Mage's Plane

Rage Against the Machine

2011-12-10T17:14:00.000-08:00

Thank you, sir. More like this, please.

Get the money out of politics. Limit corporate personhood. Stop the insider trading bullshit. Quit lending trillions of dollars of undisclosed cash to unscrupulous financiers. Kill the policies that put lobbyists in control of the political agenda, that make it impossible to have a rational discussion of substantive issues like healthcare, immigration, military matters, civil rights, criminal justice, fixing the financial system, fixing the entitlement system, and balancing the taxes that pay for it all (except for what we borrow...).

There is no interpretation of the Free Speech clause that allows our representatives in government to be bought out and corrupted. There is no interpretation of executive/bureaucratic power that allows our administration to sell us out. There is no interpretation of public welfare that makes it acceptable to ruin our future by kicking present problems down the road like the trash snowballs from Katamari Damacy.

This is our country. And we want it back.

(Edited: This post initially accused the government of spending trillions to bail out banks. That's not what actually happened. Rather, the government loaned trillions to the banks at ridiculously low interest rates. As far as I can tell, that didn't last, and the Fed got their money back. I'm honestly not sure how to feel about this, because it seems to have worked somehow. But egads, what a mind-bogglingly risky, cockamamie, STUPID plan of action. And the banks ended up making $13 billion off of it, if you believe the marginal rate calculations Bloomberg does here.

A Voter's Declaration of Illness

2011-12-06T00:12:00.000-08:00

I'm sick of party politics.

I'm sick of two-second soundbytes and two-year election campaigns. I don't want political theater, I want public policy.

I'm sick of political expediency. I don't want to see an environment where facing up to difficult issues is political suicide, and kicking the can down the road means reelection.

I'm sick of having twenty hot-button issues with two sides each, boiling down complex problems into simplistic ideologies and blowing up simple legislation into incomprehensible gibberish. I don't want a skinny government or a fat government, I want a fit government.

I'm sick of tribalism. I don't want politicians to oppose ideas just because 'the enemy' supports them, or vice versa. I don't want politicians to appeal to groupthink--the rich, the poor, the white, the black, the unions, the employers, the war hawks, the peaceniks, the youth, the elderly. Left or right or upside down, I don't give a damn.

I want an informed populace to elect serious representatives. I want sober public discussion of policies that will impact the nation's welfare. I want complications to be explored rather than ignored. I want disagreements to encourage engagement rather than divisiveness.

I am a member of the militant middle, and I'm sick of letting the fringes wrestle for control over our country, with their efforts combining to steer towards disaster. It's Pepsi against Coke to me, and I drink water.

The National Defense Authorization Act--Indefinite Detention and Wartime Executive Power

2011-12-05T03:18:00.000-08:00

I've spent the better part of the last week looking into this issue. It's a complicated subject that's being massacred by media sensationalism. They paint with broad strokes of black and white, and invoke the specter of totalitarianism. And that's when they don't outright print falsehoods; the latter article makes scare talk out of an amendment that never made it into the bill, for example.

They're not wrong to be disturbed, though. Here's what I've found in my checking:

The disputed section is Section 1031 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012 (henceforth NDAA). Section 1031 allows the military to detain:
-Anyone involved in any way with the people who orchestrated 9/11;
-Any member of Al Qaeda, the Taliban, or 'associated forces';
-Anyone who has offered 'substantial support' to the above;
-Anyone who has 'committed a belligerent act or has directly supported such hostilities in aid of' the above.

Detainment is pending disposition under law of war, which can be:
-Held until the end of "hostilities" (as defined in the Authorization for the Use of Military Force in 2001);
-Trial under Uniform Code of Martial Justice or other competent court/tribunal;
-Transfer to custody of a foreign country or entity

People will tell you that this section exempts US citizens and lawful resident aliens. They are wrong. The section with that exemption is 1032, which requires the military to detain certain people who have been captured in the course of hostilities. Nothing in 1032 removes the military's authority to detain citizens or resident aliens.

The first important aspect to consider is that the authority for this provision comes from the Authorization for Use of Military Force signed in 2001 (AUMF). You'll notice that the AUMF doesn't exempt US citizens either. In truth, the NDAA isn't granting the executive any special new authority; it is actually clarifying the extent of the wartime powers granted to the executive and the military by the AUMF. This was particularly made explicit by a last-minute compromise amendment from Senator Feinstein, which inserted a clause saying "Nothing in this section is intended to limit or expand the authority of the President or the scope of the Authorization for Use of Military Force."

The executive gaining more power in wartime--even beyond the bounds of the Constitution--is nothing new. Practically every conflict in the last century has involved something of the sort--the most famous example that comes to mind is Executive Order 9066 and the Japanese-American internment during WWII. One difference between that time and this one is that WWII was the last time the US was legally in a state of war; the Authorization for Use of Military Force is a watered-down state of affairs that we've used for pretty much every military action since then.

The more troubling difference is the amorphous nature of the enemy identified in the AUMF. Not only nations, but organizations and even people are targeted. And the victory condition--making it so that none of these nations/organizations/people can orchestrate any more terrorist attacks on the US--is incredibly vague. It's not like Al Qaeda is going to strike their colors and let us know we've won.

In the immediate term, the concern is that anyone, even a US citizen, can be detained on suspicion of supporting terrorists and held indefinitely, even turned over to another country and squeezed--ahem, tortured--for information. Legally speaking, most people who are detained in this manner can apply for habeas corpus review of their detainment...but tell that to Maher Arar, a Canadian/Syrian citizen who was detained at JFK Airport in NYC; rendered to Syria for the better part of a year, during which time he was tortured; and remains on US watchlists to this day, despite being publicly exonerated of any connections to terrorists by both Canada and Syria.

In the long term, there is the broader concern of how much wartime power we can afford the executive branch, and for how long. With no clearly defined achievable end goal, there is the real possibility of indefinitely maintaining this state of pseudo-war, and thus the extraconstitutional authority of the executive. Obama's response has been instructive: in the White House statement threatening to veto the NDAA, he called the provisions "unnecessary, untested, and legally controversial restriction of the President’s authority to defend the Nation from terrorist threats." (emphasis mine) And the White House was responsible for removing language from Section 1031 that would exempt American citizens and lawful residents from the authorization to detain. See the Senate session video record, at 4:43:29; Senator Levin explains.

On the other hand, Obama's statement also refers to "...the fundamental American principle that our military does not patrol our streets," and how the current bill "would tie the hands of our intelligence and law enforcement professionals." He is simultaneously objecting to the restriction of executive authority, the required use of military custody under 1032 rather than other forms of custody, and the disruption of existing executive/judicial doctrine on who the AUMF applies to. So from a rights perspective, it would depend on what the existing doctrine is; unfortunately, I haven't been able to find out. In the executive authority column, Obama is solidly 'for'...but that may only be because Congress is usurping his role as Commander-in-Chief by mandating who the military must detain. After all, that's just another way of saying "who must be detained by the military"...as opposed to detainment by law enforcement or intelligence.

Basically, there are a whole host of reasons why this bill is bad legislation, even beyond the human rights perspective. But it got through the Senate 93-7, and now the House gets to take a look.

Let's be clear, I'm not worried that the military is going to go out and start locking up random American citizens on fabricated charges of terrorist conspiracies. I'm worried that the military is going to approach these detentions with sober well-intentioned consideration...and still get them wrong. And I'm worried that 'wartime executive authority' will eventually become just 'executive authority', an extraordinary measure maintained long past all justifiable cause, until it becomes the ordinary state of affairs.

The Internet And How We Consume Information

2011-10-08T02:00:00.001-07:00

Okay, moving on from League of Legends to a more substantial topic. A few years back, the Atlantic writes about how the Internet affects our behavior patterns in an article titled Is Google Making Us Stupid?. The author, Nicholas Carr, argues that the flitting browsing pattern of most Internet users suggests a deterioration of deep reading and deep thinking; as people rely on machines to bring them relevant and interesting content, Carr writes, they lose the ability to penetrate dense information to find that content themselves.

I disagree with a number of points, and writing about it was interesting enough to make a blog post of it, so here goes...

First, I think the idea of Internet-induced ADD is a self-fulfilling prophecy and a scapegoat. Maintaining concentration is not an inherently easy thing to do; it's not like people didn't have trouble with that before the Internet came along. But it's easy to blame one's concentration issues on Internet usage affecting one's brain, so people do it. This issue is only exacerbated by misuse of research like the cited study of online research habits, which looks at how people browse a research site; when the author suggests that this study evidences a broader change in reading and thinking patterns as a result of Internet usage, he's speculating without basis, because the study examines Internet usage rather than broader reading and thinking patterns. Indeed, the researchers themselves are doing nothing but speculating in the quotation the author chose, when they conjecture that Internet users "go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense." Did they study how Internet users' offline reading behavior changed? No. They just looked at the common-sense skimming approach one uses on an online research site, and jumped to a wild conclusion about reading in general. This sort of confirmation bias is poor scholarship, but I would bet it's typical of research done on this topic.

Second, I find it misleading to examine Internet usage only through the lens of comparison to a bookworm. As Cracked pointed out in its article about proscribed student behaviors that are good for studying, the dichotomy in many cases is not between texting and essay writing, but between texting and nothing; in our case, the alternative to the Internet is not necessarily the library. The Internet caters to a wide audience, so online material is perforce required to be available in a form that is comprehensible to the lowest common denominator, but that does not preclude greater depth for those who seek it. That's why, in addition to Google, we have tools for deep search and exploration of the 'invisible Web' of private databases and dynamically generated pages.

Third, a brief diversion: I disagree with the suggestion that there is a clear financial incentive to promote shallow online browsing. For example, just recently my mother and I were discussing a customer intelligence company that is using the information it collects about people online to, among other things, promote prolonged browsing on particular websites for greater ad revenues per viewer. That seems to be a direct contradiction of the author's point. The Internet is moving past the era of page views and click-throughs; in order to attract continued consumer attention, content has reclaimed its rightful place as the driver of revenue.

Finally, the author's warnings about how Brin/Page's blithe assumptions about the benefits of AI characterize intelligence as reducible to a series of mechanical steps miss the mark by a long way. Intelligence can harness mechanized processes without itself being purely mechanical. Consider the analogy of a programmer with many languages at his disposal, at various levels of abstraction, with work below the level of abstraction in each case being done by a machine. Is the Python programmer more mechanical or less natively intelligent than the C programmer because his language relies more on interpretation by the compiler? Nonsense. And if you desire functionality from C that's not natively available in Python, you can always wrap a C library and bring it up to the appropriate level of abstraction. Similarly, harnessing artificial intelligence to manage the presentation of information for consumption does not inhibit reading, even if in some sense we are delegating the task of reading to the machine. Rather, it allows us to get more out of our reading at every level of engagement. Machine intelligence enables human intelligence, rather than replacing it.

Ranked Bill of Rights

2011-09-18T20:10:00.000-07:00

Okay, so it's been a while since I wrote the Ranked Bill of Rights. The thread received a lot of initial interest, but eventually it died off, as happens with all threads.

Now it's back. At 4 this morning, one xoxo pLexxy signed the thread, and that triggered a veritable flood of signatures--over 120 in the last 16 hours. Simply cataloguing the signers took the better part of an hour. So I feel it's a good time to bring that post to Mage's Plane. Here it is, in all its uncensored glory.

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Disclaimer: All statements apply only weakly to normal games, and can be waived by 5-man consensus at any time.

1. The summoner has the right to a team that plays to win.
If you queue up for a game, you are making a contract with four other guys that you will break the enemy's Nexus before they break yours, or at least give it a damn good shot. If you queue up with no expectation of contributing to that goal, you're pissing on your teammates. That means you, intentional feeders. That means you, first-time Shaco player who doesn't know why a second Shaco appeared when you pressed R, or why you suddenly started attacking Rammus in tower range, or why Thornmail-stacking Ashe is a bad idea. That means you, Mr. "I'm 7/1/2 with 200 CS and 10k gold, who gives a shit about towers or teamfights?" We give a shit, because that's the point of the game, and if you don't, why the hell are you here?

2. The summoner has the right to a team that plays together.
Riot decided to make it impossible to win the game on your own, God knows why--thought it'd make the game more interesting or something. Whatever the reason, the fact is that you can't break that Nexus by being the better player--you have to be the better team. You gotta talk to each other, listen to each other, work with each other. Sometimes that means you gotta man up and play the fucking tank, take the duo lane, and screw your KDR. No, you can't play Squishy Carry #4. No, you can't insist on solo mid Eve. No, you can't just farm top for 40 minutes and ignore the calls to group. I don't give a shit if you speak English or Swahili, but if you can't or won't respond to "karth mia," "focus ashe," "baron," or well-placed pings, then get the fuck out of my game. And so help me, I will hunt you down if you leave or AFK.

3. The summoner has the right to civility.
This is a goddam game. You may have all the killer instinct of Mike Tyson (or Jack the Ripper), but if you suck the fun out of playing, the whole exercise is worthless. Plus, you'll lose. The chatbox is not for revealing to your teammate what a fucking ghey n00b excuse for dog food he is because he gave up first blood or stole your pentakill or built double Infinity Edge on Karthus. The chatbox is for helping your team win the goddam game. Anything you put in the chatbox that doesn't do that is a waste of time and emotional energy. Get as mad as you like--scream, stamp, break things, whatever--but don't you hit that enter key and try to make your teammates feel as shitty as you do. That's the mark of a loser, and if you're a loser, who the fuck cares if you're losing?

Play to win, play together, play nice. It's that simple. If you can't deal with it, take your two remaining brain cells and go farm bots.

[I]Inspired by condon's Thou Shalt Read This MFing Thread and OmegaHorizon's own Bill of Rights. See also EncasedShadow's I pledge to follow the code.

Attention all: I will be going to a private chat named "BillOfRights" (suggestions for a better name are welcome!). I'm not on all day, but I'm on almost every day. Besides, I'm not the main attraction--you are! This is an opportunity for serious players to find each other, discuss LoL, and set up premades. Have at it, and have fun queuing--something that's certainly difficult without a like-minded team!

Empty Ladders, Empty Queues: The Dearth of Premade Play

2011-09-13T11:06:00.000-07:00

I wrote this post a couple months back, but I feel it's worth compiling these posts here for future reference. My last blog post was about how to make solo queue more worthwhile, but ultimately solo queue is an inferior experience. League of Legends is a team game, but teams are few and far between, and so it suffers. Here are some thoughts on that. There's more at the link; this is just the original message.

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The biggest problem with League of Legends isn't the lack of Leona. It isn't "Soon." It isn't the price of runes, the patch day downtimes, or even the troll-happy playerbase.

No, the problem is this: League of Legends is a competition between teams of five...where the primary mode of play is solo queue.

Solo queue forces the system to estimate your individual skill from the result of a team game. It creates opportunities for trolls to inflict themselves on others, and provides sparks aplenty to kindle ragers' ire. It marginalizes team strategy and rewards the most rudimentary low-risk high-reward tactics, because anything more sophisticated is too difficult to coordinate with four random teammates. It's a stagnant system with too much luck, too little team play, and rampant frustration.

The premade ladders obviously do not suffer from these problems; they are a superior way to play LoL. So what's holding them back? Answer: there simply aren't enough people queuing up. Those ladders haven't reached the critical mass necessary to sustain themselves. Queue times for top players can be hours, so they don't queue; but then the second-tier players become the top players in the ladder, and face hour-long queue times, so they desert.

Premade play is much more common on the EU server--we know it can work. It's no coincidence that Europe's metagame is often leaps and bounds ahead of ours (split push, tankless comps, dual-burst, Tele-ganks, AD-support bot lane)--it's not that the Europeans are inherently better at LoL, but rather that they have a popular teamplay environment where strategies are developed and refined.

