Pulitzer Prize Nominee

Pulitzer Prize nominee! Sounds impressive, doesn't it? But it turns out that almost anyone with $50 in his pocket can become a Pulitzer Prize nominee in journalism. Here's an excerpt:

Nearly any journalist can be a Pulitzer “nominee” for journalism.  All somebody has to do is fill out a form, submit a few of the “nominee’s” articles, and write a $50 check to Columbia University/Pulitzer Prizes. ...

Editors do this all the time for their writers, but you don’t have to be an editor to nominate someone: anybody can do it.

And the thing is, the Pulitzer organization does not recognize the category of “nominee” for those who get nominated this way—it recognizes the category of “nominated finalist,” those three individuals whose submissions make the cut and get considered for the Pulitzer Prize itself. The Pulitzer organization, in fact, discourages the use of the term “nominee,” presumably because any newspaper or news site journalist who has a friend with fifty bucks can be a nominee.

Clearly, things are not always as they seem.

Overpopulation, Pt. 2

Part 1 is here.

OK, so what will work to lower population growth? I think it boils down to two general categories: wealth (population growth being correlated both with the wealth of a society and, within a particular society, the relative wealth of the family) and gender equality. You might alternately label these categories as economics and women's rights.

Wealth: In the past, children were an economic asset. Large families meant free labor, especially for rural people (the vast majority back then). In cities, children could be hired out. Large, extended families provided a safety net against disaster and insurance for your old age. (Hundreds of years ago, I suppose, the wealth correlation with population growth might have been just the reverse, since starvation was always a real possibility and the death rate of children very high.)

But in more modern times, the social safety nets of developed nations have made large families unnecessary. Before Social Security and Medicare, the elderly were the poorest demographic in America. Now, they're the richest. (Children are the poorest.) Child labor laws and compulsory education meant that children became primarily an expense, not an economic asset, especially as fewer and fewer people were farmers (the long summer break for school children was always about maintaining that valuable labor force on the farm).

That's simple enough to explain why wealthier, more developed countries have a much lower population growth (note that this is true even in the U.S., though the figures are masked by immigration), but why would poorer people tend to have larger families than wealthier people in the same society? Partly, I think, it's because poor people still need the safety net of larger families. After all, extra money is a pretty good safety net for the wealthy, especially combined with a good education and valuable personal contacts. Also, poor people can't look forward to getting as much Social Security, and, of course, they're much less likely to have private pensions.

The poor don't stay in school nearly as long, either - often not even completing high school, let alone college. That means that they tend to get a much earlier start with their families. An earlier start generally means a larger family.

But I think there's something else at work, too. This talk by Jane McGonigal is about games, but it included a PowerPoint slide that seems very appropriate here:

Poor people are probably less likely to have satisfying work to do (being either unemployed or employed in less rewarding jobs), and they may have less experience at being good at something (either through less training and education, or just because what they're good at is not valued, even by themselves). They're less likely to feel that they are part of something bigger, too, I suspect.

These are all generalities, and not applicable to every individual, of course. But the poor may have less in their lives, less that seems meaningful, except their children. Wealthier individuals love their children, too, but they probably have a better chance of a satisfying work environment, stimulating friends, and a feeling that what they do matters. Well, that's my hypothesis, anyway. It really doesn't matter much for this discussion.

Women's rights: In general, population growth slows when women have more freedom, and I think there's a lot that goes into this. Education for women means that they don't start their families so early, and decent jobs for women means that they have some options. They don't have to marry the first man who comes along, or even marry at all. With freedom, women can say "no," and they can insist on birth control. Patriarchal societies, where these things are not present, tend to have very large families.

When women have more control over their own lives, birthrates typically drop sharply. It's not that they don't want children, but women generally do the work of raising them (and certainly the work of bearing them). Among men, a large family is often seen as a sign of virility. Well, biologically, men have always been inclined to a "spread the wealth" kind of reproductive strategy that's simply unavailable to women, so maybe giving women more choice just naturally leads to a preference for quality over quantity.

At any rate, if women can maintain control over their own bodies - decide when they marry, have a say in when they have sex, have easy access to cheap means of birth control and can insist on its use, can easily acquire morning-after pills, and, yes, have access to safe abortions, they will tend to keep their families smaller. This is especially the case if it makes economic sense, as I mentioned previously.

So, as it turns out, the best methods to limit population growth seem to be things we should want to do anyway. Maintain a strong social safety net, such things as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Rigorously enforce child labor laws, and work hard to keep children in school for as long as possible. Try to break the cycle of poverty, making sure that all people have rewarding jobs and a feeling of control in their lives. In particular, make sure women can control their own lives, their own bodies, and their own sexuality.

Surprisingly often, people do what's in their own best economic interest. For example, young men are a lot more concerned about fathering children when they know they'll have to help support them for 18 years. In wealthy societies, children tend to be an expense, not an economic asset. So people have fewer of them. It's pretty simple.

Regarding poor people, I hate to even hint that the right-wing are right about anything, but we do have to look at any unintended side-effects of welfare programs. We certainly don't want a "cash for kids" program of any kind. Still, punishing parents by keeping their children ragged and hungry is definitely not the way to go. It would have the exact opposite effect. We need to break the cycle of poverty, not perpetuate it. We need for all children to have a good start in life, and we need to keep all children in school for as long as possible.

Free lunches for school children is actually a great idea (far better than giving the money to their parents, which even the right-wing should realize). But we need better schools, better teachers, smaller class sizes,... just a lot more attention on a quality education for every child. Poor children are almost certainly going to need special help - personalized attention, effective counseling, and cheaper colleges. Again, we need to keep children in school for as long as possible, so they'll be wealthier as adults, with more and better options, and so they won't start their families so early. (And as a side-effect, we'll get a better-educated workforce and a thriving economy.)

These principles should work everywhere, so they should be the basis of our foreign aid programs, too. Unfortunately, countries with rapidly expanding populations struggle to get anywhere. Their economies may be growing, but they can still be losing ground in per capita economic growth. It may simply be impossible for them to do anything without getting a handle on population growth first. And, of course, patriarchal religions will fight some of these policies tooth and nail.

