome race regarded by some as naive, innocent, and joyous, and by others as troublesome, larcenous tricksters. Less overtly magical than most of their gnome kin, they blend their brethren's immense curiosity, mischeviousness, and wanderlust with generous and kind-hearted spirit. Although commonly viewed with suspicion due to their reputation as petty thieves and shoplifters, kilderkin gnomes are not motivated by avarice; they simply cannot resist their obsession with palming and collecting small, sparkly, glittery things, and just do not understand the conventions of personal property. When confronted about their pickpocketing, they shyly return what they have taken, but learn nothing that will prevent them from lifting items in the future.

Kilderkin Gnome Racial Traits

Gnomekin: Kilderkin gnomes are humanoids with the gnome subtype.

+2 Constitution, +2 Charisma, –2 Strength: Kilderkin are physically weak but surprisingly hardy, and their attitude makes them naturally agreeable.

Small: Kilderkin are Small creatures and gain a +1 size bonus to their AC, a +1 size bonus on attack rolls, a –1 penalty to their Combat Maneuver Bonus and Combat Maneuver Defense, and a +4 size bonus on Stealth checks.

Slow Speed: Kilderkin have a base speed of 20 feet.

Low-Light Vision: Kilderkin can see twice as far as humans in conditions of dim light.

Defensive Training: Kilderkin get a +4 dodge bonus to AC against monsters of the giant type.

Fearless: Kilderkin receive a +2 racial bonus on all saving throws against fear.

Gnome Magic: Gnomes add +1 to the DC of any saving throws against illusion spells that they cast. Kilderkin gnomes with a Charisma of 11 or higher also gain the following spell-like abilities: 1/day—know direction, ghost sound, detect poison, and detect secret doors. The caster level for these effects is equal to the kilderkin's level. The DC for these spells is equal to 10 + the spell's level + the kilderkin's Charisma modifier.

Infuriating: Kilderkin receive a +2 racial bonus on Charisma-based skill checks to taunt, insult, or irritate others, or otherwise make others more hostile.

Keen Senses: Kilderkin receive a +2 racial bonus on Perception skill checks.

Light-fingered: Kilderkin receive a +2 racial bonus on Sleight of Hand skill checks.

Weapon Familiarity: Kilderkin gnomes treat any weapon with the word “gnome” in its name as a martial weapon.

Languages: Kilderkin begin play speaking Common and Gnome. Kilderkin with high Intelligence scores can choose from the following: Draconic, Dwarven, Elven, Giant, Goblin, Orc, and Sylvan.

"Tomatoland" & slavery

2011-06-20T22:12:00.004-04:00

Here's an excerpt of Barry Estabrook's book Tomatoland:

Today's industrial tomatoes are as bereft of nutrition as they are of flavor. According to analyses conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, fresh tomatoes today have 30 percent less vitamin C, 30 percent less thiamin, 19 percent less niacin, and 62 percent less calcium than they did in the 1960s.

The best way to experience true tomato taste is to grow your own. Little wonder that tomatoes are by far the most popular vegetable for home gardeners, found in nearly nine out of 10 backyard plots. ...Not everyone can grow a garden or head out to a neighborhood farmers' market in search of the ideal tomato. But we all have an alternative to the sad offerings of commercial agriculture.

...Florida's tomato fields provide a stark example of what a food system looks like when all elements of sustainability are violated. ...If it were left up to the laws of botany and nature, Florida would be one of the last places in the world where tomatoes grow.

...Florida tomato workers, mostly Hispanic migrants, toil without union protection and get neither overtime, benefits, nor medical insurance. They are denied basic legal rights that virtually all other laborers enjoy. ...And conditions are even worse for some in Florida's tomato industry. In the chilling words of Douglas Molloy, chief assistant United States attorney in Fort Myers, South Florida's tomato fields are "ground zero for modern-day slavery." ...Workers were "sold" to crew bosses to pay off bogus debts, beaten if they didn't work, held in chains, pistol whipped, locked at night into shacks in chain-link enclosures patrolled by armed guards. Escapees who got caught were beaten or worse. Even though police have successfully prosecuted seven major slavery cases in the state in the last 15 years, those brought to justice were low-ranking contract field managers, themselves only one or two shaky rungs up the economic ladder from those they enslaved. The wealthy owners of the vast farms walked away scot-free. They expressed no public regrets, let alone outrage, that such conditions existed on operations they controlled. But we all share the blame. When I asked Molloy if it was safe to assume that a consumer who has eaten a fresh tomato from a grocery store, fast food restaurant, or food-service company in the winter has eaten a fruit picked by the hand of a slave, he corrected my choice of words. "It's not an assumption. It is a fact."

But RTWT. Here's another excerpt, a review or two, and an interview. The book is an expansion of Eastabrook's March 2009 "Gourmet" article The Price of Tomatoes, which describes the case of one worker who was forced into debt slavery. There Eastabrook offers this advice on buying slave-free fruits:

In the warm months, the best solution is to follow that old mantra: buy seasonal, local, and small-scale. But what about in winter? So far, Whole Foods is the only grocery chain that has signed on to the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) Campaign for Fair Food, which means that it has promised not to deal with growers who tolerate serious worker abuses and, when buying tomatoes, to a pay a price that supports a living wage. When shopping elsewhere, you can take advantage of the fact that fruits and vegetables must be labeled with their country of origin. Most of the fresh tomatoes in supermarkets during winter months come from Florida, where labor conditions are dismal for field workers, or from Mexico, where they are worse, according to a CIW spokesman. One option during these months is to buy locally produced hydroponic greenhouse tomatoes, including cluster tomatoes still attached to the vine. Greenhouse tomatoes are also imported from Mexico, however, so check signage or consult the little stickers often seen on the fruits themselves to determine their source. You can also visit the CIW’s information-packed website (ciw-online.org) if you are interested in becoming part of the coalition’s efforts.

Here's CIW's anti-slavery campaign. CIW is probably most famous here in Louisville for the pressure on Yum! and Taco Bell a few years ago. I vaguely recall the "Gourmet" story, too; I guess this is something that has been dancing around my consciousness for a while, but Eastabrooks dials it up. Perhaps it's because the tomato issue is usually framed in terms of wage negotiations, but Eastabrook discusses it in terms of human slavery. A review: "(Says Estabrook: 'If you have ever eaten a tomato during the winter months, you have eaten a fruit picked by a slave.')"

The 2003 New Yorker story Nobodies covering the investigation and trial of several slavers. This is an old story, writes David von Drehle:

On the day after Thanksgiving, 1960, legendary newsman Edward R. Murrow took millions of Americans into the tomato fields of Florida via the landmark CBS documentary “Harvest of Shame.” He began by quoting a farmer who said, “We used to own our slaves. Now we just rent them.” And he ended with the idea that an outraged public might press for meaningful laws to protect the migrant workers “who harvest your fruits and vegetables.”

More than half a century later, journalist Barry Estabrook has returned to those fields and reports that things are no better...

When I was a young reporter at The Miami Herald in the 1980s, we wrote exposes from Immokalee and Clewiston and other hubs of South Florida agriculture. The generation before us had written those same pieces, and the generation before them, too. Anyone who believes that journalists have great power to should try reading everything that has been written on this sad subject, going back to Ernie Pyle’s 1940 visit, when he observed “pigpens filled with humans” in the “Florida version of ‘The Grapes of Wrath.’ ”

But Estabrook bears witness again, and tells the story well. ...he taught me a lot—not just about farmer’s markets and heirloom tomatoes. I learned that even in the most soulless supermarket you can find better-tasting tomatoes grown in appropriate climates. You just have to look in the canned vegetables aisle.

Yes, canned tomatoes are superior to the smooth, red orbs in the produce section. They’re grown in the suitably dry air of California and allowed to ripen before they are picked and processed.

Mark Bittman concurs on The True Cost of Tomatoes:

The tomato fields of Immokalee are vast and surreal. An unplanted field looks like a lousy beach: the “soil,” which is white sand, contains little in the way of nutrients and won’t hold any water. To grow tomatoes there requires mind-boggling amounts of fertilizers, fungicides and pesticides (on roughly the same acreage of tomatoes, Florida uses about eight times as many chemicals as California). The tomatoes are, in effect, grown hydroponically, and the sand seems useful mostly as a medium for holding stakes in place.

...The breakthrough for the CIW came in 2005, when after enormous consumer pressure Yum! Brands, which controls Taco Bell, Pizza Hut and KFC, signed the agreement. (And you know what? Good for them.) Since then, Subway, McDonald’s, Burger King, the country’s largest food service operators (Sodexo, Aramark and Compass Group) and Whole Foods have signed as well.

Progress, clearly. What’s missing are traditional supermarket chains, and the CIW has targeted — largely for geographical reasons — Ahold (the parent company of Stop & Shop and Giant); Publix (the dominant chain in Florida); Kroger (next to Wal-Mart the biggest food retailer in the country); and Trader Joe’s...).

Most of us eat or buy industrially produced tomatoes, and it doesn’t seem too much to ask that the people who pick them for us be treated a little more fairly. Speak to your supermarket manager or write to the head of the chain you patronize (the easiest way to do this is to visit this page on the CIW site). Supermarkets, I expect, are as susceptible to public pressure as fast-food chains.

Our back yard is really shady, and so gardening didn't work out last year; I had been thinking of waiting until next year to put in new garden beds in a sunnier spot. It's really late in the season, but I went ahead and planted three tomato plants yesterday.

Book Snippets: "Battle Cry of Freedom" - Political parties

2011-06-08T12:05:00.002-04:00

In a couple of my posts here on electoral reform, I've referred to some contemporary dissatisfactions about political parties. That contemporary parties do not represent a pure (or even coherent) ideological position, but rather a mishmash of ideas that can be manipulated or exploited by elites, corrupt elements, or the powers that be.

James M. McPherson's "Battle Cry of Freedom" (Oxford UP, 1988) has an interesting (if somewhat orthogonal passage) on the role of political parties in the Union and Confederacy:

Formal political parties did not exist in the Confederacy. This state of affairs arose from two main causes: the erosion of the two-party system in the 1850s and the perceived need for a unified front during the emergencies of secession and war. Southerners considered this circumstance a source of strength. ...But in fact, as historians now recognize, the absence of parties was actually a source of weakness. In the North the two-party system disciplined and channeled political activity. The Republican party became the means for mobilizing war resources, raising taces, creating a new financial system, initiating emancipation, and enacting conscription. Democrats opposed most of these measures; the existence of this well-defined opposition caused Republicans to close ranks when the chips were down. Because measures were supported or opposed by parties, voters could identify those responsible for them and register their approval or disapproval at the polls by voting a party ticket. Both parties, of course, used their well-oiled machinery to rally voters to their side. In the Confederacy, by contrast, the Davis administration had no such means to mobilize support. No parties meant no institutionalized discipline over congressmen or governors. Davis could not invoke party loyalty and patronage in behalf of his policies, as Lincoln could. Opposition to the Davis administration became personal or factional and therefore difficult to deal with.

In the North, where nearly all state governors were Republicans, the ties of party bound them to the war effort. In the South the obstructionist activities of several governors hindered the centralized war effort because the centrifugal tendencies of state's rights were not restrained by the centripetal force of party. The Confederate Constitution limited the president to a single six-year term, so Davis had little reason to create a party organization for re-election. Such government policies as conscription, impressment, the tax in kind, and management of finances were the main issues in the congressional elections of 1863. Opposition candidates ran on an individual rather than a party basis, and the government could not muster political artillery to shoot at all these scattered targets. (689-690)

This implies that the main function of the party system is not to represent coherent ideological positions, but rather to focus support for or opposition to the governing party. And indeed, even aside from Duverger's law, it seems to me that the main distinction between the parties is governing vs. opposition. The two contemporary parties have a governing form and an opposition form that contrast with each other, which helps explains Jane's Law: "The devotees of the party in power are smug and arrogant. The devotees of the party out of power are insane."

Following the Civil War, the Republican Party was the leading governing party in the North (while the Democratic Party was the main opposition party there), while the Democratic Party was the leading governing party in the South (while the Republican Party was the main opposition party there. The Democratic Party was a famously Southern agent of Jim Crow and white supremacism until the 1960s. But as for the contemporary parties, it's almost as if the old governing-party form of each withered away and disappeared, leaving the opposition-party form as the new governing party in each section. For whatever sectionalism remains, the Democratic Party has become the leading governing party in the northeastern United States, while the Republican Party has become the leading governing party in the southeastern United States.

Book Snippets: "Battle Cry of Freedom" - Musket to rifle

2011-06-08T11:40:00.002-04:00

James M. McPherson explains, in "Battle Cry of Freedom" (Oxford UP, 1988), that the shift from musket to rifle just before the American Civil War caused a shift from offensive infantry charges with bayonet to defensive tactics. "The rifle and trench ruled Civil War battlefields as thoroughly as the machine-gun and trench ruled those of World War I," he says (477). In one battle later in the war, a defensive line of three trenches crawling with riflemen achieved a rate of fire on charging troops nearly equivalent to machine-gun fire, and Lee's army met its eventual defeat in the grueling trench warfare around Petersburg, Virginia. McPherson:

One reason for the high casualties of Civil War battles was the disparity between traditional tactics and modern weapons. The tactical legacy of eighteenth-century and Napoleonic warfare had emphasized close-order formations of soldiers trained to maneuver in concert and fire by volleys. To be sure, some of the citizen-soldiers of the American Revolution fought Indian-style from behind trees or rocks, and the half-trained levée en masse of the French Revolution advanced in loose order like "clouds of skirmishers." But they did so mainly because they lacked training and discipline; the ideal for Washington's Continentals and Napoleon's veterans as well as Frederick's Prussians and Wellington's redcoats remained the compact, cohesive columns and lines of automatons who moved and fired with machine-like efficiency.

These tactics also stressed the offensive. Assault troops advanced with cadenced step, firing volleys on command and then double-timing the last few yards to pierce the enemy line with bayonet charge. Napoleon used his artillery in conjunction with infantry assaults, moving the field guns forward with the foot soldiers to blast holes in enemy ranks and soften them up for the final charge. Americans used these tactics with great success in the Mexican War. West Point teaching stressed the tactical offensive. Most of the top Civil War officers had fought in Mexico and/or had attended West Point; from both experiences they had absorbed the message that the tactical offensive based on close-order infantry assaults supported by artillery won battles.

In Mexico this happened without high casualties because the basic infantry weapons was the single-shot muzzle-loading smoothbore musket. The maximum range of this weapon was about 250 yards; its effective range (the distance at which a good marksman could hit a target with any regularity) was about eighty yards on a still day. The close-order formation was therefore necessary to concentrate the firepower of these inaccurate weapons; artillery could accompany charging infantry because cannoneers were relatively safe from enemy musket fire until they came within a couple of hundred yards or less; bayonet charges could succeed because double-timing infantry could cover the last eighty yards during the twenty-five seconds it took defending infantrymen to reload their muskets after firing a volley.

Rifling a musket increased its range fourfold by imparting a spin to a conical bullet that enabled it literally to bore through the air. This fact had been known for centuries, but before the 1850s only special regiments or one or two companies per regiment were equipped with rifles. These companies were used as skirmishers—that is, they operated in front and on the flanks of the main body, advancing or withdrawing in loose order and shooting at will from long range at enemy targets of opportunity. Given the rifle's greater range and accuracy, why were not all infantrymen equipped with it? Because a bullet large enough to "take" the rifling was difficult to ram down the barrel. Riflemen sometimes had to pound the ramrod down with a mallet. After a rifle had been fired a few times a residue of powder built up in the grooves and had to be cleaned out before it could be fired again. Since rapid and reliable firing was essential in battle, the rifle was not practicable for the mass of infantrymen.

Until the 1850s, that is. Although several people contributed to the development of a practicable military rifle, the main credit belongs to French army Captain Claude E. Minié and to the American James M. Burton, an armorer at the Harper's Ferry Armory. In 1848 Minié perfected a bullet small enoguh to be easily rammed down a rifled barrel, with a wooden plug in the base of the bullet to expand it upon firing to take the rifling. Such bullets were expensive; Burton developed a cheaper and better bullet with a deep cavity in the base that filled with gas and expanded the rim upon firing. This was the famous "minié ball" of Civil War rifles. The superiority of the rifle was demonstrated by British and French soldiers who carried them in the Crimean War. As Secretary of War in 1855, Jefferson Davis converted the United States army to the .58 caliber Springfield rifled musket. Along with the similar British Enfield rifle (caliber .577, which would take the same bullet as the Springfield, the Springfield became the main infantry arm of the Civil War.

...Northern industry geared up to manufacture more than two million rifles during the war; unable to produce more than a fraction of this total, the South relied mainly on imports through the blockade and on capture of Union rifles. In 1861 neither side had many rifles, so most solidiers carried old smoothbores taken from storage in arsenals. During 1862, most Union regiments received new Springfields or Enfields, while many Confederate units still had to rely on smoothbores. ...By 1863 nearly all infantrymen on both sides carried rifles.

The transition from smoothbore to rifle had two main effects: it multiplied casualties; and it strengthened the tactical defensive. Officers trained and experienced in the old tactics were slow to recognize these changes. Time and again generals on both sides ordered close-order assaults in the traditional formation. With an effective range of three or four hundred yards, defenders firing rifles decimated these attacks.Artillery declined in importance as an offensive weapon, because its accuracy and the reliability of shells at long range was poor, and the gund could no longer advance with the infantry toward enemy lines, for marksmen could pick off cannoneers and especially the horses at distances up to half a mile. Sharpshooters also singled out enemy officers, which helps to explain why officers and especially generals had higher casualty rates than privates. ...The old-fashioned cavalry charge against infantry, already obsolescent, became obsolete in the face of rifles that could knock down horses long before their riders got within saber or pistol range. The Civil War hastened the evolution of dismounted cavalry tactics in which the horse was mainly a means of transportation rather than a weapon in its own right. (472-475)

Book Snippets: "Battle Cry of Freedom" - American Industrialization

2011-06-08T10:58:00.004-04:00

As noted before, James M. McPherson's "Battle Cry of Freedom" (Oxford UP, 1988) is a fantastic book. And a great deal of its value derives from McPherson's excellent, well-crafted prose. Later in the book, McPherson briefly describes dozens of battles with great clarity and freshness and remarkably little repetition. He's able to succintly and evocatively summarize complex trends in a page or two, or overview a debated topic simply.

For example, McPherson describes the momentous "transportation revolution" of the first half of the 19th century, which began with overland travel limited to muddy wagon tracks and rivers, followed by a massive network of railroads and canals enabling fast shipping from the western frontier to the coast. Communication that had been limited to the postal service and couriers on horseback was revolutionized by a telegraph network that allowed the instantaneous nationwide communication of prices, allowing price disparities in distant parts of the country to by arbitraged away by traders. So...

The transportation revolution refashioned the economy. As late as 1815, Americans produced on their farms or in their homes most of the things they consumed, used, or wore. Most clothing was sewn by mothers and daughters, made from cloth that in many cases they had spun and woven themselves by the light of candles they had dipped or by natural light coming in through windows in houses built of local materials from a nearby sawmill or brickyard by local carpenters or masons or by the male members of the household. Shoes were made by members of the family or by the village cordwainer from leather cured at a local tannery. Blacksmiths forged the tools and farm implements used in the community. Even firearms were built with handicraft skill and pride by a nearby craftsman. In larger towns and cities, master tailors or shoemakers or cabinetmakers or wheelwrights presided over small shops where they worked with a few journeymen and an apprentice or two who turned out fine custom or "bespoke" goods for wealthier purchasers. In an age of slow and expensive overland transport, few of these items were sold more than twenty miles from where they were made.

This pre-industrial world could not survive the transportation revolution, which made possible a division of labor and specialization of production for ever larger and more distant markets. More and more farmers specialized in crops for which their soil and climate were most suitable. With all the cash from sale of these crops they bought food and clothing and hardware previously made locally or by themselves but now grown, processed, or manufactured elsewhere and shipped in by canal or rail. To sow and reap these specialized crops, farmers bought newly invented seed drills, cultivators, mowers, and reapers that burgeoning farm machinery industry turned out in ever-increasing numbers.

In towns and cities, entrepreneurs who became known as "merchant capitalists" or "industrialists" reorganized or standardized the production of a variety of goods for large-volume sale in regional and eventually national markets. Some of these new entrepreneurs came from the ranks of master craftsmen who now planned and directed the work of employees to whom they paid wages by the day or by the piece instead of sharing with the work of fabricating a product and the proceeds of its sale. Other merchant capitalists and industrialists had little or not prior connection with the "trade" (shoemaking, tailoring, etc.). They were businessmen who provided capital and organizing skills to restructure an enterprise in a more efficient manner. This restructuring took various forms, but had one dominant feature in common: The process of making a product (shoes or furniture, for example), which had previously been performed by one or a few skilled craftsmen, was broken down into numerous steps each requiring limited skills and performed by a separate worker. Sometimes the worker did his task with hand tools, but increasingly with the aid of power-driven machinery.

...Whatever the precise mixture of power machinery and hand tools, of central shop and putting out, the main characteristics of production were division and specialization of labor, standardization of product, greater discipline of the labor force, improved efficiency, higher volume, and lower costs. These factors reduced wholesale commodity prices by 45 percent from 1815 to 1860. During the same years consumer prices declined even more, by an estimated 50 percent.

By 1860 the nascent outline of the modern American economy of mass consumption, mass production, and capital-intensive agriculture was visible. Its development had been uneven across different regions and industries. It was far from complete even in the most advanced sections of the country like New England, where many village blacksmiths and old-time shoemakers could still be found. On the frontier west of the Mississippi and on many internal frontiers in the older sections where the transportation revolution had not yet penetrated–the upland and piney woods regions of the South, for example, or the forests of Maine and the Adirondacks–it had scarcely begun. Many Americans still lived in a nearly self-sufficient handicraft, premarket economy not much different from what their grandparents had known. But the advanced sectors of the economy had already given the United States the world's highest standard of living and the second-highest industrial output, closing in fast on their British counsins despite the latter's half-century head start in the industrial revolution. (13-15)

Several explanations have been proposed for the unique, capital-intensive, mechanized pattern of development in the United States, McPherson explains: the scarcity of labor, which made laborers open to invention and mechanization, the sheer wealth of capital available in the form of natural resources, and high levels of education. (17-18)

Later, McPherson notes that the "South's defensive-aggressive temper in the 1850s stemmed in part from a sense of economic subordination to the North", since the North's economy appeared to be developing much faster than the South's (91):

Contemporaries and historians have advanced several explanations for this "failure of industrialization in the slave economy," as the subtitle of a recent study has termed it. ...Other accounts of southern industrialization have focused not on deficiencies of labor or of demand but on a lack of capital. Capital was abundant in the South, to be sure: in 1860, according to the census measure of wealth (real and personal property), the average southern white male was nearly twice as wealthy as the average northern white man. The problem was that most of this wealth was invested in land and slaves. ...A northerner described the investment cycle of the Southern economy: "To sell cotton in order to buy negroes–to make more cotton to buy more negroes, 'ad infinitum,' is the aim and direct tendency of all operations of the thorough going cotton planter." (95-97)

"Cave of Forgotten Dreams" and atlatls

2011-06-07T12:23:00.008-04:00

Werner Herzog's "Cave of Forgotten Dreams" was a great movie. It seemed like the first time that I really got my money's worth for a 3D movie.¹ All these summer action movies that are using 3D favor wide open, expansive shots, perhaps to give it an "epic" feel. But since strong foreground/background contrast is rare, most of the 3D effect manifests itself as brief gimmicky-seeming shots where a spear seems to swing out toward the audience. "Cave", by contrast, depicts an enclosed space, where there is always strong contrast between foreground and background, so the 3D effect is quite pronounced; at times it seems like you're looking into a box.

