Jim’s Brain Online

Posted by Jim at September 29th, 2005

In reading Ed’s blog today, I ran across a post that raised some issues that I can’t help but respond to.

So let’s think about Graham’s essay. The gist of it seems to be that high taxes on the rich makes start-ups not worth the risk for venture capitalists because they just don’t pay off well enough. Thus we shouldn’t overtax but we should make the use of wealth transparent so that wealth doesn’t result in great power.

I’ll take the second assumption first and make a couple comments. First, the idea of logging all transactions sounds pretty good. It allows a person to see what wealth affects and it’s already in practice in the form of being able to check who gave what donation to which politician. So presumably we’d take this a little further. I’m curious as to how far though, and, who does the watching. The government? Private firms? Also, what’s transparent? Is every ATM transaction open to everyone’s inspection? Is it limited to people with wealth or am I included?

In all honesty, I don’t really think it’d be possible to monitor financial transactions to the point that everything’s transparent. Even if we could, I’m not convinced that living in a society where everything’s transparent is automatically desirable (I’m open to it though).

Even if we could monitor transactions to the point that wealth’s effect could be monitored, I don’t think that we could monitor the connections between wealthy people. As in “Bob” went to college/is related to “Joe” who’s sister is married to a senator or something. That’s the sort of connection that can get people favors. Monitoring that sort of thing would be hard or impossible.

That being said, let’s get back to the first issue then… I think Graham’s right in that if you tax too much, you do discourage investment and you probably do discourage innovation.

However…

What I’m not sure about is what sort of policies he’s imagining when he talks about shifting money from the poor to the rich, or for that matter, what he means by poor. Is it using exorbitant taxation to move all the poor into a better economic bracket? Or is he against paying to move people off the streets and into homeless shelters? Or is it simply any policy that causes taxation of the wealthy to go past some magic number of return on investment?

Just for the record, I tend to think that exhorbitant taxation seems more likely to result from war and natural disasters for the near future. Even if Bush refuses to raise taxes, we’re going to either have to either pay more or spend less to get rid of the debt. Either way, social spending is likely to be less of a priority for a while.

As such, I’d like to balance the thought that exhorbitant taxation on the rich reduces innovation against another thought: Unmet physical needs also reduce innovation.

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs posits that people need to met certain minimum physical needs before they can concentrate on education and creative, risky ideas. I think the theory’s likely to be right in its general assumptions even though I might want to quibble with what Maslow regarded to be the highest of human needs.

To my mind what matters is the kind of inequality. Inequality isn’t so bad if it means that Bill Gates is exceptionally wealthy but a large group of “poor” people exist that have enough to eat, have air conditioned apartments and can pay their bills. Inequality is very bad thing if it means that there is a large group of poor people living on the streets, having only emergency room healthcare, or digging through dumpsters for food.

The good news is that our proportion of the former sort of poor people is larger than the latter. The bad news is that the latter sort of poor people still exist.

We lose the potential innovation of all those people scrambling for basic survival as long as their basic needs aren’t met. When they don’t have food on the table, they aren’t coming up with the next innovation in online commerce.

What I wish I knew was how long people typically stay in poverty in the US. Also, what effects does growing up in poverty have on a person’s future ability to think and create?

What I’m saying is that taxes vs. profit is a very narrow window to consider the topic of economic inequality under. It may well be that once a person brings the damage of poverty on a person’s potential into the equation, you might find that higher taxes would be a better choice.

I’m not saying I know the answer, I’m just pointing out that there’s more to be considered than taxes and their effect on venture capitalists.

Posted by Jim at September 26th, 2005

My wife gets several catalogs which boggle my mind. They are full of a few cool things, but also a lot of really, really useless crap. The picture below comes from a catalog that is an utter mystery to her as it’s full of psuedo-medieval, fantasy and wiccan items. Not being Wiccan, she has no idea how she got on their list. In addition, it’s worth mentioning that I can’t imagine any of the few Wiccans I know buying a toilet seat that looks like this.

Posted by Jim at September 25th, 2005

On Friday night, Kristen and I watched the movie Saved!

The story:
After discovering that her boyfriend is gay, Mary, a senior at American Eagle Christian High School, attempts to save him by having sex with him. Despite this, he’s committed to an institution for “de-gayification” and she spends the year attempting to hide her pregnancy from the rest of the school. Despite the fact that her pregnancy isn’t known, circumstances related to it manage to alienate her from a friend, the school’s “queen bee” Hillary Fae.

Things get crazier from there, of course. Some things that amused me:
–The white school principal/local pastor attempting to connect with the kids by using ebonics. As in “God is in da house!”
–The massive “Jesus” sign next to the school parking lot.
–Macauley Culkin does well in a role that doesn’t require him to be under 10 and cute.
–Hillary Fae’s attempt to exorcise Mary

In Case You Remember the Controversy:
Despite what some Christians seemed to believe when the film was relesed, the film does not relentlessly mock Christianity. I’d say that all the characters, even the “villain” of the piece, get treated with sympathy and affection. If anything, the film mocks self-centered zealotry as opposed to religion.