The Colbert Report: James O'Keefe & Sean Hannity

Honestly, can you get any funnier than Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert? And they're not just funny, they bring up serious issues that are pretty much ignored by our "news" media. Of course, they do it in a very funny way.

Remember all that ACORN stuff, jumped on by right-wing politicians everywhere? Here's Stephen Colbert with the rest of the story:

http://vodpod.com/watch/3174573-colbert-treats-hannity-like-a-prostitute-video

... or if you'd prefer, here's the same thing on Hulu:

http://www.hulu.com/watch/132628/the-colbert-report-tipwag-james-okeefe-and-sean-hannity#s-p1-sr-i1

But how many people will ever know that those "incriminating" videos had been edited so much they were worthless (except for right-wing propaganda)? Certainly Fox News will stay quiet about it. Hey, I don't doubt that certain ACORN offices had bad staffing, but I'm equally certain you can find that everywhere.

Oh, well, at least we can still laugh about it.

PS. Thanks to James Scott Taylor for the tip.

The New Commandments

Christopher Hitchens looks at the Ten Commandments to see which ones need a re-chisel:

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2010/04/hitchens-201004

As usual, he's entertaining and thought-provoking. Here's an excerpt:

What emerges from the first review is this: the Ten Commandments were derived from situational ethics. They show every symptom of having been man-made and improvised under pressure. They are addressed to a nomadic tribe whose main economy is primitive agriculture and whose wealth is sometimes counted in people as well as animals. They are also addressed to a group that has been promised the land and flocks of other people: the Amalekites and Midianites and others whom God orders them to kill, rape, enslave, or exterminate. And this, too, is important because at every step of their arduous journey the Israelites are reminded to keep to the laws, not because they are right but just because they will lead them to become conquerors (of, as it happens, almost the only part of the Middle East that has no oil).

The First Annual UpChucky Award

Congratulations to Don McLeroy, subject of my earlier post, who has won the National Center for Science Education's first UpChucky Award, "bestowed on the most noisome creationist of the year."

http://ncse.com/news/2010/03/announcing-first-annual-upchucky-award-005358

Well earned, Don! Just don't let it happen again, OK?

"The Crucible of Empire" by Eric Flint and K.D. Wentworth

Eric Flint is another of my favorite authors, mainly because of his sympathetic characters and general optimistic outlook. He's very prolific, often writing with a variety of co-authors, and I must admit that he's been hit or miss recently. He might be trying to do too much too fast (although I've also heard that he's been ill). But at his best, he's very entertaining.

K.D. Wentworth is the author of Black on Black (1999) and its sequel, Stars Over Stars (2001), two entertaining novels featuring an alien, raised by humans, struggling to fit in with others of his primitive species.

Together, they wrote The Course of Empire (2003), which takes place 20 years after the Earth has been defeated by an alien species called the Jao. Many humans still resist the occupation, though they have almost no chance of being successful. Others have resigned themselves to reality. What none of them realize is that Jao and humans are both at risk from a genocidal species called the Ekhat.

It's a good read, though with some gaps in logic (or so it seems to me). Interesting, and generally sympathetic, characters of both species struggle to understand each other. And what would you do in a situation like this, conquered by another species with no chance of successfully rebelling? (Note that all three of the books mentioned above are available free at Baen Books.)

The Crucible of Empire is the brand-new sequel to their first book. Humans and Jao are working together, if with some distrust yet, when yet another species enters the mix. The Lleix had been thought extinct, destroyed by the Jao centuries ago when they'd been a slave species of the Ekhat. But it turns out that a few still exist, and a ship, crewed by both Jao and humans, is sent to investigate.

This novel, too, is entertaining. But the ship doesn't encounter the Lleix until almost two-thirds of the way through the book. To me, the most interesting part of a situation like this lies in seeing the three species, all with very different cultures, interact. Admittedly, we do see Jao who are unfamiliar with human beings struggling to understand our species, but after the first book, there's nothing particularly new in that.

Also, the final third of the book seemed a bit rushed. An Ekhat is captured alive, along with a few individuals of a new slave species they'd created, but... that's the last we hear of any of them. And in the first book, we saw how Jao and humans working together provided the best chance of defending the Earth from the Ekhat, far better than either working separately. In this one, I would have preferred to see the synergies from all three species working together. But we don't get to see that (though it's implied, I guess).

Well, the book is still fun. It's not award-winning stuff, but it's definitely entertaining. (That could describe most of Eric Flint's fiction.) I wouldn't say that this novel is as good as the first book, but if you liked that one, I'm sure you'll like this one. In both books, it's easy to care about the characters, no matter what species they are.

Role-Playing Games Aren't Movies

Movies, like books, tell a story. They don't tell it in quite the same way, but that's just a difference in the medium. It makes sense to take a book and make a movie out of it. The movie is just borrowing the story and telling it in a different way.

It has seemed reasonable to most of us, I suspect, that computer games aren't all that different. (I'm talking primarily about role-playing games - RPGs - here.) Well, our computer monitors aren't that much different from a TV screen. We watch the action on a monitor and listen to the sounds from speakers. And as technology has improved, computer games have come to look and sound more and more like movies. It's not surprising that the video game industry is often compared to the movie industry, and it was probably inevitable that game developers would follow the movie model.

To a large extent, I bought into this myself. Oh, I always claimed that fancy graphics weren't important to me (even as I was wowed by them often enough). Certainly, the graphics in an RPG aren't as important as the gameplay or the story, right? Games are different from movies, as movies are different from books, but there are a lot of similarities, too. The critical difference is that games are interactive. You have to give the player something to do (the gameplay). And when telling your story, you have to make the player a part of it, in some way.