And it is used to good effect. The Neolithic art in the cave was not painted on a flat surface, but undulating walls, curved stalactites, and rock curtains. The 3D effect provides a lot of useful visual information about how the art fits into the cave. And it's amazing, as light and shadow play over the space: in one scene, we can see a painting of a rhinoceros on the far wall. Nearer to the viewer, a sheet of rock juts out, on which is painted a pair of lions: it looks as if we are witnessing the lions sneak up on the rhinoceros from behind the cover of stone.

In the end, 3D does seem gimmicky, even though it's used well in this film. Film remains a two-dimensional medium, and the 3D effect is a visual trick: by the end of the movie, the effect became so disorienting that I had to take my glasses off and look away for a moment to readjust.

Herzog finds some really wonderfully nerdy people, like the experimental archaeologist and the fragrance expert. I do wish there was more atlatl: they are awesome. An atlatl dart is like a precursor to the bow and arrow, in which the energy stored and released in the flexing bow is instead stored and released in the flexing atlatl missile. IIRC, the atlatl dart in flight has a somewhat lower velocity than an arrow, but a much greater mass, so an atlatl dart can have greater penetration of the target. While atlatl darts may be better against large game, it's easier to carry numerous arrows than the larger darts. Fortunately the World Atlatl Association has some members across the river from Louisville.

MAKE also has a weekend project video on making atlatls, and YouTube has some videos of successful hunts with them of emu, bison, and hog.

1. I also enjoyed "Coraline", but the 3D there also seemed like a more gimmicky use of the effect.

Bilingualism, brain health, and mental training

2011-06-02T11:49:00.006-04:00

In America, we live in one of the few countries where most of the population is exclusively monolingual. Bilingualism and multilingualism are more the human norm. Jared Diamond writes, in The Benefits of Multilingualism (Science, 330:6002 (15 October 2010), 332-333.):

Multilingualism—the ability to understand and speak several languages—is exceptional in the United States but common elsewhere, especially in small-scale traditional societies. For instance, once while I was camped with some New Guinea Highlanders conversing simultaneously in several local languages, I asked each man to name each language in which he could converse. It turned out that everyone present spoke at least 5 languages, and the champion was a man who spoke 15. What are the cognitive effects of such multilingualism? Recent studies (1–5) show that children raised bilingually develop a specific type of cognitive benefit during infancy, and that bilingualism offers some protection against symptoms of Alzheimer's dementia in old people.

...Our minds are assaulted by varied sights, sounds, and other external sensory inputs, plus thoughts and proprioreceptive sensations (which make us aware of the relative positions of our own body parts) (see the figure). To succeed in doing anything at all, we must temporarily inhibit 99% of those inputs and attend to just 1% of them, and the appropriate choice varies with the circumstances. That selective attention involves a set of processes, termed executive function, that reside in the prefrontal cortex and develop especially over the first 5 years of life.

Multilingual people have a special challenge involving executive function. Monolinguals hearing a word need only compare it with their single stock of arbitrary phoneme (sound) and meaning rules, and when uttering a word they draw it from that single stock. ...Multilinguals participating in a multilingual conversation...switch frequently and unpredictably between their stocks of phoneme/meaning rules. As a result, multilinguals have constant unconscious practice in using the executive function system.

Such pervasive multilingualism can cause enormous cross-pollination and "covergent evolution" in languages. Bill Foley says, in More on Papuan Languages:

Somewhere close to a quarter of the total of the world's languages are spoken in the New Guinea region-about 1100 languages. ...The small size of many Papuan speaking speech communities has often led to persistent multilingualism in the language of adjoining communities, the development of trade jargons for interlanguage communication or the shifting of language allegiance to languages of more powerful or economically advantaged neighbours. In such a complex, fragmented linguistic situation, Papuan languages not unexpectedly exhibit a pattern of enormous cross-influence in all areas. All types of linguistic features, basic vocabulary, pronouns, grammatical patterns, discourse styles can be and have been borrowed from one language into another. This makes the establishment of genetic links among Papuan languages doubly difficult: with no documentation for the vast majority of them older than 50 years, it is problematic indeed to sift what is true genetically inherited material from what is borrowed from other languages, especially borrowing from genetically related contiguous languages or borrowings centuries old from now deceased languages.

Diamond cites the research of Ellen Bialystok; LanguageLog and languagehat point us to The Bilingual Advantage, a Q&A with Bialystok at the NYT:

Q. One of your most startling recent findings is that bilingualism helps forestall the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. How did you come to learn this?

A. We did two kinds of studies. In the first, published in 2004, we found that normally aging bilinguals had better cognitive functioning than normally aging monolinguals. Bilingual older adults performed better than monolingual older adults on executive control tasks. That was very impressive because it didn’t have to be that way. It could have turned out that everybody just lost function equally as they got older.

That evidence made us look at people who didn’t have normal cognitive function. In our next studies , we looked at the medical records of 400 Alzheimer’s patients. On average, the bilinguals showed Alzheimer’s symptoms five or six years later than those who spoke only one language. This didn’t mean that the bilinguals didn’t have Alzheimer’s. It meant that as the disease took root in their brains, they were able to continue functioning at a higher level. They could cope with the disease for longer.

Which reminds me somewhat of the Gizmodo post How to Make Yourself Smarter in 20 Days, which highlights the use of n-back mental training exercises for 20 minutes a day for 20 days to increase fluid intelligence for three months. Not that I've tried it, but Brain Workshop vaguely reminds me of electronic flashcards and spaced repetition software like Anki, for memorization. Executive control, fluid intelligence, and vocabulary memorization are all very different, but it seems like 20 minutes a day of abstract memory practice would get pretty boring, and something language-related may be more interesting.

EDIT
Brain Calisthenics for Abstract Ideas (NYT)

Conlanging is a great excuse to not write

2011-06-02T10:44:00.001-04:00

Conlanging is perhaps the best excuse ever invented for NOT writing. Many of the people attracted to this hobby are science fiction or fantasy writers or other people who have reason to invent a detailed, verisimilistic fantasy world. Language can contribute to that in powerful ways; creating and using a coherent naming language or some phrases can help evoke a sense that the author is describing a dynamic, existant, alien world.

But it's very easy to go way overboard with this. Many writers spend as much or more time seeking excuses to avoid writing, because writing is hard. It's an inclination perfectly skewered by Merlin Mann's parody of distraction-free writing environments (via forkbombr via DF):

While some so-called environments that are less free of distraction may display one, three, or even more lines of text—all at the same time—we understand that if you could only achieve the theoretical removal of all theoretical distractions, you would finally be able to write something. And we want ū— to help you almost do that.

...We also understand that the only way to truly remove an unproductive distraction is to replace it with potentially dozens of more highly productive distractions.

That’s why ū— provides the theoretically serious writer with an incomparably powerful range of options, preferences, and customizations that can literally be tweaked forever without writing a single word—let alone half a character.

Conlanging may be similar to this kind of trap: A language is such a complicated thing that you can fiddle with how it handles voice, aspect, and morphology forever, rather than making a decision and going with it. Which is the perfect excuse not to spend the time working on plot, character, or dialogue.

Nonetheless, I certainly do wish that many more writers would pay more attention to the quality of their linguistic writing. Coherent naming languages would be an enormous improvement over the standard practice in science fiction of presenting gobbledygook as language (as Huttese) or sprinkling words with apostrophes, Qs, and Xs in order to exoticize weak linguistic writing (as Punctuation Shaker). The recent introduction of conlanging to film is a good step in this direction, be it neo-Sindarin or Na'vi.

Or David J. Petersen's Dothraki, created for the HBO tv adaptation of novelist and executive producer George R.R. Martin's "A Game of Thrones". I wasn't impressed by the quality of the linguistic writing on the show at first; the names were mostly warmed-over, exoticized English. When the first words of Dothraki dialogue was spoken, I was amazed because the sophistication of the linguistic writing there was so much higher than the rest of the show. And so it didn't surprise me to learn that the producers had hired someone besides Martin to write the Dothraki language and dialogue.

But it helps demonstrate how different these types of writing are: solid linguistic writing, as in a good naming language, is good for a fantasist. But conlanging is a more specialized, time-consuming, (and non-remunerative) type of artistic writing.

Approximating π

2011-05-25T14:07:00.004-04:00

The ancient fraction for estimating π, 22/7, is only accurate to two decimal places! Terrible, right? Well, that's about 0.04% too big. The common estimate of π to 5 digits (3.14159) is about 99.9999% of the true value. The fraction 355/113 is 0.0000085% too big. How terrible is that?

If you're trying to estimate the number of square feet in a circle with a radius of 100 feet, the fraction 22/7 adds 12.6 square feet to the true total of about 31,416 square feet. Using π to five digits to approximate the area is less than four square inches short of the true total. Using the ratio 355/113 instead of π to approximate the area overestimates the area by little more than a third of a square inch.

Say you're trying to cut a length of rope to go around a sphere the size of the Earth, and you know that the mean radius of the Earth is 6,371 km. If you use the ratio 355/113 to estimate π, then the 20,015-kilometer rope that you cut will be about a meter and a half too long. Measuring a length of rope that long is probably a bigger problem than the error in 355/113 as an approximation of π.

Wikipedia says:

...the decimal representation of π truncated to 11 decimal places is good enough to estimate the circumference of any circle that fits inside the Earth with an error of less than one millimetre, and the decimal representation of π truncated to 39 decimal places is sufficient to estimate the circumference of any circle that fits in the observable universe with precision comparable to the radius of a hydrogen atom.

2011 Derby Disclosure

2011-05-07T14:57:00.002-04:00

Midnight Interlude, Dialed In, and Nehro. With three wins out of the last four Derbies, it's hard not to go with Calvin Borel on Twice the Appeal.

EDIT
It was Animal Kingdom: Nehro placed.

2011 Kentucky Oaks Disclosure

2011-05-06T16:43:00.002-04:00

Zazu, along with Lilacs and Lace and Kathmanblu.

EDIT
Zazu showed.

Road to the Kentucky Derby

2011-05-02T14:56:00.001-04:00

The links in last year's Derby post are mostly still useful this year. But in the months leading up to Derby, there are a number of important Triple Crown prep races that test and prepare the 2011 Kentucky Derby contenders This year, Uncle Mo was an early favorite and the first to get his own Wikipedia page.

Before the colts are three, they're two years old. The Breeder's Cup Juvenile is held in November the year before. Uncle Mo won in 2010 (video); Street Sense had won in 2006 before winning the Kentucky Derby the following year. Also, the American Champion Two-Year-Old Colt is awarded as part of the Eclipse Awards (which also has an award for fillies); Uncle Mo won in 2010; Street Sense had won in 2006.

The major prep races leading up to the Kentucky Derby begin at the end of March and run through April; all are 9 furlongs on dirt, except the Blue Grass Stakes, which is now run on synthetic polytrack.

The Wood Memorial Stakes (top three) is held in mid-April at Aqueduct Racetrack in New York. In 2011, Uncle Mo was heavily favored to win, but in a big upset showed while Toby's Corner won and Arthur's Tale placed (video). In the past, 11 winners have gone on to win the Kentucky Derby, four of whom captured the Triple Crown.
The Arkansas Derby (top three) is held in April at Oaklawn Park in Hot Springs, Arkansas. In 2011, Archarcharch won (video).
The Blue Grass Stakes (top three) is held at Keeneland in Lexington, Kentucky. Brilliant Speed won in 2011 (video).
The Florida Derby (top three) is held at the end of March or the beginning of April. In 2011, Dialed In won (video).
The Louisiana Derby (top three) is held in early March at Fair Grounds in New Orleans, Louisiana. In 2011, Pants on Fire won (video).
The Santa Anita Derby (top three) is held in April at Santa Anita Park in California north of Los Angeles. The winner in 2011 was Midnight Interlude (video).
The Illinois Derby (top three) is held in April at Hawthorne outside Chicago, Illinois. Joe Vann won in 2011 (video).

Looking at the videos, Nehro had good performances at the Louisiana Derby and Arkansas Derby, which would seem to bode well for the long, 10-furlong Kentucky Derby.

Other notable prep races include the Tropical Park Derby (January, 2011), Fountain of Youth Stakes(March), Tampa Bay Derby (March), and Holy Bull Stakes (April) in Florida; the San Felipe Stakes (March) in California; and the Southwest Stakes (February) and Rebel Stakes (March) in Arkansas.

2010 Kentucky Derby

2011-05-02T12:52:00.003-04:00

In 2010, the top three finishers were Super Saver, Ice Box, and Paddy O'Prado.

More whistled language: Pirahã

2011-04-28T14:18:00.000-04:00

It's been a long time since I've posted anything about whistled language and palatal whistling; I managed to do some basic palatal whistling, but my skill plateaued at a very rudimentary level.

Recently, though, I was reminded of this old discussion of Pirahã channels on LanguageLog, which has recordings of musical and whistled modes of Pirahã, among many other posts on the language (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7).

Daniel Everett has a collection of Pirahã audio and video at his old Web page at Illinois State University.

Book Snippets: "Battle Cry of Freedom" - Pro-War, Pro-Horsemen

2011-04-26T16:09:00.002-04:00

I've been reading James M. McPherson's "Battle Cry of Freedom" (Oxford UP, 1988) as a review to begin my sesquicentennial homework. I'm only a couple of chapters in, and it's great. In the second chapter, he overviews the impact of the Mexican War: in the late 1840s and 1850s, the political parties divided along sectional lines over whether to allow slavery to expand into into the territory acquired in the war. The Whigs had opposed the war, and broke up in the domestic aftermath of the conflict. Here's McPherson citing a Whig congressman ironically expressing his feelings on the Mexican War:

"Mr. Polk's War" evoked opposition from Whigs in Congress, who voted against the resolution affirming a state of war with Mexico in May 1846. After the Democratic majority passed this resolution, however, however, most Whigs supported appropriations for the armies confronting enemy forces. Having witnessed the disappearance of the Federalist party after it opposed the War of 1812, a Whig congressman said sardonically that he now favored "war, pestilence, and famine." (47)

Like any patriotic and loyal American, he favors the war. As he favors the plague, the famine, and the death. Brilliant.

Book Snippets: "The Sumerians"Enki, Nin-ti, and Eve

2011-04-26T14:19:00.003-04:00

Samuel Noah Kramer, in "The Sumerians: Their History, Culture and Character" (U of Chicago P, 1964), makes occasional connections between Sumerian and Biblical mythology, citing for example a connection between Dumuzi and the Tammuz mentioned in Ezekiel 8:14-15. Another is an interesting similarity between the Sumerian and Biblical creation myth:

One of the more detailed and revealing of the Sumerian myths concerns the organization of the universe by Enki, the Sumerian water-god and god of wisdom... Another Enki myth tells an intricate and as yet somewhat obscure tale involving the paradise-land Dilmun, perhaps to be identified with ancient India. Very briefly sketched, the plot of this Sumerian "paradise" myth, which treats of gods, not humans, runs as follows:

Dilmun is a land that is "pure," clean," and bright," a "land of the living" which knows neither sickness nor death. What is lacking, however, is the fresh water so essential to animal and plant life. The great Sumerian water-god, Enki, therefore orders Utu, the sun-god, to fill it with fresh water brought up from the earth. Dilmun is thus turned into a divine garden, green with fruit-laden fields and meadows.

In this paradise of the gods eight plants are made to sprout by Ninhursag, the great mother-goddess of the Sumerians, perhaps originally Mother Earth. She succeeds in bringing these plants into being only after an intricate process involving three generations of goddesses, all conceived by the water-god and born—so our poem repeatedly underlines—without the slightest pain or travail. But probably because Enki wanted to taste them, his messenger, the two-faced god Isimud, plucks these precious plants one by one and gives them to his master, who proceeds to eat them each in turn. Whereupon the angered Ninhursag pronounces the curse of death upon him. Then, evidently to make sure she will not change her mind and relent, she disappears from among the gods.

Enki's health begins to fail; eight of his organs become sick. As Enki sinks fast, the great gods sit in the dust. Enlil, the air-god, the king of the Sumerian gods, seems unable to cope with the situation when a fox speaks up. If properly rewarded, the fox will bring Ninhursag back. As good as his word, the fox succeeds in some way—the relevant passage is unfortunately destroyed—in having the mother-goddess return to the gods and heal the dying water-god. She seats him by her vulva, and after inquiring which eight organs of his body ache, she brings into existence eight corresponding healing deities, and Enki is brought back to life and health.

Although our myth deals with a divine, rather than a human, paradise, it has numerous parallels with the Biblical paradise story. In fact, there is some reason to believe that the very idea of a paradise, a garden of the gods, originated with the Sumerians. ...perhaps the most interesting result of our comparative analysis of the Sumerian poem is the explanation which it provides for one of the most puzzling motifs in the Biblical paradise story, the famous passage describing the fashioning of Eve, "the mother of all living," from the rib of Adam—for why a rib? Why did the Hebrew storyteller find it more fitting to choose a rib rather than any other organ of the body for the fashioning of the woman whose name, Eve, according to the Biblical notion, means approximately "she who makes live." The reason becomes quite clear if we assume a Sumerian literary background, such as that represented by our Dilmun poem, to underly the Biblical paradise tale; for in our Sumerian poem, one of Enki's sick organs is the rib. Now the Sumerian word for rib is ti (pronounced tee); the goddess created for the healing of Enki's rib was therefore called in Sumerian Nin-ti, "the Lady of the rib." But the Sumerian word ti also means "to make live." The name Nin-ti may thus mean "the Lady who makes live" as well as "the Lady of the rib." In Sumerian literature, therefore, "the Lady of the rib" came to be identified with "the Lady who makes live" through what may be termed a play on words. It was this, one of the most ancient of literary puns, which was carried over and perpetuated in the Biblical paradise story, although there, of course, the pun loses its validity, since the Hebrew words for "rib" and "who makes live" have nothing in common. (147-149)

Commemorating the Civil War

2011-04-12T09:19:00.005-04:00

There are times, when traveling, that we must fly in to a city, spend a few days there, and depart. But when you see a place in this way, the sense you get of that place is disconnected from the space that it inhabits. You don't get a sense of how far the place is from its neighbors, from its rivals, from its mountains or rivers or coasts. I prefer a mode of travel that is itself a journey: fly into a city if necessary, but travel from there to another place, and depart. To travel overland, be it by train, by car, by ferry, on the surface of the Earth gives you a much deeper appreciation for the context of a place, and how it fits into the space of the world, in relationship to other places.

As with space, so with time. This commemoration of the American Civil War should not be a sudden occasional glimpse of some stuff that happened an arbitrary amount of time ago, but a way to understand the context of the unfolding events of the past, and their relationships to each other, by making an analogy to the timestream that we experience every day. It's low-bandwidth approach to appreciating history: rather than observing deeply for a short period of time, observe shallowly for a long period of time.

Five months and 150 years ago, in November 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected president of the United States, and beginning in December, led by South Carolina, the Deep South seceded and seized local federal bases and depots. In the uncertain months of early 1861, South Carolina repeatedly called for the evacuation of Fort Sumter, and the first shots of the war were fired in January to drive off a steamer attempting to resupply the fort. Lincoln took office on March 4, and eventually sent ships to resupply the fort. The morning after the first ships arrived on April 11, Confederate batteries opened fire, and the Civil War began. Virginia seceded on April 17; Robert E. Lee resigned on April 20 to go south; and a week later West Virginia seceded from Virginia. In May, Arkansas and Tennessee seceded, and Kentucky declared neutrality. Not until July was the first major battle of the war fought, at Bull Run, as Washingtonians picnicked.

In the western theater, Kentucky's neutrality would hold until September, when Confederate and Union forces attempted to secure the Ohio River valley at the river's mouth. But the major battles of Kentucky and Tennessee happened in 1862, when the Union captured Fort Donelson on the Cumberland River in February, pushing the front south to the Tennessee River, and the Confederacy was turned back from the Kentucky campaign at the Battle of Perryville in October.

In November 2010, by contrast, the Republicans made significant gains in the House in the midterm elections, and the country's political attention has been focused on conflicts over government spending, federal debt, and military action in the Maghreb. Months will trickle by in the ongoing debates, as the country drifts closer to the 2012 presidential elections, already underway. It's been a similar amount of time from the 2010 elections as from Lincoln's election to Fort Sumter.

So, there are a couple of blogs launched to overview the commemoration of the Civil War as it proceeds: The Long Recall, a period blog of the Civil War, A House Divided at the Washington Post, and Disunion at the New York Times (timeline). A snippet:

Charleston Harbor, S.C., April 9, 1861
After months of anxiety and expectation, there came at last a day of terrible clarity. For months, a single question had preoccupied the men of Fort Sumter’s beleaguered Union garrison, from their commander down to the lowliest private: what would the Lincoln administration do? Would it yield to Southern coercion and evacuate the fort, sending a signal to the world that it was ready to negotiate with the secessionists, and perhaps even let the slave states go in peace? Or would it send reinforcements and supplies to Charleston Harbor — and in so doing, quite possibly touch off civil war?

...the garrison had remained in a bizarre position of both power and powerlessness. One the one hand, as [fort surgeon Samuel Wylie] Crawford realized, they could at will change the course of American history, with a single cannon shot from one. On the other hand, Fort Sumter, which had looked so commanding and impregnable on their first arrival, was beginning to feel less so. On all sides of the harbor, they could see new artillery platforms under construction, cannons being wheeled into place, and in the distance bayonets flashing like a heliographed message, as recruits marched and counter-marched on the beach. Major Robert Anderson, the Union garrison’s commander, expressed it for most in the garrison when he wrote that he felt like “a sheep tied watching the butcher sharpening a knife to cut his throat.”

The Civil War Trust has an animated map of the battle of Fort Sumter, among others. Public, professional, and amateur historians are writing many other blogs (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 ) and lists ( 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 ).

Images: National Park Service Fort Sumter Historic Images

EDIT
In Why They Fight: Civil War Re-enactors and the Battle over Historic Sites (Time), Gregg Segal has a series of photos of Civil War re-enactors in the modern locations of battles.

Baylor University has a digital version of the War of the Rebellion Atlas.

Muddy water taking back the land

2011-04-09T12:09:00.009-04:00

Continental drift (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) isn't the only way the shape of landforms will change. Coastlines vary a great deal with sea level, as well. Climate change predicts at least a certain amount of change in sea levels. The IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report, Climate Change 2007, Working Group II, predicts less than a meter of sea level rise over the next century or so.

The most extreme speculations about rising sea levels have to do with the melting of all the ice trapped in Greenland and Antarctica, which could cause sea levels to rise 60 or 70 meters. Of course, that's nothing more than informed speculation: people just don't know enough about the the Antarctic ice sheet to predict how it will behave in the future. The current arrangement of the continents means that ocean currents are very different from the ancient worlds that had well-mixed oceans and ice-free poles, and as long as Antarctica is located over the South Pole, keeping the ice from floating off, a great deal of ice may be parked there.