As someone who went to a Christian school himself, I found familar elements within the film. Of course, the film concentrates the piety, the Godtalk, and the sillier aspects of evangelical teen culture to a level not seen in a real school. It is a comedy after all. That’s how you get a laugh.

And I laughed a lot while watching it, so it seems worth it.

Posted by Jim at September 24th, 2005

This is more or less where I expected to fit in…

You are a Social Liberal (63% permissive) and an… Economic Moderate (41% permissive) You are best described as a: Centrist Link: The Politics Test on Ok Cupid

Posted by Jim at September 20th, 2005

After hearing a story about it on NPR, I was curious about the film What the Bleep Do We Know? I never got around to seeing in the theater (it may never have come to Grand Rapids), but as it happens my sister bought it for me for my birthday.

So I watched it and overall I enjoyed it. It hit some topics that interest me such as quantum mechanics and biology as well as religion and spirituality. This is okay as one of my favorite professors in seminary had two doctorates, one in physics (dissertation on cosmic dust) and one in theology (dissertation on the Desert Fathers). Most of his theology classes included an interesting conversation between science and religion–more interesting, I might add, than the question of evolution vs. seven day creation argument which is endlessly rehashed everywhere.

The film is a combination of story and documentary illustrating its points with events in the life of the protagonist. The story moves forward with experts in science, medicine, and religion interrupting the scene to lecture. These people aren’t part of the story, but excerpts of interviews with them appear throughout the movie.

The animations that illustrate science are generally pretty good and often funny. They’re worth watching.

So that’s the good part of the movie. It tries to engage a person on the topic of what quantum mechanics and current science of the brain say about reality and it does it well. I enjoyed watching it and found myself thinking about it later.

And that brings us to the bad points of the movie. It does a good job of communicating and once you’re done watching it, you know what it’s trying to say. The trouble is, what happens if you disagree with what it’s trying to say, and, feel like the movie makers are arranging the science to support their views of spirituality?

A major point of the movie is that the way you think about your world has effects on your brain, keeping certain connections between neurons and letting the connection between other ideas drift away. Thus, you can potentially change yourself to a degree.

That’s true–even inspiring–if you feel that your life needs changing.

The trouble is that the film goes further than that, seeming to claim that your thoughts can affect reality. It cites a study that indicated that thoughts affect the shape of a water molecule. In addition, one of the interviewed experts claimed that a group of people meditating affected the homicide rate in Washington D.C.. Other bits of the movie seem to imply that you can mold reality itself to your liking.

That’s not something I can accept without a lot more evidence than this movie provides. Can the cited studies findings be reproduced? When scientists look at them, do they think that the research says what the movie implies it says? You don’t get any of that. You just get the claims. Believe them (or not) as you will.

The movie seems to jump from evidence to claims that sound good on the surface, but might not be true. For example, even if you can somehow affect the crystalization of a water molecule with your mind, you can’t necessarily affect anything else at all.

This brings us to the experts used. Most of them look pretty good. In fact pretty much all of them appear to be capable, intelligent people–even the wackier ones. For example, the expert who claimed that meditation lowered D.C.’s crime rate appears to be a decent physicist. On the other hand, he works for the Maharishi University of Management and was the Natural Law party’s candidate for president at one point. In short, he’s into Transcendental Meditation. Bearing in mind that they argue that meditation is the cure for all social ills, I take his assertion with the same grain of salt I use when Microsoft comes out with a study showing Linux to be inferior to Microsoft Windows Server 2003. I just don’t believe that he can be objective on this issue.

Similarly, I also have huge reservations about including Ramtha in the film. Ramtha is a spirit “channeled” by a woman named J. Z. Knight. J. Z. Knight appears throughout the movie just like the various physicists and doctors, commenting on reality in an odd accent. Though they don’t mention it in the movie, Ramtha ruled Atlantis at one point, making that accent an Atlantean accent. Personally, I see no reason to believe that Ramtha exists. As such, I question the judgement of anyone who regards J. Z. Knight to be an expert in anything other than marketing.

The bottom line? Watch the film, it is entertaining. Most of the experts actually seem to be experts on the topics that they are talking about and even Ramtha will at least keep your attention. If you’re looking for spiritual guidence or trying to understand the sociology or pschology of belief, however, look elsewhere,

Posted by Jim at September 17th, 2005

A couple weeks ago, I noticed Topher writing about his sole experience of playing role playing games. It was in the comments of someone else’s post about Top Secret. Basically what happened is that he died only minutes into the game and ended up entertaining himself for the next 2 hours while the other people played on.