Some RPGs (and pretty much all adventure games) are very linear. Every player has basically the same experience in these games. You might choose different characters and you might fight battles differently, but every player must stay on the same general path as he follows the storyline. Others offer more freedom. Modern developers try to make the player's decisions matter - or seem to matter, at least - often creating several different endings to the story, and sometimes creating multiple paths to get there. But it's an interactive movie, basically. Or one of those "choose your own adventure" books. In either case, it really helps to have a great story.

But I've come to believe that this is wrong, that there's a fundamental problem with this approach. Mainstream developers, IMHO, have been on the wrong path for some time now. Games are not movies. Their resemblance to movies is only superficial. I'm convinced that the whole idea of telling a story in a game is completely wrong-headed. I used to want a good story in an RPG. Now, however, I don't want a story at all.

A good story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The author knows where he's going, and he tries to make the journey as enjoyable as possible. If he's really good, you'll learn something along the way. But it's basically a linear, and passive, process. It works great for books and movies,... but computer games are different. In computer games, the player is a participant. And the bigger the participation of the player, the harder it will be for the author to tell a good story.

You can tell a good story by making the game very linear, but that inevitably means less participation for the player. Oh, sure, the gameplay may be fun (it had better be fun!), but his participation in the story is going to be very superficial. As you increase the player's options, you increase his participation, but the author loses more and more control over the story. Sure, he can write a story with several different endings, but that's just a compromise. What is the fundamental problem here? Why does this difficulty arise?

I think that game developers have made a huge mistake. I think that I've been wrong myself in wanting a good story in an RPG. I think, basically, that a game is not the place to tell a story at all. Instead, I think that each player should be creating his own story as he plays the game. That's how games are fundamentally different from movies and books. That's why movies are such a terrible model for games. Movies and books are passive, but games need active participation. We should take advantage of that, instead of trying to make them into something they're not.

Some games, some game developers, get this, but we seem to be in the very early stages of this realization. This is why Dwarf Fortress is so famous. Yeah, it's a free game with ASCII graphics (basically, no graphics at all) and a terrible interface. It's about the least commercial game you could possibly imagine. Most people wouldn't give it a second glance. But you hear it talked about everywhere, and for good reason.

Dwarf Fortress doesn't even attempt to tell a story. Instead, Tarn Adams has created a world in which players can create their own stories. He doesn't just let a player make some choices while enjoying a set story. He doesn't just acknowledge the need for player participation. Player participation is the whole point. He creates the setting and the rules, but the rest is up to you. As a player, you're not enjoying a good story, you're creating one. (This is easy to see when you read the stories so many players post about their games.)

The DF world is full of artificial people, not just non-player characters there to play particular roles. These people try to live their lives - they make friends, fall in love, get married, have children, adopt pets; they have likes and dislikes; they get happy, angry, sad; and they grieve for their loved ones. As I say, they aren't NPCs, there to help or hinder the player or to move the story along. They're not in the game to provide quests or to sell the player equipment. And they're not just interchangeable game-pieces, either. They are part of the world, and their stories are your story.

This is a completely different model for a game than what we see from mainstream developers. It's not the only game doing it, either. Aurora is another example. It's another game with no commercial appeal, but which is pointing the way to the future of gaming. It's a space-based strategy game with RPG elements,... but primarily, it's a setting in which a player can create his own story.

UnReal World is another example. It's an RPG/survival game set in Iron Age Finland. Sami Maaranen hasn't done much to make the NPCs people, but I hope that's in the works. In the meantime, there is no story but what you create yourself. Another, more commercial example, is Mount&Blade. I've actually heard this game criticized because it doesn't have a story. But that's the great strength of the game (well, that and the really, really fun combat). What this game needs is not a story, but the potential for players to create more elaborate stories than is possible right now. (I hope that's coming in the sequel due out soon.)

Similarly, though I haven't played Solium Infernum myself, I've certainly enjoyed the many stories posted on the Internet about this strategy game set in Hell. This kind of cooperative storytelling is what we might want from multiplayer games, but so very rarely get. Personally, I have no interest in multiplayer games, and I think that single-player games are better suited to what I've been talking about. But maybe there are possibilities with multiplay, too.

And finally, let me just mention a couple of old mainstream RPGs. I loved both Daggerfall and Morrowind when they were first released, despite my complete ineptness at "real-time" combat. But although I know that both had a story, a main quest line, I have no idea what it was. I ignored it completely, being happier just exploring these worlds on my own. Oblivion, the fourth Elder Scrolls game, put you into the main quest immediately (though you could ignore it after that). But I think this was the wrong direction. I'd rather see them create a world, full of realistic NPCs (virtual people, ideally), and let things evolve from that point as chance and the player's actions dictate. But no doubt that would be a lot harder to do.

My point is this: games are a terrible medium for telling a story, but a great medium for allowing us to create our own stories. IMHO, mainstream developers have been going the wrong direction. They seem to see movies as a model for games, but that's all wrong. Games and movies are only superficially similar. In reality, they couldn't be more different.

Edit:  I posted a follow-up to this here, in response to a comment below. This is a new idea for me, so I'm still working my way through it.

Overpopulation, Pt. 1

Overpopulation of the Earth is the root cause of environmental destruction and resource depletion. If there were far fewer of us, we wouldn't be worrying about these problems. That's not to say that effective regulation can't help, or that better technology wouldn't let more people live good lives. But our ever-increasing population of human beings crowds out other species and stresses our ecosystems past the point where natural processes can manage.

And the Earth is finite, after all. Whatever you think the population limit might be, there is a limit. Technology can certainly increase that limit, but not to infinity. Even if we could spread out into the rest of the universe, which doesn't seem at all likely right now, we wouldn't be able to expand fast enough to avoid this fundamental problem.

After all, the global population didn't reach a billion human beings until the 19th Century, but it doubled to 2 billion in another hundred years and doubled again, to 4 billion, less than 50 years after that (all figures just rough estimates, which is plenty good enough for this discussion). Currently, we're almost at 7 billion, and estimated to reach 9 billion in just a few decades. We couldn't possibly ship people off-planet fast enough to keep up with that, even if we had somewhere else to go.