But, speculation is fun! According to the USGS, even a 10-m rise would displace 25% of the US population. Sea Level Explorer shows height above sea level using Google Maps. Flood Maps uses Google Maps to show sea level rise from 7 meters to over 60 meters. At 13 meters, Shanghai and Tianjin in China are completely flooded, and much of Bangladesh and Calcutta in India are flooded. Not to mention Miami and New Orleans. At 60 meters, huge population centers in Bangladesh, China, coastal Europe, and the southern U.S. are under water. Johnston's Archive has some neat pictures of a 66-meter rise in sea level.

The 100-meter maps are the most fun. Maps for "An End to Global Warming" has maps of North America with a 100-meter rise (also here), released by Dave Pape under a CC-Attribution license.

New England is an island, stretching from the Hudson Straits to New Brunswick.Below its cataracts, the Ohio River flows through the tidewater directly into the huge Mississippi Sea.In the Greater Antilles, Cuba is a much-reduced archipelago, while Jamaica and Hispaniola mostly retain their shapes.
With Dubia, Chris Wayan speculates on an Earth after a thousand years of unrestrained carbon pollution and global warming:

That world heats up. Climate zones move north until the poles thaw. Greenland and Antarctica melt. Coastal nations are drowned. In the end, the sea rises some 110 meters. Global hothouse! It's happened before, of course, on this scale, but not in the last 50 million years or so.

...we shouldn't be surprised to find that Florida now has no governor—or voters. It's a scuba paradise rivaling Australia's Barrier Reef, but there's no dry land at all. Louisiana was doomed too, of course, but I was startled to find that the sea swallows half Alabama too—south of Tuscaloosa, only Red and Grove Islands and the small Troy Peninsula are left. Mississippi is even worse off—the Gulf chews inland to Tupelo and Mantee, leaving only the Jackson Peninsula and Brookhaven Island, and a jungly strip up at the Tennessee border. Mississippi Bay nibbles all the way up into Illinois, though it's broken up on the west side by long Crowley Island and the Spring and Pleasant Isles. Further south, in Texas, fishermen avoid the rotting, polluted Houston Reefs. But Austin survives—with a steamy coastal climate, flora, and culture resembling lost New Orleans.

Unfortunately, Dallas survives too.

...For, by definition, most readers will be from our world's high-population zones. Random changes will, on average, degrade them. And the lands that improve, that become the heartlands of Randomia's civilizations, are likely to be barren obscure lands in our world, mere names (if that) to non-Randomian readers. The great European cities are all flooded on Dubia (millions of European readers groan), while the green Sahara nurtures great civilizations (a handful of Saharan readers cheer). If you love civilization, Randomia will probably kill or cripple the ones you love, and plant its greatest civilizations in places you associate with backwardness.

So the grass always looks browner in a parallel world--because what you value most, what you KNOW to value, is generally lost. This principle makes it hard to see alternate worlds fairly.

His Planetocopia has all sorts of images of speculative versions of Earth and other planets. There's also some interesting discussion at the Randi forums.

The history of tarot, in brief

2011-04-08T16:27:00.004-04:00

Playing cards were probably invented in Asia and first came to Europe in the 1300s CE through the Arabic world. Few historical decks remain from the Arabic world, but one 15th-century Mamluk deck, preserved in Istabul, featured four suits of polo-sticks, swords, cups, and coins; each suit had ten pip cards and four court cards, and there may have been a joker. Playing cards, intricately painted or cheaply block printed, rapidly spread through Europe from the south, and a variety of designs and games proliferated.

In general, though, there were three main families of card designs. In the Romance world, around Italy and Spain, playing cards maintained the oldest division of the suits: Swords, Staves, Coins, and Cups. Over the Swiss Alps into the German-speaking world, the suits evolved: Leaves, Acorns, Bells, and Hearts. And in France, the suits developed into Spades (from Italian spada or Spanish espada, "swords", taking its shape from the German Leaves), Clubs (from Italian bastone, "sticks, staves", taking its shape from German Acorns), Diamonds (from Coins), and Hearts (from Cups). These stamped French-suited decks were simpler in design and thus cheaper to manufacture in the era of woodblock printing, and so spread through England and western Europe.

In the early 1400s in northern Italy, a new game developed that focused on taking tricks and capturing valuable cards with a group of trump cards. These decks had four suits of ten numbered cards and four face cards, plus a group of about 21 unsuited trumps with allegorical illustrations, as well as an unnumbered trump card used as a wild card. These Tarot card games became enormously influential, and variations of them are still played as games across Europe, especially in France, Italy, and the regions formerly part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

In the 1500s, it seems likely that the French trick-taking game Triumph or Trump, adapted for a standard 52-card deck, developed into the English game Ruff and Honors. In the early 1700s, this game developed into Whist, one of the most popular games in Europe for more than a century. Whist began as a plain-trick game in which the trump suit varied from hand to hand, and the goal was to collect as many tricks as possible. As the game diversified into the whist family of games, many common variations began to emerge, such as bidding on the number of tricks players will take in the hand. From bid whist variants came Bridge, Spades, and similar games like Hearts, while games like Euchre developed separately in parallel from similar sources. Modern collections of card games follow Edmond Hoyle's 1742 treatise on the whist, and gamblers and mathematicians were soon to develop probability and statistics.

Meanwhile, in the 1700s, various practitioners began to develop the use of playing cards as symbolic system for a divinatory or occult practice. Tarot cards, with their colorful trump illustrations, became a natural focus for this. Parallel to the Enlightenment of rationalists and philosophers, the undercurrents of occultism and mysticism were seething, soon to break out in the Romantic era. Franz Anton Mesmer mesmerized Paris. Isaac Newton wrote more on the occult and alchemy than mathematics and physics. Logicians and mathematicians speculated on a theoretical "universal language", a symbolic system that could encapsulate all knowledge in an algebra of thought. This never really panned out, except to give us thesauruses.In some ways, the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment were periods of separating rationalism from superstition, astronomy from astrology, chemistry from alchemy, which implies an investigation of both. In 1781, Antoine Court de Gébelin published a theory that held the tarot cards to be the distillation of ancient Egyptian civil and religious philosophy, brought to Europe by Roma peoples (popularly called "Gypsies"). This was totally wrong. His speculation came almost 20 years before the Rosetta Stone was discovered and 40 years before it was deciphered; he was speculating at a time when Egyptian hieroglyphs were completely mysterious to the people of Europe. But his theory contributed to the development of occult use of tarot by emphasizing and expanding the allegorical interpretations of the cards. Court de Gébelin says, for example:

Ces quatre Couleurs sont relatives aux quatre Etats entre lesquels étoient divisés les Egyptiens. L'Épée désignoit le Souverain & la Noblesse toute Militaire. La Coupe, le Clergé ou le Sacerdoce. Le Bâton, ou Massue d'Hercule, l'Agriculture. Le Denier, le Commerce dont l'argent est le signe.

In other words, the four suits represent the four Estates of ancient Egyptian society: the sword represents the sovereign, military, and nobility; the chalice represents the priesthood; the staff represents farmers and the peasantry; and the coin represents merchants and commerce.

Then in 1785, occultist and cartomancer Jean-Baptiste Alliette produced a manual on divination with tarot cards. Marie Anne Lenormand was the next famous cartomancer, and Eliphas Levi incorporated Tarot-based cartomancy into his occult system, from where it went into the Golden Dawn and eventually into every modern Borders and Books-a-Million "Spirituality" section. And we come to where we are today, where few Americans know that the Tarot deck is based on an old and still-popular game. The familiar 52-card deck has accreted layers of symbolism, too, over centuries of play: look at Lewis Carroll's Queen of Hearts or the Ace of Spades' association with victory or death. But with the tarot deck, this was more extreme.

Many people like their board games to have a strong theme, aside from the abstract mechanics of the game, be it commercial real estate in Monopoly or colonization and urban development in Settlers of Cataan. It's on this level that I enjoy the quaint metaphors of Tarot: If each suit represents a social class, then the game reflects the vicious social striving of individual members of society for one-upmanship or material advancement, who are only to be frustrated or trumped by a host of random disasters, external forces, unpredictable circumstances, or merely the vicissitudes of fortune. It's a dark, satirical, and pessimistic vision of life, quite medieval in a way. But to treat tarot as wholly other than a game would be like pondering the mystical import of Blackjack, or contemplating the Jungian symbolism of Druidic Seven-Card Flop Poker, without appreciating the game's more worldly appeal. Some people may be enjoy that, but probably more people enjoy playing them with friends and family as games of skill and chance, that have brought some joy to people for centuries.

How to play Tarot (for beginners)

2011-04-08T11:58:00.011-04:00

Some time ago, I became interested enough in the history of tarot games to get my family to try one. But our first attempt to muddle our way through some online rules failed miserably: we broke down laughing and gave up when we came to the formula for scoring the game. Tarot has some quirky rules that aren't necessarily intuitive for American players of simple plain-trick games. I ended up writing extensive notes on the rules in an effort to understand how to play the game, and for people with no basic familiarity with these games at all, hopefully this account may make the game somewhat clearer. If you are not familiar with the basic concepts of trick-taking games (hands, tricks, trump cards, following suit), it may be a good idea to familiarize yourself with a simpler or more common trick-taking game, such as Euchre, Whist, or Spades, before playing Tarot.

This is a description of French Tarot for people who have no familiarity at all with tarot games, drawn from the descriptions at Pagat.com's Tarot games and French Tarot pages, Wikipedia, and Philebus's book Tarocchi: Introducing Card Games for Tarot, available online at Tarocchino.com. I've also referred to the rules at the Fédération Française de Tarot and French Wikipedia, through my weak French and machine translation, especially to clear up any ambiguities. The American Tarot Game Association has an English translation, and there are some videos at FFT as well as here, here, and here (seemingly using VASSAL). Also here. More information is also available at Trionfi.com, Tarotgame.org, the Association for Tarot Studies, and BoardGameGeek.

French Tarot is one of the few games that still use the full 78-card deck (so you can use a French deck to play other games by removing extraneous cards), and it preserves the historic role of the 'Scuse. I have a French Piatnik Jeu de Tarot deck I bought online; French decks occasionally pop up at Internet retailers, as here. It would be better to use an Anglo-American 78-card tarot deck, either purchased online or printed at home using images like these.

I. The Deck

Tarot is played with a French tarot deck of 78 cards, such as a Tarot Nouveau with corner indices to make playing easier. There are four suits (Spades, Clubs, Diamonds, and Hearts), each of which have ten numbered pip cards and four face cards: Jack (Valet), Knight (Cavalier), Queen (Dame), and King (Roi). These rank, from lowest to highest, 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 V C D R. (Or, if you can find an Anglo-American Tarot deck, 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 J C Q K).

In addition, there is a special suit of 21 trump cards (a.k.a. tarots), I-XXI. These function like the trump suit in Whist, Spades, or Bridge. The highest trump (XXI) is called the Mond ("the World"), while the lowest trump (I) is called the Pagat (i.e., "the Magician").

Finally, there is an unsuited Joker, known as the 'Scuse, which is sort of like a wild card and allows a player to avoid playing a card that the rules would normally require them to play. The Joker can excuse a player from the normal requirement to follow suit, for example.

Together, the 'Scuse (the Joker), the Pagat (Trump I), and the Mond (Trump XXI) form a trio of cards called the Ends. The three Ends are particularly valuable, since the more Ends you hold, the easier it is to win the hand.

II. Overview of the Game

Tarot is a point-trick game in which the object is to win tricks tricks containing valuable cards. In each hand, the four players break into two ad-hoc teams: one team consists of a single player, the Declarer, who attempts to win the game by accumulating sufficient card points, while the other three, the Defenders, attempt to win enough points to stop him.

Each hand consists of about six phases: the deal, bidding, optional announcements, playing cards and winning tricks, winning the hand, and scoring the hand. The dealer deals a hand of 18 cards to each of four players, as well as a face-down stock of six cards to the table, known as the talon or kitty. After examining their hands, the players bid to become the Declarer. The remaining three players array against him as the Defenders. Depending on the bid, the Declarer may or may not add cards from the talon to his hand at the beginning, and the cards from the talon may be counted as part of the Declarer's tricks or the Defenders' tricks at the end.

Actual card play is similar to Whist or Spades, although scoring and other elements are quite different. Moving counterclockwise, players play cards one at a time, attempting to capture tricks with higher-ranking cards while following suit or by playing trump cards. Once all the cards in a hand have been played, the players count up their card points to determine the winner.

Tarot has a very distinctive method of adding up the card points. There are several ways of going about this, but each system leads to the same result. The probably-original way of counting is slower, but easier to understand, so that's what I describe here. For more information see "Counting card points in Tarot games" at Pagat.com. First, you win one point for every two cards you take. Certain valuable cards are worth additional points, as follows: The Ends ('Scuse, Mond, Pagat) are worth 4 points each; Kings are worth 4 points each; Queens are worth 3 points each; Knights are worth 2 points each; and Jacks are worth 1 point each. For example, if a player took a trick with a King, a Jack, a 10, and a 3, these cards would be worth 7 points: That's 2 points for four cards, plus 4 points for the King, plus 1 point for the Jack. There are a total of 91 card points in a full deck, of which 52 points comes from face cards and the three Ends. Each trick of four cards is worth at least 2 card points, and the six cards in the talon are worth at least 3 card points.

After determining the winner, the players score the hand in game points that the loser(s) pay to the winner. Since losers pay the score to the winner, it may be easier to keep track of it with poker chips rather than pencil and paper. It's not necessary to play for money instead of game points or chips, but for conceptual clarity, here I'll just describe game points as money. One game point is $0.01, for the purposes of this description.

A tarot game usually consists of a number of hands equal to the number of players, usually four, although five may play by having the dealer sit out the hand that he deals. All play moves counterclockwise, rather than clockwise as is common in the U.S.

III. Playing a Hand

A. The Deal

The first dealer is chosen at random, by a card draw: low card deals. The player opposite the dealer shuffles the deck and hands it to the player to the left of the dealer, who cuts it. The dealer deals out 18 cards to each player in packets of three, and deals 6 cards face down to the talon. The first or last card cannot be dealt to the talon.

A player who has only the Pagat, and who has neither any other trumps nor the 'Scuse, declares this. This cancels the hand, the players discard their cards, and the next dealer deals a new hand.

B. Bidding

Beginning with the player to the dealer's right, players either pass or bid to become the declarer. Rather than bidding on how many tricks they will take, players bid on whether they will become the dealer. In order to outbid previous bidders, they have to take higher stakes and more difficult conditions, such as not adding the cards in the talon to their hand, or giving the points in the talon to the Defenders.

Bidding goes counterclockwise beginning with the player to the dealer's right. Each player has one chance to either bid on the hand or pass. If every player passes, the hand is cancelled, the players discard their cards, and the next dealer deals a new hand. Each player has only one chance to bid.

There are four basic bids. In ascending order of priority, they are:

1. Take

The player says "I'll take it," announcing that he'll take up the role of the Declarer if no-one outbids him. This is also known as a "small bid". If he wins with this bid, the Declarer turns over the six cards of the talon, showing them to the other players, then adds them to his hand. He then discards six cards from his hand face down, which may not include any trumps, any Kings, or the 'Scuse. If necessary, the Declarer can discard trumps if he has no other cards, but he must show them to the other players, and cannot discard any of the three Ends.

When counting points at the end of the hand, the cards discarded by the Declarer count as part of his tricks. A take bid does not multiply the winner's score when scoring the hand.

The FFT explains that this is usually an opening bid with an average hand with the hope of perhaps a 50% chance of success, and often relies on the hope of finding good cards in the talon. However, it's more common to open with a keep bid in tournament play.

2. Keep

A player says "I'll keep it," to outbid a player who has bid "take". It works the same as a take bid, but the stakes are twice as high. This is also known as a "guard bid". As with a take bid, the Declarer adds the talon to his hand and discards six cards, which count as part of his tricks. When scoring the hand, a keep bid doubles the winner's score. See "Scoring the hand", below.

3. Keep without the talon

A player says "I'll keep it without the talon," to outbid a player who has bid keep. The stakes are even higher, and the conditions of victory are more difficult.

When bidding keep without the talon, the Declarer does not add the cards from the talon to his hand, no-one looks at them, and they remain on the table. But when counting card points at the end of the hand, they are turned over and counted as part of the Declarer's tricks. When scoring the hand, this bid quadruples the winner's score.

4. Keep against the talon

A player says "I'll keep it against the talon," to outbid a player who has bid keep without the talon. These are the highest and most difficult stakes.

With this bid, the talon is added to the Defenders' tricks. Nobody looks at it until points are counted at the end of the hand, but the Declarer does not get the benefit of the talon: instead, it counts against him. When counting points at the end of the hand, the talon is counted among the Defenders' tricks rather than the Declarer's tricks. When scoring the hand, this bid sextuples the winner's score.

C. Announcements and Bonuses

If this is the first time you're playing, skip this step. At this stage, players have an opportunity to announce certain bonuses: Pagat Ultimo, a Slam, or a Handful of Trumps. There is no obligation to do so, but an announced bonus is worth twice as much when scoring the hand.

These bonuses do not affect who wins the hand, but only affect the scoring of the hand. See "Scoring the hand", below.

1. Handful of Trumps

A Handful bonus occurs when a player announces that more than half of the cards in his hand are trumps. Before playing the first trick, the player reveals the trumps that he wishes to declare as part of his Handful.

The player only needs to reveal the minimum number of trumps to demonstrate the announcement. For example, if a player has 12 trump cards and declares a Single Handful, he only needs to reveal 10 trump cards to the other players, and can conceal the other two. The 'Scuse can count as a trump for the purpose of declaring a Handful, but if the player uses the 'Scuse in this way, he must reveal all of his trumps.

The Handful provides a bonus to the score only when it is announced beforehand, and the bonus accrues to the team that wins the hand. So it may be beneficial for a player to not announce the Handful if he thinks his team will not win.

There are three kinds of Handful bonuses, depending on how many trumps the player holds. A Single Handful consists of at least 10 trump cards, and gives a $0.20 bonus to the score. A Double Handful consists of at least 13 trump cards, and gives a $0.30 bonus to the score. A Triple Handful consists of at least 15 trump cards, and gives a $0.40 bonus to the score.

The bonus for a Handful is the same regardless of the bid. That is, the bonus for a Handful is applied to the score after the base score has been multiplied by the bid factor. The Handful bonus is not multiplied by the bid factor.

2. Slam

A Slam is a bonus for winning every trick in the hand. A Slam doesn't need to be announced in advance, but the bonus is significantly larger if it is. An Announced Slam must be declared before the first trick is played.

An Unannounced Slam gives the winner a bonus of $2.00 when the hand is scored. An Announced Slam gives the announcing team a bonus of $4.00 if they succeed in taking every trick, but if the announcing team fails, it takes a penalty of -$2.00.

The bonus for a Slam is the same regardless of the bid. That is, the bonus for a Slam is applied to the score after the base score has been multiplied by the bid factor. The Slam bonus is not multiplied by the bid factor.

3. Pagat Ultimo

Pagat Ultimo is a bonus for winning the last trick when it includes the lowest trump, the Pagat. It doesn't need to be declared, it's just added if the last trick includes the Pagat, but it's listed here with the other bonuses for convenience.

The Pagat Ultimo bonus modifies the score by $0.10, which benefits whichever team won the trick (even if it didn't win the hand). For example, if the Declarer won the hand and won the final trick with the Pagat, $0.10 is added to the score. But if the Declarer won the hand while the Defenders won the final trick with the Pagat, then $0.10 is subtracted from the score.

Unlike the other bonuses, the bonus for Pagat Ultimo depends on the bid. That is, Pagat Ultimo is added to the base score before the base score is multiplied by the bid factor.

D. Playing Cards, Winning Tricks

Once bidding and announcements are complete, the Declarer says "Play", and card play begins. The player to the dealer's right leads the first trick: he plays a card by laying it face up in the center of the table. Moving counterclockwise, the other players play a single card each. They must follow suit if they can, playing a card from the same suit that led the trick. Otherwise, they must play a trump. If a trump as already been played to a trick, they must play a higher trump, if possible. If a trump leads the suit, each player must play a trump. If a player has neither a card of that suit nor a trump, he can throw off (discard) a card from another suit, but it cannot win.

The trick is won by the player who played the highest-ranked trump card, or otherwise who played the highest-ranked card in the suit that led. He adds the cards to his pile of tricks captured.

The 'Scuse is so named because it excuses a player from the normal requirement to follow suit or play a trump. A player can play the 'Scuse to any trick, regardless of whether the player the player has cards in the lead suit or trumps. With one exception, the 'Scuse cannot win a trick, but the player who played it does not lose it. Whoever wins the trick must return the 'Scuse to the player who played it, who adds the 'Scuse to his pile of captured tricks. In compensation, the player who played the 'Scuse must then pay a numbered pip card to the player who won the trick. If the 'Scuse-player doesn't have one yet to pay, he must pay it later.

A player can lead the 'Scuse, in which case the next card played is considered to lead the trick for purposes of following suit.

If the Pagat is played in the last trick, the team that wins that trick gets the Pagat Ultimo bonus of 10 points when scoring the hand.

Normally, if the 'Scuse is played to the last trick, it switches sides. For example, if one of the Defenders plays the 'Scuse on the last trick, the Declarer wins the 'Scuse even if he does not win the trick, although he must compensate the Defenders (as above). However, if one team has won every trick in the hand, and leads the 'Scuse on the last hand, then the 'Scuse wins the trick. This rare case is the only time that the 'Scuse can win a trick.

E. Winning the Hand

Once all the tricks have been played, the Declarer and the Defenders count their card points. If the Declarer bids keep against the talon, then the talon is added to the Defenders' tricks. Otherwise, it is added to the Declarer's tricks.

As noted above, a team gets one card point for every two cards it has captured. The team also gets card points for capturing face cards and the three Ends, as follows.

Card	Value
Ends ('Scuse, Mond, Pagat)	4 points
Kings (R)	4 points
Queens (D)	3 points
Knights (C)	2 points
Jacks (V)	1 points

For example, if a player won a single trick containing the Queen of Hearts, the Knight of Hearts, the 8 of Hearts, and the Pagat, then those four cards would be worth a total of 11 points.

To win, the Declarer needs to accumulate a target number of card points that varies depending on how many of the three Ends he has in his pile of captured tricks.
With no Ends, the Declarer needs to meet a target of at least 56 card points to win.
With 1 End, the Declarer needs to meet a target of at least 51 card points to win.
With 2 Ends, the Declarer needs to meet a target of at least 41 card points to win.
With 3 Ends, the Declarer needs to meet a target of at least 36 card points to win.

If the Declarer has the minimum number of card points, then he wins, and each of the Defenders must pay him. If the Declarer does not have the minimum number of card points, then he loses, and must pay each of the Defenders.

F. Scoring the Hand

Whoever loses must pay the winner(s). The amount to be paid is determined by calculating how well the Declarer won or lost, adding the Pagat Ultimo bonus if necessary, and multiplying the score by a factor determined by the bid. Then bonuses for a Slam or Handful are added to the score, which is then paid to the winner(s). See also "Announcements and bonuses", above, or "Examples of scoring", below.