So how can we reinvigorate premade play on the NA server? I have a few suggestions.
-IP bonuses for premade queues. Simple, clean, effective. Put greed to use! If people earn 4/3rds the IP for finding 4 friends and queuing for 5's Ranked, they'll do it. Heck--right now, it's only fair that they earn more considering that they're waiting an extra 15-30 minutes in queue.
-Open challenges from top teams. Ask a favor from CLG or TSM or EG, or from other popular streamers with high-Elo friends. See if the Runeterra In-House League will lend a hand. Get some top Rioters together--Eski, Phreak, Classick, Pendragon, etc. Get people to issue open challenges on the premade ladder, and stream matches from 5's queue. The failure of the premade ladders was a trickle-down problem--so let's trickle down success.
-Clans clans clans. Okay, this one's obvious. Get people to group up, and they'll queue together. One of those Beta promises that fell through, and I think it's the most important one. Independently organized clan platforms will never have the momentum of a Riot-supported clan system. It doesn't even have to be clans, specifically--any general networking tool to get teammates together will do. Friend lists and chat rooms are not enough.
-Hard reset on the premade ladder. Solo queue should be soft-reset to avoid the chaos that reigned at the beginning of Season 1--sure, I get that. But the premade ladders were a failure this season. They need the reboot. Cut queue times with a reset and you make an opportunity for people to get back into 5's.
-Rate teams, not players. Solo queue forces you to rank the individual because the individual is the one who queues--but here we're dealing with teams. Individual skill ratings have no meaning at all in this setting, and cobbling five such to compose a team rating has even less. This will be tricky to implement, but absolutely worth the effort. I remember when red posters downplayed the importance of clans because it was more important to have permanent teams--well, why don't we have permanent teams, then? Make it so players get together and register a team name for Ranked, with those players individually registered for that team (allow more than 5 so people can sub in). The ladder should be comprised of those team names, rather than summoner names.

Solo queue is a pathetic shadow of how League of Legends is meant to be played. In order to bring strategic depth to the general population, combat the effects of leavers/griefers, and expand the competitive scene, it is absolutely critical that we make the premade ladders into a real option for competitive play.

Turning Skill Into Elo: Solo Queue Mindset and Methodology

2011-09-12T10:48:00.000-07:00

I've written once before about climbing the Elo ladder. That was nearly 10 months ago, and I wince on rereading that guide. I got some basics right--keep calm, communicate, comp well, and so on--but I had the perspective of a new-to-Ranked, barely-1300 player, and it shows. It shows most in my emphasis on picking a champion that can carry you out of Elo Hell. Since then, I've had it ground into my bones that the champion doesn't carry; the player does.

As before, this guide is directed at people who feel their skill level is above their Elo. I'm at the low end of gold, so I can't exactly advise 1800 players on getting better. But an 1800 player who thinks he should be 2100 is really in the same boat as the 1300 player who thinks he should be 1600, or the 900 player who thinks he should be 1200. In each case, the player perceives that he is not held back by his skill, but rather that his Elo perversely holds him back from rising, in the form of uncarriable teammates. Here I will lay down some principles that help you turn your team from a hindrance into an asset that helps you carry your way up the ladder.

(Some games can't be carried. Accept it and move on. You don't have to win every game to go up; you just have to win more than you lose. Finding ways to blame your feeder teammates for the last game you lost isn't going to help you do that.)

You aren't communicating enough. Yes, you. If that chat box isn't being used within the first 3 seconds of champ select, and isn't full within the first 15 seconds, you're not doing your job, which is coordinating with your teammates to find a comp that works for everyone. One thing that tremendously frustrated me in the 12-1300 brackets was when people would keep quiet until the end and then say "Oh by the way I can't jungle." The earlier you can get that person to own up, the easier life will be. Inversely, if someone has a main, getting them to say so can prevent role redundancy.

Speaking of mains: Have a few. Don't have just one--then you can get banned/picked out, or someone might fill your role before you can talk (see above about communicating), or you might get counterpicked, or whatever. But don't try to have two dozen--then you won't have sufficient mastery of each champion. The ability to play all champions to your Elo is not going to raise your Elo; being consistently better than your opponents with the champion/s you choose is what will do that. You should be comfortable with as many champions as possible, especially in key-but-unpopular roles like jungler/support, but focus your efforts on a smaller group. If your main is someone common, you need at least one more in the same role. Don't count on getting Singed every game.

Understand matchups. Part of mastering a champion is knowing when not to use it--so even if you're a pro Teemo, don't pick him against Mordekaiser solo top. Recognize what your goals are in your particular matchup. Don't focus on trading harass with Morgana at level 5--keep the lane off your tower and kill her with burst later. Don't fight Mordekaiser in your creeps--burst him from a distance. Don't let your team enter game against Tryndamere without Exhaust, against Twisted Fate without Teleport, against Shaco without CV.

Realize who has to die and who has to live. If you're jungling and the enemy has a Kog'maw, you gank his ass and shut him down. If your team's Tristana is 6/1 with IE-PD at 20 minutes, you protect her in teamfights even at the cost of your ass, because she will win the fight as long as she's alive to DPS.

Realize the point of winning fights. No, it's not your KDA. It's the ability to take objectives unopposed after fights. With that in mind, don't chase 3v1 just because he's not dead yet if you can take two towers instead. And don't go looking for a fight when there's no objective at stake. You should never get caught at dragon cave when dragon's not up, and neither should your teammates, so spam that Ctrl-click when necessary. The corollary to this is that if you can take the objective without a fight, that's better than fighting, so don't towerdive when you can slow-push and poke a tower down.

Maphacking wins games. Buy a ward every time you go back. If you're the support, buy three. Learn the good ward spots--next to enemy wraiths, between the river bushes, in front of dragon, behind baron, and so on. Realize what the threats/opportunities are at different points in the game and ward accordingly--don't just drop it in the nearest brush.

And back to the original point: it's all very well for you to do these things, but you'll win far more if you can get your team doing them too. That means telling them what to do in a way that makes them feel good about doing it. "Tristana, you're our carry this game, we need to keep you alive, and you need to stay alive." "Their only chance of coming back is getting picks or BDing, so push lanes and force Baron." "We can come back as long as we don't get caught in bad fights, ward baron and turtle." Pings are your friend. Ping the next objective. Ping where you think the enemy is. Ping to back off, ping to go in. Having a second type of ping is the best thing Riot has done for solo queue in a long long time. Make use of it. Carries not following you in? You're not pinging enough. Support getting caught out of position? You're not pinging enough. The more you can flood the chat box with GOOD communication, the harder it is for Negative Nidalee to start the blame game. And the more you give your teammates good direction, the less time they have to do something stupid.

The corollary to the above, of course, is that you absolutely cannot start the blame game yourself. Especially late game, anything bad that happens is the whole team's fault, because the team has to function as a unit to win. Raging is the surest way to break down team coordination, which is the surest way to lose. Don't do it if you value your Elo (or your account, for that matter).

Finally, realize that your skill level isn't high enough. If you aren't on the front page of the ladder, you have no reason to sit back and say "I'm good enough, it's up to my teammates to get carried." And if you're good enough to be on the front page, there are other concerns. I will hazard to say that nobody has plumbed the depths that League of Legends has to offer. Rock Solid gave us a glimpse when they shocked the world this past weekend by knocking off CLG and TSM in quick succession at the IEM NYC qualifiers with comps that defied the established metagame. We can't all hope to imitate RS' success--nor should we attempt to imitate a team that prides itself on being inimitable and innovative--but we can surely improve ourselves, elevate our games, and play better than we ever did before. At the end of the day, that's what rising in Elo is all about.

The New IP System--How Did it Really Affect You?

2011-09-11T16:59:00.000-07:00

By now it's common knowledge that Riot is a soulless, greedy corporation intent on sucking our wallets dry. The most obvious evidence for this is that Riot continually releases 6300-IP champions, and nerfed our IP gains to boot, so that the poor playerbase is forced to spend their hard-earned money on overpriced champions just so they don't fall behind.

Have I accurately captured the QQer's mindset? All right, moving on.

I see this complaint over and over and over again. It's tremendously frustrating. Today I'm going to focus on one aspect of this: the change to the IP system. Players lament the loss of 120 IP for 25 minutes of game time. They claim to have lost the ability to earn 6300 IP in two weeks, which puts them hopelessly behind in buying the latest 6300 champion.

But is that really what happened?

Boring Numbers Time

Average game time under old system: 35 minutes. The source for this, a TREMENDOUS number of games archived in Lolbase, has unfortunately been lost, as Lolbase has become defunct. So you'll have to take my word for it.

[W/L]
IP at 25 minutes: 118/62, avg. 3.6 IP/min
IP at 35 minutes: 110/68, avg. 2.55 IP/min
IP at 45 minutes or longer: 102/72, avg. 1.93 IP/min (or less)

Average game time under new system: ??? (I conjecture 30 minutes due to 20 minute surrender change)

IP at 20 minutes: 71/46, avg. 2.92 IP/min (this needs to be checked, I don't have the numbers)
IP at 25 minutes: 76/51, avg. 2.55 IP/min
IP at 30 minutes: 88/58, avg. 2.43 IP/min
IP at 35 minutes: 98/65, avg. 2.33 IP/min
IP at 45 minutes: 121/80, avg. 2.23 IP/min
IP at 55 minutes or longer: 145/93, avg. 2.16 IP/min (or less)

Explanation of Boring Numbers

The IP/minute is much, much flatter under the new system. At the old average of 35 minutes, IP/minute has declined; however, shorter game times due to 20-minute surrender imply IP/min is higher than the 35-minute number under the new system. So the nerf is at most 7% in terms of pure game time, and is almost certainly less. It could be argued that out-of-game time reduces the benefit of playing many shorter games for IP, but this argument is coming from the same people who lament the loss of 118 IP for 25-minute games under the old system, so I'm not sure how to respond.

Now consider the addition of guaranteed FWotD through Co-op. So a casual player who plays a couple of games a day can get FWotD in 15 minutes despite losing his PvP games. The gain from this depends on how many games you play per day, but anyone who's playing enough for this not to balance out the losses in IP/min doesn't have to worry about having enough IP.

An example game is provided below to show that the graph I'm basing these numbers on accurately represents actual game results. Additional examples can be provided on request. If you have an example of your own, feel free to post the screenshot. If you have a counterexample, feel free to post the screenshot. Merely posting "I only got 40 IP for my last 60-minute win!!!" does not count as a counterexample.

Conclusion

I have never taken the complaints about IP seriously. IP does its job: it introduces new players to the game for free (even more so with the price reductions), allows serious players to get competitive without paying money--but does not allow players to acquire the entire game for free. But even were IP QQers to have a legitimate argument, innumerate arguments like "Riot nerfed our IP gains, I can't afford this game anymore!" would cause me to dismiss them out of hand.

If I have a complaint about the store, it's the price of RP. I might have spent money on this game long ago, except I'm not willing to buy $10 in RP, buy only one 6300 champion (two if they're on sale), and have RP left over that I paid for but can't use. The game makes me want to buy from Riot, but the store stops me every time. This is bad for business, Riot. Fix it.

Caveat

After getting multiple responses on this subject, I have to add one thing: Because long games can stretch up to an hour, players need to budget an hour of free time for their last game, no matter how long it actually takes. What matters in that case is the IP/game rather than the IP/minute, so the nerf actually shows here. However, the people to whom this most apply are the people who are squeezing in 1-2 games per day, and those are the people who benefit most from guaranteed FWotD through Co-op v. AI, so in my opinion it balances out.

Not Quite a Sonnet

2011-05-04T20:20:00.001-07:00

Randomly inspired by a friend's Facebook status, which contained the first line of this poem.

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Life Waits Not For You

Hot enough to take a cold shower.
Bored enough to waste a night hour.
The rain falls, the clouds tower
Death arrives with a pretty pink flower.

"Who are you?" I ask with an angry glower,
But even afore he speaks, I shudder.
This is he who has an eternal bower...
He says: "I bring your endless slumber."

Indignant, I cry, "My bill's not due!
There's nothing tying me to you.
I'm healthy, clean-living, enemy-free
What sort of death can you pin on me?"

The implacable reaper raises his voice:
"Your death's one of spirit, this end is your choice.
You've spent your life in search of escape
Why stay in a world you seem to so hate?"

Deaf to my pleas, his scythe makes my end.
All my life I killed time; now time takes revenge.

The Ranks of Elo Hell

2011-02-11T15:09:00.000-08:00

I never got any voice training, but I still like to sing. I drive my parents crazy singing songs over and over again trying to get the right voice for the tune. So I might as well combine my longtime obsession with my latest obsession, right?

The result is a parody video of the Eagles' "Hotel California", describing the misery of those stuck in "Elo Hell"--trapped below their skill level by terrible teammates and griefers. I named it "The Ranks of Elo Hell", found the Hotel California instrumentals online, bought myself a decent USB mic, and made this:

Amateurish production values, but I had fun doing it. Hope you like it.

But I'm not a noob!

2010-12-12T14:56:00.001-08:00

Sorry, these are much more 'inside joke'-intensive than the 'you might be a nerd' list. If you want to know why I haven't been posting recently...well, here are some places to start. Yeah, new year, new unhealthy obsession. I know.

You might be a noob...if the post-game screen runs out of digits to display your number of deaths.

You might be a noob...if you're still playing four-bar Ashe forty minutes into the game.

You might be a noob...if you see everyone hit 18 while you're still in the single digits.

You might be a noob...if you think "map control" means the ability to unlock your camera with Y.

You might be a noob...if you have never bought anything from the Consumables section. Except health pots. So many health pots. Four hundred health pots.

You might be a noob...if you have 6 Doran's Blades because you heard that Blade stacking was OP.

You might be a noob...if you have recently abandoned Christianity to join the Church of Elementz' Tier Lists.

You might be a noob...if someone advises you to "smartcast" and you reply "So, aim my skillshots this time?"

You might be a noob...if you think you will surprise them with your decision, but fail because even stupid bird is here.

You might be a noob...if you think King Arthur's assault on the Rabbit of Caerbannog is a sterling example of how teamfights should work, so your battle cry is "Run away!"

You might be a noob...if you cannot find a hint of green anywhere on your 'Recent Matches' page.

You might be a noob...if you think Jungle Yi is the answer to any team comp dilemma. Even if there's a Warwick involved.

You might be a noob...if, when you see someone ping dragon, you think they're just trying to get the dragon to ping back.

You might be a noob...if someone types "mia" and you type back "yes, manliness is awesome."

You might be a noob...if you get killed by a Xin Zhao and think, "But my Phantom Dancers gave me 100% dodge chance!"

You might be a noob...if you think rage is part of this complete breakfast.

You might be a noob...if you get lost in the jungle.

You might be a noob...if the answer in every situation is "Push mid!"

You might be a noob...if you decide that Smite is a good summoner spell because it helps you last-hit uninhibited minions.

You might be a noob...if you wonder why anybody would use a 'minimap' when the big version is right there in front of your face.

You might be a noob...if you think hotkeys are for Koreans.

You might be a noob...if you think your teammates' roles are all the same: Cheer you on from the sidelines while you honorably defeat the enemy in single combat.

You might be a noob...if you think their Nexus can't be killed until you destroy the fountain turret.

You might be a noob...if you blue-pill by gray-screening and win by blue-screening.

Backstory; or, what's your character doing in this dungeon when he could be farming for a living?

2010-06-28T07:46:00.000-07:00

Writing character backstories is great practice for writing in general. The character sheet is background research, which you use to answer a few prompts:
1) How did your character acquire his skills?
2) How does your character behave under ordinary circumstances?
3) Why is your character adventuring, given the high mortality rate?

As long as those questions are answered, getting the backstory to the DM before the campaign begins is more important than writing a high-quality backstory--another reason why it's good practice for me. You can go into as much depth as you like on any of the prompts, and naturally backstory length varies widely. A good one can be a paragraph or twenty pages, but the shortest are more likely to be uninformative, the longest unreadable. The DM's got enough work; saddling him with a novel-length character description, or forcing him to build your character's identity himself, is inconsiderate.

Here are a couple of backstories that I've written in the last week. The first is a work in progress, both because I want to make it longer and because the character is in an ongoing campaign. The second was a thought experiment.

--------------------

Sharran was born the scion of a noble family, descended from celestials in the service of Heironeous, and thus naturally devout followers of that god. The lion's share of the familly served in the capacity of Heironeus' clerics and paladins, and it was expected that Sharran would follow the same route. But Sharran was quite unlike his relatives. His short, wiry frame and scrambling approach to life contrasted sharply with the contemplative and courtly habits of his tall, graceful siblings. Rumors that Sharran was illegitimate added to a general atmosphere of unease concerning the young heir, which served to isolate him.