So what do we do about it?

For Part 1 of this discussion, let's look at bad solutions. What won't work?

Well, China's "one-child policy," begun in 1978, seems to have worked, with the country claiming one quarter of a billion fewer births to its credit. That means that their economic growth hasn't been overtaken by population growth, as in many countries, leading to strong per capita gains.

But China is a dictatorship. Even if the rest of us would accept their methods, this sort of thing would be impossible in a liberal democracy. It would destroy us, destroy our system of government, destroy our way of life. Plus, it probably wouldn't work. In recent years, a huge black-market for fertility drugs has developed in China, as a way of avoiding these "one-child" restrictions. After all, it's not so much "one child" as "one pregnancy." By having a whole litter of kids in one birth, you can have your large family and avoid any penalties.

OK, how about the South Carolina plan? According to André Bauer, current Lt. Governor (Republican, naturally), if you feed poor children (among South Carolina Republicans, that's naturally assumed to mean "black children"), they'll just continue to breed. Fair enough, I suppose. But would we really be willing to starve children to death to solve the population crisis?

And it wouldn't work, anyway. Oddly enough, people are quite resistant to starving to death - and particularly in seeing their children starve to death. This would be a lot harder to do than you might think.

Well, then, maybe a kinder, gentler version of that? We could, for example, limit tax deductions to only two children, no more - or even increase taxes proportionally on large families. Of course, this wouldn't mean anything to upper class families, but it might be significant to the working poor. And it's the poor who tend to have large families in the first place.

But this would basically mean perpetuating an underclass mired in poverty. Not only isn't that the kind of society I'd prefer (or you either, I hope), but it would actually worsen the problem. As I noted before, it's the poor who tend to have the largest families. Keeping them poor, or even increasing their poverty, is certainly not the way to lower population growth.

Finally, I've heard it seriously suggested that propaganda might work. Make having large families a disgrace, an embarrassment, a social faux pas. Teach people the dangers of unrestricted population growth, the problems of pollution and resource depletion, the finite nature of the planet and our worries about the future. Won't informed people do the right thing?

Unfortunately, human nature being what it is, people are far more likely to find excuses for doing whatever they want to do. Note that smoking cessation programs have had some success, but tobacco companies are still making money hand over fist. And that's something that directly affects a smoker's own health, and the health of his family, not just some vague "benefit to the planet" sort of thing. (Smoking isn't such a basic instinct as reproduction, either. Not ever close.)

To solve the problem, you need to work with human nature, not against it. I'll get to my suggestions in Part 2, posted here.

The Secret Future of Videogames

Here's another fascinating article from Rock, Paper, Shotgun. It's well worth reading if you're interested in computer games, science fiction, or just what the future might hold. You might consider it a companion piece to my previous post, Design Outside the Box. The focus is different from Jesse Schell's presentation, but their imagined futures aren't incompatible at all.

Futurologists and science fiction writers have long been making claims about the role of technology in our lives, either speculatively in futurological texts, or simply as entertainment, in science fiction films, books, and comics. However, they’ve only recently begun to take videogames as they actually exist in the real world seriously as a major part of our future. Look back to 1960s visions of the future, and games aren’t even a twinkle in the futurological perception And yet in terms of the reality of future-becoming-present that we actually experience they are a major factor. They’re one of the most visible symbols of both technological progress, how that progress is influencing our culture. Games are a hybrid thing: a fusion of art and science, and as both disciplines push onward, so they push games ahead of them. They’re the construction yard in which many of the people who are working on the future – designers, occasionally writers and artists – are to be found.

One important factor in both articles is the "rapidly ballooning bandwidth" of mobile devices. This has big implications for the future, because of the various things we might do with it. We don't know exactly what we will do, but it's certainly interesting to speculate.

But Stross [science fiction author Charles Stross] sees another trend too, a blurring of real and game worlds. He argues that the sea-change will come with “ubiquitous location services.” Those systems that can pinpoint our mobile phone down to a single street. “We haven’t quite gotten our heads around the idea of having devices on our person that always know where we are,” says Stross. “This is less obviously gaming related, until you start thinking about augmented reality, or live action role-play. You can play games in the real world without having arranged to meet. If you’re in the same area as another player of one of these games, for example, your phone could steer you towards each other, so that you could interact.”

That "blurring of real and game worlds" sounds a lot like Jesse Schell's "Design Outside the Box" presentation, doesn't it? The implications are similar, though they focus on different uses by different interests.

[Ray] Kurzweil argues that the progress of the computer is a progress inwards. It’s going to become increasingly part of our our biology, and that means it’s going to become part of what it is to be human. Continuing the “smooth curve” of our cybernetic integration with things like mobile phones (which, in practical terms, render us telepathic) or even wrist watches – which firmly position us in time – the future will deliver more and more tech into the body. Within a couple of decades nanobots will be in our very blood, says Kurzweil. These will allow us to experience games in “first-person”, where our very eyes are the screen we carry around and use. Reality, he says, could be reduced [to] a window in the corner of our specially augmented consciousness.

Unlike Stross, Ray Kurzweil isn't a science fiction author, he's a futurist - and as such, his predictions are even wilder. I'm going to take all that with a grain of salt, but even relatively modest advances might make a big change from today. Artificial intelligence, for example, is with us today. No, these aren't cybernetic people - and they may never be cybernetic people, I can't say - but they're bound to seem more and more like real people, and that's the important point when it comes to games (and game-related kinds of programing in other types of software, too).

Eskil Steenberg ("Swedish coding-mastermind") has an interesting point to make, too. He argues that "technology has digressed gaming," since higher graphics and voice acting have made it too difficult to implement some gameplay.

Steenberg argues that the future of games is one in which software will have to find solutions for the enormous problems that following the curve of increasing hardware sophistication has presented us with. “The examples of how things that used to be simple have now become hard are numerous,” he explains. “Dwarf Fortress and similar games give a hint to where games would be, if graphics and sounds didn’t stand in our way.”