The base score for a game is $0.25. To this, add the difference between the Declarer's target and the number of card points he captured. For example, if the Declarer has 2 Ends, then he needs 41 card points to win; if he captures 56 card points, then add $0.15 to the base score. On the other hand, if he captures 40 card points, then instead add $0.01 to the base score.

Next, add the Pagat Ultimo bonus if applicable. Winning the Pagat in the final trick benefits whoever won the trick, giving a $0.10 bonus. If the winner of this trick won the hand, then add $0.10 to the base score. If the winner of this trick lost the hand, then subtract $0.10 from the base score.

Then, multiply the base score according to the Declarer's bid. Take bids do not modify the score. If the Declarer bid keep, multiply the base score by 2. If the Declarer bid keep without the talon, multiply the base score by 4. If the Declarer bid keep against the talon, multiply the base score by 6.

To this modified score, add bonuses for an Handful or a Slam, as described in the Announcements phase of the hand. A Slam is when a team wins every trick in the hand; this adds $2.00 to the score. An Announced Slam, announced before the first trick is played, adds $4.00 to the score if the announcer's team succeeds at winning every trick, and subtracts $2.00 from the score if the team fails to take every trick. A Single Handful adds $0.20 to the score; a Double Handful adds $0.30 to the score; and a Triple Handful adds $0.40 to the score. The Handful and Slam bonuses are not multiplied, but added to the score after this multiplication has taken place.

After the final score is calculated, every member of the losing team pays every member of the winning team that amount, and a new hand begins. The player to the dealer's right becomes the dealer of the next hand.

IV. Examples of Scoring

North deals. West bids take and South, East, and North pass, so West becomes the Declarer. At the end of the hand, the Declarer needs 36 points to win with 3 Ends, and South has 36 points, so South wins. The score is $0.25 for the game, plus nothing for card points, plus nothing for the bid or bonuses. Each of the Defenders pays West $0.25.

West deals. South bids keep, and East, North, and West pass, so South becomes the Declarer. With 2 Ends, the Declarer needs 41 points to win, and South has 40 points, so South loses. The score is $0.25 for the game, plus $0.01 for card points, times 2 for the bid. South pays the Defenders $0.52 each.

South deals. East bids take. North bids keep, West passes, and South passes, so North is the declarer. There are no announcements. With 2 Ends, the Declarer needs 41 card points and North wins 56 card points. The score is $0.25 for the game, plus $0.15 for card points, times 2 for the bid. Each of the Defenders pays North $0.80.

East deals. South bids keep, becomes the Declarer, and the Defenders win the final trick with the Pagat. With 2 Ends, the Declarer needs 41 points, but South only has 40 points, so he loses. The final score is $0.25 for the game, plus $0.01 for card points, plus $0.10 for Pagat Ultimo, times 2 for the bid. Having lost, South pays $0.72 to each of the Defenders.

North deals. West bids keep and becomes the Declarer, and wins the final trick with the Pagat. With 3 Ends, he needs 36 card points and wins 49. The score is $0.25 for the game, plus $0.13 for card points, plus $0.10 for Pagat Ultimo, times 2 for the bid. Each of the Defenders pays West $0.96.

South deals. East bids take. North passes. West bids keep against the talon. South passes, so West is the declarer. West declares a Triple Handful and a Slam, and succeeds, taking the final trick with the 'Scuse. With all three Ends, the Declarer needs 36 points and takes 88 points (since the talon is counted as the Defenders' tricks), so he wins. The base score is $0.25 for the game, plus $0.52 for card points, times 6 for the bid, plus $4.00 for the announced Slam and $0.40 for the Triple Handful. Each of the Defenders pays the Declarer the final score, $9.02.

Interestingly, it looks like the maximum score is the same if West had taken the last trick with the Pagat instead of the 'Scuse: although West would get the Pagat Ultimo bonus, the Defenders would get the card points for the 'Scuse if West is to get a Slam.

Addendum

In this description of the French game, I've used English terms as well as terms from Austrian Tarock and other tarot games, since this may make it easier for Anglophone novices. In France, of course, French terms are used.

English	French
trump	atout
trick	la levée
Ends	bouts, "ends"; oudlers
the Mond	le mond, "the World"
the Pagat	le petit
the 'Scuse	l'excuse, "the Excuse"
Declarer	le preneur, "the taker"
Defender	défenseur
the talon	le chien, "the dog"
Take (bid)	Je prise, la petite
Keep (bid)	Je garde
keep without the talon	garde sans le chien
keep against the talon	garde contre le chien
Handful	poignée
Slam	chelem
Pagat Ultimo	petit au bout

There are several main ways to count card points in tarot games. As explained here, you can count 1 point for every two cards, plus additional points for valuable cards, so a pip card and a King (worth 4 points) are together worth 5 points. It's more common in descriptions of French Tarot to describe pip cards as worth 0.5 points and Kings as worth 4.5 points, so that a pip card and a King are together worth 5 points. Another way is to count pip cards as worth 1 point and Kings as worth 5 points, but subtract 1 point from each pair of cards, so that a pip card and a King are together worth 5 points. These all yield the same result, and just offer a tradeoff between speed of counting and ease of understanding.

A Bipedalist

2011-03-10T14:33:00.007-05:00

Since I moved away from New York, there's been a big push in the city to improve transit and install bike lanes, and a new (and very cool-looking) lane along Prospect Park West has provoked some controversy. John Cassidy at the New Yorker mourned the loss of street parking in favor of safe routes for cycle commuters, prompting responses from Felix Salmon, Bike Snob, Ryan Avent, Adam Naparstek, Adam Sternbergh, Paul Krugman, and Cassidy again. Ezra Klein points out that people on bicycles leaves more lane space and parking space free for the drivers. My views on bike lanes should be apparent from this.

The funniest part of all of this, though, is Cassidy's derisive witticism "bipedalists" for bike-lane advocates.

Cyclists and pedestrians have a lot of shared interests: traffic fatalities are one of the leading causes of death in this country, and while many of these deaths are motorists hitting motoriests, a great many of them are motorists hitting cyclists and pedestrians. So, per mile travelled, walking is the most dangerous way to travel in this country, bar none. Cyclists and pedestrians want to get to where they're going without being killed, and destinations to be relatively close. These issues are often put in confrontational terms, but we all share these needs; cyclists are also drivers, most people teach their kids to ride a bike (and don't want them hit). And of course, we are all bipeds. Safer for some of us is safer for all of us, as Tom Vanderbilt points out in his fair, awesome, and worth-reading article "Rage Against Your Machine" in Outside, March 2011:

As various studies have found, the more cyclists and cycling infrastructure a town has, the safer it becomes statistically, not just for cyclists but for drivers and pedestrians alike. When New York City put a protected bike lane on Ninth Avenue, some protested it as unsafe for people on foot. But since the lane's opening, pedestrian injuries on Ninth have dropped by 29 percent. Last year, as miles of bike lanes were added, New York had its best pedestrian-safety record ever.

So this seems like the perfect label to re-appropriate, under which cyclists and pedestrians can advocate together for our common interests in safe, two-legged locomotion. Call me a bipedalist.

EDIT
It's the way of these things that noone can ever stop. More Cassidy, Salmon, and some Olaf Storbeck.

EDIT 2
Matthew Shaer has a great piece in New York, "Not Quite Copenhagen", on the Prospect Park West bike lane controversy. It's a long piece worth reading in full, but here are some random, our-of-context fun facts:

Bike lanes are relatively easy to install. The Prospect Park West path, with all its safety paraphernalia, was built in about a month; unprotected lanes can be created in a matter of days. Bike lanes are also inexpensive. The Bloomberg administration estimates that over the past four years, the city has spent $11 million installing bike lanes, with two thirds of that cash provided by the federal government. Over the same period, the city spent $1.5 billion on street repair alone. And since streets with protected bike lanes see 40 percent fewer accidents, according to City Hall, and traffic crashes set the city back over $4 billion a year, bike lanes can actually save New York money. They also cut pollution, which is good for everyone. Bike lanes, when framed this way, are just common sense.

...Still, the Ninth Avenue lane is an ideal place to experience the unfettered freedom that can come with riding a bike in New York. As any urban rider (and I am one of them) can attest, there is something infinitely joyful in putting foot to pedal, something intoxicating in not being bound by the whims of a bus driver or subway conductor or thick tangles of crosstown traffic. Whipping down the street, completely protected from the cars zooming by just a few feet away, may be the closest any New Yorker comes to flying.

Winter 79: Spring is coming

2011-03-09T13:35:00.002-05:00

The hard cold of the winter broke some time after Groundhog Day, and it's been warmer and rainier since. It's hardly ever dark on my ride home from work.

The maples began blooming a few days ago. Spring is coming.

A City Party in New York

2011-03-08T11:47:00.005-05:00

Matt Yglesias notes some hostility to bike lanes among NYC politicians and suggests that

...partisanship is a very useful device of governance and democratic accountability. But large American cities are so lopsidedly Democratic and deal with issues that are so different from the national ones, that I think most cities would be better served by a different system. The ideal thing, I think, for places like NYC and DC would be to actually have freestanding separate municipal level political parties.

A municipal city-issues party seems like it would be possible in New York, given that the state is one of the few that didn't do away with electoral fusion, and so continues to have several viable third parties. New York has a system in which third parties who get more than 50,000 votes in a gubernatorial election qualify for ballot access statewide. Perhaps the reason there isn't a municipal-level third party is that the ballot access rules are geared to statewide elections?

Thankfully, New York Board of Elections breaks out election results for the 2010 governor's race for New York City. On all party lines, there were 1,366,054 votes for governor; 148,525 or 10.9% came from the parties that qualified based on performance that year. Of these parties (Independence, Conservative, Working Families, Green), only the Working Families Party got enough votes in NYC alone to qualify, with almost 77k votes. The Green Party qualified for the first time since 1998, winning ten thousand of its nearly sixty thousand total votes in NYC.

So, it's at least plausible for a municipal-issues party to survive in New York, at least if it were as well-funded and organized as the Working Families Party. That seems like a fairly high bar to clear. But: Be the change you want to see in the world.

Politics and "Star Wars"

2011-02-25T13:35:00.005-05:00

Not this. Ezra Klein directs us to this metaphor from political scientist Jonathan Bernstein:

Remember: if you're reading this blog, odds are good that you're at least in the top 10% of all Americans in political knowledge, and more likely you're in the top 1%. And for those of us in that group, it's hard to imagine just how little the median American knows about the day-to-day events that we pay so much attention to.

...to get a sense of what politics is like for many Americans, I suggest thinking of something that you do encounter in some way all the time, but that you just have zero interest in. Perhaps sports in general -- or, for sports fans, a major sport that you don't pay any attention to. Perhaps it's current pop music, or HBO shows, or celebrities. Me? NASCAR, the NBA, and any games made since Missile Command and Stargate Defender. The idea is that I actually do encounter and, in a way, retain a fair amount of information about those things in the nature of headlines that I see but skip the stories, or references made in other things I do read or watch, or conversations I've had that veer off in that direction. It's not as if I know absolutely nothing. It's just that the stuff I've heard is not organized at all, and I'm sure I've picked up misinformation along the way, since I don't scrutinize any of it.

It makes me think of nothing so much as Star Wars: Retold (by someone who hasn't seen it), in which Joe Nicolowski has his friend Amanda Boone (remarkably accurately, considering) narrate the story of the three "Star Wars" movies, even though she has never actually seen them.

Appalachia, island continent

2011-01-28T10:49:00.007-05:00

During the late Cretaceous, shallow seas divided what is now North America into several continents. Much of the east lay on the island continent of Appalachia. Here's one map of 75 million years ago.

Here's another, drawn from National Geographic's 1993 "North America in the Age of the Dinosaurs" map. It's in their print map collection under North & South America, here.

Paleontology of North America has some other world maps, including the Cretaceous. There are no dinosaur fossils from Kentucky in this period, but a few plant fossils. The Cretaceous saw ammonites and mosasaurs along the coast, flowering plants like willow and walnut in Illinois and Sequoia in Virginia, hadrosaurs in Missouri, New Jersey, and Tennessee, the sauropod Astrodon in Maryland, and Pteradon in Delaware. Fossil hunting in New Jersey was particularly important in the early history of paleontology, since the state from 1858 yielded the first nearly-complete dinosaur fossils from North America: the duck-billed Hadrosaurus and the tyrannosaurid Dryptosaurus (1, 2, 3)

Thieves' House

2011-01-26T13:51:00.000-05:00

It may be that Fritz Leiber's stories about Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser were the origin of the thieves' guild trope. In any case, the Thieves' Guild of Lankhmar is a great adversary to these characters. A close reading of the stories can suggest some details about their headquarters, though perhaps fewer than a building from a movie such as the "Night of the Living Dead" farmhouse.

"Thieves' House" is chronologically later but the first published of the stories, from 1943. Thieves' House lies on Cheap Street, an empty alleyway. Its door is always open, its entry is lit by torches, but such false hospitality only heightens the foreboding of the place. The thieves on watch signal warnings with ominous whistles. Immediately inside the entrance, a shaft stretches up so thieves can attack intruders from the ceiling, and trapdoors in the floor allow thieves to surprise foes from below. Accessible from the entry corridor is a winding stairway leading up. On the second level of the building, the stairway opens onto a chamber lined with curtained alcoves. One of these alcoves has a secret stone door leading to a safehouse outside the building.

This alcove-lined room is the main setting for much of the story's action, since it is here that the Master of Thieves first examines the great treasure. From here, Fafhrd and the Mouser speed through mazy corridors, up and down several stairways, to egress through the roof or to deep cellars accessible only through ancient, forgotten stairs and passages lined with spring-blade traps.

"Ill Met in Lankhmar", published in 1970 and winning the Nebula and Hugo awards, revisits Thieves' House and its ever-open portal on Cheap Street. Fafhrd and the Mouser disguise themselves as beggars to infiltrate the building, since the Beggarmasters of the Beggars' Guild report to the Thieves' Guild. The front doorway is very low, since a niche is hidden above it on the inside from which two hidden guards may attack intruders. The front door opens into a corridor lined with four doors: three open into training rooms for thiefly skills such as lockpicking, pickpocketing, and dodging artfully, while a fourth opens into a dining hall. At the end of the corridor, a stairway winds up with curving balustrade.

On second story stretches a corridor identical to that of the first floor, except for its luxurious appointment, lined with seven doors. The first room contains costumes, wigs, and equipment for disguises. The next four doors are shut. The sixth door opens into a map room with a round meeting table and seven chairs, as well as numerous models of Lankhmart buildings. The seventh room contains the eldritch equipment and workspace of a felonious sorcerer and his imp.

Past the second floor, the winding stair continues up two more stories past two more empty corridors. On the fourth floor, a portable ladder leads up to a hatch in the ceiling leading onto the slate roof. A guard is posted below the hatch, and a thief on the roof passes signals to distant buildings with the light from a lantern.

These descriptions do contradict somewhat; in one, the characters go up the stairs to find a corridor, and in the other, they find a room. However, "Thieves' House" makes it clear that the building is rife with secret doors, traps, and secret passages unknown even to its residents. Perhaps such a secret door sometimes conceals the second-floor corridor or room.

Games to Try

2011-01-26T13:45:00.002-05:00

Last August, during my GenCon recap, I expressed some nostalgia for the old hex-and-counter conflict simulation wargames from Avalon Hill, SPI, and other companies that I remember seeing, but never getting a chance to play before they largely faded away. I've spent a couple days trolling through Board Game Geek and elsewhere exploring this subject, and have happened on a couple of games that I'd really like to try.

"Hammer of the Scots" (2002, Columbia Games)(img) is a block wargame that explores the Wars of Scottish Independence, which simulates a fog of war in a manner reminiscent of "Stratego". It seems to be well-regarded, covers an interesting topic, and hopefully looks enough like a Euro-style game that I may be able to rope some family into playing. Unfortunately, it's a two-player game; I suspect that part of the reason so many interesting games get played so rarely is that they're very particular about the number of people who may participate in what is an inherently social activity.

"Age of Napoleon" (2003, Mayfair Games)(video) is a grand strategy game overviewing the Napoleonic wars from 1805 to 1815, with a counters and a card-driven system to represent combat events and shifting diplomacy. It seems like a game I'd enjoy at the same level I enjoyed "Axis & Allies" back in the day, with a history theme I have a nascent and developing interest in, an interesting representation of the vagaries of diplomacy, and grand-strategy-level play light enough to play in an afternoon or evening. Sadly, it is also only a two-player game.

Battle Cry (2000, 2010, AH/WotC) spawned the Commands and Colors system that drives several popular history- and fantasy-themed strategy games. These games, like Command and Colors: Ancients (2006, GMT Games) seem to be very popular and fun, but more game-y than simulationist. I'm a little burned out on WWII and fantasy battle games, and would like a more hardcore take on ancient and American Civil War combat, but this is probably a good game to get, anyway: there's a sesquicentennial coming on, and my interest in the Civil War will likely be high for some time. A game-y system is more likely to attract players, and the 150th anniversary edition includes a lot of battles from the western front important to the Ohio River Valley (Fort Donelson, Perryville) that receive scant attention from wargames.

Entdecker: Exploring New Horizons (2001, Mayfair) is a prequel to "Settlers of Cataan" by the same designer, which uses tile placement to represent the exploration of an archipelago and create territory to be claimed by the players. My family enjoys playing Cataan and Carcassone a lot, so this game may garner some similar interest while being a nice change of pace from those games. It's also the first multiplayer game on this list. =/ There's also a bunch of children's games, like "LEGO Minotaurus", "Max", and "Blokus", that may be a worthy step up from "Candyland".

But I started all this by looking into what historical wargames people are playing these days. Going through all these games, I've started to turn against some of the games like C&C:A that make compromises with historical accuracy for better gameplay; Who wants to play a historical wargame if it doesn't accurately represent the personalities of individual Roman commanders or the interaction of rampaging elephants with pre-Marian legions at Cannae? Terribly unbalanced scenarios, stacks of chits, and endless consultation of combat results tables are a small price to pay for the historic verisimilitude only an old-school hex-and-counter game are supposed to provide!

So perhaps for ancient-era wargames something like SPQR Deluxe (1992, 2008, GMT Games)(img) might be the way to go. It covers most of the Punic Wars and several battles through the Roman Republic era. And ancient tactics are kind of interesting; the way units are laid out in lines and blocks is kind of "chess-y".

A better idea to dip toes in this water might be to try one of the old free or introductory low-complexity wargames, like "Battle for Moscow" (1986, GDW; 2009, VPG)(img) or "Napoleon at Waterloo", an introductory game put out in 1971 by SGI before it was acquired by TSR, and now freely available.. The NAW system was the basis for "Blue & Gray" (1975, SPI; DG), a relatively lightweight Civil War wargame, as well as Napoleonic games. "Battle of Honey Springs" (2007, LPD) is another free introductory print-and-play wargame that cover most important ACW battles in Indian Territory, now Oklahoma. And if ~that~ is any fun, then try to something newer like "Three Battles of Manassas", Perryville, or other series (1, 2, 3) before considering a monster game like "Three Days at Gettysburg".

Happy Solstice

2010-12-21T11:40:00.002-05:00

This morning was a once-in-centuries full lunar eclipse on the winter solstice, but even though last week's ice storms have melted off, it was too overcast here to be worth waking up.

Still thinking about solstice traditions. Since this is the first year I've had a proper Yule Tree, I'll save the trunk to kindle a fire on the solstice, and maybe grill some pork chops.

Even more continental drift

2010-11-11T15:35:00.006-05:00

Somehow my earlier posts about speculative future continental drift neglected the great Oct. 20, 2007, article at NewScientist.com, "Pangea, the comeback".

Most of these projections assume that, over 300 million years or so, Australia (and possibly Antarctica) will fly across the Pacific Ocean and collide with western North America. Then, the Americas will mash together and collide with the eastern edge of Afro-Eurasia. The exception is Christopher Scotese's Pangaea Proxima, which has the Atlantic Ocean stop widening and begin to shrink away.

These are all just speculation, of course, and apt fodder for fantasy. Grognard James Maliszewski, considering setting his old-school RPG in a hypothetical future Pangea, pointed out that the map of the Mystara campaign setting was based on the continents of the Jurassic. Commenter Malcadon points out the similarity between Robert E. Howard's Hyborian age and the Afro-Eurasia of 50 million years from now.

Dougal Dixon, an author of "The Future is Wild", has another similar work: After Man: A Zoology of the Future.

EDIT
Offensive redirected link removed for the Hyborian Age. Try Wikipedia here or here.

Election results 2010

2010-11-02T22:04:00.008-04:00

Ken Herndon concedes in the Metro Council race:

With all but two precincts reporting, James had 58 percent of the vote, while Republican Candace Jaworski had 13 percent, and incumbent Independent Deonte Hollowell had just 8 percent; the rest were write-ins.

Democrat Ken Herndon had tried a write-in campaign, but there were far fewer write-in votes cast than James received. County election officials will begin counting write-in votes Monday.

According to the election board, there are 14,013 registered votes in the district, which is centered in Old Louisville.

Herndon said around 8 p.m. Tuesday that he had called James to congratulate him on winning. “There was just too much straight party voting. It was too difficult to overcome,” Herndon said.

Background here and here. Full results later.

Paul beats Conway for the Senate seat, Yarmuth wins re-election, Fischer wins for mayor, and it looks like Ben Chandler won a very narrow re-election in KY-6.

Polls are closing in California, since it's about 10pm now: time to see what happens with Prop. 19.

EDIT (2010-11-11)
Write-in votes for Herndon counted; James win affirmed (C-J):

Democrat Ken Herndon, who ran a write-in campaign after the party’s executive committee selected David James as its candidate for the office, received 900 write-in votes, said Sue Toole, chief operations officer for County Clerk Bobbie Holsclaw.

Based on recorded machine votes, James, a former Louisville police officer and Fraternal Order of Police president, had 3,070 votes, while Republican Candace Jaworski had 657 votes and independent incumbent council member Deonte Hollowell had 398 votes. Herndon had conceded the race to James election night.

Sarah Palin in 2012

2010-11-02T14:46:00.008-04:00

It seems like it'd be worthwhile to put down something I've thought for some time.

Since Barack Obama won the 2008 presidential elections, there has been a group on the blue side of the aisle that has been secretly hoping Sarah Palin would run in 2012 and become the Republican candidate. This is because she's considered easy for Obama to beat. Lots of voters strongly dislike her, and if she ran, it might set up a 1964- or 1984-style blowout election. See here or here. Even David Plouffe thinks so. But this kind of sentiment is wrong: this is a much more dangerous scenario than people recognize.

It became pretty clear after the 2008 elections, in early 2009 or so, that the economy was going to still be bad by the time of the 2010 elections, which was going to play to the benefit of the Republicans. The scale and impact of the 2007-2009 recession was badly underestimated by many, from John McCain's famous "the fundamentals of the economy are strong" gaffe at a time when many Republicans denied that there was a recession underway at all, to the Obama administration's underestimates of the rise in unemployment absent stimulus and subsequent decision to lowball the stimulus.

Although the media loves the tactical fallacy and dramatic narratives, structural factors like war deaths and economic conditions drive election results. Real disposable personal income predicts elections and presidential approval often tracks unemployment. The rest is window dressing. The 2007-2009 recession was another jobless recovery. Economic weakness can persist for years following the collapse of a major housing or asset price bubble: look at Japan. And so the Republicans are to have a big year this cycle.