Sharran objected to the righteous fervor and militaristic demeanor of the Tarciels, which he believed insulated them from the rest of the world and subjected them to an unhealthy stasis. When it came time for him to choose his path, he wanted nothing more than to shake things up. As he was presented with the ceremonial sword and shield that represented the choice between clergy and the knighthood, inspiration descended upon Sharran. Taking an ordinary stick that laid nearby, he dealt a mighty blow that broke the sword and shattered the shield. Then he strode out the door and out of the city, for good.

It has been many years since that day. Sharran has come to the understanding that Fharlanghn the Dweller, god of roads, is the source of his powers. But he still does not fully understand how he came to be a druid of the traveling deity. For one thing, he cannot find companionship with animals, a central tenet of druidic teachings. Perhaps it's a parting shot from his family and their Outsider blood; but then, how is he to progress towards enlightenment? (How ironic that the blood of angels should be such an impediment.) How can he reconcile his philosophy of change with the druid's focus on balance? Sharran travels in search of answers. But he may have to put his personal dilemmas on hold in the face of a plague that threatens all.

--------------------

Jenaya grew up on the streets of Skyfane City, carving out a life for herself outside the law. And she was good...very good. She came to view crime as an art form, from the skillful choice of mark to the evasion of the Man afterwards. Her devotion to the art form soon exceeded her devotion to crime--though she was hardly averse to breaking the law. She began to take on higher-profile targets, letting her whimsy dictate her choices. The day after breaking up a crime ring before the law arrived, she would thieve a priceless treasure from a well-guarded aristocrat. The only constant was the fox mask she left wherever she did her daring work. Rumors spread about the Fox--a man with mastery of illusion magic, a sorceress with great powers of seduction, a quickling with an uncommon interest in human affairs. Jenaya let the rumors take hold, even added some of her own--and quietly laughed whenever she heard them on the street.

Even so, someone had the wherewithal to track her down. She woke up one night to find herself surrounded by hard-looking folk. A man, their apparent leader, sat at the foot of her bed. He introduced himself as an enforcer of the Nightsong Guild, a powerful player wherever there was play to be had. Jenaya had been stepping on more than a few toes, and so come to the enforcers' attention. The man offered her a mutually beneficial arrangement. Membership in the Nightsong Guild would give Jenaya greater resources with which to pursue her antics, and legitimacy in the underworld of civilization. In return, the guild would benefit from the notoriety of the Fox, and occasionally ask her services for particular tasks--and take a cut of the Fox's prizes, as well. She could refuse, of course, but then she would risk making the guild her enemy--and they had amply demonstrated their ability to track her down.

Jenaya accepted. Privately, though, she saw an opportunity to outdo all her previous work. How would it do to trick the underworld's most famous tricksters? As she trained in the team tactics that characterized the Nightsong Guild, she also began her preparations. She gathered information about the guild's leaders, its network of operations, its allies and enemies and triply turncoat traitors. And she began scheming to take down the guild from the inside.

But she was found out before she could set her plans in motion, and the entire guild was mobilized against her. She escaped by the skin of her teeth, and now she's on the run. The Nightsong Guild even took the unprecedented step of releasing information on the Fox to the law--betraying the underworld's cardinal rule. With nothing left to Jenaya but her devotion to trickery, she constantly heightens her skills in order to avoid the authorities by day and the assassins by night.

--------------------

Critiques welcome.

Religion: For or Against?

2010-06-25T14:25:00.000-07:00

Well, crap. I will be eternally apologizing for late posting, it seems. Well, that's why I imposed a regular posting schedule--to deal with the issues that prevent me from meeting regular schedules.

Anyway, this is another miniature essay developed in response to a query. I did one on atheism, so I suppose it's only fair I do one for religion as well.

Religion is an important element of culture, and an efficient instrument for disseminating values and ideas. It is a powerful group identity, like ethnicity or nationality. Like those, it is capable of great good (consider the statistics for Christian charity, for example) or great evil (the Inquisition, suicide bombing, sectarian violence). It is capable of smaller goods (e.g. whether or not prayer 'works', it's an extremely effective way to unload stress and negative feelings) and smaller evils (interference with the lives of homosexuals because of ancient proscriptions, or interference with scientific disciplines). Religion was a primary enabler of slavery and abolition both--and the same religion, at that.

Ideally, how we live our lives should have very little to do with whether there is or isn't a God. Is the Golden Rule less valid if its source is not divine? If it is divine? But in practice, anyone can see that belief in God matters very much to people. So the best I can hope for is a marketplace of ideas, where one can practice kindness and exercise reason according to his own doctrine.

And this is the sticking point I have with religion. When it comes to the marketplace of ideas, religion is often static, if not incarcerating. The most extreme example of this is the death penalty for apostasy in Islam, still practiced in some places; that tends to discourage independent thinking. The reliance on absolute truth as the foundation of doctrine hampers the evolution of doctrine in the marketplace. Once someone has taken up fundamentalist Christianity, it's nearly impossible to budge that position for ethics or practicality or what have you.

But then...that's true of many group identities, isn't it? At the end of the day, so many choices come down to my party, my ethnicity, my country, my leader, my faith right or wrong--and how could a population of six billion people avoid grouping up? How could we get anywhere if nobody ever banded together in common cause? It's simply how civilization works. And I cannot uniquely condemn religion for the problems inherent to any large group. So I must allow it, warts and all, and try to mitigate the associated problems. Society is damage control for humanity.

Begin!

2010-06-20T01:11:00.000-07:00

While Stumbling through the Intertubes a while back, I came upon a little website called WeBook, and was intrigued. The premise is simple: someone pays a little money to put up the first page of his story, other people (and editors) rate the story, and if they like it, they ask for more—first a chapter, then the whole book. The website makes a game out of this process, by letting raters know afterwards what other raters and editors thought of the book. This system encourages people to try for the ‘right’ rating, the one other people and editors gave, to demonstrate their knowledge of literature—though undoubtedly some take pride in idiosyncratic ratings, a display of unusual taste. Occasionally, the website will mix things up a little: they’ll add the first page of one published work, to see if readers can spot the black sheep. The first time this happened to me, the Verne entry was obvious. It’s unfair to the authors, since published works usually undergo extensive editing, but the difference is plain to see.

All this got me to thinking about how writers begin stories. To some extent, it’s obvious—hook the reader, hook the reader, what every writing instructor has told his students for centuries. And some authors make this objective crassly obvious. Take, for example, the systematic opening murders of Dan Brown and Lee Child novels, the Law & Order style of starting with a dead body; or another staple, the birth of a child on a dark and stormy night intruded on by mysterious forces.

But many good books aren’t so blatant about it. A Navy commander is interrupted in post-battle repair work to report to his superior (all right, so he’s on a spaceship, but still). Another man waits in prison to return to his ordinary life. Two witches have a trivial squabble, a ranch manager is briefly mistaken for a stable boy, and an old man visits his wife’s grave. These books have clearly defined opening scenes, but identifying what draws the reader in isn’t easy. This is popular literature, mind—I’m not even going to try applying this paradigm to something like The Sound and the Fury or The Silmarillion or other books that plainly weren’t written to appeal to readers.

(I can hear the Tolkien fans screaming bloody murder right now. Relax, I’m one of you. I loved Silmarillion. But it wasn’t written to sell. It’s essentially a snapshot of Middle-Earth’s history—something that continuously evolved throughout Tolkien’s lifetime. I can guarantee you that J.R.R. didn’t write the Old Testament-style opening to win readers over; in fact, reading his son Christopher’s notes in Unfinished Tales, readers are turned off by the intro. And, really—d’you think any diehard Tolkien fan would put down the book because of the beginning?)

One common element lingers, though: depth. Why did WeBook’s Verne entry stick out like the Mona Lisa on a wall of graffiti? Okay, the use of archaisms like “compeers” and “nation of shopkeepers” did most of the work. But in a book about three men deciding to launch themselves to the Moon, Verne starts out describing the American post-Revolutionary state of military affairs, and particularly artillery affairs, in loving detail. You can tell where he’s going with this, of course. However, the introduction leaves the impression of a larger world working behind the scenes of the story.

Each of the books I looked at did much the same thing. Events occur against a backdrop. The job of the introduction is to place the story within that framework. This is where the formula of Dan Brown fails: for all the gruesome shock value of his introductions, they don’t connect the reader to the story’s world in any way. Some novels go to the other extreme and end up making text of context. It’s hard to find an example to condemn, though: the dystopia Brave New World is direct in its worldbuilding, and Asimov certainly takes every opportunity to return to psychohistorical reasoning in Foundation, but this is entirely justifiable.

The best way to create an impression of depth is probably just to write a deep story. There’s a reason why the first words the author writes aren’t usually the first words of the book, and essay writers often leave the intro for last. My recommendation to WeBook authors: though you only need to submit a page, it should be just the tip of the iceberg.

D&D: F1rst P0st1!111!!

2010-06-17T14:10:00.000-07:00

Hmph. This isn’t exactly how I wanted to start off my regular schedule, by being late. But having no Internet poses a serious obstacle to posting. I might have to make the timing more flexible: Monday-Tuesday, Wednesday-Thursday, Friday-Saturday, or something like that.

Anyway, I can’t imagine how I managed to avoid writing about D&D for a full year, but I did. I got into tabletops via D20 Modern, with a group of high school buds holding occasional RL sessions. After we split up for college, the campaign died—well, it would be more accurate to say we took the brain-dead vegetable off life support. We turned to live chat campaigning and the D&D 3.5 system, but gaming occurs in fits and starts, and nobody can seem to find an open time and commit to it. Currently we’re on indefinite hiatus.

I had considerably more success once I noticed the Play-by-Post forum on the Giant in the Playground website, which I previously frequented for the Order of the Stick webcomic. PbP lacks some of the ambience of face-to-face gaming, but the upsides of flexible time commitment are tremendous. It’s the same reason I play most of my chess on the Facebook client: I don’t have to block out an hour for a chess game (or several for a D&D session), and can instead parcel out my time as it becomes available. In this system I’ve become involved in several campaigns, and I’m having a lot of fun. Progress is slow, of course; that’s the other drawback of play-by-post, the same way a chess game takes days to complete on Facebook. But that means I get more time to think, develop character ideas, and write.

D&D really stimulates my creativity. Lots of it ends up directed at the game itself, of course, but there’s spillover in other areas as well. My previous fantasy posts came not long after I began playing, and it’s no coincidence. It’s another source of regular writing, though hardly one I can claim is improving my productivity. Of course, if I wanted to get really involved in D&D as a creative endeavor I’d DM a campaign, but at that point I have to wonder about how the workload scales. Putting a lot of effort and ingenuity into that sort of project beats doing nothing, but it’s hardly a state of affairs I could maintain for any length of time—and campaigns take months or years.

D&D lends itself to a goodly number of theoretical discussions as well, and I plan to talk about those. Class balance (or rather, the lack thereof), party genders, the alignment system, integrating magic into a campaign world—all these are topics that I can discuss at length. So I probably will, since it means another update gets done on time. We’ll see how it goes.

Time to Write

2010-06-14T20:06:00.000-07:00

You know how RL shenanigans often prevent people from updating their blogs? Well, in my strange world, RL issues are requiring me to start posting regularly.

I am a lazy bum. Doubt me? I was supposed to write this post six weeks ago. Indeed, dear reader, you would be inundated with fascinating blog posts, if only I would write them. (I’m modest, too!) Until I do something about this character flaw, I will be essentially unable to get on with my life the way I want to. Sure, there are ways and ways to take the easy ride through life, but they don’t go anywhere interesting. Whatever fantasy stories may say, an interesting life has to be worked for. That lesson has been hitting me upside the head for four and a half years, as activity after activity went under the heading of “Used to do that, didn’t put in the effort to get anywhere, eventually stopped.” When academics went on that list, even I could see there was a problem.

I am also a poor writer. I can turn out a good finished product (readers of my aborted attempt at fantasy storytelling may disagree), but it takes me an inordinate amount of time to get there. This is, to an extent, a reflection of the laziness problem: if I spend hours of writing time arguing on Facebook, nothing gets done. But it’s also a problem in itself.

I have trouble writing without first setting everything out in my head. Every word I set down has been mentally examined to the point where it should sue for sexual harassment. Typing and retyping is standard operating procedure for writers, but I try to juggle all the revision before I write. When this becomes difficult—say, the writing being juggled is a 10-page essay on the moral fiber of the United States—I get lost and end up distracting myself with food and fun as an escape from my confusion. Dr. Keith Hjortshoj, director of Cornell's Writing in the Majors program, describes this pattern of behavior in his book Understanding Writing Blocks:

…writing blocks usually (though not always) occur in the composing phase and carry writers back into prewriting activities or diversions. Turning back often feels safer than moving ahead, which might produce bad writing as evidence of our ignorance and confusion, or create messes we can’t untangle. Better do some further reading, make further notes and outlines, or simply take a break to think about the task.

I was lucky enough to be able to meet with Dr. Hjortshoj once to discuss my own writing difficulties. He told me bluntly, “You have to write crap.” Because when I focus on writing well, the keyboard is silent while I endlessly ponder how to proceed, and when I finally complete a sentence or two, I engage in notwriting to get away from pondering. Let a spiral staircase represent progress achieved through the cycles of writing and revision: I have been trying to pull myself straight up, rather than walking step by step. If I instead allow myself to write poorly, I can produce more with less effort, and then revise to improve the quality.

Writing on this blog will hopefully help me kill two birds with one stone. In setting a regular update schedule, and keeping to it, I discipline myself. In putting together reasonably lengthy posts, I practice the processes of writing.

So, I am committing to a Monday-Wednesday-Saturday update schedule. Drop by, read what I write, berate me for not writing…wait, I forgot, I probably don’t have a readership. Well, I’ll be berating myself, so that’s all right. Stay tuned!

The Consequences of Atheism

2010-05-04T21:56:00.000-07:00

Brief thoughts, triggered by a discussion. The other person is Christian, hence I neglected to generalize my comparison to all religions, but that's not important. What is important is that the concept of atheism is poorly understood. In discussions of atheism, a commonly seen refrain is, "Atheism is simply the lack of belief in a God." While basically true, this definition is shallow and open to misconceptions. By expanding a little on the concept of atheism, I hope to reduce its ambiguity, and shed some insight on what it means to be an atheist.

What are the consequences of disbelief? Well, to examine that, I need to present a comparison with the consequences of belief. There is something extremely comforting about belief in God, and that is the idea that humanity's existence has a meaning preordained by God. We are special, because God made us, because God says we are special, because God cares about us. And with that comfort comes the responsibility to obey the laws God laid down in time immemorial, because that is how humanity is expected to express its meaning. I won't get into arguments about inherent sin and how that affects the meaning of humanity and so on, because that is an extremely deep topic, and not central to what I'm trying to say anyway.

So that's the basic scenario from a believer's viewpoint. What happens when we take the belief in God away? First, we remove life's preordained meaning. Some people just stop there, and wallow in the apparent meaninglessness of life without God. Christians mock them, and deservedly so. But I want to talk about atheism, not nihilism, so let's look at the rest.

Lacking belief in any divinely inspired meaning to life, and unwilling to believe that there is no meaning to life, these people are left to determine the meaning of life for themselves. Another target for Christian mockery--they think people choose atheism simply to get away from the strictures and morals of faith, and do whatever they want under the guise of relativist morality. Maybe some do. But that is a child's conception of freedom. With the freedom of self-determination comes the responsibility to seek a productive, beneficial, and meaningful philosophy of life, and to live up to that philosophy as best one can. In my view, it is this essential recognition--that the right to think independently carries the obligation to think carefully--that makes atheism a viable, positive way of life rather than a mere denial of religion.

And Now For Something Completely Different

2010-01-31T17:25:00.000-08:00

...or maybe not. Honestly, I'm a math major, but whenever interesting research comes up, it's about biology (heck, this is the first post on my blog that even has the "math" tag). Is it that the barrier to entry for interesting math research is way, way too high for me? Probably. I could post about how interesting I find the Twin Prime Conjecture and the Riemann Hypothesis and infinitely differentiable Riemannian manifolds (Bozhe moi), but I'd just be doing a vaguely boring rehash in most cases. Oh, exception: I find it really neat that the Cantor set contains an uncountably infinite number of points (and the proof of this is really neat, too, and illuminates the name 'Cantor ternary set'), that these points are arranged in segments, and that it still has measure 0 (that is, if you add up the length of all the segments in the set, it sums to 0). Fractals = mindscrew.