I have a hard time arguing with that, since Dwarf Fortress is a truly incredible game, light-years ahead of mainstream games in the actual gameplay. I never thought of the poor (basically nonexistent) graphics as being necessary for that kind of game - with today's technology, anyway - but it's certainly an interesting thought.

And so we come back around to Kurzweil’s speech. “Play is how we principally learn and principally create,” said Kurzweil to the game developers. In saying that he points to another reason why the coming decades of gaming might be more about how we interact and how we play, than about how hi-tech the platform is. It’s the exact reason why the billion-fold increase Kurzweil predicts might not be the key factor in our gaming future. The key factor will be our own interest in creativity. We have to want games to do new things.

Stross agrees on this point, highlighting the crudest of gaming technologies, and their sophisticated results: “The reason pen and paper RPGs don’t die is that it’s about consensual story-telling. It’s about creativity. Most people don’t want to be creative, but one in a hundred people want to get involved: they’re bored by passive consumption..."

That's interesting to me, but I'm a gamer. And Rock, Paper, Shotgun is a gaming site. But I still think that gaming's impact on the rest of the world is going to be bigger, much bigger, than just the kinds of games we gamers play...

The point, it seems, is not that games are “going to be competitive with real reality,” but that games are going enrich “real reality”, and be interwoven with it. “Virtual reality” was never a good term. As American writer Steven Shaviro points out, it should always have been know as “prosthetic reality”. Games are going to extend our reality, and they’re going to do it by being smarter, and more varied. The future is gaming heading off in all kinds of different directions.

Yes, that's where the potential lies for truly mind-blowing changes in our lives. Maybe our toothbrushes won't start giving us gaming "points," as in Jesse Schell's vision, but it wouldn't surprise me if gaming became a much bigger part of all of our lives (even just for training or educational purposes), and "virtual reality" become ubiquitous (with advertising only a part of it).

Beer Makes You More Attractive

Beer does make human beings more attractive,... but there's a catch. Check out this post on Not Exactly Rocket Science, one of my favorite science-oriented blogs.

Health Care Reform

I always enjoy Jon Stewart's take-downs of Fox News, as in last night's episode. Well, this is one television show I never miss, though I don't get Comedy Central, so I watch it online.

But what struck me was when Faux - er, I mean Fox - News interviewed four elderly men and women who, predictably, repeated Fox talking points while expressing their opposition to health care reform. Yes, they were clearly gullible and no doubt easily confused. Even better for the right-wing, many of the elderly are easy to scare, perhaps already having trouble accepting the immense changes in society during their lifetimes.

But seniors like these love their own government-run, socialized health care system. They just don't want anyone else to have the same benefits they already enjoy. Doesn't that seem remarkably selfish?

Even Republicans have (almost) stopped their attacks on Medicare and Social Security, since they're so popular. In fact, they've actually been trying to convince seniors that they're "saving Medicare" from the Democrats! That would be hilarious, if so many ignorant and gullible people didn't seem to be buying it. Well, I guess it's easy to scare timid, fearful little people, isn't it? And they do have a dedicated propaganda arm in Fox News.

But personally, I would love to drop my health insurance and go with Medicare, instead. And I'm young enough and healthy enough that I'd certainly drop the overall per-capita costs of the program, too. Of course, this would deprive the insurance companies of my premiums, and they have a great deal of political power (even more now that the GOP-packed Supreme Court has overturned precedent and released the floodgates of corporate cash).

My health insurance premiums increased 25% this year, on top of a 12% increase last year and 15% the year before that - a 61% increase in just three years. Health insurance is easily my biggest annual expense - ahead of food, ahead of housing, certainly ahead of clothing (of course, my wardrobe consists almost entirely of worn bluejeans and a variety of Blood Bank t-shirts). And that's with a $2,000 deductible, which means that I won't go to the doctor unless I'm half dead.

I would switch insurance, but, of course, a new policy won't cover pre-existing conditions (and life is apparently a "pre-existing condition" to insurance companies). And if you're not in some kind of group policy, they can dump you at any time - or increase the rates 100%, instead of just 61%. Insurance companies make money by insuring only those people who won't - or can't - actually use the policy. That's why they don't complain much about Medicare, since the elderly need far too much expensive care to be especially lucrative.

Now, I have nothing against private insurance companies, though they need to be watched (but then, so does the government). I just want them to have some competition. We hear it repeated ad nauseum that the government is horribly inefficient, incapable of managing anything except wars, so why does government competition scare them so much? If these private companies really are so efficiently run, they should have no problem competing against inept government bureaucrats, right?

And these elderly (not all of them, but the majority) who gullibly accept every Fox News talking point, and who are the biggest supporters of the GOP,... why not let other people have the same benefits that you enjoy so much? It's not "socialism" when it benefits you, is that it? (Sort of like how corporate welfare is so popular with the rich, but they insist on strict capitalism - with no bailouts! - for the poor?) Were you always this selfish, or did that sneak up on you over the years?

Before those superb initiatives of Social Security and Medicare - brought to us by progressives in the Democratic Party, over the intense opposition of the GOP - the elderly were the poorest demographic in America. Now they're the richest. (It's odd that the elderly don't seem to appreciate this, isn't it?) None of us want to go back to those days (although Republicans are still trying to get their hands on that money, still trying to privatize those programs, so wealthy corporations can dip into that income stream and become even wealthier). But why be so selfish in trying to keep the benefits of government-run health insurance - as just one option -  to yourself?

John Boehner's Constituents Deserve Better

Here's a great editorial in The Onion, the satirical news site, supposedly written by John Boehner, Minority Leader in the House of Representatives. It's pretty funny.

More, you can tell that the creator of this feels about the same way I do about what's going on. I'm furious with Republican "leaders" like Boehner, and almost as angry at the spineless Democrats who let them get away with it.

Here's an excerpt:

I assure you, the last thing my voters need is some well intended, do-all-I-possibly-can-to-help-the-little-guy congressman running around Washington, working across the aisle, and fighting tooth and nail for jobs, health care, and financial reform to ensure their tax dollars never end up in the hands of banks capable of holding our entire economy hostage.