It's pretty normal for the coattail effect to cause a hangover in the next midterm election. Since the Civil War, the president's party loses House seats in the midterm elections, averaging losses of about 32 seats. Here's a picture:

In that 100-plus years of midterm elections, there have been three exceptions. The Republicans need to win 39 seats to reclaim the House, so if they win 40-50 seats or so, their victory will be somewhat above average that will leave them with a very narrow majority. But hardly the blowout "apocalypse" that Republicans have been exulting about this season. Republicans are likely to overinterpret the results of this election, and the media will be complicit in propagating a narrative of a surging GOP winning a "referendum" on the president.

The opposition party campaigns on the deficit, which is driven by the cyclical fall in tax revenues despite flat government spending. The Republicans are probably deluded as usual about their desire to enact spending cuts to popular government programs, or will focus on inconsequential but high-profile gimmicks over the budget. Or they might be serious for once and try an ill-conceived austerity plan at a time of economic weakness. The "growth through austerity" argument is wrong in the short term; the IMF surveyed growth-through-austerity attempts and found "...that the typical such episode is clearly contractionary: a fiscal consolidation equivalent to 1% of GDP leads on average to a 0.5% decline in GDP after two years, and to an increase of 0.3 percentage points in the unemployment rate." Perhaps monetary policy and QE could counterbalance this. But in any case, divided government is unlikelier to respond accommodatingly if the economy receives another financial shock similar to the Lehman failure that neccesitated TARP. Problems with the euro may spark such a crisis, given Greece's problems. Who knows. In any case, given the scale of the output gap, likelihood of a continuingly jobless recovery, and serious downside potential to a weak political response to a new economic shock, there's a significant chance that the economy will be weak in 2012.

If the economy is too stagnant, weak, or recessionary in 2012, the Republican will probably win, regardless of who the candidate is. And although people wrote off her chances following the 2008 elections, the odds that Sarah Palin would be the Republican candidate for president in 2012 have been growing since then. Much of the excitement, media coverage, and money she has generated over the last two years has been driven by the speculation that she would run for president: that fades away if she runs and fails, and it fades away if she fails to run. Many of the current primary competitiors are boring technocrats, people who failed to ignite the base before, or elites or phonies like Mitt Romney that too many would have to hold their nose for to support (like they hated doing with John McCain). Palin encapsulates everything the base loved about President George W. Bush, and nothing they hated about him. Two years out, South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint looks to be Palin's only real competitor for Tea Party energy, and possibly the conservative elites could rally around him. But Palin thrives on the scorn of the media and Republican elites: the more they dismiss or belittle her, the more the base gathers around her. So there is a significant chance that she could win the Republican primary in 2012.

So, here it is: There is a nontrivial chance that Sarah Palin could win the primary, and a nontrivial chance that any Republican candidate could win the presidency in 2012. This is what has come to be known as a fat tail or a black swan. People think there's small chance of it happening, but the consequences would be large and very negative.

Sarah Palin would be a terrible president, a dreadful president. And that's reason enough to hope she never gets anywhere near the office.

Elections 2010

2010-11-02T10:50:00.008-04:00

Today is Election Day. I'll be watching the results tonight on the PBS Newshour on KET, as well as WHAS11 and Fox41. The CNN Election Center has good information, and in addition to the Louisville Courier-Journal and the New York Times, there's the usual political blogs. Check out Marc Ambinder's hour-by-hour guide, or try Nate Silver's.

Other useful sites for elections and election watching include:

Google Maps: Vote (and others)
Kentucky Voter Information Center (ky.gov)
Jefferson County Clerk Elections Center (jeffersoncoutyclerk.org)
Vote Kentucky (ky.gov)
Kentucky Board of Elections (ky.gov)
Kentucky Unofficial Results (ky.gov)
Jefferson County Unofficial Results (ky.gov)

See also various voter guides, including the LEO overview of the Metro Council and mayoral races and the C-J's 2010 Louisville/Kentuckiana Voter Guide.

The most interesting elections this cycle? Prop. 19 in California is the most important vote on cannabis legalization in years, and could have a huge impact on American drug policy. The Louisville mayoral and Metro Council races will be interesting, too, although all the write-in votes will require a hand count.

Weird film adaptations

2010-10-28T15:36:00.004-04:00

It's strange enough to hear that "What to Expect When You're Expecting" is being adapted to film as a romantic comedy.

But I was really amazed to see a press release announcing that DreamWorks is in negotiations to buy the film rights to View-Master. Yes, that View-Master, the stereoscopic toy. It's supposed to be a "Goonies"-style film from the writers of the new "Transformers" movies. And the press release wasn't dated to April 1.

I can even imagine a film based on "Candyland" or "Battleship". But aren't movies supposed to have conflicts, plots, or at least characters?

The wheel of fortune ever turns

2010-10-19T09:01:00.004-04:00

And what goes comes full circle, I suppose. Yesterday morning we went outside to discover that over the weekend, someone had broken into our back shed and stolen my commuting bicycle along with a push mower and some other yard tools. I had won that bike last year, and dubbed it the Jub-Jub.

Since the Jub-Jub is gone, I'll have to have the Esquilax fixed up for commuting. And possibly uglify it even further.

More metro council race

2010-10-07T16:07:00.003-04:00

I summed up some of the backstory of this race a few weeks ago, but it was interesting to see the yard signs at the St. James Art Fair last weekend. The show is one of the largest events in Old Louisville, and has some interesting work; we spent the afternoon making and selling sandwiches for a neighborhood association fundraiser.

In the weeks leading up to the event, it seemed like Ken Herndon was the only candidate with any actual campaign. Not only have there been plenty of yard signs from his previous campaign with a "Write In" sticker, but he's printed new yard signs for the write-in campaign. Judging from yard signs, Herndon's campaign is clearly the most prominent in the neighborhood, drawing far more support than the Conway-Paul senatorial race, the Lally-Yarmuth congressional race, or the Fischer-Green-Heiner mayoral race. By contrast, it hardly seems like Deonte Hollowell or David James have a campaign at all.

The James campaign got a couple of large yard signs up around the time of the show, but I've hardly seen any Hollowell signs (just promotional paper fans). At least Hollowell has been ruled a valid candidate for the race, although there have been reports of marijuana possession at a 2009 speeding arrest.

Drought

2010-10-01T23:34:00.001-04:00

It's official: for Louisville, this is the driest September on record, and the third driest month ever. 0.14 inches of rain in 40 days, and little prospect for more soon.

Coin hoarding, Gresham's Law, and base metals

2010-09-29T16:49:00.003-04:00

Argentina's weird coin shortage got some press back in 2008 and 2009, and it continues into 2010. Some suspected hoarders or melters when inflation was at 25%, and led small businesses to give change in mints or candy.

Where are Argentina's coins? (Global Post, 2009-05-11):

The coin scarcity has created a strange predicament: Merchants regularly refuse to sell their goods or services if it means they’ll have to give coins back as change. For small transactions, they’d rather lose the revenue than spare the change. ...Many of the banks are as loath to let go of their coins as the small businesses are.

...The cause of the coin scarcity isn’t clear. The Central Bank says it’s supplying enough: a record 524 million new coins in 2008, up 13 percent from 2007. This year will likely bring a new record, and there are supposedly 5 billion Argentine coins currently in circulation — about 125 per person.

Many blame coin hoarders and black-marketeers, several of whom have been caught. But they seem to be effects, rather than causes, of the shortage. Another scapegoat is the city buses, which until now have only accepted coins.

...The shortage might have been precipitated by the rise in commodity prices in the last few years, said Dardo Ferrer, chief economist at the Market Foundation. There have been reports of people inside Argentina and across its borders melting coins for their metal, which became worth more than coins's face value when the price of raw materials rose.

Coin hoarding and melting were common in an earlier age, when money derived most of its value from the intrinsic value of the metal, James Surowiecki explains:

Hoarding of this sort, and the resulting coin shortages, was once a recurring economic problem, one that the Italian economic historian Carlo Cipolla dubbed “the big problem of small change.” But these shortages were thought to be a feature of premodern times, when coins were made out of precious metal, and people literally brought silver to the mint to have it turned into coins. If the value of silver rose beyond the face value of coins, hoarding silver was a natural response. Today, coins are government-issued tokens, and their value is theoretically unconnected to the metal they contain.

This isn’t to say that the material worth of a coin’s metal can’t still exceed its face value; the rising value of zinc, for instance, meant that, last year, every new penny issued cost the U.S. Mint about 1.7 cents. But hoarding no longer makes sense unless it’s done on a large scale, and most people in Buenos Aires are not melting down their coins into hunks of copper.

Gresham's law implies that coins with a lower intrinsic value will replace coins with a higher intrinsic value if the nominal value of the coins remains the same. A lot of this happened in the 1960s and 1970s, when the U.S. shifted to a true fiat currency and started minting dimes (and other coins) in a copper-nickel alloy rather than silver. Numismatists shifted through change for decades to collect all the silver dimes and remove them from circulation. According to Coinflation.com, the intrinsic value of a silver Mercury or pre-1964 Roosevelt dime is US$1.59, although the face value remains US$0.10.

So, how likely is it that hoarders are (or were) melting down the coins of Argentina for a profit? The Central Bank of Argentina's Web site is a little strangely laid out, but has useful information about the coins. Most of Argentina's coins are minted in aluminum bronze or cupronickel, and some of them have a brass-plated steel variant. Let's look at three of them: the aluminum bronze 50-centavo coin, the aluminum bronze 25-centavo coin, and the cupronickel 25-centavo coin. Since there are no brass-plated steel variants, these would be among the easiest to collect and melt down.

The 50-centavo coin weighs 5.8 grams, and is composed of 92% copper and 8% aluminum. The metal in each coin is thus worth US$0.044. The nominal value of 50 centavos is US$0.12.
The aluminum bronze 25-centavo coin weighs 5.4 grams, and is composed of 92% copper and 8% aluminum. The metal in each coin is thus worth US$0.04. The nominal value of 25 centavos is US$0.063.
The cupronickel 25-centavo coin weighs 6.1 grams, and is composed of 75% copper and 25% nickel. The metal in each coin is thus worth $0.072. The nominal value of 25 centavos is US$0.063.

Only the cupronickel coin has greater intrinsic value than face value. But Argentina, like the U.S., has a penny problem. Both of the 1-centavo coins are worth more than US$0.01 for the copper, while the face value of the coin is only worth a quarter of a U.S. cent. Argentine pennies are worth nearly four times as much for their metal as for their face value. Melting may make economic sense with the 1-centavo coin, and possibly others. But if melting was the culprit, it seems like steel coins would eventually make their way into circulation. Or perhaps, having gotten swept up in a hoarding dynamic, hoarders can profitably sell even steel coins, which helps maintain the hoarding behavior.

However, there have been at least some cases where it is known that people have been melting down base metal coins to use as a raw material.

Sharp practice of melting coins (BBC, 2007-06-26):

Millions of Indian coins are being smuggled into neighbouring Bangladesh and turned into razor blades. And that's creating an acute shortage of coins in many parts of India, officials say.

Police in Calcutta say that the recent arrest of a grocer highlights the extent of the problem. They seized what they said was a huge coin-melting unit which he was operating in a run-down shack.

The grocer confessed to melting down tens of thousands of Indian coins into razor blades which were then smuggled into Bangladesh, police said.

"Our one rupee coin is in fact worth 35 rupees, because we make five to seven blades out of them," the grocer allegedly told the police. "Bangladeshi smugglers take delivery of the blades at regular intervals."

This was three years ago, and prices have changed since 2007, but a quick comparison at contemporary prices may be interesting. According to the Royal Bank of India, all currently-minted Indian coins are minted in stainless steel. The old two- and five-rupee coins were cupronickel. Assuming a 75% copper/25% nickel alloy, the metal in the old six-gram two-rupee coin would be worth approximately US$0.07, while one nominal rupee is worth US$0.02 at current exchange rates. So it's entirely plausible that hoarders were melting the coins for copper and nickel. It seems like steel prices would have to be higher for the metal for the new 5.62-gram stainless steel two-rupee coin to be worth more than the face value of the coin, but perhaps Bangladeshi melters have additional costs to obtain raw materials otherwise.

Falls City Beer in 2010

2010-09-27T16:49:00.005-04:00

Perhaps I noticed this in passing and then completely forgot, but it appears an entrepreneur has bought the old Falls City Beer and relaunched it as a craft beer. Louisville is a really great town for beer, compared with our neighbors.

Falls City was a Louisville brand for many years, probably most (in)famous nationally for the market flop Billy Beer. It eventually devolved into the kind of weak alcopop politely and euphemistically known as "American pale lager", contract brewed in Evansville and then Pittsburgh. It had a surprising amount of loyalty, and I'd long hoped it could be revivified as a purveyor of good beer. It appears to be so. Here's their new FaceBook page.

Apparently this happened some time ago, and I completely missed it. Blogging at Mojo back in December 2009, John LaFollette said:

A new Falls City Brewing Company has set up shop in the city that gave the iconic brand its name, pledging to recreate the craftsmanship and high-quality standards that, in its heyday, earned Falls City beer national distinction.

The new owner, Louisville businessman David Easterling, declined to be interviewed until his plans for the company were clearer, but said they should be producing beer and test-marketing it around town within the month.

...Falls City beer was once a staple of Louisville bars. Falls City bar signs are still hanging at Check's Café in Germantown—the bar gets regular requests for it, and says they will carry the new version—and at the Outlook Inn in the Highlands.

In the years following Prohibition, Falls City competed locally with the Fehr's and Oertel's breweries and with Evansville-based Sterling, and by 1950 was producing 750,000 barrels a year, making it the most popular beer in Louisville.

Still, by the late 1960s, the brewery struggled to keep up with larger, national brands, and made cuts in ingredient and production quality. Facing declining sales and a declining reputation, Falls City was sold in 1978 to the Wisconsin-based G. Heileman Brewing Company

Roger Baylor had an interview with owner David Easterly in the LEO, beside some consumer reactions, back in April 2010.

Has anyone had the new brew? It sounds like it may be worth supporting.

Greatest hits from the Zombie Apocalypse

2010-09-23T15:22:00.004-04:00

My previous blog (2006-2008) was known as Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse, as noted before, and mostly consisted of tongue-in-cheek reviews of zombie movies.

I've been considering importing at least some of that old content, especially now that the company hosting the old blog is changing its business model. My plan at present is to post stuff here backdated to the date of its original post, but edit the content as I see fit: Archive the interesting stuff, but give it a buff and polish. Stay tuned.

The down side of "sound money"

2010-09-22T15:04:00.005-04:00

I have a soft spot for goldbugs: they're at willing to consider how our economic system could be different with very different foundations, and relitigate century-old monetary disputes. It's like a steampunk monetary policy. Although I always wonder why they never talk about silver, the international standard for thousands of years, instead of gold, a colonial-era fad. Or why something like the terra wouldn't be more plausible going forward.

But the gold standard is a bad idea. Gold is deflationary, because it can't be mined at a pace that keeps up with global economic growth. Deflation discourages investments in future production rather than savings, and it's difficult to get people to accept nominal pay cuts during a recession. Modest, controlled inflation is more conducive to long-term growth, but everybody really, really hates inflation.

But this chart from Doug Short lays out the effects pretty clearly.

The gold standard offered great price stability in its day. Because it more frequently interrupted inflation and economic growth with deflation and protracted recessions.

Happy Equinox

2010-09-22T13:30:00.003-04:00

...btw; today's the autumnal equinox (and the week of Oktoberfest).

I managed to find Jupiter with my wee telescope on Monday, but I couldn't get it to focus any sharper than a blur.

Visualizing Louisville

2010-09-22T12:54:00.005-04:00

Yesterday I saw Eric Fischer's maps of race and ethnicity in American cities, but somehow managed to miss his map of Louisville (h/t tVV).

Louisville Magazine has a brief piece about Charlie Farnsley's effort to bring back the old city flag. Bumper stickers are available at Brand Louisville (h/t WFPL The Edit).

The Louisville metro council 6th district race is a mess

2010-09-22T12:45:00.004-04:00

It's kind of a long story, but the Louisville Metro Council election in my district (6th) looks like it's going to be a huge mess.

Back in 2008, Ken Herndon ran against the incumbent, George Unseld, in the Democratic primary. Days before the election, a truly vile and viciously homophobic mailer was sent out to residents of the district attacking Herndon and his campaign. The mailer attacking Herndon came after Metro Councilman Jim King had pressured Herndon to drop out of the race.

After Unseld very narrowly won the primary (by only 112 votes), Herndon filed a lawsuit in an attempt to uncover the source of this flyer. He found evidence linking Unseld and King's offices to the flyer (allegedly at the behest of Mayor Abramson's office), but no smoking gun.

Councilman Unseld died this June in his offices, suffering extensive bleeding following a fall. Hundreds came to his funeral.

Twenty applicants applied to fill the open seat, of whom several dropped out. The Metro Council interviewed the remaining 11, including Herndon, U of L Pan-African Studies professor Deonte Hollowell, and attorney Neena Parks Thompson. A long series of deadlocked votes ensued. Finally, independent Deonte Hollowell was chosen as a compromise; he's reportedly the first Independent to serve on the Metro Council.

Dr. Hollowell came to our neighborhood association meeting after announcing that he was running as an Independent in the November election to fill the remainder of Unseld's term (the first such meeting we've attended, btw). He says that he is very committed to running as an Independent rather than seeking the backing of a party, since he feels (IIRC) that such partisan disputes are not relevant to the welfare of the district. It is a noteworthy sentiment, but I suspect it's somewhat naive: the district's voters are registered 71% Democratic, 17% Republican, and 11% independent or other.

Hollowell was likely chosen as a seat-warmer until a Democratic candidate could fill the seat in November. I suspect he was not taken very seriously at the time. But since taking the seat, he's been working with Unseld's staff and has been doing a very competent job, to my understanding.

For the November election, the Democrats selected former FOP president David James, despite potential residency problems. James was nominated after a weighted vote by a nine-member panel. At the last minute, the GOP selected Candace Jaworski for the race.

In August, Ken Herndon launched a write-in campaign, making it a four-way race. Normally, a write-in campaign is not a serious effort. But Herndon is well-known in the district with a large bloc of support, the nomination process was badly tainted by party shenanigans, and the electorate is already very split since the incumbent is an Independent. There are a ~lot~ of Ken Herndon signs (left over from the primary) with a "Write In" sticker on them in Old Louisville.

So at present, there are four candidates: Republican Candace Jaworski, Democrat David James, incumbent Independent Deonte Hollowell, and write-in candidate Ken Herndon. Anything could happen.

Now, a lawsuit has been filed to remove Hollowell from the ballot, alleging that he didn't have enough petition signatures to be eligible to run as an independent. Ed Springston points to former Democratic Party chair Jennifer Moore among others (you can guess who).

At this point I think it's responsible only to vote for Deonte Hollowell or write in Ken Herndon. And it's certainly plausible that someone could win the seat outside the two major parties. The parties have made a real mess of this. But at least the results will be "interesting".

More electoral fusion in New York

2010-09-21T13:35:00.006-04:00

New York is about the only state in the country that has a system where third parties robustly participate in elections, since the state retains electoral fusion. Electoral fusion allows small parties to cross-endorse the candidates from the major two parties. Although the two major parties continue to dominate the state's politics, this means that the smaller parties can wait in the wings for unusual situations and allow ideological voters to express their preferences in other ways.

It got a lot of attention back in the 2009 special election for New York's 23rd Congressional district, in which more Conservative Doug Doug Hoffmann beat more liberal Republican Dede Scozzafava for the seat, as voters in the right-leaning district attempted to signal their preference for a more conservative candidate.

Now, it might be consequential in the 2010 New York gubernatorial election, as Rick Lazio is still on the Conservative Party line against Republican nominee Carl Paladino after losing in the Republican primary.

More coverage:
Paladino Rout of Lazio Jolts New York G.O.P. (NYT)
Paladino and New York’s Republicans (538@NYT)
Poll Showing Gains by Paladino Excluded Key Candidate From Ballot (538@NYT):

A new poll this morning from Rasmussen Reports suggests significant tightening in the New York governor’s race. The poll has the Democrat, Andrew Cuomo, ahead 54 percent to 38 percent against Carl P. Paladino, the boisterous Buffalo businessman who soundly won the Republican primary last week against Rick Lazio.

...Still, there is one clear flaw with this poll, which is that it did not include an option for Mr. Lazio, who – even as he lost to Mr. Paladino among Republicans — won the Conservative Party’s nomination for governor and is expected to remain in the race. The Conservative Party is a big deal here in New York because of fusion voting, which allows multiple parties to endorse the same candidate on the ballot (Mr. Cuomo, for instance, is the nominee of the Democrats, as well as the liberal Working Families’ Party). Some voters in New York look toward the endorsements of the Conservative Party and the Working Families’ Party when filling out their ballots, and they can sometimes tip the outcome in a race.

But sometimes, the Conservative Party and the Republican Party split, as they have in this case — and this can have a much bigger influence on the outcome.

EDIT
Or not. Rick Lazio has dropped out.

More English spelling reform

2010-09-16T16:58:00.001-04:00

Via Johnson via John Wells, I learned of Masha Bell's blog Improving English Spelling covering spelling reform. Some of the best posts are among her earlier ones, in which she makes the case for very modest regularizations of the most common English words to facilitate education and literacy among young students:

...as well as plenty of posts discussing individual spellings or the weird history of irregularly spelt short u. The sheer pigheadedness behind some of the irregular spellings is always amazing, as when the inkhorns added a "p" to the front of Gaelic "tarmigan" in order to make it look Greek and thus edumacated.

Wells makes a great point, too:

She also compares the ‘redundant’ -e in such words as accurate, adequate, delicate, private, with the ‘phonic reliability’ of words such as accelerate, assassinate, calculate. ...This implies, interestingly, that perhaps we ought to complicate our spelling by introducing a difference between moderate (verb, ˈmɒdəreɪt) and moderat (adjective, ˈmɒd(ə)rət), or separate (verb, ˈsepəreɪt) and separat (adjective, ˈsep(ə)rət) and other similar pairs.

It would certainly, I think, be advantageous to abolish the -e not only in love but also in have and give. These three very basic words immediately undermine the ‘magic e’ rule that reading beginners are taught. It would be nice, too, to be able to distinguish liv (verb, lɪv) from live (adjective, laɪv).

A great idea. Spelling reform has been going nowhere for years, and is generally done in countries more comfortable with language policy, language planning, and more significant government power over elements of popular culture. More recently, it was controversial in Germany.

I suspect the only hope for spelling reform in English is through guerilla and asymmetrical means, such as by endorsement of popular respellings like "nite" for "night". It will happen when writers just begin writing and publishing in reformed spellings, and the spellings that make sense drift from signs and text messages into usage in increasingly formal or prestige contexts.

Letters to a future age

2010-09-07T11:54:00.006-04:00

...on the Georgia Guidestones, an American Stonehenge: Monumental Instructions for the Post-Apocalypse (Wired).

It's kind of amazing how relatively easy it is to send Rosetta Stones forward into the future, although I wonder how this monument would hold up over 10,000 years. That is a truly mind-boggling distance of time, and yet but a pittance if our species is to continue to survive in geological time.

EDIT
The third directive is "unite humanity with a living new language".