This brings me neatly to the subject of evolution. No, really. Woese and Goldenfeld claim that collective evolution, mediated by lateral gene transfer, should dominate our understanding of the formation of genetic novelty in early life. I'd try to give a better summary the way I did last time, but the topic is too big and the paper is too small and I just don't know enough. Upshot: I need to start taking biology again next semester. Oh, and there's a new paradigm of understanding biological innovation and all that.

Query: I seem to recall that some 5-8% of the human genome is sourced from endogenous retroviral DNA...in light of that, how should the collective view of evolution described above influence our understanding of the interaction between extremely complex organisms (like us) and extremely simple ones (like the virii)? Also, can I use virii as a word? Some things to look into.

You know you're a nerd when...

2010-01-26T02:46:00.000-08:00

Since I made a nice long compilation of these, I figure I might as well put them somewhere convenient. Here goes.

You know you're a nerd when...

When you write page-long Facebook comments about *serious business*. Heck, when you write page-long Facebook *anything* about serious business.

When your choice of favorite hang-out ends with a TLD.

When Feynman is a household name.

When you verbalize your actions with Net slang. A laugh is just a 'lol', a sigh is just a *sigh*...

When the Rules of the Internet are more familiar to you than the Rules of Fight Club.

When you go to Sporcle to train.

When you prefer Primer to Avatar.

When Neo first shows off his powers irl and you think, "Oh shit, they're embedded in nested Matrices!"

When you are ashamed of your sesquipedalian loquaciousness.

When you decide that referencing xkcd for nerd cred is cheating.

When you bet on the inclusion of one preposition in one line of one book. (It's "Aragorn sped *on* up the hill." Obviously.)

When Twenty Questions really means "Keep asking till you give up."

When the food is problematic.

When you cannot get through the day without your fix of silly cats.

Alternatively, when you disdain silly cats, but think silly dogs are the shit.

When you're good friends with someone you've never met in meatspace.

When you're at the bookstore, and start riffling through a book to see if you want to buy it...and realize, a while later, that it would be pointless to buy a book you've already read, and also that the sun's gone down.

When you consciously verb nouns. Double points if that makes you think of Calvin and Hobbes.

When you make sure your [sarc][/sarc] tags are properly formatted.

When weirdness becomes a goal to attain rather than a quality to shun.

When you are a Timmy, Johnny, or Spike. Melvin or Vorthos? Okay, now you're just a smartass.

When the fate of your debate rests on a fictional planetary ecologist.

When you feel a compulsive need to use xor to remove logical ambiguity.

When you are familiar with the Laws of Poe, Sturgeon, Godwin, Moore, and Finagle.

When TV Tropes ruins your vocabulary.

When you describe Jesus as a subclass of God that implements the Human interface.

When the zeta function is elementary. (Except when it isn't.)

When you think that Transcendentalists must not have liked polynomials very much.

When you worry about the effects of drunkenness on your mental math.

When your response to use of the words pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, electrophotomicrographically, and floccinaucinihilipilification is something other than "Gesundheit".

When you worry about your use of the Oxford comma.

When your reaction to hearing about Homo floresiensis is to muse that Tolkien was telling the truth all along.

When you join a party by making a charsheet.

When you realize that the Ringworld is unstable.

When you consider the joke "there are 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't," and its higher-base variations, to be old hat.

When your chat with a friend bounces between nontrivial reasoning in philosophical thought experiments and appropriate balance for interacting feats/spells in D&D.

When you start dismissing nerdy pickup lines because the math/science involved is too elementary.

When, in your conversations, the term "lawyer" refers to a gaming pedant rather than the profession.

When the Chinese in Firefly breaks immersion because it's really BAD Chinese, or the dialect changes mid-episode.

When your bedside table reading pile is really a bedside table, three desk shelves, the top of your clothes drawer, and the lower bed bunk--and you leave the room at 3 AM to go find a different book.

When you lose The Game.

When you feel a little sad inside that someone, somewhere, knows more digits of Pi than you.

When hearing a relatively obscure mathematical term causes you to break out in song (Mandelbrot set, anyone? Bonus points if you started singing on 'Julia set' instead).

When you sit down to read all the goddamn codex entries in Dragon Age.

When you start min/maxing your Pokemon's attributes.

When you've been clicking on the 'random article' button for the last two hours.

When you find yourself having to choose between chess and go for the next game.

When you lol irl.

When people compliment you on your Renfaire or cosplay costume.

When you are genuinely outraged that Tom Bombadil got replaced by a random encounter with wood-elves, and then wonder whether those wood-elves were more likely to be Sindarin or Noldorin.

When you have tried to memorize the elements...lyrically.

When you show up to your school's traditional first-day hazing...wearing your self-made chainmaille coif.

When Quenya is your second language.

When you rack your brains thinking of ways to contribute to this list.

********************************************

(note: about 95% of these are actual self-reference, but not all.)

More will be added below when appropriate.

If, at any time during the last 525,600 minutes, you have mused on the diminishing cost of a gigabyte of memory...you might be a nerd.

Related: The probability that you are a nerd increases asymptotically to 1 with the number of arbitrary unit conversions you have memorized.

Biology is Weird

2010-01-25T14:03:00.000-08:00

...and that's one reason why I like it. Consider: the selective inefficiency of complex organisms like mammals is one reason why we become more complex, according to a recent paper published in Genome Research. In simple, rapidly reproducing organisms like our single-celled cousins, gene duplications get eliminated reasonably quickly because they're a resource drain. But in complex organisms that tend to have smaller populations and longer generation times, these redundant paralogs can survive, and this often leads to specialization as paralogs diverge via mutation. I mean, it's not all that surprising to consider gene duplication as a significant mechanism for introducing variation and complexity (once you realize that it happens, anyway), but the idea that these occurrences depend on our poor selection is kind of a mind-bender.

...on an unrelated note: looking at this post, I realized that I'm falling prey to sesquipedalian loquaciousness, i.e. I'm using more big words than I need to. That's not good, even for my writing seminar--I bet profs get annoyed by roundabout expressions and overly complex language just as much as any other reader. Time to cut back. (...I think it's working!)

Binghamton Monthly Tourney November '09

2009-11-24T03:12:00.000-08:00

I have a rating now! Well, actually, I think it will take several more days to show up online, but I am still officially a member of USCF! This is very exciting. How did I get a rating, you ask? Simple! I went to Binghamton for their monthly tourney, as the title suggests. It offers free 1-year membership in USCF with the $35 entry fee. Great deal, considering the membership's around $30/year by itself.

The chess was very fun, though not quite as intense as when I played Palatnik in the simultaneous match. I recorded the games, of course, and I present them here with extremely rudimentary analysis. I am the Unrated player in each game--I decided to leave out names, since there's no particular need to include them.

Game 1
White: Unrated
Black: 1476
E91 - King's Indian/Classical System with 7. ...d6

1.d4 Nf6
2.c4 g6
3.Nc3 Bg7
4.e4 d6
5.Be2 0-0
6.Nf3 Nc6
7.0-0 d6
8.Be3 Ng4
9.Bg5 Qd7
10.Ne1 Nf6
11.f4 h6
12.Bh4 Nh7
13.e5 dxe5
14.dxe5 Nd4
15.Bf3 Nf5
16.Bf2 Rd8
17.Nc2 Qe7
18.Qe2 c5
19.Rd1 Rxd1
20.Rxd1 Qc7
21.Nb5 Qe7
22.Ne3 a6
23.Nxf5 gxf5
24.Nd6 Qc7
25.Bh5 f6
26.Ne8 Qe7
27.Bh4 Bd7
28.exf6 Nxf6
29.Bxf6 Bxf6
30.Nxf6+ Qxf6
31.Rxd7 b5
32.cxb5 axb5
33.Qxb5 Qh4
34.Bf7+ Kh8
35.g3 Qf6
36.Qb7 Rd8
37.Bxe6 Rxe7
38.Qxe7 Qxb2
39.Qe8+ Kg7
40.Qf7+ 1-0

-------------------------------

Game 2
White: Unrated
Black: 2097
Opening: D08 - Queen's Gambit/Albin's Counter Gambit with 4. a3

1.d4 d5
2.c4 e5
3.dxe5 d4
4.a3 a5 (a3 is passive, but required. Perhaps better is 4. Nf3 immediately.)
5.e3 Nc6
6.Nf3 Bg4
7.Be2 dxe3
8.Bxe3? Qxd1 (8.Qxd8+ Rxd8 9.Bxe3 Ne7 10.Nbd2 Ng6 11.0-0-0 drawish)
9.Bxd1 Ne7
10.Nc3 0-0-0
11.h3? Bxf3 (11.0-0 Bxf3 12.Bxf3 Nxe5 13.Be2 Nf5 14.Bf4 Ng6 15.Bg4 Nxf4 16.Bxf5+ Kb8 17.Rad1 drawish, but I haven't thought about it much)
12.Bxf3 Nxe5
13.Be2 Nf5
14.Bf4 Ng6
15.Bh2 Nd4
16.Bg4+? f5 (16. 0-0 is far less bad)
17.Bd1 Re8+
18.Kf8 Ne5
19.b3 Nd3
20.Nd5?? Re1# (Anything else loses, but Nd5?? was fastest)
0-1

-------------------------------

Game 3
White: 1550
Black: Unrated
C02 - French/Advance Variation with 4. Bb5+?

1.e4 e6
2.d4 d5
3.e5 c5
4.Bb5+? Bd7
5.Bxd7+ Nxd7
6.c3 Ne7
7.Nf3 Nc6
8.0-0 cxd4
9.cxd4 Qb6
10.b3 Rc8
11.Ba3 Bb4!?
12.Bb2 Na5
13.Nd2 0-0
14.Qe2? Rc2
15.Rb1 Rc8
16.Rfc1 Qd8
17.Rxc2 Rxc2
18.Qd3 Rc7
19.Qb5 Nc6
20.a3 a6
21.Qd3 Be7
22.Rc1 f6
23.Qc3 fxe5
24.Nxe5 Nxe5
25.dxe5 Bg5
26.Rc2 Rf7
27.Nf3 d4!
28.Qd3 Rd7
29.Bc1? Bxc1
30.Rxc1 Rd5
31.Re1 Rc5
32.b4 Rc3
33.Qb1 Rxa3
34.Rd1 Qb3
35.Ng5 d3
36.Nxe6 Nxb4
37.Qb2 Ra2
38.Qb3 Qxf2+
39.0-1

-------------------------------

Game 4
White: 1784
Black: Unrated
Opening: King's Indian Attack vs. French Defense

1.e4 e6
2.d3 d5 (I actually expected him to play 2.d4 so much that I wrote down d4 on my record sheet, made my move, and then noticed his next move and realized, "Oh, right, he plays KIA.")
3.Nd2 Nf6
4.e5 Nd7
5.g3 Bb7
6.Bg2 c5
7.Nf3 b6
8.0-0 Nc6
9.Re1 Be7
10.Nb3 Qc7
11.Bf4 c4
12.Nd4 cxd3
13.Nb5 Qd8
14.Bg5 0-0
15.Bxe7 Qxe7
16.cxd3 Ba6? (I honestly didn't spot the next move. I got compensation, though.)
17.Nc7 Nc5
18.Nxa8 Nxd3
19.Re3 Nxb2
20.Rb1 Nc4
21.Rc3 Rxa8
22.Qf4 b5
23.Rc1 Nb4
24.Rb3 Nxa2
25.Ra1 Nb4
26.Rxb4 Qxb4
27.Rxa6 Qb1+
28.Bf1 b4
29.Ng5 Qg6
30.Bh3 b3
31.Rxe6 b2!
32.Bf5 b1=Q+
33.Bxb1 Qxb1+
34.Kg2 Qb7? (34.fxe6 and White cannot mate)
35.Qf5 g6 (if now ...fxe6, 36.Qxh7+ Kf7 37.Qh8+ Ke7 38.Qxg7+ and Black can resign)
36.Qf6 fxe6
37.Qxe6+ Kh8?? (37. ...Kf8 escapes, eventually)
38.Nf7+ Kg7
39.Qf6+ Kf8
40.Nd8+ 1-0

-------------------------------

I was...moderately happy with this outcome. I definitely should have won the last game, and probably could have drawn the second game with solid play. My play wasn't exactly ideal in the other two games, either. But overall I showed well, I think.

Oh, since I haven't put up my game against Palatnik on the blog, I'll do that now. It was a simultaneous game, so I don't read too much into it, but I was ecstatic to get the draw.

White: Semon Palatnik 2473
Black: Terry Drinkwater Unrated
E05 - Catalan Opening
1.d4 Nf6
2.c4 e6
3.g3 d5
4.Bg2 Be7
5.Nf3 0-0
6.0-0 dxc4
7.Ne5 c5
8.dxc5 Qc7
9.Nxc4 Rd8
10.Qb3 Bxc5
11.Nc3 e5
12.Bg5 Nc6
13.Bxf6 gxf6
14.Nd5 Rxd5
15.Bxd5 Nd4
16.Qd3 Bf5
17.Be4 Bg4
18.Bf3 Bf5
19.Be4 Bg4
20.Bf3 Bf5
21.1/2-1/2

Fight!

2009-07-28T14:57:00.000-07:00

So after I made a big deal out of apologizing for being a day late, this is three weeks later that I actually put anything on the blog. As expected, writing challenges don't just disappear when I make a commitment to make them disappear, but I'm working on it. Anyway, the way the writing is going, I can't exactly post in chronological order. Some scenes don't work at all, and some flow out nicely. So today I'm posting my most recent effort. Time to introduce some new characters, neh? Well, not really; but they do come up.

********************************************************

As Yuki and I circled warily, I mused that it wasn't actually all that different from work. All right, so office suits didn't carry swords into the conference room, but their verbal sparring often had the same life-and-death quality.

She moved first, reversing direction and coming in hard with a slash towards my left shoulder. I took it on my left guard and punched out with the other, pivoting towards her, but she just kept moving and ended up to my left with a clear shot at my back. I dropped into a forward roll and winced as her sword cut the air above me.

I spun as I rose, expecting a fast-approaching blade, but Yuki just stood there looking at me curiously. Not questioning my fortune, I started my own charge, hoping to get in close, where my mailed fists would be more effective than her blade. But she danced away, and I had to put up both arms to block a flurry of blows.

"Slow," Yuki taunted as she struck. "Perhaps it is my fault for expecting something. What happened to the skill of the one known as Iron Fury?" She worked my guard high, then suddenly reversed into a middle thrust.

"I'll take age and treachery over youth and skill any day," I retorted. I pivoted around the incoming sword and dropped my right hand down to keep her from shifting to a slash. The pivot ended with my back to the sword, as I reached out for a vicious backhand blow. Yuki traded for a knee to the side, and then it was her turn to fall away in a roll. I pursued, but stopped before a nigh impenetrable steel curtain, Yuki whipping her blade back and forth to keep me at bay even as she rose.

"You say that, but you don't really mean it," she pointed out. "You fight tricky, but you never used tricks to fight. You've laid on a world-weary veneer, but--"

I interrupted with my fists. We exchanged a few blows, sword on fist, then separated. Yuki was the worse off; I could feel a bruise coming up, but she was limping.

"Why'd you cut me off?" she demanded.

"After years apart, you still talk like you know me," I said. "Not to mention you still talk like it's a free action. I'm not here to listen to you. I fight, I take you to the hospital, I go. That simple." I closed in, leading with my left.

And blocking with my right, against Yuki's descending blade. I told you it was her feet, right? Against anyone else two fists beats one blade, but Yuki was already miles away from my intended attack. Not just that, either. Her grin was all the warning I had before I got a hammer blow to the side. I staggered, and she was behind me. I whirled, left arm sweeping below my right guard, but she just came in behind the block and poked my chest with her sword. I raised my arms in defeat.

"So is this what it takes to get you to listen?" Yuki inquired, breathing hard.

"Well, it helps," I replied.

"'Good," she said with some asperity. "Because 'simple' is the last word for our situation, and if it takes a blade to make you listen to an adventurer, I'll leave it there till I'm done."

"Now you're just being contrary."

"Maybe I am," she admitted, smiling. "Besides, inside's better than out for long talks." She sheathed her sword. "But then, the only reason you're not leaving right now is that you know I'm faster. And when I'm done, you'll know why that's worst for all of us."

"All of you, maybe," I retorted. "Worst for me would be--wait a second. All? You mean everyone's back? And how did you manage that little feat?" I looked quizzically at her, but faltered at her suddenly grim expression.