No, sir. My constituents deserve better.

They deserve a leader willing to roll up his sleeves and play the types of twisted, greedy political games that, by their very nature, tear apart the fabric of our democracy for the sake of assuring reelection. They deserve someone on their side who will ask the tough questions, such as how will painting Democrats as radical ideologues play in, say, Arkansas? Can we vote "no" on the health care bill and still make it look like we give two craps about the welfare of ordinary Americans? How can we twist positive news about the GDP into a negative for the Obama administration?

But read it all. The ending is pretty good, too. And never forget that we let these people do this to us. By our ignorance, by our gullibility, by our cowardice, we get the kind of political system we deserve.

This Too Shall Pass

OK, this video clip is just fun - and safe for work. Enjoy!

Someone has to stand up to the ignorant

Yesterday, Don McLeroy lost his re-election bid for the Texas State Board of Education. This was in the Republican primary - well, it is Texas, after all - and apparently even Republicans, even Texas Republicans, get tired of being a laughing-stock to the rest of the country.

Of course, this doesn't mean that sanity has suddenly struck down there. Many of the other board members are nearly as bad. But McLeroy is the right-wing lunatic who famously stated that "someone has to stand up to the experts," as he was busy trying to turn Texas schools - and our own - back to the Dark Ages.

Admittedly, this has its humorous side, since McLeroy is a dentist. Would he agree then that, when it comes to dental problems, we should listen to Joe Bob, our uneducated slob of a neighbor, rather than going to one of those elitist dentists? Unfortunately, this has its tragic side, too, since Texas is a huge market for textbooks, a market than no publisher can afford to ignore, so what these ignorant, superstitious bumpkins decide is likely to damage education throughout America.

But this anti-elitism sentiment is not McLeroy's alone. This faux populism, this feeling that "my ignorance is better than your knowledge, you egghead," seems to be a growing movement in America. Maybe, to some extent, it's an inevitable consequence of democracy. Since we each get an equal say in elections, that probably translates to "my opinion is as good as your opinion," which is a very egalitarian point of view. There's nothing particularly wrong about that, in most circumstances.

But it does not mean that I know as much, about their particular specialty, as scientists who are highly-educated professionals in that specialty. Obviously, people wouldn't spend years going through dental school if it didn't make any difference, right, Don?  Likewise, biologists know more than laymen about biology, climatologists know more than laymen about climate science, etc.  How could it be otherwise?

I say "scientists," because this is particularly the case with professionals trained in the scientific method. But it applies to other fields, too. In general, historians are going to know more about history - at least in their specialties - than us laymen, lawyers are going to know more about the law, and plumbers are going to know more about plumbing. It's a good thing to be well-educated and highly trained. Except, perhaps, on Fox News.

In the Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, fundamentalist and tea-bagger world of the far right - which increasingly dominates the entire Republican Party - education is suspect and knowledge is considered elitist. Barack Obama, a product of a biracial marriage (in 1961, no less!) and a broken home, raised by his mother and his grandparents in very modest circumstances, is considered elitist because he got a good education (working hard and taking advantage of scholarship opportunities) in some great American universities. Yeah, that's certainly not the American dream, is it?

In the past, his determination, intelligence, and hard work would have been considered a good thing (well, maybe not in a black man). The fact that he's a constitutional scholar, a real expert, would have been a benefit for high public office. But no, these days intelligence is suspect. If you're intelligent, if you're well-educated, that just shows that you're "not one of us" (which the color of his skin just emphasizes to these people). We real people have to stand up to those smarty-pants experts with their fancy diplomas and clear-headed thinking, right?

The funny thing is that a guy born into wealth and privilege, whose powerful family connections kept him out of a war they all supported, and who got into an elite college because of who his father was,... well, he was just an average Joe, right? I mean, it was clear that he didn't know any more than the rest of us, and we certainly don't want anyone elite in the White House!

For some reason, an aristocracy of birth, of wealth and political power, is just fine. George W. Bush and Paris Hilton are the ideals, these days. But you can't trust people who are, you know, smart. And well-educated. We certainly don't want to listen to intelligent, skilled professionals, do we? People who actually know what they're talking about are elitists. We can't have that. We Marching Morons must stand up to the experts!

I don't understand any of this. Have we become so cowardly as a people that we're just giving up on trying to be the best? We used to have the best educational system in the world, bar none. Now, all too many of us don't respect education at all. We don't respect knowledge. We don't respect expertise. "My ignorance is just as good as your knowledge." But it isn't, that's the thing. Ignorance is never as good as knowledge, not even close.

George Carlin

George Carlin's "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television" stand-up comedy routine is rather famous (or infamous, if you prefer), but I'd never seen it. Well, here's a ten-minute excerpt, a video clip on FunnyorDie.com. Or if you prefer, here's the same thing on YouTube (unfortunately, you can't trust YouTube to keep that link active).

Needless to say, it's NOT safe for work,... but it's really funny. George Carlin was a very funny guy! These days, all too many comedians seem to go for the lowest common denominator, the 13-year-old demographic (not to insult 13-year-olds), with this kind of stuff, but Carlin was clever with it. And very, very funny.

I've got to admit that I'm partial to his "Religion is Bullshit" routine, too.

A Silver Lining

There's an article on Rock, Paper, Shotgun today called "There Is No Silver Lining." The Silver Lining was a computer game being created by fans in homage to the old King's Quest adventure games. This was strictly a volunteer effort, not a money-maker, and they had permission from Vivendi Games, Inc., the owner of the King's Quest copyright.

Now, however, after eight years of work, Activision, which merged with Vivendi in 2008, has shut them down. The corporation decided that they won't allow a non-commercial, fan-made, unofficial sequel to their property after all, though it's been 12 years since the last King's Quest game was released.