Summon monster lists in Pathfinder RPG

2010-08-31T12:09:00.003-04:00

The summon monster lists of 3.5e never made much sense to me, since the monsters tended to be of fairly widely varying power levels. The summon monster spells in the Pathfinder RPG seem a little more systematic.

For these generalizations, ignore the CR boost provided by the fiendish/celestial creature template, which occasionally puts creatures outside of this range. Summon monster I generally summons CR 1/3 to 1/2 creatures, with the exception of the CR 1 riding dog. Summon monster II summons CR 1 creatures, with the exception of the less powerful giant centipede, while summon monster III always summons CR 2 creatures.

Summon monster IV summons creatures of CR 3 to 4; summon monster V summons creatures of CR 5 to 6; summon monster VI summons creatures of CR 7 to 8; summon monster VII summons creatures of CR 9 to 10 (mostly 9); summon monster VIII summons CR 11 outsiders; and summon monster IX summons outsiders of CR 13 to 14.

So, for example, when putting together an alternate summoning list, a CR 2 axe beak would be an appropriate creature to summon with summon monster III.

Every key Westminster system parliament hung

2010-08-24T10:18:00.003-04:00

This blog follows electoral reform somewhat lackadaisically: mostly I reckon electoral fusion is the likeliest way to enable third parties to survive and complement the major parties in the US, which has a first-past-the-post presidential system with a strong status-quo bias, rather than the parliamentary system in which most multi-party systems thrive.

But it's interesting that the London School of Economics blog points out that the results of the 2010 Australian elections mean that first-past-the-post electoral systems, the Alternative Vote (aka instant-runoff voting), and other systems of proportional representation have led to a hung Parliament in every major country using the Westminster system.

Every key ‘Westminster model’ country now has a hung Parliament, following Australia’s ‘dead heat’ election (LSE):

Thanks largely to the success of the Greens in attracting one in every nine votes, Australians now have a lower house (called the House of Representatives) which is completely hung, for the first time since 1940.

...For the first time in history, the Australian outcome means that every key ‘Westminster model’ country in the world now has a hung Parliament. These are the former British empire countries that according to decades of political science orthodoxy are supposed to produce strong, single party government. Following Duverger’s Law their allegedly ‘majoritarian’ electoral systems (first past the post and AV) will typically produce reinforced majorities for one of the top two parties.

But now the table below shows that four of the five key countries have coalition governments in balanced parliaments where no party has a majority. The one exception is Canada, where the Parliament has been hung since 2004, across three general elections.

The linked paper has some interesing conclusions about Duverger's law, the premise that first-past-the-post voting systems lead inexorably to two-party systems (while conversely, proportional representation leads to a more diverse system of parties):

Few propositions in political science are as well known as Duverger’s association of plurality rule systems with two (or few) party competition and an accompanying ‘hypothesis’ (more tentatively) linking proportional representation systems to multi-party systems.

...While the DL literature undeniably opened the way for us to explore some fundamental underlying regularities in the operation of all elections, we have argued here that it extensively misattributes competition space effects to electoral system differences. Using the key concepts of the number of observable parties and 'effectve competition space', we developed a series of precisely measurable tests for Duvergerian two-party drift, and also contrasting predictions of how district-level performance should be structured if results are random or reflect only equi-probability influences (that is, assuming that all logically possible vote combinations across parties are elikely to occur).

When the ‘number of observable parties’ is just 2 or 3 we can predict the district-level results by assuming equi-probability With only two observable parties, outcomes should followbi-nomial probability distribution, defined essentially by the mean vote for the largest party (V1). For three observable parties, outcomes outcomes should reflect the multi-nomial probability distribution, defined by the mean support for the two largest parties (V1 and V2). This approach means that most of the ‘strong’ cases conventionally cited as evidence of Duverger’s Law (sucperfect 2 party district-level outcomes in many US Congressional districts) can be fully and more parsimoniously explained in ECS terms, rendering them inadmissible as support for DL effects.

Both the theoretical argument and the preliminary data from India, the UK and USA reviewed here, suggest that as more and more parties enter competition so strong automatic pressures come into play that make it less and less feasible for two-party drift to occur. Again it is not clear that any reference to electoral system effects is needed to explain multi-party vote outcomes – the driving force here is simply the increase in the number of parties getting a tiny 1 percent of the vote each and the impacts of such changes on the shaping of competition space. we might turn around Sartori’s famous (and loaded) question (2005, p. 107): ‘How much feebleness makes a party irrelevant?’ A clear implication of our approach (and of the data reviewed here) is that every small party getting enough votes to enlarge the competition space can be very relevant indeed for the evolution of party systems.

See also the LSE guide to voting systems.

For re-reading of Nehwon

2010-08-17T13:01:00.006-04:00

I always think of the Nehwon stories of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser as coming from a much later fantasy tradition than the sword-and-sorcery of the 1930s pulps, since Fritz Leiber continued writing these stories through the 1960s, 1970s, and into the 1980s. Several of the anthologies were published in 1968 (Swords in the Mist, Swords Against Wizardry, and The Swords of Lankhmar) and 1970 (Swords and Deviltry and Swords Against Death). Leiber created Fafhrd following the excesses of the rather inhuman Conan; Fafhrd may be a northern barbarian, but he is usually the more cautious and circumspect of the pair, with an uncanny singing voice.

My first reading of these stories was in the order that the anthologies have come to be arranged in: first, Swords and Deviltry (Vol. 1); then Swords against Death (Vol. 2); Swords in the Mist (Vol. 3); Swords Against Wizardry (Vol. 4); The Swords of Lankhmar (Vol. 5); Swords and Ice Magic (Vol. 6); and The Knight and Knave of Swords (Vol. 7). But this seems a faulty way to read them; it implies that the stories present a sustained fantasy narrative, when they rather are very episodic and diverse in tone and style.

I've been considering rereading these stories in order of original publication, skipping from book to book to learn of the adventures of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser as they were revealed, in order to break up the illusory suggestion of a narrative flow. In a way, this approach also shows how old many of these stories are. For rough comparison, Robert E. Howard committed suicide in 1936; H.P. Lovecraft died in 1937; Clark Ashton Smith turned toward sculpture around 1935. Leiber and Harry Otto Fischer began constructing the world of Nehwon around 1937, and Leiber published the first Fafhrd/Mouser story in 1939.

So here follows a listing of the anthologized stories in order of original publication. It's not a bibliography exactly, but more like a cheatsheet for ordering the 36 stories in the anthologies. For example, "Scylla's Daughter", originally published in 1961, later became the first part of The Swords of Lankhmar. The Internet Speculative Fiction Database, the ISFDB Wiki, Galactic Central's magazine list of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Wikipedia were useful references.

"The Jewels in the Forest" aka "Two Sought Adventure" (August 1939), Swords Against Death
"The Bleak Shore" (November 1940), Swords Against Death
"The Howling Tower" (June 1941), Swords Against Death
"The Sunken Land" (February 1942), Swords Against Death
"Thieves' House" (February 1943), Swords Against Death
"Adept's Gambit" (1947), Swords in the Mist
"Claws from the Night" aka "Dark Vengeance" (Fall 1951), Swords Against Death
"The Seven Black Priests" (May 1953), Swords Against Death
"Induction" (1957), Swords and Deviltry
"Lean Times in Lankhmar" (November 1959), Swords in the Mist
"When the Sea-King's Away" (May 1960), Swords in the Mist
"The Unholy Grail" (October 1962), Swords and Deviltry
"The Cloud of Hate" (May 1963), Swords in the Mist
"Bazaar of the Bizarre" (August 1963), Swords Against Death
"The Lords of Quarmall" (January and February 1964), Swords Against Wizardry
"Stardock" (September 1965), Swords Against Wizardry
"The Two Best Thieves in Lankhmar" (August 1968), Swords Against Wizardry
"Their Mistress, the Sea" (1968), Swords in the Mist
"The Wrong Branch" (1968), Swords in the Mist
"In the Witch's Tent" (1968), Swords Against Wizardry

The Swords of Lankhmar

"Ill Met in Lankhmar" (March 1970), Swords and Deviltry
"The Snow Women" (April 1970), Swords and Deviltry
"The Circle Curse" (1970), Swords Against Death
"The Price of Pain-Ease" (1970), Swords Against Death
"The Sadness of the Executioner" (April 1973), Swords and Ice Magic
"Trapped in the Shadowland" (November 1973), Swords and Ice Magic
"The Bait" (December 1973), Swords and Ice Magic
"Beauty and the Beasts" (January 1974), Swords and Ice Magic
"Under the Thumbs of the Gods" (April 1975), Swords and Ice Magic
"Trapped in the Sea of Stars" (September 1975), Swords and Ice Magic
"The Frost Monstreme" (August 1976), Swords and Ice Magic
"Rime Isle" (May and July 1977), Swords and Ice Magic
"Sea Magic" (December 1977), The Knight and Knave of Swords
"The Mer She" (December 1978), The Knight and Knave of Swords
"The Curse of the Smalls and the Stars" (March 1983), The Knight and Knave of Swords
"The Mouser Goes Below" (1988), The Knight and Knave of Swords

It was in issue 11 of "The Dragon" that "Sea Magic" appeared, a year after TSR published a Lankhmar board game. TSR included the Nehwon pantheon in 1980's Deities & Demigods and a Lankhmar campaign setting book for AD&D in 1985.

It's a pity, as well, that my cheap ibooks paperback editions from 2003 are already turning yellow and brittle with age. Hopefully the Dark Horse editions will be more durable.

EDIT
Further comparison: The Fellowship of the Ring was first published in 1954, and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was first published in 1950.

Succumbing to Warhammer

2010-08-11T13:00:00.004-04:00

Well, I usually go to GenCon for the RPGs; in 2010 it looks like the collapse of the 3e bubble is nearly complete. There were some good deals on old stock from Goodman Games, but there were many fewer clearance sales.

This year, I got really nostalgic for the kind of strategy and war games that I used to play back in the day, but rarely play anymore. In the early 1990s, I used to play a lot of Axis & Allies, and later on borrowed some armies to play Warhammer with folks that played old Avalon Hill wargames from time to time. At recent GenCons, I've picked up dwarf, undead, and monster decks for Battlegrounds Fantasy Warfare (bgg), which is a great concept (I was hoping to pick up the Punic War deck, but Your Move Games was not at the convention this year). So I spent some time demo-ing strategy boardgames from Fantasy Flight Games. They were heavily promoting Battles of Westeros (bgg) this year, which I watched some demos of. I personally only demo-ed Tide of Iron (bgg) and Battles of Napoleon (bgg). Tide of Iron was OK; it seems like a fun enough game, but possibly overgeneralized and random for my tastes, although it did allow more than two players. Of the three, Battles of Napoleon seemed like the most fun and worthy game. It has relatively few unit types (infantry, cavalry, and artillery) that play over a large hex grid, but much of the strategic depth comes from the command structure and management. It looked like a lot of fun, but at $100, it's somewhat pricey for a game I'd rarely play.

At the last minute, I instead went in for Warhammer, splitting a copy of the Battle for Skull Pass (bgg, review) with a friend. Tonight we assemble and divide it. As another friend said, it's cheaper now, but more expensive in the long run ;)

Battle for Skull Pass includes small 500-point armies for the dwarfs and orcs & goblins and 7th edition rules.The more recent set, Island of Blood, includes small Skaven and High Elf armies and 8th edition rules, which were released in June (1, 2, 3).

Games Workshop has articles on collecting, modelling, gaming, and painting, errata and FAQs, and a nice map of the Warhammer world. There are fan forums like the 40k forums knowledge base
with basic information on gluing, painting, and stripping paint. Wikipedia has background on the game and the armies.

Mantic makes cheaper, ostensibly compatible figures and has a how-to section that includes assembling and painting dwarf and undead units at present.

Voter choice in primaries vs. parliamentary systems

2010-08-10T15:18:00.004-04:00

Yglesias points us to Neil Sinhababu on getting your voter choice fix:

Whenever I talk to people who wish our system allowed for more parties, and thus more options in a general election, I tell them that they've got plenty of options -- they just have to get involved in primaries. ...I guess there are different ways of fulfilling voters' desires for more than two choices -- primaries and multiparty systems. Maybe part of the reason why so few countries have direct primaries is that when you already have a multiparty system, you've given enough scope for voter choice that you don't need primaries.

2010 has seen a lot of really interesting primary races, especially on the GOP side. The Jack Conway-Daniel Mongiardo/Trey Grayson-Rand Paul races here in Kentucky offered some interestingly contrasting candidates, and the "centrists" of each party didn't win out in the way that's usual. While it's not quite true today that primaries are the real election in the way it was during the era of machine politics, primaries are really important races. It's a shame people pay so relatively little attention to them.

But still I say: Electoral fusion!

An extensible number system

2010-08-09T11:30:00.006-04:00

Earlier this year, I pointed to John Nystrom's 1862 proposal for a tonal (hexadecimal) number and measurement system to replace that of English in lieu of the metric system, and speculated that a system similar to Nystrom's could be used to generate a flexible number system that can be extended to describe any base. I've been noodling around with the idea since then, and here's what I've come up with.

Each of the numbers from 1 to 20 has a simple word that represents its basic identity. These words are simple consonant-vowel syllables; these should be generally accessible to speakers of numerous widespread languages, and contrast in place and manner of articulation as much as possible.

A table of the numbers and their names is below. The numbers are named as follows: "Ye" is 1; "bi" is 2; "sa" is 3; "te" is 4; "fu" is 5; "go" is 6; "mi" is 7; "pa" is 8; "ze" is 9; "du" is 10; "vo" is 11; "ki" is 12; "hu" is 13; "be" is 14; "su" is 15; "to" is 16; "fi" is 17; "ga" is 18; "me" is 19; and "pu" is 20.

The consonants are pronounced roughly as in English, and the vowels are pronounced as in Spanish or Japanese. A different orthography might be appropriate for English speakers: the word for 2 rhymes with "bumblebee", and the words for both 14 and 19 rhyme with "meh", but the words for 2 and 14 have different vowels. It'd probably be almost impossible to get English speakers to pronounce everything properly, though ;)

Each of these numbers can be used as the basis for a number system. To indicate that a number is the base, append "-n" to that number's name. For example, the word "du" represents the idea of 10. Thus, "dun" represents 10 within the context of the decimal (base-10) system. Effectively, appending "-n" to "du" means "10 raised to the 1st power".

This may not seem terribly useful. But the system can regularly extrapolate a word for any position in the number system as an exponent of the base. The decimal word for 100, for example, means literally "10 raised to the 2nd power". To do this, append "-l" to the word for the base, and follow it with the word for 2 ("bi") appended by "-n". So the word for a hundred is "dulbin". The word for 1,000 is "dulsan".

Overall, the system is strict place-value notation, similar to East Asian numbers. Numbers larger than the base are said as they are written in positional notation, multiplying and adding as necessary. Within the context of decimal math, "dun ye" (literally, "ten and one") is 11. "Bi dulbin dun bi" (literally, "two hundreds, ten, and two") is 212. "Sa dulsan ye dulbin bi dun sa" (literally, "three thousands, one hundred, two tens, and three") is 3,123. Since "dun" is the word for 10 in a base-10 context, the decimal system is internally known as the "dunal system".

This system's main feature is that it can predictably extend any base up to 20. The octal, or base-8, system, is the "panal system", since "pan" is the word for 8 in a base-8 context. "Te pan fu" (literally, "four 8s and five") is decimal 37. "Mi palbin fu pan sa" (literally, "seven 64s, five 8s, and three") is decimal 491. In hexadecimal, "te tolbin" (literally, "four 256s") is decimal 1,024.

This is more limited than scientific notation, of course. But without resorting to scientific notation, in vigesimal, the system can count to more than decimal 2 octillion. In decimal, the highest it can count is one short of one sextillion.

For convenience and clarity, binary can be handled in a somewhat different manner, the short binal system. In short binal, 1 is "ye", 2 is "bin", and 4 is "tel". Subsequent numbers are created by appending "-b" to the name of the power of 2. For example, "sab" is 8 (rather than "bilsan"), and "teb" is 16 (rather than "bilten"). Thus, "teb sab tel ye" is decimal 29.

One clear drawback is the high level of rhyming. These words are more similar than the same words in English; the example of decimal 212 above adequately demonstrates how repeating the same sounds could be confusing. Of course, explicitly repeating the base might make it easier to break the number up. And the difference in scale between "dulsan", "dulgon", and "dulzen" might be more readily apparent than between "thousand", "million", and "billion", given that people often fail to easily conceptualize the difference in degree. Certainly, this is a limited system deficient for the purposes that John Nystrom envisioned (replacing the number system of a natural language); but it may be useful within the scope of its intent.

Number	Name	Decimal	Hexadecimal	Vigesimal	Short Binal
1	Ye	ye	ye	ye	ye
2	Bi	bi	bi	bi	bin
3	Sa	sa	sa	sa	bin ye
4	Te	te	te	te	tel
5	Fu	fu	fu	fu	tel ye
6	Go	go	go	go	tel bin
7	Mi	mi	mi	mi	tel bin ye
8	Pa	pa	pa	pa	sab
9	Ze	ze	ze	ze	sab ye
10	Du	ye dun	du	du	sab bin
11	Vo	ye dun ye	vo	vo	sab bin ye
12	Ki	ye dun bi	ki	ki	sab tel
13	Hu	ye dun sa	hu	hu	sab tel ye
14	Be	ye dun te	be	be	sab tel bin
15	Su	ye dun fu	su	su	sab tel bin ye
16	To	ye dun go	ye ton	to	teb
17	Fi	ye dun mi	ye ton ye	fi	teb ye
18	Ga	ye dun pa	ye ton bi	ga	teb bin
19	Me	ye dun ze	ye ton sa	me	teb bin ye
20	Pu	bi dun	ye ton te	ye pun	teb tel
21	—	bi dun ye	ye ton fu	ye pun ye	teb tel ye
22	—	bi dun bi	ye ton go	ye pun bi	teb tel bin
23	—	bi dun sa	ye ton mi	ye pun sa	teb tel bin ye
24	—	bi dun te	ye ton pa	ye pun te	teb sab
25	—	bi dun fu	ye ton ze	ye pun fu	teb sab ye
100	—	ye dulbin	go ton te	fu pun	gob fub tel
256	—	bi dulbin fu dun go	ye tolbin	ki pun to	pab
400	—	te dulbin	ye tolbin ze ton	ye pulbin	pab mib teb

Downtown eats in Indy

2010-08-03T16:47:00.002-04:00

We're leaving for GenCon tomorrow. Yay!

GenCon is fun if you work it right, especially to meet up with old friends who live elsewhere. But I'm not a big fan of downtown Indy; it seems like what a suburbanite's idea of what a downtown should be like. It seems so sterile, rather than being an organic neighborhood where people might actually live. And it is completely overrun with generic chain restaurants.

We always go to the Ram (link), a chain brewpub with a location next to the convention center that has always made a show of welcoming gamer nerds. The Shake 'n Steak nearby is a little cheaper, but always super crowded, while the Einstein Bros Bagels (link) is decent for a breakfast. The food at the Convention Center itself is expensive and truly wretched. We've tried to eat elsewhere from time to time, but such experimentation has led to some terrible experiences, as when (desperately hungry late at night) we wandered into a Hooter's that served one of the most disgusting greasy fish and chips I've ever eaten.

So here's some preliminary research on restaurants near the Convention Center. Mostly I've been using the IndyEthnicFood.com map, trying to get information on places that aren't too expensive, too generic, or serve what we already eat too much of.

The place I've always wanted to go to eat in Indy is the Brugge Brasserie (link, map), ever since sampliing some of their beer at events here in Louisville. They brew some fantastic Belgians, as I recall. The brasserie is a gastropub serving Belgian and European food. At 1011 A.E. Westfield Blvd., however, it is way to the north in Broad Ripple about seven or eight miles north of downtown. This neighborhood, though, appears to have a bunch of great restaurants and all of Indy's independent brewpubs such as Barley Island (link) and Broad Ripple Brewpub (link).

Two years ago, it was really nice to have lunch at a Japanese restaurant after a couple days of Convention Center food and pub grub. The nearest Japanese restaurant is Mikado. A block east is Sushi on the Rocks (link, map, menu) which has lunch specials under $10. At 235 S Meridian St., it is between Georgia and South St.

Noodles & Company (link, map, menu) is a chain that offers a variety of Asian-, American-, and Mediterranean-inspired pasta/noodle dishes. It looks like a meal here runs about $5-10. At 121 W. Maryland St., it's right next to the Convention Center between Capitol and Illinois Ave. The Pita Pit (link, map, menu) is another chain that has various sandwiches for $5-10 and is open until 9 or 10pm. At 1 N. Pennsylvania St., it is just north of Washington St. and about a block southeast of the Soldiers & Sailors Monument. There's a couple of other places around Pennsylvania Ave. and Washington St., like King David Dogs (link) and Dick's Barbeque (link, map, menu) at 50 N. Pennsylvania Ave, which has meals under $10.

TaTa Cuban Cafe (link, map) sells Cuban sandwiches. At 137 W. Market St., it's about a block due west of the monument. Giorgio's Pizza (link) has sandwiches and calzones for just over $5 as well as pizza by the slice, and is on the eastern side of Monument Circle.

The nearest Indian restaurant that I can see is India Garden (link, map, menu). Most of its entrees range from $10-15. At 207 N. Delaware St., it's just north of Ohio St., about two blocks northeast of the Monument.

Epic feats of literature and memory

2010-08-02T09:27:00.004-04:00

Given that historical epics were transmitted orally by rhapsodes, scops skalds, bards, and other singers of tales, it might ought be unsurprising that a person can memorize the entire "Paradise Lost". But since there's little tradition of this sort of thing being done in contemporary English, it's interesting to see exactly what it entails.

It's never to late to memorise a 60,000-word poem:

Pounding the treadmill in 1993, John Basinger, aged 58, decided to complement his physical exercise by memorising the 12 books, 10,565 lines and 60,000 words that comprise the Second Edition of John Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost. Nine years later he achieved his goal, performing the poem from memory over a three-day period, and since then he has recited the poem publicly on numerous occasions. When the psychologist John Seamon of Wesleyan University witnessed one of those performances in December 2008, he saw an irresistible research opportunity.

...Just how did JB manage to pull off this incredible feat? He studied for about one hour per day, reciting verses in seven-line chunks, consistent with Miller's magic number seven - the capacity of short-term, working memory. Added together, JB estimates that he devoted between 3000 to 4000 hours to learning the poem. Seamon's team interpret this commitment in terms of Ericsson's 'deliberate practice theory', in which thousands of hours of perfectionist, self-critical practice are required to achieve true expertise.

JB didn't use the mnemonic techniques favoured by memory champions, but neither, the researchers say, should we see his achievement as a 'demonstration of brute force, rote memorisation'. Rather it was clear that JB was 'deeply cognitively involved' in learning Milton's poem.

Seamon, J., Punjabi, P., & Busch, E. (2010). Memorising Milton's Paradise Lost: A study of a septuagenarian exceptional memoriser. Memory, 18 (5), 498-503 DOI: 10.1080/09658211003781522

Basinger describes the experience in a way evocative of the ars memorativa, as a building he can enter and explore. Nine years is certainly short enough for a youth to learn such a poem, if it comprised the bulk of his formal education.

One might compare the case of a Muslim hafiz, who has memorized the entire Qur'an. The Qur'an has 114 chapters with a total of more than 6,000 verses, comprising some 80,000 words.

