Dave Arneson has died

D&D co-creater Dave Arneson has died.

I saw him a few times at GenCon, and heard him lecture there the first year I went. I hope they have a moment of silence for Arneson this year.

I realize that my post on gold pieces and US dollars didn't include the prices of goods at 2001 gold prices, which were more typical of recent decades. If you use the 2001 gold prices, a longsword would cost $1,166; a +1 longsword about $100,000; a backpack $155; a vial of ink $622; a day of trail rations $6.40; a light riding horse $5,800; and a skilled 1st-level commoner would earn $8k a year. Raising the dead would cost a half-million dollars, and a cure light wounds potion would be worth almost four thousand dollars.

By way of contrast, a MRE costs about five to seven dollars retail. According to some recent Googling, prices for a Beretta 92FS run about $550; a semiautomatic civilian Colt AR-15 about $1,200; and an automatic, legally transferrable M-16 about $15-25k. However, even a fully-automatic firearm has no chance of hitting the incorporeal undead without a wizard on hand to cast magic weapon.

Shippingport Island to open spring 2009...?

McAlpine Locks Work Nearly Done (BrokenSidewalk): As part of the project, the original sandstone lock dating from 1931 was removed to make way for the larger, modern lock. The Corps of Engineers has saved many of the stone blocks that made up the lock walls and resurrected them as a monument in the future visitor’s center park along with several artifacts related to river commerce. The McAlpine Locks are one of the only such systems to be located in an urban area and the project architects and engineers paid special attention to pedestrian and aesthetic concerns. A new bridge providing access to Shippingport Island features “aesthetic screening”, giving the appearance of a suspension bridge and a new pedestrian overlook will allow future visitors to peer over the lock walls as barges pass through. The new lock is functional but still in testing phases as the finishing touches are applied to the overall complex.

While the entire area around the McAlpine Locks is subject to strict security clearance, when the project is done early next year, visitors will be able to walk, bike, or drive across the new bridge to Shippingport Island for fishing or boat launching. The views up- and down-river from the bridge are quite beautiful, and the entire visitor’s center will be tied into the RiverWalk bike and walking trails.

New McAlpine Locks chamber completed (C-J)

The visitor center is supposed to open in May, and presumably the bridge to Shippingport Island will be open then.

The bridge and facilities are right alongside the Riverwalk path, and it's always been really tempting to think about going over there. It'll be really cool when it is open to the public...

EDIT
My looeyville points us to the guided tours of the Louisville Mega Cavern under the Zoo, apparently the largest civil defense shelter of the Cuban Missile Crisis period.

An English Mode for Cyrillic

Among my experiments with alternate orthographies in the past few months has been adapting various scripts to writing English, in a similar way to how the Latin alphabet has been extended to all the languages of the world. While I may aspire to write English phonemically in the Arabic script, Cyrillic is a more plausible writing system to start with. In the custom of the tengwar, I call this an English mode for Cyrillic.

Is there a rational reason to do this? Well, as I learned in China, being able to decipher street signs and place names is of enormous value when traveling in a country, even if your command of the language is poor. Learning a phonemic script can take a week or three for passable use, but learning a language can take years. Russian is a beautiful and elegant language, but realistically I am unlikely to learn more than a smattering of it at any time. Learning to read Cyrillic script in English may prove of value in learning to scan Cyrillic text generally, although it could plausibly increase errors in the decipherment of non-English text among people with a serious interest in learning a Slavic language.

Why would any English speakers write in Cyrillic? I imagine a lost Arctic island, New Sannikov Island, peopled by the descendants of illiterate English whalers marooned in the 17th century or later American prospectors, who only learned to read after a Ukrainian doctor washed ashore. They probably wouldn't write this way, though.

This script is geared most strongly to the Russian values for the letters, although many characters are used in different ways to represent the greater number of vowels of English. I also relied upon Cyrillic characters archaic in modern Russian, and the Cyrillic alphabet used to write Romanian before the 1860s. Romanian, as a Romance language, seemed like it would be an instructive example in using Cyrillic to write a non-Slavic language.

Most of the letters (АБВГДЖЗИКЛМОПРСТФЦЧШЫ) have common values in old Romanian and Russian. With some of the letters (ЕӖЙНУЭЮЯ) the Russian value is preferred. With others (ЅѸХѠЪѢѲ) I leaned to the Romanian sound. And I probably just made stuff up, too. Several of the characters from Romanian, such as Yat, are archaic letters that were reformed out of modern alphabets decades ago. The glyphs for the hard sign and such in Russian are here used for separate vowels.