Thus the title, "There Is No Silver Lining." I'm certainly not going to argue that Activision was right, and my "silver lining" doesn't apply to this particular situation, but I do see a lot that's going right in the gaming world. First, though, you might want to check out Rock, Paper, Shotgun's take on this.

I can't comment on the "misuse of intellectual property and copyright." That's a broad subject which, if I had any expertise in the area at all, would take a separate post (at least). And, of course, piracy is another big subject, and I'm certainly sensitive to copyright holders' worries about that. (Human nature being what it is, it is far too easy to justify taking what we want without paying for it, and that's as true for software and music "pirates" as it is for muggers.)

In this case, I think that Activision is shooting itself in the foot, but I don't expect that will mean much to them. They might, indeed, change their minds in this particular case, given enough publicity. But that wouldn't change their general attitude. Besides, even most game-players will never hear of this, and if they do, almost none will stop buying Activision games because of it, though it might increase piracy a bit (in both cases, people will simply justify whatever actions they want to take).

No, the silver lining is that computer gaming is alive and well on the Internet. Yes, one famous game company after another has folded or merged (often into Activision). This is very big business now - far larger than the movie industry, in fact. Mainstream games are multimillion dollar investments by huge multinational companies, and this is especially the case with console games, with their proprietary formats. These corporations aren't controlled by game-lovers, but by money-lovers, and they're all looking at simply selling to the biggest game-buying demographic (what we used to call the lowest common denominator in television programing).

But this is only the most public side of things. Look a little deeper and you'll find a thriving community of people who really love computer games. "Indies" are small, independent game developers, and they're everywhere. OK, they're almost always struggling to survive. Money is always tight, and they certainly don't have the budgets for the expensive graphics of mainstream titles.

But they're doing some great work, nonetheless. Look, for example, at Mount&Blade, a superb game by TaleWorlds, a husband and wife team in Turkey. Look at Solium Infernum by Cryptic Comet. Look at Spiderweb Software, Iron Tower Studios, Amanita Design, Paradox Interactive, CD Projekt. These companies are of varying sizes and can be based almost anywhere in the world (very commonly, these days, in Eastern Europe). They tend to design for niche markets, but they're doing some great stuff.

But look deeper yet. The Internet has connected game developers with fans, and fans with each other, to an amazing extent. Fan-created work, as in The Silver Lining, is only a part of that, although a thriving part. But individuals who have their own vision, and don't want to compromise it, are creating some amazing games, with support and encouragement from their fans.

Dwarf Fortress is one incredible example. The game is free to download and play, while Tarn Adams, the programmer, lives on donations from his legions of fans. He's been working on a new version for a year and a half, and still gets thousands of dollars in donations every month. He's certainly not getting rich, but he's creating the kind of game he wants (and that a lot of us want to play).

Of course, the game certainly isn't for everyone, and it would never sell as a commercial game. The graphics are basically nonexistent (ASCII graphics, though fans have come up with various graphical solutions to that), and the interface is poor. But the gameplay is absolutely incredible. Mainstream game developers could learn a great deal from Dwarf Fortress.

Or look at Aurora, another free game by a focused - or obsessed - individual developer. This is quite a game, with many dedicated fans. Frankly, it's so difficult to learn that it almost seems more like work than play. But Steve Walmsley has developed, and continues to develop, the game for his own play (and to serve as a foundation for his fiction). This is his vision. He has lots of people offering suggestions, but it's his baby. If you like it, fine. If not, go somewhere else.

There are all sorts of games like this on the Internet (few this good, admittedly), but I'd like to mention one more, UnReal World. This is a survival game set in Iron Age Finland (appropriately, since Sami Maaranen, who's been working on it since 1990, is Finnish). This game isn't free, but the lowest level of registration is only $3. And like the other games I've mentioned, it's continually being upgraded and improved. Also like the others, it's a really great game.

My point is just that, despite the problems with mainstream developers (don't get me started on DRM!), the computer gaming world seems to be thriving. The Internet has released all this potential, and we're only just beginning to see the results.

And, I suspect, that's not just in games, either.

"Blackout" by Connie Willis

Connie Willis is one of my very favorite science fiction authors, but unfortunately, she's not very prolific. And most of what she does write is short fiction. Blackout is her first novel - though, actually, only the first half of a duology - since 2001's Passage (which I loved). Since the second half of the story won't be published until fall, maybe I should have waited before reading this. But I couldn't resist.

Blackout returns to the same uptime time-travel world as in her Doomsday Book (1993) and To Say Nothing of the Dog (1999), both Hugo Award winning novels. But as anyone familiar with those books must know, it's the downtime setting that's really important. And for that she also returns to a familiar setting, the London Blitz during World War II, the focus of her award-winning novelette, "Fire Watch," and her novella, "Jack" (and, to some extent, her short story, "The Winds of Marble Arch," too).

Clearly, Willis is inspired by the courage and the tenacity of British civilians in World War II, and so am I. This book is filled with ordinary people doing extraordinary things in a time of extreme danger and uncertainty - and the young historians who have come from the future to study them. But right from the beginning, there are ominous signs that things might be going wrong with their time-travel technology. Although there's humor in the book, as usual with Connie Willis, the mood in Blackout doesn't change so dramatically, and isn't so impressively varied, as in Passage. For the most part, there's tension from the beginning, and the tension just builds as the book continues.

Most of the book focuses on that courage and tenacity of the British public, of all ages, in the 1940's - shopgirls, weekend sailors, upper-class ambulance drivers, maids, etc. But this is not historical fiction. There's an unknown problem that might leave the young time-travelers stranded in the past, or worse, alter the very course of the war, possibly enough that the Axis might win. By the end of the book, we still don't know what the problem is or how dangerous it might be. But it's clear that something has gone wrong. I eagerly await the conclusion.

Are there any problems with the book? Well, I enjoyed the madcap beginning of the book, where everyone involved in time travel is frustrated by the constant rescheduling (forewarning that something could be wrong), but it might not be to everyone's taste. And the chapters alternate in focusing on three main characters, and at least a couple of minor ones, jumping back and forth from year to year and month to month. You really have to pay attention to the dates in the chapter headings (although the story is linear from the point of view of each separate character).