An endorsement for fusion voting

2010-07-29T12:34:00.004-04:00

...from Bruce Bartlett in Forbes:

One option I have long favored for giving third parties more influence without the necessity of changing the Constitution or abandoning the two-party system would be fusion voting. Under such a system, third parties could cross-endorse major party candidates and have their votes aggregated. Such a system has long operated in New York, which has a Conservative Party, Liberal Party and many others. Oregon has recently adopted this system as well.

The main benefit of fusion voting is that it would force major party candidates to seek the additional nomination of third parties and work to accommodate their interests. In New York, for example, the failure of a Republican candidate to also secure the Conservative Party nomination virtually guarantees defeat.

Fusion voting also allows for interesting alliances and provides useful information to voters. A Republican with cross endorsement from the Liberal Party might be viable in a heavily Democratic area. Those who would never vote for a Republican might be willing to do so by pulling the Liberal lever.

Fusion voting thus makes third parties an important part of the political system. Without it, people mostly feel that their votes are wasted on a third party candidate because the odds are so heavily stacked against them. Fusion voting also encourages fringe voters to participate in the political system, rather than being alienated from it.

I made the case here; some history here.

I write like horror

2010-07-15T16:17:00.002-04:00

A few moments ago I idly succumbed to the "I Write Like" meme going around on Facebook. I plugged the text of this old blog post into their analyzer and got this result:

I write like
Dan Brown

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Horrors! I have never read Dan Brown. Because Geoffrey K. Pullum's hilarious review at Language Log has convinced me that he is a contemporary Edward Bulwer-Lytton.

I write like Dan Brown? This aggression will not stand, man! So I try again with the text of this blog post. The result?

I write like
David Foster Wallace

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

An improvement, I suppose. Although it seems my writing remains likely to irritate the guys at LanguageLog, even if I don't share DFW's absurd prescriptivism.

Cycling ban in Colorado

2010-07-01T15:54:00.002-04:00

Black Hawk is a tiny town in Colorado, just west of Denver and north of Idaho Springs. They have banned bicycles in town. Of course, it's an illegal bike ban that violates cyclists right to travel and contradicts state law. Repeal doesn't seem likely because the town is so tiny and city government is all for it, but litigation is scheduled for August. The mayor of Black Hawk seems to have some ethical problems as well.

Today in stupid driving tricks

2010-07-01T14:54:00.002-04:00

This morning I was cycling up 4th St., and as I approached a stop light, a driver tried to zoom around me with a lazy pass. He didn't have enough distance to complete the pass before the stop light, so as we waited at the red light, his car was stopped taking up most of the oncoming lane. His only comment, of course, was "GTF out of the road."

A few weeks ago, I came up to a red light on 4th St. in Old Louisville. I stopped and signaled a left turn, and a car came up and stopped behind me. I signaled again and started into the left turn when the light turned green. But as soon as the light turned green, the driver started forward and tried to pass me in the oncoming traffic lane in the middle of the intersection, right through my path of travel. Fortunately, the dude stopped this boneheaded maneuver before he hit me. He waited in the oncoming traffic lane in the middle of the intersection for me to complete my turn before continuing on his way.

It's been a long time since stuff like this has happened. People on 4th St. are usually pretty good about sharing the road.

RPGsWere-eel

2010-05-26T13:34:00.004-04:00

The following post is released under the OGL.

Were-eels are lycanthropes with the ability to turn from humanoids into marine eels and eel-humanoid hybrid shapes. Natural lycanthropes are born with this ability and have perfect control over their shapechanging. Afflicted lycanthropes contract this ability like a curse or disease from another lycanthrope; they sometimes change form involuntarily.

CREATING A WERE-EEL
Were-eels follow the normal rules for lycanthropes, but gain the amphibious special quality when in hybrid form.

LYCANTHROPE, WERE-EEL
This elongated creature looks like a humanoid with the wide-mouthed head of an eel, flippery hands, and mottled, slime-slicked skin.
Were-Eel (Human Form) CR 3
XP 600
Human fighter 2
CE Medium humanoid (human, shapechanger)
Init +6; Senses low-light vision, scent; Perception +3
DEFENSE
AC 16, touch 12, flat-footed 14; (+4 armor, +2 Dex)
hp 17 (2d10+2)
Fort +4, Ref +2, Will +1
OFFENSE
Speed 30 ft.
Melee longsword +4 (1d8+2/19-20)
Ranged dagger +4 (1d4+2/19-20)
Space 5 ft.; Reach 5 ft.
STATISTICS
Str 14, Dex 15, Con 13, Int 10, Wis 12, Cha 10
Base Atk +2; CMB +4; CMD 16
Feats Improved Initiative, Power Attack, Cleave, Combat Reflexes
Skills Climb +7, Swim +7, Perception +3
Languages Common
SQ change shape (human, hybrid, and marine eel; polymorph), lycanthropic empathy (marine eels and giant moray eels)
ECOLOGY
Environment warm oceans and coasts
Organization solitary, pair, or nest (3-6)
Treasure NPC gear (chain shirt, longsword, 3 daggers, other treasure)

Were-Eel (Hybrid Form) CR 3
CE Medium humanoid (human, shapechanger, aquatic)
Init +6; Senses low-light vision, scent; Perception +3
DEFENSE
AC 23, touch 12, flat-footed 21; (+4 armor, +7 natural armor, +2 Dex)
hp 19 (2d10+4)
Fort +5, Ref +2, Will +1
Defensive Abilities bravery +1; DR 10/silver
OFFENSE
Speed 30 ft., swim 30 ft.
Melee longsword +5 (1d8+3/19-20), bite +5 (1d8+3 plus grab and curse of lycanthropy)
Ranged dagger +4 (1d4+3/19-20)
Space 5 ft.; Reach 5 ft.
Special Attacks gnaw
STATISTICS
Str 16, Dex 15, Con 15, Int 10, Wis 12, Cha 10
Base Atk +2; CMB +5; CMD 17
Feats Improved Initiative, Power Attack, Cleave, Combat Reflexes
Skills Climb +8, Swim +16, Perception +3
Languages Common
SQ change shape (human, hybrid, and marine eel; polymorph), lycanthropic empathy (marine eels and giant moray eels), amphibious
SPECIAL ABILITIES
Gnaw (Ex) If a were-eel in hybrid or animal form begins a round with a grabbed foe, it inflicts automatic bite damage (2d4+3 points of damage). A were-eel possesses a second set of jaws in its throat that aid in swallowing—it can make a second bite attack (+5 attack, 1d4+3) against a foe it has already grabbed.

Natural were-eels tend to be stolid and secretive, with oily, pale skin and unnaturally wide and grim smiles.

Were-eels prefer isolated coasts, harbor towns, and busy ports, where they can blend in with a transient population and have access to both humanoid victims and salt water.

RPGsMarine eel

2010-05-26T12:55:00.002-04:00

The following post is released under the OGL.

This seven-foot-long carnivorous eel undulates through the water, leering with its broad jaw.

Marine Eel CR 2
XP 600
N Medium animal (aquatic)
Init +7; Senses low-light vision, Perception +5
DEFENSE
AC 18, touch 13, flat-footed 15; (+3 Dex, +5 natural)
hp 13 (2d8+4)
Fort +4, Ref +6, Will +1
OFFENSE
Spd swim 30 ft.
Melee bite +3 (2d4+2 plus grab)
Space 5 ft.; Reach 5 ft.
Special Attacks gnaw
STATISTICS
Str 14, Dex 16, Con 12, Int 1, Wis 12, Cha 8
Base Atk +1; CMB +3; CMD 16
Feats Improved Initiative
Skills Stealth +7, Perception +5, Swim +10; Racial Modifiers +4 Stealth in rocky, aquatic areas
ECOLOGY
Environment warm oceans
Organization solitary, pair, or nest (3–6)
Treasure none
SPECIAL ABILITIES
Gnaw (Ex) If a marine eel begins a round with a grabbed foe, it inflicts automatic bite damage (2d4+2 points of damage). A marine eel possesses a second set of jaws in its throat that aid in swallowing—it can make a second bite attack (+11 attack, 1d4+2) against a foe it has already grabbed.

The marine eel is a ferocious predator, capable of holding prey in its primary jaws while a smaller set of jaws inside its throat chews away bite-sized portions.

Continental Drift and "The Future is Wild"

2010-05-13T19:23:00.007-04:00

"The Future is Wild" is a great series. It starts off 50 million years in the future, when it speculates that mammals are still dominant. But the mammals are different, of course: arctic capybaras wander the tundra, hunted by saber-toothed badgers. My favorite of these critters is the spinx, a burrowing chicken with the lifestyle and social behavior of today's naked mole rat.

The future of 100 million years gets progressively stranger. The continents has shifted significantly. North America has drifted north while South America has rotated west; Australia has shot across the Pacific Ocean to begin colliding into Alaska; and Antarctica has moved north into the middle of Pacific, where Hawaii is today. Much current landmass is flooded.

This is the world in which the cephalapods take their first steps—or slitherings onto land, in a massive tropical swamp. The first terrestrial cephalapods highlighted are the swampus: here are some of their young.

By 200 million years in the future, the continents have drifted to form a supercontinent.

The cephalapods have developed to dominate the land, with enormous herbivores such as the five-meter, eight-ton megasquid.

My favorite creature of them all is the squibbon, an agile cephalapod swinging from branch to branch among the treetops.

Some of these speculations might be a little dubious: wouldn't a 120-ton tortoise have problems with heat regulation? But it's a really fun project and an entertaining series.

Derby 2010 Disclosure

2010-05-01T18:03:00.004-04:00

Super Saver, along with Stately Victor, Paddy O'Prado, and Lookin at Lucky. It's hard not to put a wager on Devil May Care, as well.

EDIT
TwinSpires is swamped, leaving me just across the board on Super Saver and Lookin at Lucky, with Stately Victor to win. =/

Oaks 2010 Disclosure

2010-04-30T17:12:00.000-04:00

Blind Luck, along with Beautician and Tidal Pool.

2010 Kentucky Derby: Linkage

2010-04-23T15:26:00.006-04:00

The Kentucky Derby is the first Saturday in May, which this year happens to fall on my birthday. That won't happen again until 2021.

The Louisville Courier-Journal of course has extensive coverage of the Kentucky Derby, including the 2010 Derby Briefing Book and the Horse Racing and local events blogs. The C-J's most-requested Derby recipes was originally published back in 1997: make sure to pick up a gallon of bourbon.

Events follow a schedule, and most everything in April and May are scheduled around Derby and the events scheduled around Derby. Thunder over Louisville, the fireworks and air show, is two weeks before Derby. BBC Brew Day is the week before Derby. The Great Steamboat Race is the Wednesday before Derby; the next day is the parade, and Oaks is on Friday.

Hunter S. Thompson wrote about the 1970 Derby (sort of) in "The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved", and William Faulkner wrote on the '55 Derby in "Kentucky. May. Saturday." (h/t JH). Faulkner opens that piece by penning a paean to Kentucky as fine as you'll find. I'm queuing up the 1969 film of Faulkner's last book.

Anyhow, this post was intended to be about coverage of the race itself. The official sites are Oaks, Kentucky Derby, and Churchill Downs. Churchill owns TwinSpires.com for online wagering.

The New York Times' The Rail blog covers the Triple Crown. The 2009 edition was begun on April 20, and featured a blackberry-bourbon mint julep recipe. Steven D. Levitt often reveals his Derby picks at the Freakonomics blog (he was pretty hilariously wrong in 2009). The Baltimore Sun's horse coverage is more geared towards the Preakness. But it makes me think about how fantastic "The Wire" was.

Blood Horse has coverage of Triple Crown Mania, and CBS Sports and ESPN have horse racing feeds. Many horse racing sites like the Daily Racing Form are oriented towards subscribers, although there are some blogs ( 1 2 3 4 5 6 ). Wikipedia has a list of the winners back to Aristides.

The Kentucky Derby YouTube channel has including replay back to 2002. Here's the 2009 Derby, 2008 Derby and Oaks, 2007 Derby, 2006 Derby, and 2005 Derby, as well as things like Welcome to Louisville and Making your Mint Julep. I moved to Louisville in 2004, right after Smarty Jones won; so the first Derby I really paid attention to was won by Giacomo.

Succumbing to Facebook

2010-04-22T15:57:00.002-04:00

I resisted MySpace, and resisted Facebook for a long time. I've been a member of LouisvilleMojo.com, a local social networking site, for nearly as long as I've been here in Louisville; but it's local.

But last week it came out that, with the drop in revenues from the recession, they were converting the site into a paid-only dating site. I reckon that's about the end of what interest I took in the place. So I finally knuckled in and made a Facebook account last Wednesday, April 14.

O well.

Scoundrel's whist: A card game

2010-04-14T11:46:00.001-04:00

Scoundrel's Whist is a game for four players. It is a trick-taking game with some similarities to whist, but with a greater emphasis on competitive play and a scoring system that rewards capturing many low cards rather than taking many tricks.

One player is selected as the dealer, who shuffles the deck and deals out thirteen cards to each player, beginning with the player to his left. The final card is dealt face-up onto the table, and indicates which suit is trump. After the trump suit is chosen, the dealer adds the card to his hand, and play commences with the player to his left.

In addition to the trump suit, two cards trump all other cards: the Jack of Clubs and the Jack of Spades. These two cards are known as the "scoundrels." If the two scoundrels are played in the same trick, the second scoundrel wins the trick. However, when a player wins a trick with scoundrels, he or she discards the scoundrels from the trick. Thus, the point value of the scoundrels don't count against his or her score.

The first player leads the trick, placing a single card face up on the table. Each player continuing to the left plays an additional card to the trick, and must play a card of the same suit if they have one. A player with no card of the suit may discard a card into the trick or play a trump. The trick is won by the highest card of the suit that led, or otherwise the highest trump card. After a trick is won, the player turns the cards face down into their pile. Play continues around to the left until all 13 tricks have been played.

After the tricks have been played, players count up the value of their cards, and the player with the highest point total wins. Cards are scored as follows: All face cards and 10s are worth -1 points, the 8s and 9s are worth zero points, and all 2s, 3s, 4s, 5s, 6s, and 7s are worth one point.

A canny observer might notice some parallels; other scoring systems are occasionally used.

For electoral fusion

2010-04-14T11:26:00.002-04:00

Lots of folks are dissatisfied with the two-party system. They feel it's a racket, that the two parties aren't substantively different because they seek the median voter, that they can't identify with either party or vote in good faith for either of them. It may be that for these reasons, some people don't participate in the fundamental institution of liberal democracy: the vote.

So there is a desire for third parties from people with widely varying ideological positions and backgrounds. But in most places in the U.S., third parties are not viable. This is a consequence of "Duverger's law", the principle that any political system with simple majority voting tends to evolve into a two-party system, because minor parties tend to act as spoilers. This is certainly no ironclad law, but it seems to generally hold true in the United States.

So people looking to create viable alternatives to the two main parties often advocate for some type of electoral reform, such as proportional representation or instant-runoff voting. Some folks who wish for viable third parties admire the multi-party democracies of Europe, where many ideologically varied parties govern through coalitions. However, these countries use a parliamentary system of democracy with proportional representation that is quite different from America's presidential system. Changing our electoral system in this way would result in a practice of democracy that is quite different from what Americans expect, and would generally require sweeping constitutional reforms or even a new constitutional convention if implemented above the level of local government. Americans generally don't expect opposition parties to field a shadow government or dissolve the government when they win an election.

There is an easier way to enable viable third parties, however, with a simple electoral reform that hearkens back to the earlier days of American democracy: electoral fusion. When I moved to New York some years ago, I was surprised by how viable third parties were there. It's certainly not a perfect system, and it may be a necessary-but-not-sufficient change to create viable third parties, but it can be very functional in the right situations.

Electoral fusion received a lot of press last year as a consequence of the dramatic 2009 special election in New York's 23rd Congressional district. After President Barack Obama nominated the conservative-leaning district's Congressman, John H. McHugh, as the Secretary of the Army, a special election was scheduled to fill his seat. Eleven Republican Party county chairs chose moderate Republican Dede Scozzafava as the GOP nominee for the race, while the Democratic Party chose Bill Owens as their nominee, who was cross-endorsed by the Working Families Party. However, the Conservative Party, who normally cross-endorses the Republican candidate, chose longtime Republican Doug Hoffman as their nominee. Scozzafava fared poorly in the polling and dropped out of the race, leaving Hoffman as the conservative frontrunner. Although Hoffman narrowly lost the general election, if he had won, it would have been a victory for ideological conservatives who wanted to ensure that conservative Republicans, not moderate ones, held the seat. Hoffman's bid for the seat was a consequence of New York's inclusion of viable third parties, driven by electoral fusion.

Electoral fusion is a system in which third parties appear on the ballot, but are allowed to cross-endorse the candidates of other parties. Some of the major third parties in New York include the Working Families Party, associated with labor unions, and the Conservative Party, dedicated to promoting ideological conservatism. Other parties include the Right to Life Party, the Independence Party, and (formerly) the Liberal Party. In most elections, the Democratic, Republican, Working Families, and Conservative Parties will all appear on the ballot, but the Working Families Party will endorse the Democrat candidate and the Conservative Party will endorse the Republican candidate. So for example, if (hypothetical) incumbent Democrat Michael Brown* was being challenged by Republican William Jones*, Michael Brown would appear on the ballot as a candidate of the Democratic Party and the Working Families Party, while William Jones would appear on the ballot as a candidate of the Republican Party and the Conservative Party.

One consequence is that voters can more clearly signal politicians their priorities and beliefs. If Michael Brown wins re-election due to a large turnout by union voters voting on the Working Families line, he might reasonably conclude that labor issues are a high priority for his constituents. If William Jones is swept into office by voters voting on the Conservative Party line, it might convince him to take a more conservative, rather than moderate, tack as a Republican. Or imagine that William Jones was endorsed by the Republican Party, the Conservative Party, the Right to Life Party, and the Libertarian Party. If Jones received relatively few votes on the Right to Life Party line but many votes on the Libertarian Party line, he might reasonably conclude that liberty and property rights are more especially important to his constituents, and build his record on that.

Another consequence is that in many districts, third parties can routinely attract enough votes to stay on the ballot. And when necessary, they can field their own candidates. Often, cross-endorsing the candidate of the two large parties allows them to exist in "sleeper mode", waiting for the time when fielding an independent candidate can be useful. And third parties are certainly not limited to rubber stamping the candidates of the main parties.

Alyssa Katz's 2005 story in the Nation highlights some of these effects. She describes how the Working Families Party in 2004 endorsed Republican State Senator Nick Spano, who won re-election by only 18 votes, which infuriated many progressive Democrats but helped lead to the GOP relenting in its long opposition to a minimum wage hike the WFP wanted. In an unusual election in 2003, Letitia James won a New york City Council seat as an Working Families Party candidate running against a Democratic candidate who had been convicted of soliciting prostitutes and not paying child support.

This is what happened in the 2009 New York special election. Generally, the Conservative Party cross-endorses the Republican candidate. But in this case, committed conservatives who were unsatisfied with the ideological position of Scozzafava nominated Hoffman to run on the Conservative Party line. This eventually impelled Scozzafava to drop out of the race, which was widely regarded by conservatives as a victory for their ideological preferences.

So the New York special election demonstrated the advantage of allowing voters to more clearly express their preferences. And it is an important tool to fight corrupt incumbents in otherwise noncompetitive districts.

Guest-blogging at the Volokh Conspiracy, David Schleicher observed last year that electoral fusion helps reduce the lack of competitiveness in city council elections, leading to the elections of Republicans Fiorella Laguardia, Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg in largely Democratic New York City. Many districts have a very partisan electorate, which can lead to corrupt political machines; electoral fusion was a key ingredient in the fight against Tammany Hall.

Moreover, unlike proportional representation or instant runoff voting, electoral fusion is not alien to American democracy. Fusion has a long history in America; during the 19th century, it was practiced in elections at all levels of government. This practice only ended at the end of the 19th century, when ballot rules were introduced that required political parties to obtain access to the ballot through petitions, and the two dominant parties outlawed the practice of letting a candidate's name appear on the ballot twice. The rationale for this was merely to protect the hegemony of the Democratic and Republican parties. That is the sole purpose of banning electoral fusion: to ensure that the two main parties have a permanent duopoly on political representation.

New York is the only state that didn't ban electoral fusion at the time; it was the only state that followed the argument that electoral fusion is often the only way to defeat an entrenched and corrupt political machine. And so New York was the only state to preserve a political system that included more than three parties. Electoral fusion is legal or has been legalized in a few other states, although third parties have not necessarily been as successful as in New York. In 2009, Oregon legalized fusion voting, aiding the Independent Party of Oregon and other parties. The National Open Ballot Project is one organization that advocates this.

Of course, electoral fusion is not without its critics, who protest the way it enables vanity parties, or criticize specific third parties like the Working Families Party from both the right or the left. The Working Families Party certainly is one of the most notable New York parties, and attracts attention for its successes, organization, and practices (1, 2, 3). A system that allows third parties to exist will enable a diverse group of parties: some will be terrible, or ideologically repellant to many people. The WFP will be stronger or more prominent in some districts, and the Right to Life Party more so in others. In addition to a Conservative Party and a Liberal Party, there may be a Socialist Party competing in the marketplace of ideas. But that doesn't mean that the existence of third parties can't improve elections or political representation within the context of our two-party system. And legalizing electoral fusion would be a simple, easy change.

See also:

* These names are made up from the fourth and fifth most popular first names and surnames in the U.S. Any similarity to real candidates is accidental.

Spring 26: Green has returned

2010-04-14T10:15:00.002-04:00

Today is the 26th day of Spring. Things move quickly at this time of year.

I saw my first daffodil in full flower on the 89th day of winter, the Friday that was the day before the equinox. In another day or two, the daffodils were in full flower.

Next was the yellow-flowered forsythia, and the purple saucer and white star magnolias came into full bloom. Then the Bradford pears burst into flower. By now, nearly all the trees are well into leafing out: from the bleak frozen winter of a month ago, everything is transformed. The tree pollen is really bothering my allergies, but the streets are nice and shady.

Last Sunday, I figured out how to hook up our bike trailer, and took the boy out for his first bike ride in Central Park. It was a good idea to take short ride; he still has a little getting-used-to-this to do.

Louisville Cycling Blogs

2010-04-14T09:57:00.006-04:00

A while ago, I tried to compile a list of notable or regular Louisville-specific bike blogs. It's a few months old, but still pretty reasonable. Post more, guys!

No such list would be complete without Broken Sidewalk, of course.

EDIT
Check out the blog for new local business Vic's Classic Bikes. Here's one for you, Hal Heiner.

Lists of 2009

2010-03-11T15:02:00.000-05:00

I enjoy the "best of" lists we get at the end of every year; it's a great time to recharge my DVD queue, at the least. 2009 is several months into the past by now, but at least we're past the "Hurt Locker" v. "Avatar" awards chatter: The Academy Awards were last weekend, but the Pulitzer Prizes for 2010 are coming up (April 12).

LEO's December 30,2009 issue had some top five lists for film and music. Time had a list of lists, as did Nerve, but those are nothing to compare with the exhaustive Lists: 2009 and the recap.

There's also the best cycling blogs of 2009 and even more "best movie" lists of 2009 and the 2000s.