This system should work reasonably well for transcribing my dialect, a western/mid-southern US dialect that merges lots of vowels, including "Mary-merry-marry," "cot-caught," and "pin-pen." It might work less well if you use more vowels. Dipthongs are represented with digraphs: эи, аи, ои, ѣу

Here are some samples, followed by some Benjamin Franklin quotes; I'll post some longer extracts when I get my keyboard for made-up languages finished.

Ѡѹлвъринз!

Аи лыв ын Лѹъвъл, Кынтъки.

"Ѳъ Кѣт ын ѳъ Хѣт" ыз ъ бѹк баи Др. Соис.

Ѳъ рэин ын Спэин стэиз мэинли ын ѳъ плэин.

Ѳэир нэвър ѡъз ъ гѹд ѡор ор ъ бѣд пис.

Аи ѳинк ал ѳъ хэрътыкс аи хѣв нон хѣв бын анъръбл мын. …Ыт ыз нат ту маи гѹд фрынд'з хэръси ѳѣт аи ымпют хыз анэсти. он ѳъ кантрэри, 'тыз хыз анэсти ѳѣт хѣз брат ъпан хым ѳъ кэиръктър ъв хэрътык.

Letter	Name	Pronunciation
А а	Az	"a" in "calm"
Б б	Bet	"b" in "bay"
В в	Ve	"v" in "vie"
Г г	Glagol	"g" in "gay"
Д д	De	"d" in "day"
Е е	Ye	"ye"*
Ӗ ӗ	Yo	"yo"*
Ж ж	Zhe	"zh", the sound in "J'ai," "vision," or "pleasure"
Ѕ ѕ	Je	"j" in "jay"
З з	Ze	"z" in "zoo"
И и	I	"ee", the vowel in "eat"
Й й	Short I	"y" in "you"
К к	Ka	"k" in "key"
Л л	El	"l" in "low"
М м	Em	"m" in "may"
Н н	En	"n" in "no"
О о	O	"o", the sound in "oak"
П п	Pe	"p" in "pea"
Р р	Er	"r" in "roe"
С с	Es	"s" in "see"
Т т	Te	"t" in "tea"
Ѹ ѹ	Uk	"oo," the sound in "foot," "pull," and "good"
У у	U	"oo," the sound in "ooze," "truth," and "boot"
Ф ф	Ef	"f" in "fee"
Х х	Ha	"h" in "he"
Ѡ ѡ	Omega	"w" in "way"
Ц ц	Tse	"ts" the sound in "pizza"
Ч ч	Che	"ch" in "cheer"
Ш ш	Sha	"sh" in "she"
Ъ ъ	Yer	"u" in "utter"
Ы ы	Yeru	"i" in "it"
Ѣ ѣ	Yat	"a" in "at" or "cat"
Э э	E	"e" in "ever"
Ю ю	Yu	"yoo" in "you"*
Я я	Ya	"yaw"*
Ѳ ѳ	Theta	"th" in "thaw", "they"

*iolated vowels

My experience with alternate orthographies

I think the first non-Latin alphabet I learned to read was Japanese, when I moved there back in 1998. I perused some Japanese in rōmaji books, but when confronted with having to get by in Japan, one of the first things I learned was the kana. It's certainly the most important thing to do if you want to learn a language—to learn the script that best represents its speech and grammar.

Learning the script takes a week or so. Learning the language is much harder, and takes some years and hundreds of hours of study.

When I left Japan, I could get by in ordinary conversations, read the kana, and understood about 300 of the 2,000 or so jōyō kanji.

Rather than flying home, I took a boat from Ōsaka to Shanghai and spent two months travelling around China third class. The Chinese ideographs are the lingua franca of East Asia, and although I could barely speak any Chinese, I was able to get around the country, reading maps and place names and train destinations, deciphering menus in a basic way. It wasn't my understanding of the Chinese language that helped me get around China, so much as my understanding of the script shared between the Chinese and Japanese languages.

• 東京 means "East Capital." In Japanese, it's pronounced "Tōkyō." You could pronounce it "Dongjing" in Mandarin.


• 北京 means "North Capital." In Mandarin, it's pronounced "Beijing." You could pronounce it "Hokkyō" in Japanese, although most people don't.