"Not everyone," she said quietly. "Verth never took to townie life the way you did. I found him a month ago, all right--found him with a layer of snow covering the hole in his belly. Word was he'd fallen in with the local thugs, and ran his mouth once too often for the boss." She stared into the distance. I laid my arm across her shoulders.

"The thugs?" My voice was soft.

"Dead," she said, almost without emotion. But her eyes were moist. "Took me a week to root them all out. Not sure anyone else knew who was who--got myself a couple of wanted posters by the fourth day. You know how it is."

"That I do," I sighed. "How about the others?"

"Carran never left," she answered, blinking her eyes dry. "This is his life. Couldn't pry him away from it with a crowbar. Lyran was on-again, off-again. Trying to have it both ways, I'm surprised he never got--caught. Too fond of creature comforts for his own good, the rascal," she grumbled good-naturedly. "We'd pick him up in Plesset and he'd drop out in Deringham, saying he'd never be back. Didn't have your resolve, I guess. Ephestra settled down like you, though. Hell, she was going steady when I showed up. She was more trouble than you, honestly. You don't want to come back, but she didn't want to leave. Love's harder to budge than hate."

"She left, though," I cut in. "Why don't we head back to Folger's, and you can catch me up on why."

"What, you don't want to hear more about Ephestra's exploits?" she asked mischievously. "Time was you'd be jealous."

"Time gone past," I replied in kind, then sobered. "Besides, you may be chuckling now, but last night you weren't so pleasant. Not angry, either, however you tried to fake it." I fixed her with a serious stare. "You were nervous--scared, even. And that's got me more worried than when you had three feet of steel pointed at my chest."

"Yeah, but that's because you knew I wouldn't follow through," she pointed out.

"No, that wasn't it," I replied, moving suddenly. Before she could react I had her in a headlock. She yelped, reaching for her sword, but I blocked her from drawing. "Notice anything?" I asked her casually.

She sniffed. "You didn't break a sweat. But why let me think you were out of practice?"

"Because I wanted to see if you needed me, broken down as I wasn't," I replied, releasing the hold. "Besides, if you'd been going all out yourself I'd have been down at the first blow. Shall we?"

"I still would've won," she said irritably, stalking towards the road. I smiled and followed.

********************************************************

I'll also be editing the first excerpt for continuity and style whatnots.

Ok, So It's a Day Late

2009-07-09T21:54:00.000-07:00

As promised, the first part of my writing. I may have to rethink this--it wouldn't be fair to me or to you to release half-finished junk (for example, right after the end of this section I've skipped a good deal of what I envision to be internal dialogue because it depends on where I take the novel later). OTOH, it means I could edit the posts as I go along, which might be educational in itself.

All right, here goes.

************************************************************

“So a guy walks into a bar.” I used to laugh at those. Get a man drunk and he’ll do things he wouldn’t soberly consider for love or money. Ever hear the one about Superman luring people off the roof? But sobriety hadn't stopped me from doing unimaginable things. And love had nothing to do with it, worse luck.

So I ignored the joker and ordered my drink. Yeah, I was sober, but I didn’t want to be. And this was the only place in town that served 12% beer, so here I was. The first swallow scorched my throat going down, and I was going for actual flames when a shove from behind turned the rest of the bottle into glass shards and foamy splatter. I turned around to let the shover have a piece of my mind, and perhaps a few hours’ rest. Like a drunkard, remember, I thought, and let my fist come around in a massive, sloppy arc that it never completed.

Yuki stood there, one hand on her hip like the other was meant to be, only it was busy crushing my wrist. “Really, John, I knew you must have deteriorated, but this is pathetic,” she said with a hint of accent. “It makes me wonder if I shouldn’t just break this and leave you to fester.”

I’d prefer if you didn’t—break it, anyway,” I managed with some semblance of politeness. “Be hard to work one-handed.” If she was here, then so was the rest of the gang.

“Relax, John,” she said scornfully, seeing my eyes dart. “They're busy trawling--you know the drill. I wouldn’t need backup anyway, the state you’re in.” I didn’t dispute the point, even if she had mistaken my punch for the real thing. “On the other hand,” she added, “I’m not here to drown myself in alcohol either, like you are. I’ve got better things to do than dwell on the bad old days, and now you do too.”

“Yeah, I have a job.” I freed my wrist. She let me. “I make an honest 9-to-5 living now, and I don't need--"

"Trouble," Yuki interrupted, sneering. "You used to live for trouble, John. You've got the scars to prove it. Are you so scared of acquiring more that you'd hide behind a desk and a mug of beer? Have your fists gone soft? Or is it that you're too good for us, with your steady pay and comfortable lifestyle?" She looked up at me, face hard. "I guess we don't need a man getting fat in the belly and the purse. We'll just be about our merry way, and let you be about your job." She made it seem a dirty word.

I knew she was goading me, but I was never famed for my patience. "Do you want to see if I've gone soft? Take this outside, and we can have ourselves a philosophical discussion." I almost said "put up your fists," but I remembered that it was her feet I'd have to watch.

"It can wait until you've sobered up," she replied. "We're staying at Folger's Inn down Broadside Way. Tomorrow, at noon--if you still have the guts." She strode away. I didn't bother to protest that I'd had less than one drink. Watching her flowing movements, I wasn't sure I could best her, sober or not. One fight, I told myself. I have my pride. But after that, I'm done, no matter what they say or do.

************************************************************

ps. John and Yuki are just names, right now, and subject to change. I can tell you one name that won't come up as Yuki's replacement, as if it matters: Kagemoto Hoshiko. I want to use that name, but not on a character who seems so hard-headed. I might even write something just for that name, because it's so evocative to me. It translates: Star's child, origin of shadows. Sweet.

Writing

2009-07-02T01:10:00.000-07:00

Those who know me know I have a problem with writing. It's not that I write poorly, as I hope a quick sampling of this blog would show. I've never gotten a grade below A- in any English class, and a large part of that is my cumulative essay grade. (Certainly it's not my work ethic.) No, writing well is not the problem. Writing quickly is the problem. I take forever to put fingers to keyboard, far longer to put pen to paper. Every sentence is a hard-fought battle against my twin desires to rewrite the sentence (I'm doing it now, with this sentence--and yes, I often end up with long paranthetical remarks as a result of this) and to go surfing my routine websites (a smattering of webcomics, manga websites, and Facebook-related material) for the umpteenth time just to get away from the writing.

This difficulty is made infinitely more frustrating by the fact that I deeply enjoy writing. As an avid reader, it's hard for me not to fantasize about turning my own ideas into essays and stories--hence this blog, at least regarding the essays part. I look forward to filling white space with words, words that interconnect to form rich dialogue, complex analysis, (I'm freezing up again here, trying to come up with another example to fill the gap and fit the rule of three) evocative poesy, and all the other types of literature I so eagerly gobble up from the reader's end. (My brain is screaming "aagh, repetition!" I'm trying to ignore it.) I go on Facebook and read my friends' poems, stories, and essays, and I think, "I want to do that!" or even "I could do better than that!" Yet my resolve dwindles after another few (synonym for frustrating, synonym for frustrating...ah, what the heck) hours watching a white screen remain infuriatingly (yay, found a synonym!) blank--unless I fill the screen (and the time) with games or other escapes.

Much of the problem is what rests between my ears--not too little, but too much. This is not a reference to my intellect, but rather to my extraordinary dependence on mapping out everything I plan to write before writing anything at all. (I'm doing it now--gotta stop, gotta stop!) The papers I turn in for my English classes are generally my first drafts--with an inner voice driving me to perfect everything as I write it, revision often proves redundant. Yet going through the whole process of revision would still take less time than the time it takes me to produce those first drafts, more because the tension of producing quality work according to plan in one go drives me quite literally to distraction than because it's more difficult to produce quality work. Write well, write quickly, or write according to plan--I can only do two of the three at any given time.

Therefore, I'm now working on how to facilitate the interplay of planning and writing so that each helps, rather than hinders, the other. As part of this exercise, I'm writing a story. What kind of story? I had no idea when it started. I went with a bar joke and let the characters play out from there. As I write, the story takes shape--something like the result of a three-way between Watchmen, R.A. Salvatore's work, and Order of the Stick. That's if the story doesn't change, which it's guaranteed to, but so it goes. From here on out, I'll post weekly updates to the story, and I promise they will be substantial. I mean, as long as I'm producing large quantities of verbeage, why not throw it to whatever snarling Internet trolls (or possibly even reasonable people, if I'm lucky) might frequent this blog?

Just a Theory

2009-04-12T12:48:00.000-07:00

I have a bit of an obsession with intelligent design. Look back through my older posts and you'll find a brief post about Ben Stein's movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. That post has approximately 50 pages' worth of commentary, a pitched battle between myself and an ID proponent. If you want to look at the minutiae of the debate between evolutionary theory and intelligent design, look there. This is not a post to deal with minutiae.

This is my response to a single comment made by one design supporter on one Facebook discussion. This is the essence of my stance on intelligent design.

I don't understand why this is some sort of evidence against ID. Presumably a designer would know this and that's why sexual reproduction is the way it is.

This is the nugget, the kernel within the post that demonstrates why ID should never be taught in science classrooms (I would say "will" but I know a parochial school in my area that teaches intelligent design). This is because the basic reasoning behind this quotation can apply to any natural phenomenon we care to name.

"Presumably a designer would know this and that's why gravity is the way it is."

"Presumably a designer would know this and that's why malaria is the way it is."

"Presumably a designer would know this and that's why the stars are the way they are."

"Presumably a designer would know this and that's why the brain is the way it is."

Each sentence covers a wide swath of scientific knowledge - relativity, epidemiology, astronomy, neurology. "This is the way it is because a designer did it."

This statement demonstrates two massive problems with intelligent design:

1) The familiar objection - it's unfalsifiable. A designer could have done anything, useful or useless, beautiful or ugly, efficient or inefficient. Like the invisible insubstantial room-temperature dragon in my basement, the designer cannot be disproven. God could have created fossil bunnies in the Precambrian era. The designer could have predicted the existence of pollution, and created an algorithm that would eventually develop enzymes to counter that pollution. The designer could even have worked through strictly evolutionary processes (though no ID advocate likes to admit that, because they think evolutionary processes don't work). No matter what science discovers, the designer could have done it. Like the bogeyman it will always haunt scientific inquiry no matter how long scientists spend disproving "facts" like irreducible complexity. The designer becomes a tautology. Once it is assumed that 1 = 0, anything can be proven.

2) The design hypothesis seriously hinders scientific inquiry. Don't bother with predictions, don't bother with experimentation, don't bother with discovery - the designer's got it covered. He knew something, and that's why the world is the way it is. What else are we to assume from the red tape ID proponents have strung up across every evolutionary phenomenon beyond the level of speciation? "It's impossible for the bacterial flagellum to have developed naturally, so don't bother investigating it." "It's impossible for complexity to arise through stochastic processes, so don't bother simulating it." "It's impossible for paleontologists to find enough transitional fossils to satisfy evolutionary theory, so don't bother digging." Or how about the favorite whipping horse of any design supporter, abiogenesis? "It's impossible for life to have developed naturally. The odds against it are staggering. So never mind the abiotic synthesis of amino acids, of polymers, of phospholipid bilayers. Never mind autocatalytic cycles, and the actual laws of probability. It didn't happen, so don't bother investigating it." Don't bother with scientific inquiry.

Science asks HOW phenomena develop, HOW processes function, HOW the universe came to be the way it is. ID answers with WHO, a perverse frameshift mutation of the question. Thus it is reduced to tearing down what is already known, what we already have. In the process, it makes a mockery of the method by which we gather knowledge--that is, science. Then ID proponents wonder why scientists scorn them, why their "theory" is refused "equal time" with "Darwinism" and instead "suppressed" by "establishment" science and education. The answer is simple: it is not, and has never been, science.

How the Laffer Curve fundamentally undermined fiscal conservatism

2009-03-08T01:04:00.000-08:00

Just about everyone knows the basic idea behind the Laffer curve: at both 0% and 100% taxation, the government gets no tax revenues, meaning that decreasing taxes can theoretically lead to increased revenues. The resultant theory of supply-side economics helped catapult Ronald Reagan to the Presidency in the 1980s, and controlled GOP economic policy for a generation. It also crippled economic conservatism on the national stage, perhaps beyond our ability to heal.

But wait, you say. Isn't lower taxation in line with the goals of fiscal conservatism? Well, yes and no. To economic conservatives, lower taxation is a desirable but secondary byproduct of lower spending. This unremarkable revelation came to me when I was thinking about the California budget deficit (see two posts down) and realized that the debate was framed incorrectly.

We don't have a budget deficit. Wait, don't leave, let me explain! The term "budget deficit" implies that the problem is insufficiency; specifically, that tax revenues are insufficient to cover spending programs. But this is an absurd way to view the problem. For starters, tax revenues have consistently increased relative to inflation over any period of time you care to name. Some data: here are historical records of tax revenues over the last 75 years and an inflation calculator. I challenge readers to find any time period 10 years or longer where real tax revenues decreased. Factor in population growth if you like; it doesn't matter. America's government, just like California's, has generally taken in more money from its citizens each year.

Furthermore, tax revenue is, by and large, the independent variable in this equation. The only government that has absolute control over how much money it gets is a dictatorship. More to the point, changes in tax policy don't have any real long-term effects on tax revenues, which have hovered around 18% of GDP for at least 30 years and probably much longer (here's some historical GDP data for curious readers to play with). George Bush's much-reviled (or much-vaunted, in the right crowd) tax cuts led to a short, sharp fall (>10%) in tax revenues as a percentage of GDP between 2000 and 2004 - but by 2007, revenues were right back on the long-term trend line. The limited effect of political decisions on tax revenues is amply illustrated by this graph from Paul Krugman's 1/16/08 NY Times editorial, "Taxes and revenues - another history lesson." Krugman contends that this graph shows the benefits of increasing taxes, but fails to note that the graph correlates much more closely to GDP than to either Clinton's or Bush's tax policies.

Clearly, tax revenues aren't the problem - they're perhaps the last consistent performer in Washington. Hence I repeat my point: we do not have a budget deficit. Rather, what we have is a spending surplus. Basic economics teaches us that we have limited resources to satisfy unlimited needs; but when politicians can punt scarcity into the national debt, they tend to spend beyond their means in attempting to deliver instant gratification of their constituents' demands. This leads right into the basic tenet of fiscal conservatism: the key to responsible governance is restraint in government spending. In short, the problem isn't how much money government takes in, it's how much money government puts out.

In this sense, the Laffer curve is nothing but trouble for economic conservatives. Here's the core of the problem: the Laffer curve diverts focus from the problem of excessive spending by dangling the dual carrot of lower taxes and higher revenues. Supply-side economics is only useful insofar as it suggests that raising taxes is not necessarily an efficient revenue collection instrument; taken any further, it generally becomes an argument for lower taxes in order to spend more. Hence absurdities like conservatives compromising with liberals by spending money on social programs as well as the war effort; like the "compromise" between tax cuts and increased spending in the recent trillion-dollar stimulus bill; like the generation-old tendency of the opposition party to accuse the majority party of indiscriminate spending, ignoring its own indiscretions when it was the majority party (blatantly evident in both parties over the past three years). Rather than measuring our wish-list against our budget, we measure our budget against our wish-list. Then we wonder how it is that so many people bought houses they couldn't afford to keep, caught up in the dream of a permanent real-estate boom.

Perspective on Religion, Prayer, and Meditation

2009-03-03T23:59:00.000-08:00

I recently received a questionnaire from a classmate related to a class assignment, and I feel like my responses were worthwhile enough that I should lengthen my memory of them by posting them here. Some of the answers are very shallow; I plan to contemplate the questions further when I have time.

1. What is prayer to you? What is your definition of prayer?

Prayer (meditation) is a process of stillness, focus, awareness, contemplation, and understanding - in that order.
[secondary] Prayer is stress relief, an emotional buffer between my raw feelings and my actions.

2. Why do you pray?

I pray (meditate) when I am most emotional, and when I am least emotional. When I am intensely emotional, I seek to calm my feelings and restore my self-control. When I am emotionless, I seek to enter the process described above through stillness.

3. What form does your prayer take?

I quiet myself, assume a posture (no specifics other than tucked chin and straight back; it's pretty spontaneous) and focus on my breathing.