It reminded me of one of my formative moments in playing games. In high school, a local computer store turned into a bit of a hangout for the people who regularly called a local BBS (run by the owner of the store). Eventually we ended up playing RPG’s at the store on Saturday afternoons.

During one of these sessions, I made a character only to have him destroyed minutes into the game. I spent the next three hours on the BBS, fuming slightly and waiting for the game to end.

Unlike Topher, it was not my first time playing so I didn’t end up leaving with the impression that this was what happened every time. Like Topher, I left with the impression that I had not had a good time. This impression wasn’t at all mollified by the GM explaining the reason for letting it happen. Basically, it fit with the mood he was trying to create and letting my character just get hurt or allowing me to come in with a new character wouldn’t have fit with the mood he was trying to create.

In fairness, he was right about it not fitting the mood, but, I decided immediately that whatever my artistic intentions with regard to role playing games, I would have to do it without killing characters. People come to these games to game and not to sit for 3 hours doing nothing.

Since then I’ve come to realize that this rule doesn’t fit all situations. In fact, I’d argue that as a result I’ve made some mistakes as a GM.

An Example: Top Secret
It’s the end of a summer long Top Secret campaign. The players have made it to the secret underwater lair of an organization that has been trying to start nuclear war. The leader has a device in his hand that will (if he but presses a button) rain nuclear destruction on certain carefully chosen cities and will probably end civilization since the US and USSR will inevitably retaliate against each other. Trouble is, blowing him away will likely result in everyone’s death since gunfire will cause a leak.

The obvious solution is to wrestle with him for control of the device. The problem is that he can press the button long before they cross the room to him.

At this point, there is a problem and it partially results from my GM’ing style. I tend to set up situations that seem interesting to me and give no thought at all to the solutions. When you think it through they’ve got a choice: save the world and probably die themselves or die and save the world.

At any rate, that’s the most obvious choice. Some players were all for dying. Some were against. Play came to a stop as people debated what would happen next and play ground to a complete halt with at least one player appealling to me to provide a solution.

In an effort to get play moving again without automatically killing everyone, I had one of the non-player characters with them (who had an outrageous accuracy with a particular pistol) shoot the device. Figuring that hitting the device slowed the bullet down enough to not instantly destroy the integrity of the base’s walls, we went on from there.

Even now, I’m not particularly happy with that one.

Another Example: Magus
It’s the second to the last episode of a Magus campaign. This one is set at a university in northern Michigan where contemporary mages are trained (for the curious, the campaign idea predates Harry Potter).

It’s summer break and as with each summer break in the campaign, I’ve had the characters do a longer story arc off campus. In the tradition of Dante and C. S. Lewis (but minus the quality of either), this story arc ended up in Hell.

Gabriel attacked an enemy of his family in a way that could have resulted in his death. In fact, Joe, Gabriel’s player, explained to me that he was totally okay with that and it would be an appropriate end to the character. I wasn’t sure what to do. Here’s why:

1. Having him die would leave Joe without a character for the last game of the campaign, something that just seemed wrong.
2. Major metaphysical issues that I hadn’t thought through. If you’re alive, can you die in Hell? I hadn’t thought out that particular rule of the universe and it seemed too big an issue for me to decide just then.

Here’s what happened: Gabriel survived the destruction going on around him. That was okay, but dramatically it would have been a lot better to have him die and I regret that. Probably what I should have done is cut off the episode just at the moment of Gabriel’s action, thereby stalling for time, allowing me to hopefully come to a better conclusion. It would have been a great cliffhanger for one and, generally speaking, time allows me to come to the better choice than the spur of the moment.

I’m pretty sure that Joe wrote about this incident on a blog at one point, but I wasn’t able to find it anywhere (Joe, if you’re reading, feel free to point me to a link).

Conclusions
I don’t have any particularly novel conclusions about this issue. My bias continues to be that characters shouldn’t be killed thoughtlessly. In general, it should only happen if the player’s okay with it, but doing it well is determined by the details of the situation.

All I know for sure is that it’s something that I’ll need to work on in the future.

Posted by Jim at September 13th, 2005

A couple days a week, I work for 3 hours and watch kids for the rest of the day. During the time that I’m working, I sometimes allow them to watch television or a movie. Today, I allowed them to watch Sesame Street and Reading Rainbow.

What I had not anticipated is that PBS might be attempting to help kids process hurricane Katrina. Thus, Sesame Street had a hurricane today. The power went off, Big Bird’s nest got ruined, and he’ll have to live with Gordon.

Once that was over, Reading Rainbow came on. The topic for today? Hurricanes. Thus, Abby has been talking about hurricanes for the last three hours.