• 台北 means "Platform North." The capital of Taiwan is pronounced "Taibei" in Mandarin and was "Taihoku" under Japanese administration.


• 仙台 means "Wizard Platform." It's the Japanese city "Sendai."

I've been fascinated with Central Asia for some time: the steppe, the Altay Mountains, the Gobi Desert, to Siberia and the coldest places on Earth. I went to Tibet on my trip to China, and I'd like to traverse the Silk Road from Beijing, to Mongolia and Kazakhstan, and to Tehran and points south. One of the things I find so fascinating about this region is that the terrain is similar in many ways similar to the dramatic Western landscape of my childhood, the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains, but has a completely different cultural history which has been recorded for hundreds and thousands of years.

Uyghur is a Turkic language spoken around the Tian Shan, the mountains of heaven, from Kashgar to Ürümqi. Over the centuries, it had been written in Old Turkish runes, a variant of the Sogdian alphabet derived from Aramaic, variants of the Perso-Arabian script, several variants of the Latin alphabet, and Cyrillic. The Old Uyghur alphabet was adapted by the Mongols during the time of Genghis Khan to write Mongolian, and Nurhaci adapted the Mongolian alphabet to Manchu before laying some of the groundwork for the Qing Empire; the Manchu alphabet is one of the world's loveliest scripts.

In other words, Uyghur has been written in most of the dominant scripts of Eurasia, and some original ones besides. I wondered: why shouldn't English be so diversely written? What would English look like if it were written in a truly phonemic orthography? What would it be like to write poetry in a script in which words that rhyme, like "mate" and "weight" were written in a way that looked similar?

I have been a fairly digitally-oriented person in this decade, but I came to be interested in the book as a physical object about a year and a half ago after reading about the surprisingly many tomes bound in human flesh.

In a thousand years, all our DVDs and hard drives will be as blank, meaningless stones. The historians of the future will look back for individual objects to interpret to corroborate what data survives, as they look back to the baked clay tiles the Sumerians scratched, the carved obelisks of Egypt, the ink-scrawled bamboo strips of wartorn China. No book can be more uniquely individual than one bound in the skin of a person, and such a precious work would deserve to be handwritten rather than blogged or printed on an inkjet.

So I got some calligraphy pens to see about writing insular miniscule, perhaps the most attractive script used to write English in the years before Charlemagne made it Europe's standard Latin script. I also set about learning to write in the Read alphabet.

It was interesting going at first, trying to re-discern the phonemes of my idiolect, using guidebooks keyed to Received Pronunciation and northeastern dialects. First I had to figure out that my basically Oklahoma dialect, mixing Western and Southern elements, had undergone all the vowel mergers one might guess, including "pin-pen," "Mary-marry-merry," and "cot-caught."

Writing it has become fairly easy, although most everything there is to read is stuff I wrote myself or things written by people with very different dialects. Except for copying back notes, I have little practical reason to read it, so writing is actually much easier than reading. I want to see what can be done scribing it with some proper calligraphy tools.

While Quikscript is an easy-to-write and attractive script, useful for many purposes, a truly phonemic script has some drawbacks. It's problematic to create a universal English dictionary when dialect and pronunciation varies so. And I wonder if there is a more appropriate way of representing English vowels.

First Day of Spring 2009

Well, tonight I'm getting married.

March 20 was the Vernal Equinox. I wanted to do it yesterday, but Saturday is more convenient.

Pork brains in milk gravy

Now with only 1170% of your daily cholesterol intake.

(via MR/NC)

Gold pieces & US dollars ...back when there were dragons

It's surprisingly easy to convert between US dollars or other contemporary currency and the currency of D&D and d20 games. The currency of D&D is a fixed weight of metal, in which gold, silver, and copper are convertible between each other at a rate of 10:1. One hundred copper pieces are worth 10 silver or 1 gold.

The measures are a little confusing, because while gold and silver are priced in troy ounces, copper is priced in standard avoirdupois pounds. But in troy, avoirdupois, and apothecaries measures, a grain is a grain is a grain. One troy ounce is 480 grains and one avoirdupois pound is 7000 grains.