4. To whom do you pray? What is your image of God?

If I pray to anyone, I suppose it's myself. In a sense, I pray that I may improve myself.

5. How often do you pray?

Intermittently over the past five-ish years, recently increasing in frequency. I now pray (meditate) in some fashion on most days.

6. Do you feel that God ever communicates to you? How?
7. Have you ever had a time when you felt that one of your prayers was answered? Describe the incident. If not, is there a time where you feel or felt close to God?

No, and no.

8. At what point do you feel most spiritual? With whom? When?

I am most spiritual when I am surrounded by my own thoughts. In that sense, I am always alone when I am spiritual, even though I may be with other people.

9. Why are you religious (or not)?

Because I was not brought up in a religious context, I am not predisposed to believe in a higher power, which precludes a belief in most religions. When it comes to my worldview, I value the empirical over the hypothetical, the descriptive over the normative, the real over the ideal; as such, I prefer to restrict my belief in the supernatural and/or transcendent. Finally, the material plane satisfies my capacity for wonder, so that I have no real desire to add a divine element to the mix. The causes and consequences of humanity interest me more than the causes and consequences of deities.

10. Do you want to be religious or are you pushed otherwise? Why?

While going to a religious school has certainly opened my eyes to the possibilities of faith, I remain unwilling to circumscribe my worldview with religious doctrine. To adopt religion seems a limited and limiting way of life. At this time, the most religion I would allow into my life would be the admission of a higher power (Deism) mixed with elements of philosophy and meditation from various Eastern religions. And at this point, I think my beliefs would be most accurately described as agnostic, which is a shift from my atheism prior to entering Bellarmine.

California's Budget Crisis and the Economic Stimulus

2009-03-03T22:47:00.000-08:00

My father often tells me that he has only ever seen one graph in the San Jose Mercury News that concisely conveyed relevant information without distortion. The graph was in an article from the late '90s discussing California's budget deficit, and it graphed the California government's inflation-adjusted revenues and expenditures over time. The notable point to be recognized, my father would say, is that although both lines steadily increased as time passed, the line representing expenditures was consistently higher than the line representing tax revenues. California's tax revenues had increased at a rate significantly outstripping inflation, meaning that in any given year, Sacramento politicians had more real resources than the previous year--yet the government's response was simply to keep spending beyond its means. Worse, my father would tell me, California was making long-term spending commitments, out to a decade or more, based on the assumption that these trends would continue, that the tech boom was a permanent phenomenon. This article, said my father, plainly showed the seeds sown for a California crisis down the road.

Of course, I'm not saying my father was some kind of genius just because his prediction is coming true. Anyone with the same information and a basic capacity to reason could have done the same, and many probably did. Still, I have to say, this sounds a lot like what my father's been saying:

California spends far more than it takes in, despite having some of the highest taxes in the United States. It is hostile to business, and the middle class is fleeing in droves. It runs huge deficits every year, yet the Dem dominated legislature refuses to do anything effective to cut spending.

Now one in ten Californians is unemployed. Does any of this sound familiar? It should. It’s what Obama and the Democrats have in mind as a “solution” for the rest of the country.

I don't really agree with Bill Quick on that last point. The problem with California is that politicians based their spending commitments on the rose-colored glasses theory of economics. They planned based on an eternal boom, and it came back to bite them. Obama, on the other hand, knows the economy's tanking, and he's promoting spending in order to fix it. In other words, rather than being the fuel for spending (as in California), the economy is now the impetus for spending. As such, I don't think it's fair to say that Obama and the CA legislature are touting the same solution, because they've been working on different problems.

However, it is telling that when the economy was booming in California, the answer from the left was increases in social spending on education and healthcare, coupled with tightened environmental regulation under the recently established California EPA. And here is Obama's analysis of the economic crisis, taken from his recent not-State-of-the-Union speech to Congress:

The fact is, our economy did not fall into decline overnight. Nor did all of our problems begin when the housing market collapsed or the stock market sank. We have known for decades that our survival depends on finding new sources of energy. Yet we import more oil today than ever before. The cost of health care eats up more and more of our savings each year, yet we keep delaying reform. Our children will compete for jobs in a global economy that too many of our schools do not prepare them for. And though all these challenges went unsolved, we still managed to spend more money and pile up more debt, both as individuals and through our government, than ever before.

(emphasis mine)
So Obama advocates increased spending on education, healthcare and the environment as partial solutions to the crisis (even accepting the nebulous connection between the former and the latter), while California Democrats advocate increased spending on education, healthcare and the environment as something to do with cash from boom times. It's almost as if their drive for this social spending is completely indifferent to economic concerns, and all the wailing and gnashing of teeth over the economic crisis is just a means to push through the left-wing political agenda. "Never let a good crisis go to waste" and all that.

A Working Government

2009-01-31T14:00:00.000-08:00

"The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works."

Volokh Conspiracy's Ilya Somin writes a thoughtful post with this quotation from Obama's inauguration speech as the vehicle. Professor Somin argues that "[Government] has systematic flaws that justify a presumption against it," basically defending the virtues of small government. It's a great piece of work, and Volokh has a great comment culture, so read the whole thing. However, I think Somin passes over the fundamental problem with this statement, with only a passing reference to what I consider its biggest flaw: "Who could possibly be against government when it 'works'?"

My problem with Obama's statement is not that it has no general presumption about limiting government power, but rather that it has no general presumptions at all. The only positive declaration implied by the statement is that what "works" is important; but without any idea of what "working" is, how are we the listeners supposed to learn anything from this statement? Without any semantic content in the statement, listeners are free to attach any interpretation they want to it, making Obama into a tabula rasa for everyone's hopes and fears. Everyone's in favor of things working; the problem is that nobody can agree on how best to arrive at the "working" conclusion. Obama's statement, like many before it, expresses the obvious and skips all the controversy that comes attached.

For reference, here is the full transcript of Obama's inaugural address. The statement in question can be found on page 2.

VI Day

2008-11-22T12:04:00.000-08:00

Zombietime wishes to commemorate the remarkable progress in the last year or so in Iraq by setting today, the 22nd of November, as Victory in Iraq day. I agree, but read the whole thing.

Where next?

2008-11-05T21:46:00.000-08:00

From Representative Jeff Flake (R-AZ), via The Volokh Conspiracy, comes an agenda for Republicans in the wake of the '08 elections:

I suggest that we return to first principles. At the top of that list has to be a recommitment to limited government. After eight years of profligate spending and soaring deficits, voters can be forgiven for not knowing that limited government has long been the first article of faith for Republicans.

Of course, it's not the level of spending that gets the most attention; it's the manner in which the spending is allocated. The proliferation of earmarks is largely a product of the Gingrich-DeLay years, and it's no surprise that some of the most ardent practitioners were earmarked by the voters for retirement yesterday. Few Americans will take seriously Republican speeches on limited government if we Republicans can't wean ourselves from this insidious practice. But if we can go clean, it will offer a stark contrast to the Democrats, who, after two years in training, already have their own earmark favor factory running at full tilt.

Second, we need to recommit to our belief in economic freedom. Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations" may be on the discount rack this year, but the free market is still the most efficient means to allocate capital and human resources in an economy, and Americans know it. Now that we've inserted government deeply into the private sector by bailing out banks and businesses, the temptation will be for government to overstay its welcome and force the distribution of resources to serve political ends. Substituting political for economic incentives is not the recipe for economic recovery. . . .

There are, of course, other pillars of the Republican standard -- strong national defense, support for traditional values and the Second Amendment -- but these are not areas where voters question Republican bona fides. In any event, as we have seen over the past several months, economic woes tend to subsume other concerns. We shouldn't complain. We can now play our strongest hand.

To make the obvious pun, Flake's no flake; that was a good message. A few problems, though:

The first problem that I spot with this is that earmarks are essentially irrelevant numbers-wise. Regardless of the moral high ground of being anti-pork, it's hard to get excited when one of the main pillars of a platform is "just" $17 billion, 2% of the nation's discretionary spending. Eliminating all of them would just barely keep the budget flat for one year. Without a better reason to make this an issue, the GOP should just leave it alone - all the more so since 2000-2006 saw so much GOP earmarking that their credibility is ruined on the issue. It seems like an issue that should only be pursued once the GOP wins back a majority - then an anti-earmark stance will actually carry some weight. Don't put the horse before the carrot, so to speak.

Second problem: when a conservative talks about free-market principles, voters will think "deregulation." And when they think of deregulation, they will connect it rightly or wrongly to the financial crisis. That's not a platform anyone can win on.

Third problem: by putting the Second Amendment right next to "strong national defense," Flake plays right into a fundamental paradox of the right wing that many voters see: that while conservatism is about limited government, conservatives often push for a stronger government and the curtailment of absolute freedom in the interest of security. When I say "curtailment of absolute freedom," I don't mean that Big Brother is now watching you and a wrong word will get you carted off to prison; I mean that the right wing will support legislation establishing the potential for a Big Brother system in times of conflict. Yes, the economy is important, perhaps more so than anything else from a strictly political standpoint. But if the Republican Party wants to reestablish credibility, it needs to start by explaining the seeming contradictions in its platform, and this is perhaps the biggest of them all. After we've established that the platform is consistent, THEN we can move on to consistently living up to it.

Update: On Volokh Conspiracy, this comment by Richard Aubrey caught my eye:

The earmarks are the key, the bribe, to get legislators to vote the required way, on the big things. A key doesn't weigh much, but heavy doors can be unlocked.

I hadn't thought of this at all. By using earmarks, the argument goes, Congressmen are able to break the political process and so get much more damaging legislation passed. I'd like to see some examples of this, but there's the potential to make earmarks a significant issue here. 'Course, the fact that this is the first I've heard of this line of thought shows how poorly anti-porkers are selling it...

So why do I want to go to the school I indicated as my #1 choice?

2008-10-05T19:37:00.000-07:00

The college application process is riddled with minor idiocies. Everything's a crapshoot at the higher levels - one college admission officer noted that if her university had rejected their entire incoming freshman class and taken the next batch instead, they'd have just as good a student body. Testing like that done on the SAT is notoriously bad at measuring much of anything. Heck, I took the Chemistry SAT II yesterday (I should have done it in May or June right after I finished AP Chemistry, but whatever), and the problems were perhaps marginally harder than the ones on the test I took to get out of General Science freshman year. 'Course, there were more of them, but that just means less time to check your answers. Do colleges really want to value people based on whether or not they slipped a 0 (or a hydroxide group) the first time round? Then there's the college info sessions, which were probably good before the inevitable "How can I get into Harvard?/How can I get my kid into Harvard?" crowd turned them into homogeneous, bland mixtures of random facts and balancing acts (don't want to drive any kids away with definite statements!).

By far the worst offenders, however, are the college essay questions. Your mileage may vary, of course; Chicago U's essays are notoriously quirky, for example. But I'm talking about the generic questions, and especially about one particular type of question: "Why do you want to go to School X? What makes School X a good place for you? Why are you applying to school X?" Here are some potential honest answers to this question:
"To get an education." (how many students have typed this on the page, stared at it, sighed, and deleted it so they could start over? H/t Dr. McNinja.)

"Look, I'm applying just in case I don't get into School Y over there." I'm always amused by how schools take it for granted that if a student applies, they MUST want to go there.

"School X is near where I live."

"Look, Mr. Stanford/MIT/Caltech/Harvard/Princeton/Yale/[your school here] admissions officer, it's obvious why I want to attend School X. Your school has an incredible program in the area of my interest. It has lots of challenging classes in other areas, too. Your school has great professors, vast resources, myriad ways to have fun, great research opportunities, a "study wherever the hell you want" program, good food, a beautiful campus, and a student body worthy of it all. Asking why I want to go to School X is like asking why a Christian wants to go to Heaven, and you know it."

I'm not kidding with that last sentence, either. For many students, school is the religion of choice, or at least a counterpoint to their actual religion. More on that another time, perhaps.

Of course, students can't write essays like that and get accepted to college. So they something just a bit less obvious, and then write about it using all the Rules of Essay-Writing:
- It needs to have a Catchy Opening and Grab your Reader's Attention!
- It needs to Tell a Story! Make the point, don't state it!
- It needs to be Concise and Punchy!
- However, be sure to Elaborate!

Etc.

I've been reading a book containing 50 essays by students that got into Harvard. The book applauds these essays as the most descriptive, informative, well-written essays of any they received. Yet none of them, I'm sure, were answering the question "Why do you want to attend Harvard?" That question is not going to elicit deep insight or beautiful writing on the part of the student. Any direct answer violates the central principle of college essays: "Show, don't tell." Sure, it's easy to ask a simple question like "Why us?", but it doesn't tell the school much about the student. Huge trouble for us with little benefit for anyone; why even bother?

Sicilian Defense, why hast thou forsaken me?

2008-09-30T22:04:00.000-07:00

Chess has become a big part of my life since summer started. I began playing chess when I was six or thereabouts, but I had no idea what I was doing. I read a lot of books - my favorite was Hypermodern Chess, a commentary on Aron Nimzovich's famous games by Fred Reinfeld - but I'd just read the commentary and look at the pictures without figuring out what was actually going on. Then I spent about a decade forgetting how to play chess, until I found out that I was friends with the top two chess players at my school.

Now, I have a real competitive streak - anybody who's familiar with me is nodding knowingly right about now. It could even be argued that I started this blog because I wanted to keep up with Kelly and her blogging. So naturally I set out to catch up with a "nation's top 100" type (if anyone knows Jay Kumar at UC Berkeley, this is him) and someone who's been playing chess tournaments as long as I've been avoiding the game. One thing led to another, and soon I was the guy with his nose in an opening book and his free hand on a portable chessboard during a trip through Lamar Valley in Yellowstone. LAMAR VALLEY, f'chrissakes!

I'm actually pretty good at this chess thing, and I made the school team this year. I don't actually know how I match up with the other team members, because it's a ladder system: new members start at the bottom and work their way up with challenge matches. I DO know that I'm not in the top 3; there's a couple of CRAZY freshmen, plus one of the "two best at my school" people (he's not anymore, though - hee), occupying those slots. But for someone who's been playing chess for half a year, being in that nebulous area between 4th and 8th ain't half bad.

Anyway, I wrote this post pretty much for one reason, that being that I played my first game in an actual match today. We played French Defense (I need to study either that or Nimzoindian, since they're the two obvious openings after 1. d4 e6), and I was actually doing pretty well. I was winning positionally in the endgame - I had an unassailable pawn duo on the 5th rank - and my opponent only had 6 seconds left on the clock. But I lost! My opponent was moving really fast, in order to avoid losing time (if he moved within 5 seconds, he didn't lose any time), and instead of taking my time, I decided to give him less time to think by playing fast myself. BIG mistake. I broke my pawn line with an ill-timed advance, and his king tied my rook down, which allowed him to get a passed pawn and win. With 6 freakin' seconds left on the clock. Note to self: If you have 15 minutes left and your opponent has 15 seconds, you left that time there for a reason. USE IT. Blargh.

OTOH, I'm still happy that I outplayed my opponent to that point. And it's not like my loss killed our chances, since EVERYONE lost (except for Dittmer, and he only won on time after being down pieces). Monta Vista really is a strong team. I look forward to playing them again later this year; I bet I'll be stronger, and I definitely won't make the same rookie mistake I made this time. It's only the second time I've played a real-life timed match - I'll just have to get used to the fundamentals of time-constrained play.

So if that was the point, why the title, you ask? Simple: Sicilian was the opening I wanted to play as Black against e4. It was awesome and cool and complicated and...and...and I was horrible at it. I never really understood the rationale behind some of the common elements (like the e6-d6 pawn center) and I had no idea how to take advantage of the opponent's mistakes. Plus the kingside fianchetto always fell apart in ways that didn't happen when I played King's Indian Defense off d4 (though I wasn't great at that either). Although Sicilian is notable for being an aggressive counterattack on Black's part, I always got locked into certain positions and my mobility fell to zilch as White attacked my pawn structure (the e6-d6 pawn formation often left the d-pawn weak, plus White got to advance his f-pawn a lot, which didn't help my constricted formation). I might experiment with it a bit now, since it's been a month or so since I last seriously played it and I might have some new insights, but I'm still annoyed at how badly I played that opening. Any hints from any experienced chess players who happen to read this post would be appreciated (I'm looking at you, CEETTN of the pit of malice).