Winter 81: Tidings of Spring

2010-03-11T14:39:00.001-05:00

Today is the 81st day of winter; the vernal equinox is less than two weeks away.

The two weeks prior, until this past weekend, have been unrelentingly cold. I've always been glad that there's a dial thermometer outside across from the kitchen window; but for some weeks it has been a grim herald, unfailingly pointing to 20°F (-6°C) when I get up, and scarcely improving throughout the day.

This past weekend, it got up into the 50s, nearly to 60°F (15°C); it was up into the 60s on Monday. Yesterday it started in the 50s, and got up into the 70s (and would have done the same today if it wasn't threatening rainstorms). That's the kind of weather that really hearkens to Spring, to the first warm rain, and the first day that cyclists appear en masse. But now I'm not merely yearning for the Vernal Equinox to mark progress towards the end of winter's dire chill, but also for all the delights of spring, and the growing season. KET premiered "Thoroughbred" last night for pledge week, which certainly seems to me like an omen of the Derby, and our coming warm weather.

Sunsets are now noticably later, and the irises out front seem to be perking up, although everything in the yard is still very dormant, of course. My arborist friend identified the main tree in the backyard as a red maple, which appears not to have the expected flower buds, although leaf buds are present. The red maples in Central Park are blooming, the crocuses are blooming on St. James Court, and a few daffodils are getting ready to open their blossoms.

If I was starting seeds, I'd have to start them about now, if not earlier. But I don't really have plans for that, so I'll likely have to buy some tomatoes and peppers in a month or so, and plan on starting seeds next year.

On Lupercalia, 2010 CE

2010-02-14T22:27:00.004-05:00

Today is the 56th day of winter, in the 2,010th year of the common era. Today is a celebration descended from the Roman ritual of Lupercalia, celebrated in a colorful way by them, and renamed by the Christians after one of their saints, in the usual way.

Today we took possession of our snow-blanketed house. Another snowstorm is due tonight.

Weird.

Temple of Amun

2010-02-13T23:53:00.008-05:00

Kemetic temples had a number of distinctive features and layout. The Temple of Dendur was a small Nubian temple built by Augustus and now located at the Met. Other smaller temples include the Temple of Debod, the Temple of Taffeh, and the temples of Ptah, Osiris Heqadjet, and Opet at Karnak. The Temple of Amun at Karnak is one of the largest religious complexes in the world. Even smaller temples like the temples of Khonsu and Mut are extensive. These temples consist of hypostyle and peristyle courts and a naos or adyton, accessed through pylons. A sacred lake adjacent to the temple provided symbolic water for ceremonies.

Here's a map, which fits on a 24x30 gaming flip-mat, of an imaginary temple that has some of these basic features. One square is 5 feet. A smaller version of a minor temple, with an analogous layout, is at bottom.

All doors are closed and locked, and all interior surfaces are carved with bas reliefs, inscriptions, and cartouches that describe the temple, its ceremonies, and patrons.

1. Pylon Gate
Access to the temple courtyard is through a gate of pylons. Another pylon gate 50 feet to the east defines the outer courtyard and the outer perimeter of the temple complex.

2. Peristyle Court
This enclosed, open-air courtyard is surrounded by a colonnade that offers modest shade and shelter. It is in the open-air courtyard that priests meet with visitors, receive gifts, and administer services.

3. Hypostyle Court
Immense graven columns, colorfully painted, support a flat wooden ceiling high overhead. Clerestory windows over the central aisle allow some illumination. This fully covered interior court begins the private areas of the temple closed to the public. An altar can be set up in front of the doors to the inner sanctum.

4. Closets
Locked storage areas contain ritual implements, supplies, and other goods.

5. Inner Sanctum
This room contains the cult image of the temple's primary deity.

6. Accessory Sanctums
These small chapels house the cults of subordinate saints or demigods.

RPGsA feather token

2010-02-03T11:28:00.007-05:00

Too bad my submission to Paizo's RPG Superstar 2010 competition, the portable latrine, didn't make it to Round 2. The item below, released under the OGL, is superficially similar, and is what I used in my home game as part of "The Coils of Set".

Feather token—conveniently conveyable cesspit
Aura Strong conjuration; CL 12th
Slot —; Price 400 gp; Weight —
Description
Like any feather token, this wondrous item has a special power to suit a specific need, and can only be used once. Often created to assist military logistics, the conveniently conveyable cesspit aids in the quick construction of sanitary latrines and toilets. When cast onto a solid, nonliving, material surface on which the user is standing, it creates a hole or pit no more than 10 feet wide and 10 feet deep. This pit is fitted with a wooden toilet seat on the side adjacent to the user.
Construction
Requirements Craft Wondrous item, major creation, move earth, disintegrate; Cost 200 gp

3D POD

2010-02-03T11:11:00.001-05:00

Sean K. Reynolds points us to Shapeways, which appears to offer 3D printing on demand. Very cool stuff. Ceramicwombat offers stainless steel dice; Bathsheba offers mathematical sculptures like hypercubes; and there is stuff like gyroscopes, astrolabes, orreries, and rings. The company also has a StampMaker and RingPoem maker. They also have a cool blog.

Open Game License 1.0a

2010-02-03T10:50:00.002-05:00

All Open Game Content on Panglott's Garden will be clearly marked as such and linked to this license.

OPEN GAME LICENSE Version 1.0a

The following text is the property of Wizards of the Coast, Inc. and is Copyright 2000 Wizards of the Coast, Inc (“Wizards”). All Rights Reserved.

1. Definitions: (a) “Contributors” means the copyright and/or trademark owners who have contributed Open Game Content; (b) “Derivative Material” means copyrighted material including derivative works and translations (including into other computer languages), potation, modification, correction, addition, extension, upgrade, improvement, compilation, abridgment or other form in which an existing work may be recast, transformed or adapted; (c) “Distribute” means to reproduce, license, rent, lease, sell, broadcast, publicly display, transmit or otherwise distribute; (d) “Open Game Content” means the game mechanic and includes the methods, procedures, processes and routines to the extent such content does not embody the Product Identity and is an enhancement over the prior art and any additional content clearly identified as Open Game Content by the Contributor, and means any work covered by this License, including translations and derivative works under copyright law, but specifically excludes Product Identity. (e) “Product Identity” means product and product line names, logos and identifying marks including trade dress; artifacts, creatures, characters, stories, storylines, plots, thematic elements, dialogue, incidents, language, artwork, symbols, designs, depictions, likenesses, formats, poses, concepts, themes and graphic, photographic and other visual or audio representations; names and descriptions of characters, spells, enchantments, personalities, teams, personas, likenesses and special abilities; places, locations, environments, creatures, equipment, magical or supernatural abilities or effects, logos, symbols, or graphic designs; and any other trademark or registered trademark clearly identified as Product identity by the owner of the Product Identity, and which specifically excludes the Open Game Content; (f) “Trademark” means the logos, names, mark, sign, motto, designs that are used by a Contributor to identify itself or its products or the associated products contributed to the Open Game License by the Contributor (g) “Use”, “Used” or “Using” means to use, Distribute, copy, edit, format, modify, translate and otherwise create Derivative Material of Open Game Content. (h) “You” or “Your” means the licensee in terms of this agreement.

2. The License: This License applies to any Open Game Content that contains a notice indicating that the Open Game Content may only be Used under and in terms of this License. You must affix such a notice to any Open Game Content that you Use. No terms may be added to or subtracted from this License except as described by the License itself. No other terms or conditions may be applied to any Open Game Content distributed using this License.

3. Offer and Acceptance: By Using the Open Game Content You indicate Your acceptance of the terms of this License.

4. Grant and Consideration: In consideration for agreeing to use this License, the Contributors grant You a perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive license with the exact terms of this License to Use, the Open Game Content.

5. Representation of Authority to Contribute: If You are contributing original material as Open Game Content, You represent that Your Contributions are Your original creation and/or You have sufficient rights to grant the rights conveyed by this License.

6. Notice of License Copyright: You must update the COPYRIGHT NOTICE portion of this License to include the exact text of the COPYRIGHT NOTICE of any Open Game Content You are copying, modifying or distributing, and You must add the title, the copyright date, and the copyright holder's name to the COPYRIGHT NOTICE of any original Open Game Content you Distribute.

7. Use of Product Identity: You agree not to Use any Product Identity, including as an indication as to compatibility, except as expressly licensed in another, independent Agreement with the owner of each element of that Product Identity. You agree not to indicate compatibility or co-adaptability with any Trademark or Registered Trademark in conjunction with a work containing Open Game Content except as expressly licensed in another, independent Agreement with the owner of such Trademark or Registered Trademark. The use of any Product Identity in Open Game Content does not constitute a challenge to the ownership of that Product Identity. The owner of any Product Identity used in Open Game Content shall retain all rights, title and interest in and to that Product Identity.

8. Identification: If you distribute Open Game Content You must clearly indicate which portions of the work that you are distributing are Open Game Content.

9. Updating the License: Wizards or its designated Agents may publish updated versions of this License. You may use any authorized version of this License to copy, modify and distribute any Open Game Content originally distributed under any version of this License.

10. Copy of this License: You MUST include a copy of this License with every copy of the Open Game Content You distribute.

11. Use of Contributor Credits: You may not market or advertise the Open Game Content using the name of any Contributor unless You have written permission from the Contributor to do so.

12. Inability to Comply: If it is impossible for You to comply with any of the terms of this License with respect to some or all of the Open Game Content due to statute, judicial order, or governmental regulation then You may not Use any Open Game Material so affected.

13. Termination: This License will terminate automatically if You fail to comply with all terms herein and fail to cure such breach within 30 days of becoming aware of the breach. All sublicenses shall survive the termination of this License.

14. Reformation: If any provision of this License is held to be unenforceable, such provision shall be reformed only to the extent necessary to make it enforceable.

15. COPYRIGHT NOTICE

Open Game License v 1.0a Copyright 2000, Wizards of the Coast, Inc.

System Reference Document. Copyright 2000, Wizards of the Coast, Inc.; Authors Jonathan Tweet, Monte Cook, Skip Williams, based on material by E. Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson.

Panglott's Garden, Copyright 2009-2010, Jeremiah Rose.

Pathfinder RPG Core Rulebook. Copyright 2009, Paizo Publishing, LLC; Author: Jason Bulmahn, based on material by Jonathan Tweet, Monte Cook, and Skip Williams.

Pathfinder RPG Bestiary, © 2009, Paizo Publishing, LLC; Author: Jason Bulmahn, based on material by Jonathan Tweet, Monte Cook, and Skip Williams.

Tome of Horrors. Copyright 2002, Necromancer Games, Inc.; Authors: Scott Greene, with Clark Peterson, Erica Balsley, Kevin Baase, Casey Christofferson, Lance Hawvermale, Travis Hawvermale, Patrick Lawinger, and Bill Webb; Based on original content from TSR.

END OF LICENSE

A non-metaphorical garden

2010-01-29T09:07:00.015-05:00

Shortly before Christmas, we made an offer on a house, and we will close on it this afternoon. This would be the first time I will have owned property myself, which I can plant as I desire. I have gardened in many ways before: in many containers across two continents, in community garden plots, in neighbor's yards. But now Panglott shall have at last a non-metaphorical garden.

My plan for now is to spend the first year observing the plants that grow there now: to see their types, habits, and varieties; to watch the patterns of sun and water on the property; to mull future garden plans. There are a few patches of English ivy and wintercreeper to work on weeding out, and most of the trees appear to be weedy Ailanthus growing along the fenceline that I'll want to replace, but I hope for the first year to be mostly observation. With a small bit of land, it'll be worth the time to find the sunny patches as the sun shifts in the sky, to find the wet and dry patches, to slowly stress the weeds into oblivion, to plan a layout, and to drag out and savor the slow process of getting things the way I'd like them to be.

For a long time, I have been an avid gardener without any garden. Living in the U.S. and Japan and traveling in China and Europe, I've seen some really excellent and inspiring gardens. At present, I think there are three main traits I'll want to encourage in my yard:

Nativeness
The single largest threat to the environment of the continental U.S. is not global warming, or overhunting, but invasive species. Following more than a century of overhunting, clearcutting, habitat destruction, and pollution, one of the great environmental disasters of the 20th century was the downfall of the American chestnut. Two generations ago, the exotic chestnut blight wiped out four billion chestnut trees, the most commercially, economically, and ecologically valuable tree of the climax forest in the East. A generation ago, Dutch elm disease wiped out beloved elm trees across the country. And now that the emerald ash borer has entered Kentucky, ash trees will likely become virtually extinct in this part of the world for centuries or millenia to come.

Invasive species are bad for our local environment, and their spread is often aided and abetted by home landscaping. Some of Kentucky's least wanted plants are introduced from landscaping: burning bush, Japanese honeysuckle, English ivy, and the ugly, obnoxious, highly aggressive wintercreeper. Most of these plants are really pretty ugly, to boot. Louisville's otherwise very cool Riverwalk is absolutely choked with exotic honeysuckle and multiflora rose. There's more information at the Kentucky Native Plant Society or native gardening at USFS

Whenever I go out for a hike or bike ride in the woods or a park, I'll see a patch of English ivy or wintercreeper or honeysuckle beginning the process of taking over a patch of otherwise bucolic woods. It's depressing. And when I come back into the city and see those same plants infesting yards and gardens, it's still depressing. I'd rather, as much as is possible, stick to the plants and flowers common in the area of the Falls of the Ohio, the Ohio River valley, and the Eastern woodlands west of Appalachia. This is hardly a limitation: the Eastern forest of the United States is one of the most botanically diverse temperate ecosystems in the world.

Michael Pollan penned a diatribe Against Nativism 15 years ago, which raises some valid points, but I think this remains an interesting approach to gardening, in general.

Usefulness
If you're going to put in the work to grow a plant, there should be a purpose for the labor. Plants worth cultivating should serve us for food, for spices, for tea, or for useful materials. A tomato plant or two, and a window box full of mint are good; sunflowers and squashes have been grown here for thousands of years, and there are interesting opportunities to experiment with cultivating native plants for food, such as sunchokes or ramps (Allium tricoccum). American bamboo is a good structural material for crafts. Horsetails can be scouring brushes. Bee balm and yarrow make nice tea.

I've long been intrigued by the idea of Kerala home gardens: that every household would have a few trees that supply food to enrich the family's diet. When I was a kid in Oklahoma, we had a peach tree and an almond tree, which provided a fantastic wealth of fruit and nuts every year. We had more peach pies than we could eat. It was great.

This idea has been expanded to forest gardening and permaculture, which seems to be something of a treehugger buzzword. But layering perennial food-producing to mimic the ecologial structure of a forest could be a way to get a wealth of food with less work. I am a big believer in perennials, especially those that can fend for themselves. And the plants typical of our local forests can fit such a system well: a canopy of hickory, pecan, oak, black cherry, or persimmon (but sadly no chestnuts), beside which can grow pawpaws, sand plums, American plums, hazelnuts, or serviceberries. Below, in the understory, can grow native ferns for fiddleheads, mosses, and perhaps wild ginger. Sounds workable, but needs more research.

The things you should grow at home, given the work involved, are things that you want an overwhelmingly bounty of (you can never have too much homegrown tomatoes), or unusual things that are hard to buy in the store.

Aesthetics
And so my priorities are opposite of most. There are some flowers that I enjoy absent practical uses: coneflowers, asters, blazing star, wild roses, &c. And I have come to think "usefulness" should include "attracts hummingbirds and butterflies" (clearly, very utilitarian creatures), so: butterfly weed, meadow lily, trumpet honeysuckle, red columbine. Trumpet creeper is the best hummingbird flower, but very aggressive; I'd be hesitant to plant it, but would be satisfied if it's already there.

Photos: Top—Helianthus tuberosus
Benimoto (CC BY 2.0)
Second—Lonicera sempervirens
pellaea (CC BY 2.0)
Third—Prunus americana
nalilo (CC BY-ND 2.0)
Bottom—Aquilegia canadensis,
nicmcphee (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Bikes and Cars: Better Together

2010-01-27T14:53:00.010-05:00

I've been blogging at panglott.blogspot.com for most of the past year, but I thought I'd crosspost this response to Bikes vs Cars: The Unsolvable Problem.

Although he's a fan of the pedal, Holland's main point is that because sometimes traffic collisions happen, it's impossible for bicycles and cars to share the road—at all. Thus bicycles should stay off the road except when they can convince drivers to stay off it entirely. But this doesn't make any sense. Hundreds of motorists are killed in accidents and collisions in Kentucky every year...should we conclude then that motorists cannot share the road even with each other? By far, the most dangerous mode of transportation, mile for mile, is walking. Pedestrians get hit and killed by drivers all the time. But should we then conclude that pedestrians shouldn't walk down to the corner store or the local park except when the roads have been cleared of cars? The physics involved means bike-car collisions aren't favorable for cyclists. But head-on accidents at 60 mph aren't often favorable for drivers, either. And if a difference in kinetic energy causes sufficient danger for cars to drive cyclists off the road, then the presence of commercial trucks should drive passenger cars off the road, too.

The fact is, people successfully DO share the road all the time. Motorists share the road with each other, with cyclists, with motorcycles, tractors, horse-drawn carriages, and all sorts of other vehicles, and even with pedestrians at crosswalks. There are tragic fatalities, of course, which we should work to minimize. But this is the whole point of the rules of the road: to allow vehicles to coexist on the roadway. And they can be very successful. In cities all across the world, and across the United States, motorists and cyclists share the road all the time. Louisville is no Tokyo, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Portland, Oregon, or Davis, California. But Louisville is also far removed from the worst cities in America for cycling—places like Wichita, Dallas, and Houston. Much of central Louisville is almost ideal for cycling, with wide, flat, leafy avenues connecting destinations closer than about five miles. There are cultural issues in how we handle traffic conflicts. But cycling isn't dangerous, and the health benefits outweigh the accident risks by 20 to 1.

I think I'm most troubled by the despair that cars and bicycles can EVER coexist, because I have seen such enormous material improvement in Louisville's cycling facilities in the last few years. I went genuinely car-free about three and a half years ago, after my car was totaled in an accident in Spaghetti Junction, and I decided not to replace it. Since then, there's been a new bike lane along my normal commute along 3rd Street, useful bike lanes all over town, better signage and awareness. These improvements have made a visible difference that I have seen from year to year: more people cycling in the road rather than the sidewalk, more people cycling with traffic rather than against it, better attitudes by motorists, and more people cycling in general. That's especially true in the summer, when more cyclists are out to enjoy the fine weather, but I've seen plenty of bicycle tracks in the slush of the bike lanes in this winter's foul conditions as well.

There is no doubt in my mind that these improvements save lives. And safer streets make people more comfortable in using them, which can make the streets safer still. In lots of places, improvements are starting from a very bike- and pedestrian-unfriendly starting place. But small changes can be a starting place for continuous improvement that can yield large increases in safety over time. For me, this is cause for optimism.

Sometimes people suggest that cyclists should ride on the sidewalk. This is a really bad idea. Sidewalk cycling is not safe, for anybody. For one, cars and bicycles are both vehicles and they move like vehicles, while pedestrians move very differently. On a sidewalk, bicycles are quiet and easily startle pedestrians, and collisions are likely. Also, when bicycles cross the street while riding on the sidewalk, they are acting in a way that is very unpredictable to motorists. Drivers expect pedestrians to emerge from the sidewalk at stop signs, but pedestrians are slow. Drivers certainly do not expect vehicles to emerge from the sidewalk at ten to fifteen miles per hour. Cyclists who do this are effectively darting out into traffic, which is very dangerous behavior, and rightfully illegal.

Years ago, when I first started cycling around town more seriously, I bought into all that stuff we pick up about how "the roads are so dangerous that cyclists need to stick to the sidewalks". I was afraid, and I rode on the sidewalks. I was hit by a car within three months: as I was cycling on the sidewalk, a car that didn't see me pulled out to the curb and crushed my front wheel under its tire. Luckily, I wasn't hurt, and the wheel was easily replaced; I know people who've been seriously injured doing the same thing. It was my fault, and all the lesson I needed. In the years since then, I have followed the rules of the road as best I can: cycling in the road with traffic, using lights and hand signals, stopping at lights and stop signs. That incident was the only time I've been hit by a car in years. Vehicular cycling is the best way to protect ourselves, and cyclists who do stuff like darting out into traffic, running stoplights, and riding the wrong way on the street at night without lights aren't merely breaking the law: they're being nearly suicidal. Sadly, the traffic laws, for cyclists, can be self-enforcing.

A lot of "bike vs. car" threads are very confrontational, but they shouldn't be. There are a few of us who live without cars, but overwhelmingly, cyclists are drivers and drivers (at least occasionally) ride bikes (or teach their kids to). Cyclists and motorists are our neighbors, our friends, our kids; mostly, we all just want people to get from here to there without being injured or killed. I lived without a car at all or some years, but after after we got married, my wife of course kept her car; we have a one-car household, although I prefer to commute and run errands by bike. These modes of transportation complement each other more than they conflict. If you are driving down Bardstown Road and see a cyclist, that's one less person taking up a parking space that you could use.

Cyclists are often very defensive about motorists, because negotiating the roadway with cars can indeed be very intimidating. There are a few assholes out there that threaten and harass cyclists. But there are many more drivers who go out of their way to be considerate (sometimes ~too~ far). I see way, way more "Share the Road" license plates than drivers who harass cyclists. And drivers, who are mostly afraid of hitting cyclists, appreciate people who follow the rules.

When I'm driving and see a cyclist, or when I'm cycling and see a driver, I am not filled with hatred and loathing. If the other person is doing something stupid and reckless, like running red lights, speeding, not using lights at night, or darting out into traffic, the emotion I feel is more like a private, reproachful disgust at the self-destructive folly of others, about which I can do nothing but try to avoid the consequences.

Lots of people point to cycling as a way to help the environment or reduce our carbon footprint, but I don't think it's the most compelling argument, and I don't think it's the main reason that cyclists stick with it. Cycling can be a lot of work, which means it's great exercise. It's outdoorsy, in both fair weather and foul. And bicycles are inherently fun, which is why people often think of them more as a form of recreation than as a practical means of transportation. Any sunny spring day in May, I'd rather feel a spring breeze in my face and smell the trees leafing out than lock myself in what is essentially a motorized refrigerator. Bikes are cool, and easy to individualize. And it is very satisfying in a very basic and hard-to-describe way to get somewhere (literally) under your own power. Driving dozens of miles is a chore, but cycling dozens of miles is an accomplishment.

There is absolutely no way that our society could convert from using almost entirely cars to using almost entirely bicycles. There's no reason we should: we need cars, trucks, boats, trains, airplanes, feet, and bicycles. Also rocket ships and eventually space elevators. We need safe roads and bridges and airports and docks for people to use. For one, it's inconvenient to go from central Louisville out to the big box stores in the exurbs on a bicycle, just as a consequence of how this city has been built up. I think two to five miles or closer is about the distance that it's practical for most people to cycle, although some people enjoy going farther. I love cycling everywhere, and I think more people would probably enjoy it (especially if they had racks, baskets, and fenders, and the roads were safer). I don't think everybody would love it, or that it's realistic for everybody. But I think there's probably a group of people who are on the fence, and to them I'd say: give it a try! It's fun, it's good exercise, and it's cheaper than driving.

Pedal Your Blues Away