For the most part, I didn't have any trouble keeping track. But a couple of times, we start reading about people who haven't shown up previously, and we don't have any idea who they are. Frankly, we don't have to know who they are - it's clear enough that one of the characters in each chapter is a time-traveler - but the first time this happened, I thought I'd missed something earlier in the book. No, just go with the flow and expect that things will come together in the end.

I do wonder a bit about the size of the book, since this is only half the story. In the Acknowledgments, Willis mentions how it "morphed from one book into two and I went slowly mad under the strain." It does seem odd that an author of primarily short fiction should need a duology to tell this story. And Passage was surprisingly long, too (though I loved every bit of it). Well, a story takes as long as it needs, and so far, this one does not drag in the telling. But I know people who want a book to get to the chase, who think that most modern science fiction is too long. So I've started to notice this kind of thing.

All in all, none of that bothered me. The book was riveting, and I could hardly put it down. But I don't know yet if this is going to be as good as her other novels. It is longer than anything else she's written, and so far, there's been a lot of tension, with steadily increasing levels of fear, but not a clear-cut threat (other than the ever-present threat of German bombs, of course). The time-travelers are worried about getting home, scared that something terrible might have happened in their own time, and terrified that their presence might end up changing history after all. I'll wait for the conclusion before making any firm judgments, but I can certainly say that I've enjoyed the story so far.

Design Outside the Box

This is the video of Carnegie Mellon University Professor Jesse Schell's presentation to the D.I.C.E. (Design, Innovate, Communicate, Entertain) Summit of video game executives on February 18, 2010:

http://g4tv.com/videos/44277/DICE-2010-Design-Outside-the-Box-Presentation/

It's 28 minutes long, but it's really fascinating. He starts off talking about Facebook games, but don't be put off if you're not familiar with them (I'm not, myself) or about the other examples he gives, because he ends up imagining a wild future where everything we do is, basically,... a game.

And the dollar amounts he tosses around - the amount of money currently being made by visionary people - should certainly catch your attention. This is big business right now, and it's only going to get bigger.

Still, the most fascinating part of his presentation is at the very end, where he imagines how this could end up. It's not just about making a great deal of money, although that's probably the part that excites these video game executives. Game theory can also show us how to motivate people to improve their lives. OK, in the real world, it's probably going to be mostly about the money, and I probably won't like the majority of the results, but there's the potential here for good, as well.

It really is an interesting talk. I wish I'd had a professor like this when I was in college! It's not that I didn't have some good professors, but this guy's enthusiasm is contagious.

PS. My thanks to Jim Harris (see the link to his blog, Auxiliary Memory, at the lower right here) for the tip. He said this was "major science fictional," and he was certainly right!

Edit: FYI, here's a related post.

Global Warming

Cartoon is by Joel Pett, from USA Today (http://mediagallery.usatoday.com/Editorial-Cartoons/G373,S81137)

I thought the cartoon was a good introduction to this, since it makes the same point - or one of them - that Al Gore does in his Febr. 27th editorial in the New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/opinion/28gore.html

Registration (free) is required to read the article, but here are the first two paragraphs, which is all I wanted to comment about right now:

It would be an enormous relief if the recent attacks on the science of global warming actually indicated that we do not face an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it.

Of course, we would still need to deal with the national security risks of our growing dependence on a global oil market dominated by dwindling reserves in the most unstable region of the world, and the economic risks of sending hundreds of billions of dollars a year overseas in return for that oil. And we would still trail China in the race to develop smart grids, fast trains, solar power, wind, geothermal and other renewable sources of energy — the most important sources of new jobs in the 21st century.

OK, so go ahead and assume that the consensus of climatologists is wrong. That's possible, if not the smartest bet. What if, despite the overwhelming evidence otherwise, the Earth is not heating up due to the greenhouse gases we're dumping into the atmosphere? What then? What if we do something about this problem, and it turns out to be a false alarm?

Well, we're still being held hostage by Arab oil states, Russia, Venezuela, Nigeria, etc. - some of the most unstable and oppressive regimes in the world, who all have their own reasons to pressure America in various ways. They're all very happy to see us dangle on their string, but doesn't it make sense to try to free ourselves from that?

We're still sending hundreds of billions of dollars overseas every year to buy oil from these countries, money that weakens the dollar, that worsens our trade deficit, and that could be better used in so many other ways. And since we desperately need the oil, and have absolutely no control over the price we must pay, we're reduced to begging Saudi Arabia and other oil-rich nations to keep the cost down (which works about as well as you'd expect).

And meanwhile, China is investing vast sums of money into the technology of the future. They don't have much oil, either, but they're smart enough to work on resolving that, they're smart enough to try to take the lead in future technology, instead of clinging desperately to an idealized past.

Admittedly, they're a dictatorship, so they don't have this messy democracy stuff to deal with. But that's the whole point. We Americans need to be smart ourselves, because it's we who tell our leaders what to do, not the other way around. Or is democracy just a failed experiment, people being too dumb, too gullible, too short-sighted to make decisions for themselves? Are we just going to give up, letting China have the future, while we huddle in a pasture, waiting for the Rapture to lift us into a glorious, though imaginary, new world?

Even if you despise the Democrats and think the worst of Al Gore, even if you think that global warming is a giant, worldwide conspiracy intent on victimizing poor, helpless multinational oil companies, even if you like a long-shot bet, and think that all ignorant people must "stand up to the experts," so what? What's the worse that could happen? That we'd wean ourselves off foreign oil, start to spend our money on American-made products, and continue to lead the world in science and technology? Yeah, that would really be terrible, wouldn't it?

Slow-Motion Hummingbirds

This is a neat slow-motion video, if you like hummingbirds, but I suggest turning down the volume on the music.


Edit: This was originally posted when I first started to blog, before I'd even figured out how to embed video clips. But three and a half years later, I had a comment, so I thought I'd fix this up a bit. :)