Why does it matter when life begins?

2008-08-24T23:39:00.000-07:00

Wow, it's been a while. One would think I'd have spent MORE time thinking about blogs over the summer and LESS during the school year, but such are the contradictions of teenage life.

Another vague, half-formed thought I've been masticating crystallized as I viewed the comment thread of this post over at Hot Air. The post itself castigates Pelosi for her poor attempt to reconcile her pro-abortion stance with her Catholicism (not that I care, since I'm not Catholic), so of course the comment thread walks through the whole abortion debate again.

The only part of the abortion debate I'm interested in is the "murder of an unborn child" question. After all, that IS the deciding factor of the debate. If abortion is indeed murder, that obviously outweighs any considerations about women's freedom and so on, and the pro-lifers carry the day. If not, then the idealistic argument of a woman's right to choose (even if I often feel that it should be a choice of whether or not to have sex rather than a choice of whether or not to get an abortion) and the practical argument that the government has no business legislating the issue will outweigh any moral arguments the right can muster. A lot of people have gotten this far, which is why one so often hears the question, "when does human life begin?" For many, that question was answered by the Pope in 1869, when he announced that the cutoff mark was conception. This is the foundation of many a pro-lifer's position on abortion.

But upon looking at the issue, I was confounded by the question you see up top. Why is it that the primary factor everyone thinks of is life? Bacteria are alive, broccoli are alive, cows are alive, yet few have any compunction about ending the life of these creatures. More to the point, my arm is alive; the cells in my kidney are alive; that tumor that had to be cut out of my aunt Louise was alive, and human to boot, but we have no moral qualms about amputation or kidney removal or chemotherapy. When it comes to defining the boundaries of murder, "life" and "human" seem wholly inadequate. For the true crime of murder is not the death of the cells comprising a human being, but the death of the mind (to the religious, the "soul") that resides within.

That's why, to me, the relevant word is "consciousness". When Mazer Rackham describes the buggers' clearing of Eros to Ender, he makes sure to mention that the buggers don't see what they did as murder. As a hive race, they expected to encounter another such; what they did was "trimming", not murder. By the same token, until the foetus reaches independent consciousness, it's naught but a part of the mother, and the mother can decide to remove it if she wants.

Don't confuse this with the "personhood" criteria that one can find on Wikipedia. I do not require that a foetus be able to tell the world, "I think, therefore I am," to be a person. The minimum standard for consciousness, according to the few websites I've visited that discuss the subject, appears to be the ability to feel pain, which develops around the 26th week (regardless of when the foetus starts actually feeling pain). So in my opinion, till then, the mother can do what she darn well pleases; afterwards, she should treat the foetus with all the respect she would give any other living human being. Which may not be much, but it's a start.

EDIT: Both Alioth, here, and BKennedy at Hot Air have pointed out that the potential for consciousness could be used as an alternative cutoff point, and one that would establish the sanctity of the foetus from conception (since this standard requires that the entity in question would do so if left alone, we can ignore gametes, since they must first find another gamete to reach this stage). Also, Think_B4_Speaking at Hot Air has offered a second possible milestone for the establishment of independent consciousness, namely the point when the foetus' brain waves begin registering (around week 11), which would change the cutoff point to near the end of the first trimester.

Finally, a couple of clarifications:
1. "Independent consciousness" does not mean that the foetus be self-sufficient or awake, merely that it have a "self" which is separate from the mother.
2. I am not trying to equate cancer cells with human foetuses (foeti? heh). However, both of them are alive, human, and genetically unique, thereby disqualifying those three criteria from consideration. Obviously a foetus either has independent consciousness, or it has the potential for such, while tumors have neither, so we're right back to those two criteria.
3. When I draw a line, I draw a line. I don't draw a slippery slope. So please, no comments about how next I'll be excluding female foetuses, or foetuses with Down's Syndrome, or gay foetuses (and how am I supposed to tell that last, anyway?). None of these characteristics become apparent until after brain waves begin registering, anyway, so the point is moot.

One More Rule for the Internets

2008-04-01T00:21:00.000-07:00

For every stupid idea you can think of, there will be a Youtube video depicting exactly that - and sometimes a full-on movie.

How this saw the light of day is beyond me. And what's with the ridiculous outfit? It gives Ben Stein that child-in-man's-clothing appearance - I suppose it's an appropriate metaphor for ID trying to fit into the scientific framework, though.

For those who don't understand the title reference...

Look, Mommy, I Fed the Troll

2008-03-16T03:17:00.000-07:00

I remember a short while back, Bill Whittle wrote a post about his encounter with a troll on his daily blog stroll. A similar thing happened to me while I was perusing Hot Air (I went there following Captain Ed, since he shut down Captain's quarters *tear*). I was looking at the whole furor over some of the crazier things Obama's pastor has been saying about how the US caused 9/11 and AIDS for good measure. Now, I don't believe in guilt by association, but it's amusing to watch politicians get dragged down by these "crazy-uncle" relationships. However, as I was looking at the comments, I run across this guy named docweasel, who seems really pissed that Obama's getting questioned about all this stuff when Romney didn't get the same questions last year (never mind that he gave a whole speech about it and Obama didn't, but never mind). Ultimately he starts branching into some really hate-filled anti-Mormon bigotry, and that's where I got annoyed. So, I read his comments and his blog post on the subject, and refuted him point by point. Maybe it was pointless, but I sure had fun.

Hmmm. As it turns out, I missed a point - it seems that Reverend Wright is one of Obama's campaign advisors. Or rather, he was - Obama's thrown him under the bus now that the statements have come to light. But frankly, this doesn't really excuse Obama, since the statements were made way back in 2003. If Obama wanted to avoid being associated with that kind of rhetoric, he knew what he was bargaining for when he asked Wright to sign up. If nothing else, it'll be amusing to see what Hillary's team makes of this. After all, she's behind, and desperate to find any bit of leverage she can use to pull herself back up to Obama. That includes crazy statements made by his pastor of twenty years. Expect a lot of political poo over the next few days. Anyway, for those who enjoy this sort of thing, sit back and pass the popcorn.

......................................................

Docweasel, even assuming moral equivalence between Mormonism and what Rev. Wright is preaching (which is ridiculous), it's far more difficult to believe that Romney embraces the less palatable parts of Mormonism than that Obama endorses the worst of Wright's wrongheadedness. After all, there's no equivalence in what they have to do to distance themselves from the objectionable material. Obama merely has to attend a different UCoC church. According to your argument, Romney would have to renounce his entire religion - though I'm not religious myself, I understand that it's a bit more difficult than changing shirts or even churches (imagine that). To Romney, the objectionable parts of Mormonism are not sufficient to justify renouncing it - that's a reasonable statement, I think, given that plenty of Muslims in America say the same thing to themselves every time another bomber bites the dust in Iraq. Obama thinks Wright's statements aren't objectionable enough to justify driving to a different church every Sunday - that's an UNreasonable statement.

Anyway, moving to point-by-point refutation (I'd do this on your blog, except you won't let anyone comment on your absurdities):

* According to Mormon scripture, the founder of your church (Joseph Smith) was told by God in 1820 that all the churches of the day were “an abomination.” Do you agree with God’s view of other churches, as quoted by Joseph Smith? (Pearl of Great Price, JS-Hist 1:18-19)

Hmmm, this is refuted by THE VERY QUOTATION FROM CAPTAIN ED THAT YOU USED IN YOUR ARTICLE. You know, the "more than 100 years ago" response. Romney is not obliged to answer for what Mormons thought of other religions 190 years ago. Especially not if this doesn't translate into a prescription for action today (you know, like the Muslim prescription for action regarding non-Muslims, which STILL doesn't automatically incriminate all Muslims out there).

* According to your church’s Articles of Faith, number eight, the Book of Mormon is the “word of God.” Do you believe that?

No. Way. Mormons think the Book of Mormon is holy? It MUST be heresy. Is there some kind of rhetorical rule against demolishing straw men the opponent sets up for you?

* According to the Book of Mormon there are only two churches: the “church of the Lamb of God [presumably the Mormon church]” and the “church of the devil,” “the whore of all the earth.” Do you agree with that Mormon scripture? (Book of Mormon, 1 Nephi 14:10)

Of course, no context is provided. Without the context, there's no reason to assume that the bad church is of any particular religion or even a tangible church - it could be a symbol for devil-worship, or of US Congress for all I can tell from what's given. Is this supposed to be a genuine question? How can I tell, when it's so ridiculous? Furthermore, now we're getting into the "well, the book says this, so he's bad!" arguments. Are we next going to castigate Jews because the Old Testament forbids homosexuality?

* According to the Book of Mormon a dark skin is a curse imposed by God on the unrighteous and their descendants as a punishment for sin. Do you agree with that doctrine? (Book of Mormon, 1 Nephi 12:22-23, Alma 3:6, 2 Nephi 5:21-22, Jacob 3:8, 3 Nephi 2:15-16, Mormon 5:15; references to the “Lamanites” are taken to be referring to Native American “Indians”.)

Is the question "Are you a racist?" going to somehow become a better question because you attached a religious quote to it? Now I know why nobody's asking these questions; they'd get laughed out of the room.

* According to Mormon doctrine, the president of the Mormon church is a prophet of God, receiving revelations and commandments (God’s laws) directly from God. Do you believe that? (Doctrine and Covenants , 21:5, 43:3, 58:18)

According to the Old Testament, God talked to people, According to the New Testament, God talked to people. Why are you shocked that according to Mormonism, God might still be talking to people?

* One of the most sacred rituals for adult Mormons, performed only in a Mormon temple, is a ceremony called “the endowment.” Have you undergone this ritual? If so, in what year?

* To be admitted to the temple for the endowment ceremony a Mormon must be “in good standing” in the church and undergo a personal interview with church leaders, who examine the member as to whether the member obeys church commandments, supports church leaders, pays full ten percent tithe, wears the prescribed Mormon underwear, abstains from coffee, tea, alcohol, tobacco and extramarital sex, and other matters. If the member answers correctly, a pass to the temples (called a “temple recommend”) is issued, good for two years. Do you have such a temple recommend now, indicating that you are in good standing in your church?

Obviously these two questions are meant to go together, but it's not obvious what they're getting at. Is is somehow a bad thing if Romney is in good standing with the Mormon Church? Is it somehow a bad thing if he isn't? What exactly is the point of this?

* In the secret Mormon temple ceremony Mormons take an oath of obedience to “the law of the Lord.” Did you take that oath?

Well, it's no more ridiculous than having witnesses in court swear on the Bible. Again, is there any point to this question other than to figure out whether Romney is really Mormon or not?

* Before 1990, the endowment ceremony required members to take an oath of secrecy not to reveal anything that happened in the temple under penalty of death. Did you take that oath?

Who cares?

* In the temple ceremony Mormons also take a secret oath to “consecrate your time, talents and everything which the Lord has blessed you, or with which he may bless you, to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints…” Did you take that oath? Would you consider the office of the presidency of the U.S. to be a “blessing” with which the Lord had blessed you?

No, Romney isn't going to consider his happiness in this life a blessing from the Lord. It must be a lie. Like the cake. You know, this refutation is getting really boring. All these questions are meant to SOUND incriminating, but they never actually get there.

* Mormons teach that by obedience to all the commandments of Mormonism, a Mormon may attain the highest degree of heaven and ultimately become a god, creating and ruling over his own universe. Do you believe that? Is this your ultimate personal goal?

"Mormons teach" - what an ambiguous phrase. Is this supposed to be another part of the Book of Mormon, or is it something that's commonly taught, is it something a few radicals espouse, or what? Who cares what Romney's plans for the next life are, anyway? Are they going to somehow affect your judgment of his actions in this one?

* Although your church presently condemns the practice of polygamy, the scripture commanding it is still in the Mormon Doctrine and Covenants, Section 132. Many early Mormons were polygamous and married (”sealed”) to numerous wives “for eternity.” Do you believe then that there will be polygamous families in Mormon heaven?

This is the lamest question ever. Even if polygamy retroactively became a sin, even a Protestant would say that's just more time spent in purgatory, assuming you lived your life in a generally virtuous way.

* The extensive interest of Mormons in genealogical research is to enable them to perform “baptisms for the dead,” thus posthumously inducting previous generations into the Mormon church. Many non-Mormons become angry when they learn that the names of their ancestors - having often been faithful members of some other religion during life - have been used in this way. often without permission of the living descendants. The posthumous baptism of many Holocaust victims caused considerable anger among Jewish groups, and your church agreed to stop the practice as to them (but admitted that it was unable to do so). Do you feel that such anger is justified? (Would you feel anger if some voodoo cult was using your deceased grandparents’ names in some voodoo ritual, and then announcing to all the world that they were now voodoo worshippers?)

And Romney is condemned for the well-intentioned but misguided action of Mormon leaders over half a century ago because...why?

* It is well documented that Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon Church, secretly had many wives. Some of those women were at the same time married to other men, some were as young as fifteen, He claimed that he was commanded by God to enter into these marriages. Do you feel that these early marital practices of the church founder were really commanded by God? (See the book In Sacred Loneliness: The Plural Wives of Joseph Smith by Mormon historian Todd Compton for detailed biographies of these wives.)

Hey, if all those wars the Old Testament documents weren't sinning because God said they weren't, why can't the same overriding authority be applied to polygamy?

* Mormons believe that when Christ returns to earth, a millennium of peace will begin under Christ’s rule (Article of Faith number ten), presumably as a single theocracy. Most Mormons believe that during that time, Mormons will be Christ’s appointed officers and that the law will conform to Mormon teachings. Do you believe that?

Translation: If the Mormons turn out to be right, do you think the Mormons will be rewarded for being right? Answer: Who cares?

* According to Mormon scripture (Doctrine and Covenants 135:3) Joseph Smith did more than any other man except Jesus Christ “for the salvation of men in this world.” Do you agree with that, keeping in mind the contributions of men like the Apostles, Saint Paul, Thomas Aquinas, Saint Augustine, Martin Luther, Martin Luther King, and others?

No way, the people who thought Smith was a prophet put him above people who weren't prophets. Unthinkable.

Damn, dude, why did I waste my time with this drivel when I could be sleeping? I love how you try to pull the moral equivalence stunt with Wright's conspiracy theories. For your next trick, I suppose you'll prove that Joseph Smith caused cancer...or something.

The feebleness of your attacks only justifies to me the suppression of them by mainstream conservative thinkers. Spewing idiocy like this will only make conservatives look bad.

This is pretty hilarious. The same fucking rightwing blogs that declared Romney’s racist, sexist, intolerant cult to be out of bounds for criticism or discussion are now piling on cherry picked quotes about Obama’s minister. You can find plenty of really hateful slurs against blacks, Jews, Catholics etc. in the book of Mormon, but, partly because of blind hatred for McCain and Romney being his main competition, blogs, just like this one, refused to allow any debate on that.

Actually, what's really hilarious (but not surprising) is that you have no f***ing clue who Ed actually supported. I won't give any hints, but it starts with a "Fred" and ends with a "Thompson". And if we're talking "racist, sexist, intolerant," why aren't there women priests n other branches of Christianity? Break out the torches and rakes and other handy implements, let's storm the Vatican!

Link me to ONE FUCKING article where Allah or anyone else talks critically about the hate filled crap Romney teaches and gets taught by his minister every fucking day of the week. Romney is a 3rd generation elder in a dynastic family of Mormon leaders. Obama just attends the church.

The sad thing is, I probably could link you to an article on Captain's Quarters that does just that if I felt like expending the effort. Since I don't, you'll just have to suck it up. And your comment only illustrates why Obama's choice is more damaging - there's less personal damage involved in not making the choice. Imagine Romney's position as a child of the second dynastic elder of the Mormon community. Imagine trying to renounce your religion and most likely your family name because bits of the holy book disparage black people. Now imagine Obama's choice between listening to Rev. Wright's rhetoric and...going to a different church. That Obama chose to listen to Wright despite the ease of not doing so demonstrates that he doesn't find it all that objectionable. Not so in Romney's case.

Now you can debate the relative evilness of what Wright says vs. the Book of Mormon all day: the point is, its JUDGING SOMEONE’S RELIGION, which none of us has the right to do, in fact, if you ARE a Christian, Jesus told you DIRECTLY NOT TO DO IT, FUCKWITS.