Since in D&D there are 50 coins to the pound, each coin weighs 140 grains. That's very slightly more than 9.07 grams, or just less than 1/3 of an ounce (for comparison, a Sacagawea dollar weighs 8.1 grams; four dimes are about 9 g). Get the spot prices for gold, silver, and copper, from Kitco.com, and plug it all into a spreadsheet. Official coinage is somewhat more valuable than scrap and bullion, because it carries official authenticity, has numismatic value, and is scarcer. But the spot price sets its intrinsic value.

Last Friday (February 27, 2009), gold cost $939.60/oz, silver cost $13.23/oz, and copper cost $1.51/lb. So a d20 gold piece is worth $274.05, a silver piece is worth $3.86, and a copper $0.03.

Today's levels are the result of a decade-long runup in commodity prices, which persists for precious metals; older prices are a little more typical. On June 1, 2001, gold was $266.70/oz; silver was $4.58/oz; and copper was $0.745/lb. This means that a d20 gold piece was worth $77.79, a silver piece was worth $1.28, and a copper piece was worth a penny.

Since the d20 system uses standard equipment prices, it's simple to compare game prices to contemporary real ones. A longsword costs 15 gp, or $4,110.75 in today's money; a +1 longsword costs more than a quarter million dollars. A 2-gp backpack costs $548.10, a vial of ink costs $2,192.40, a fishhook costs $3.86, and a day's worth of trail rations is $19.29. A donkey costs as much as a vial of ink, a light riding horse costs $20,553.75, and a pig is worth about eight hundred dollars. An ordinary, skilled 1st-level commoner earns nearly $30k/year. Raising someone from the dead, a spellcasting service too expensive to be generally available, would cost at least $1.49 million, while removing a negative level would merely cost about a hundred thousand dollars.

The currency of Rome, by contrast, used a multi-metal standard. After the currency reforms of Augustus Caesar, the gold aureus was worth 25 silver denarii, 100 bronze sestercii, or 400 copper ases. The bronze sestercii weighed about 25-28 g. The silver denarius weighed about 3.9 g (about $1.66 of silver), and served as the backbone of Roman finance. Roman prices and currency varied greatly.

A century ago, the US used a silver dollar, a coin with 24.057 g actual silver weight. That specie is worth $10.23 in today's money, but an inflation calculator will show that a 1909 dollar is can buy $22.81 worth of goods in 2007 dollars. The word dollar comes from the Austrian "thaler," a Bohemian coin originally minted in 1518. The actual American dollar comes from the Spanish reales de ocho, the piece of eight, which Spain had shipped by the galleon-full from its rich silver mines in Mexico and Peru. At the time of the American Revolution, the states had no currency of their own, and approved the pieces of eight for American commerce until a dollar with the same value could be established. The eight reales coin was often cut into eight bits for change: two bits was thus equivalent to a quarter dollar. The New York Stock Exchange traded in eighths and sixteenths of a dollar until as late as 2001.

Of course, comparing prices between historical periods, much less fantasy worlds, is misleading. Agatha Christie expected to never be rich enough to buy a car, but never too poor to be without servants. And mass production and economic development has made things much, much more affordable, as Brad DeLong notes:

Our goods are not only plentiful but cheap. I am a book addict. Yet even I am fighting hard to spend as great a share of my income on books as Adam Smith did in his day. Back on March 9, 1776 Adam Smith's Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations went on sale for the price of 1.8 pounds sterling at a time when the median family made perhaps 30 pounds a year. That one book (admittedly a big book and an expensive one) cost six percent of the median family's annual income. In the United States today, median family income is $50,000 a year and Smith's Wealth of Nations costs $7.95 at Amazon (in the Bantam Classics edition). The 18th Century British family could buy 17 copies of the Wealth of Nations out of its annual income. The American family in 2009 can buy 6,000 copies: a multiplication factor of 350.



Books are not an exceptional category. Today, buttermilk-fried petrale sole with pickled vegetables and parsley mayonnaise, served at Chez Panisse Café, costs the same share of a day-laborer's earnings as the raw ingredients for two big bowls of oatmeal did in the 18th Century. ...Today we still spend about one dollar in five on food—down from the half of income that Americans spent in 1776. The share hasn't fallen more because some of us buy buttermilk-fried petrale sole with pickled vegetables and parsley mayonnaise cooked, served, and cleaned up by others rather than (or in addition to) oats in the gunnysack. One reason is that the oats-for-five-meals-out-of-six-diet of 18th Century Scots was monotonous, and we are glad to escape it.