Idiot. I can finally say it because you finally made it clear that you missed the entire point of the discussion. WE'RE NOT DISCUSSING OBAMA'S RELIGION. Being a card-carrying member of the United Church of Christ is not the objectionable thing here. The objectionable thing is that he sits and listens to Wright (and helps support him financially) as Wright makes these ridiculous speeches, when it wouldn't be difficult to distance himself from all that. On the other hand, your assaults on Romney's Mormonism are definitely judging religion, though your judgment is incredibly weak if this is the best you can offer. I'd hope you could come up with more, except then I might have to do another monster comment like this, and I don't want to do that.

Oil's Obvious Solution: Why Isn't it More Noticed?

2008-02-27T22:27:00.000-08:00

First, an administrative note: I was so busy with homework that I couldn't do any more of the planned series on the nominees, and now that McCain has wrapped up the Republican nomination further comment on the Republican race is pretty pointless. Later posts will probably tell readers (if there are any at this point) what I think of Hillary, Obama, and McCain, so I'm calling off the series.

Anyway, this post came together for me while I was strolling through Captain Ed's comment section. Having corrected the misconception that Clinton performed an economic miracle (for those who are interested in that discussion, here is the relevant post), I moved on and noticed a post complaining that Exxon pays taxes for a lot of the poor population. This piqued my interest, and while replying my thoughts coalesced into something worthy of a blog post. Here we go:

Oil, as much as food, is a necessity; our nation runs on the stuff. But high gasoline prices have inspired widespread complaints about the evil oil companies who make ungodly profits at the taxpayer's expense. Furthermore, oil's role in carbon dioxide emissions, its limited nature, and its disreputable provider nations (particularly in the Middle East) combine to make it that much more objectionable. Whether or not you believe that oil companies make too much money or that CO2-created AGW exists, oil is not an ideal energy source by any stretch of the imagination, certainly not as THE resource of the United States.

So, what to do about Texas tea? Motivated by dislike verging on hatred for oil companies as well as global warming, the left offers various solutions, which for the sake of simplicity I will divide into two categories: carbon taxes and cap-and-trade systems. As the name indicates, carbon taxes generally tax the hell out of everything that emits a greenhouse gas, including (and probably especially) products that use oil as well as oil companies. The rationale is that creating an economic disincentive will encourage companies to search for other energy sources, plus Congress gets more money (which is a good thing for Congressmen, if not for the rest of the country). Cap-and-trade systems set a limit on the amount that the country can emit, divide up that amount into small units, and hand those units out to companies to sell back and forth until everything balances out. Proponents of this system argue that it sets a clear limit on emissions (as opposed to the gas tax); that it is something of a "free-market" solution that allows companies flexibility in determining their emission rates; that it has been tested successfully on sulfur dioxide emissions, reducing acid rain without a lot of hullabaloo; and that Congress gets money from it (of course). Meanwhile, the Republicans offer the tried-and-true solution of leaving it to Smith's invisible handmobile. Some Republicans simply don't see this as an issue - they don't think AGW is real and don't fault oil companies for making a profit. Others trust that the free market will sort things out - if the oil companies are so eeevil and oil kills babies, surely someone will notice after a while.

However, none of these stock solutions mix well with oil because of the nature of the industry. Carbon taxes are essentially gasoline taxes applied on a broader scale - but the net result would simply be higher prices. Since oil is a necessity, oil companies have a lot more leeway in their pricing than most - they can adjust prices to meet their desired profit margin, and the only real loser in this situation is the consumer. More specifically, the loser is the poor consumer - since taxes on oil companies translate into higher prices at the pump, a carbon tax is essentially the same as the regressive sales tax for oil companies. We can see this in a smaller frame by looking at gasoline taxes, which don't put people off buying gasoline and don't stop companies from making large profits. So that solution doesn't hold up.

Cap-and-trade is more complicated, but still ultimately fails when it comes to controlling oil companies. First, the initial handout of permits is a process seemingly ripe for corruption and havoc, unless there's already a good way to control that process. Assuming the acid rain politicians figured that out, we then move to the effect on oil companies, which is essentially nil as they can purchase permits willy-nilly unless and until the market freezes up as companies attempt to hold on to their remaining credits, which basically destroys the system. And the cost for those permits will once again go straight to the taxpayer.

Finally, the free-market solution will fail (or at least be EXTREMELY slow) because of the dominance of oil. Until a development like the one that allowed us to exploit oil comes along, oil is the best natural resource available. There's technology that allows us to use other resources for the same process, but those are very slow to come together because there's little short-term incentive at the moment to develop it; furthermore, any resource that requires a surrounding infrastructure (like gasoline) will have trouble competing against the well-developed infrastructure that supports oil.

To reuse the chemistry metaphor, the unifying quality of these solutions is that they are polar; they're each developed by one side of the political continuum. Oil, being a nonpolar substance, can only dissolve nonpolar substances; let's try a nonpolar solution. Promote government R&D that develops an incentive for alternative energy sources. The X-Prize worked well for private spacecraft development; something similar can be (and probably is being) done for alternatives to oil in various industries. Using the X-prize model, the left is happy because it helps the environment and hurts the eeeevil oil companies, while the right is happy because it preserves free-market incentives and removes ties with OPEC. Why don't more people talk about this? Is it because it's already done to the degree where more won't help?

Another simple solution, which I was reminded of by a friend: nuclear energy. Apart from the stigma of Chernobyl and the problem of getting rid of nuclear waste (both solvable), is there any reason why we aren't putting more effort into this area?

Election 2008: The Candidates

2008-01-08T22:42:00.000-08:00

I thought it would be a good idea to say where I stand regarding each of the candidates now, given what I know about them, so that later comments by me regarding the candidates can be taken into context. This will be a series of posts, each dealing with one or perhaps two candidates.

The Republicans: Ron Paul

I'm going to spend the most time discussing the candidates I absolutely reject and those I absolutely accept; Ron Paul falls firmly into the former category. Dr. Paul, to me, is an idealist who lacks an understanding of the complexity of the real world, and as such I cannot support him.

There are certain anecdotes that have stuck in my brain regarding him that exemplify this. First, there's his stance on evolution: he dismissed it as a "theological issue", and said he didn't accept it. Paul supporters will tell me that he only said that there are no absolute answers on either side, but that he spent so much time expounding on that subject only indicates that he doesn't know/care that theories CAN'T be proven. Also, to me he staked out an absolute position the second he said "It's a theory, the theory of evolution, and I don't accept it." His discussion of science left me seeing only his ignorance on the subject, hardly an encouraging trait.

Though Paul's rejection of evolution is tolerable, as science is at best a minor issue for the presidency, his thoughts on the Civil War, as expressed on Meet the Press with Tim Russert, left me more worried. Here's the relevant excerpt:

MR. RUSSERT: I was intrigued by your comments about Abe Lincoln. "According to Paul, Abe Lincoln should never have gone to war; there were better ways of getting rid of slavery."

REP. PAUL: Absolutely. Six hundred thousand Americans died in a senseless civil war. No, he shouldn't have gone, gone to war. He did this just to enhance and get rid of the original intent of the republic. I mean, it was the--that iron, iron fist..

MR. RUSSERT: We'd still have slavery.

REP. PAUL: Oh, come on, Tim. Slavery was phased out in every other country of the world. And the way I'm advising that it should have been done is do like the British empire did. You, you buy the slaves and release them. How much would that cost compared to killing 600,000 Americans and where it lingered for 100 years? I mean, the hatred and all that existed. So every other major country in the world got rid of slavery without a civil war. I mean, that doesn't sound too radical to me. That sounds like a pretty reasonable approach.

So much misunderstanding, so little time. My primary beef is with two points. First, does Ron Paul honestly think Lincoln could have avoided the war and kept the Union together, when the South seceded even before his inauguration? Or perhaps Paul thinks that we'd have been better off split up and not resolving the slavery issue at all? He pins the whole war on Lincoln, not understanding that the Civil War has at least 85 years of history behind it. And this leads right to the second point: Ron Paul trivializes the war by making it just about slavery. The war was the result of a deep schism between South and North, of which slavery vs. abolition was merely a symptom. At least two other major causes were present: the conflict between industry and agriculture, and the conflict between Federalism and Nationalism. At the same time, Paul thinks Lincoln did this to enhance the federal government's power, to "get rid of the original intent of the republic." So the war shouldn't have been fought because "there were better ways of getting rid of slavery", but Lincoln only fought it because he wanted to enhance his own power. Get your story straight, Paul. When I heard this on top of the science issue, I started to think maybe Dr. Paul slept through high school; to get such a crucial period of our history so completely wrong...

But the most annoying anecdote of the lot is the most relevant to the debate. Ron Paul, running as the Consitutional Candidate who will Elevate that Sacred Document to the Level it Deserves, doesn't seem to think the Sixteenth Amendment exists at all. He has denounced the income tax as unconstitutional numerous times, the most recent of which was just a week ago:

BECK: We`re with presidential candidate Ron Paul.

And, boy, there`s something that nobody else says. Nobody on Wall Street will say that. And it only makes common sense that we are destroying our own currency.

One of the things that I think attracts me to libertarians is the idea of getting back to the gold standard and abolishing the IRS. Is it true -- I believe I have read that you say if you don`t pay your taxes, you are in the category of civil disobedience akin with Gandhi and Martin Luther King.

PAUL: Well, I -- I think it`s practicing the same principle, yes, because the income tax, the way it`s collected is unconstitutional. And if you believe that, and you practice civil disobedience, you to suffer the consequences.

I chose to try to change the law. I haven`t chosen that method.

But people who sincerely believe that it`s unconstitutional to be guilty until you prove yourself innocent and you be your own -- you have to testify against yourself, I think they have a legitimate cause. And I think it`s a libertarian principle to practice civil disobedience. It`s non-violent.

Now, the only possible justification I've found for this position is that there were wording errors in most of the ratification documents for the Sixteenth Amendment - but that argument has been cut off at the knees by the Supreme Court several times. So either Ron Paul doesn't know that the Sixteenth Amendment exists (unlikely since he's referenced it often); he's clinging to an age-old argument refuted by the Court; or he doesn't have any respect for the process of amending the Constitution. None of these are palatable to me, especially not coming from The Only Honest Candidate In Politics (TM).

This much convinces me that Ron Paul is ignorant; his noninterventionist foreign policy and "the perfect is the enemy of the good" economic policy shows me that his naivete leads him to dangerously simplistic idealism. The real world is more complicated than Dr. Paul seems to believe, and I would not want such a man holding the highest office in the land.

EDIT: Ah, yes, one more nail in the coffin for Ron Paul: the crazy newsletters of his past. It seems there are only a few possibilities: first, he actually wrote those diatribes (or knew about them), which makes him a racist homophobic bigot; or second, he had no knowledge of what was being printed under his name, which makes him criminally careless. Neither of these are presidential qualities. Myself, I suspect a bit of both; there's substantiation of my point about Lincoln in one of the articles as well as personal information in some others, but the overall position doesn't sound like Paul. Anyway, if Ron Paul's candidacy isn't already dead, this drives a stake through its heart, burns the corpse, and scatters the ashes to the wind.

Some Iowa Statistics, or Why Huckabee Isn't Winning

2008-01-05T18:08:00.002-08:00

There have been numerous comments on the incongruity of having Iowa as the first primary state, given how non-representative it is of the nation as a whole. The primary factor is the disproportionate number of evangelical voters in Iowa (though to the largely religion-blind Democratic party this is negligible); the SF Chronicle reported that around 60% of Republican caucus-goers were self-described evangelical Christians according to exit polls, which is an obvious aid to Mike Huckabee. Michael Medved has a post up at Townhall.com analyzing the strength of Huckabee's evangelical boost in Iowa. Unfortunately, in the process of concluding the bias isn't strong at all, he completely screws up the statistical analysis. I'll critique his post first and then offer my own conclusions about the data he presents.

Michael Medved's conclusions are unorthodox if nothing else. He compares Mike Huckabee's support among Evangelicals (46%) to his support among women, the poor, and the young (40, 41, and 40% respectively) as well as the total of 34% of caucus attendees. This leads him to the conclusion that Evangelicals did not differ significantly from Iowa Republicans as a whole. Well, I have news for Mr. Medved: this is because Iowa as a whole is evangelical. The vote counts from women, the poor, the young, and everyone are skewed by the huge proportion of evangelicals present. Thus no real conclusion can be drawn from the data Mr. Medved offers. He does basically the same analysis with Mitt Romney's numbers, making the argument that the difference between 19% of evangelical voters and 24% of overall voters isn't large, and again missing the skew in the overall numbers from the evangelical numbers. He uses this to argue that Romney's "phoniness" alienated voters in Iowa, without any evidence to support the phoniness (I know it's there, but it's sloppy to not show any since he's giving it as THE reason why Huckabee beat Romney); this conclusion might be valid if the statistics pointed that way, but they don't. There goes half his post right there.

Medved also points out here that Huckabee didn't really win the evangelical vote because he didn't get a majority; he got only 46%. But in the same article he points out that the next most popular candidate among evangelicals was Romney with 19% of the vote; the other 4 major vote-getters split 35% of the evangelical vote. In head-to-head contests among evangelicals, Huckabee beat each other candidate by at least a 70-30 split, and it's highly unlikely that Huckabee is the last choice of the 54% of evangelicals who voted for someone else. Medved fails to recognize how dominating 46% of the vote is in a 6-way race, though it doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize the difference between 46% and the average of 16.66...% if votes were divided evenly.

But Medved really gets in over his head with the latter part of his post, where he attempts to blame Huckabee's low numbers among non-evangelicals on anti-religious bias. His justification? The large difference between the non-evangelical number (13%) and the overall vote. That's right, Huckabee's unpopularity among non-Christian conservatives is due to anti-religious bias, and we know this because Huckabee's just so darn unpopular among the non-Christian conservatives compared to everyone else. Of course, I know what he's actually trying to say, which is that Huckabee's unpopularity among non-Christian conservatives is so far out of line with Iowa Republicans generally that there must be some underlying reason, and anti-religious bias is the most likely (though again he provides no evidence for this claim). But the real reason, again, is the huge number of evangelicals. Because evangelicals make up such a huge percentage of Iowa caucus-goers, and because there's such a huge difference between the evangelical and non-evangelical votes (46% to 13%, for reference), the result will obviously be a large difference between the total vote and the evangelical vote. All one can conclude using Mr. Medved's methods is that evangelicals like Huckabee more than non-evangelicals; the rest of his post is a patchwork of unsupported conclusions and poor analysis of statistics.

This is not to say, however, that no conclusions can be drawn from the data Michael Medved provides. First, a trivial calculation: Huckabee's support among evangelicals was 10% greater than total support in Iowa, while the difference between the non-evangelical and total votes was 21%. Since this data would imply that 70% of the caucus-goers were evangelicals, which differs from the 60% estimate by a significant amount, one can conclude that there was a "decline to state" option; furthermore, voters that took that option liked Huckabee about as much as evangelicals. One can guess that the majority of the "decline-to-state" voters were actually evangelicals.

Second, a more significant calculation: What happens if we make Iowa more representative of the nation as a whole? Iowa's evangelical vote represented 60% of the total, but the percentage of evangelicals nationwide is only about 15%. Since the percentage of Iowa evangelicals is about 40%, and evangelicals turned out in greater numbers to vote for the Huckster (a ratio of 3 to 2), let's be generous and guess that the evangelical vote in a more representative state would make up 25% of the total (a 5 to 3 ratio - I AM being generous here). Then we can extrapolate the voting percentages Mr. Medved provided, with 75% of the hypothetical representative state giving Huckabee 13% of their support (non-evangelicals) and 25% of the state giving Huckabee 46% of their support (evangelicals) for a total of 19.8% of the primary vote in a representative state. By contrast, Mitt Romney would get 75% of this state to give him 33% of the vote and 25% of the state to give him 19% of the vote, for a total of 29%. Though Mr. Medved does not link to the source for the numbers he cites, he does say that the other candidates all had far less support from evangelicals (less than 10% each), so their numbers would be even further boosted by this conversion. So the conclusion one can draw from this set of numbers is that the disproportionate number of evangelicals in Iowa actually played a HUGE role in propelling Mike Huckabee to the top. Of course, we knew that already - even if Michael Medved still has no clue.

Anyway, this is why I still think Huckabee has no realistic chance at the Republican nomination. Without the evangelical base, he has nothing that would appeal to conservative voters. My justification of this position another time.