I don’t know what came on after that (I had Abby turn off the tv), but I fully expect that if I allow them to watch Arthur this afternoon, I will find that Elwood City (Arthur’s hometown) has been demolished.

Posted by Jim at September 10th, 2005

Undoubtedly you’ve probably read a few (okay, a lot) of hurricane Katrina related blog entries by now. I’ll just take advantage of this opportunity to make a couple observations.

1. Though the government response wasn’t particularly effective, I don’t feel a need (at this moment) to blame the current leadership of either Louisiana or the US for the problems. It’s not that I believe that either is without fault. It’s just that I don’t really have the necessary information to feel confident of my opinions at the moment.

I did, however, feel somewhat bothered to learn that the reason that New Orleans didn’t have levees that could stand up to level 5 hurricanes was due to politicians feeling that the public probably wouldn’t have wanted to pay for it. They may have been right, but it’s pretty obvious now that we the public didn’t save any money on this deal.

Learning that funds that were originally earmarked to improve levees (during the Clinton administration) were diverted for use in Iraq doesn’t make me happy either. It’s worth mentioning that according to the guy involved in planning the improvements, the changes wouldn’t have stopped everything. That being said, it would have been better than the current disaster.

2. I’m sick of hearing people say things like, “New Orleans shouldn’t be rebuilt because it’s mostly under sea level.” Using that logic, you should probably evacuate a large portion of the Netherlands immediately, but yet the Dutch don’t seem to be going anywhere.

In the course of rebuilding the levee system, it might be worth checking out the Dutch system. Apparently one of the problems New Orleans has is that thanks to the levee system, the city is actually lower with respect to sea level than it was before the levees were put in. Before the levees, the place would flood, depositing sediment all over and keeping land at a certain level. Now all the sediment just goes straight into the Gulf of Mexico.

To avoid similar problems, the Dutch apparently constructed two sets of dykes, the outermost of which has an opening when the tides are low (and closes when tides are high). Supposedly, this allows them to keep sediment that might otherwise be lost.

I don’t know how this would be adapted to New Orleans, but it seems like something worth thinking about. New Orleans isn’t the only city in the world under sea level. Hopefully the reconstruction will build on other places’ successful ideas.

I know I said two observations, but I’ll add a third…
3. Race: I’ve heard a lot of people suggest that it would have gone better if the people left behind were largely white rather than black. I don’t have the information necessary for me to be confident in saying that that’s either true or false. That being said, I could imagine race subtlely affecting the process in a number of ways. For example, whites sometimes associate being black with ciminality. This might result in a less trusting attitude toward black New Orleans residents on the part of National guard troops. Similarly, it might cause reporters to view stories of rape and violence with greater credibility than otherwise (and according to some people, some of those stories don’t hold up).

All I know for sure is that race still affects things even if the way it affects things isn’t completely obvious.

So anyway, this is a bit of my jumbled thinking about Katrina. Take it for what it’s worth.

Posted by Jim at September 5th, 2005

So, as mentioned earlier, I’m hoping to run a campaign one of these days. The premise is simply that the players are among the staff of Earth’s embassy to a massive, star-spanning empire. The story will hopefully include psi abilities, archeaology, revenge for past wrongs, and the aftereffects of using power.

If the life of a civilization were likened to a long day at the bar, this campaign would begin just before the bartender begins to kick everyone out and end soon after everyone’s walked out the door.

I’m not interested in game design as much as I am in creating an interesting story. Despite this, I am curious about game design and decided I wanted to use some variation of Dogs conflict resolution system in my next campaign.

There are a couple things I like about the idea.
1. If I use someone else’s system, I don’t have to start from scratch: This is particularly useful when you don’t really know the Forge theory at all, are mildly curious, and are willing to watch things go horribly wrong due to changing what you don’t understand–and I am. Thus I’m taking things, modifying them only if they don’t fit, adding a couple things, and moving on from there.
2. There are some things I just like about the system: Escalation is among them. I’m neither for nor against the idea of fallout, but it works (and even seems necessary) within the system, so I’m not changing that either. The system also gives a lot of emphasis to the major attributes of the character and that fits with this campaign.

Changes and Modifications
The changes and modifications stem from some basic differences in the setting and personal preference. Dogs uses attributes as the base dice for any conflict resolution and traits as additional dice. Thus, if someone wants to shoot somebody, they role the combination of acuity and will. If they want to run after someone, they use a combination of heart and body.

Somewhere along the line though, I decided that I wanted to skip the conventional attributes found in role playing games (all variations on strength, intelligence, willpower, dexterity and endurance) and just have people’s psychic abilities be their attributes. My thoughts are that if they want to be exceptionally intelligent or exceptionally strong, let them take it as a trait.

Thus people’s attributes would be:
Telepathy: The ability to read, communicate with, and attack people directly mind to mind.
Telekinesis: The ability move objects with your mind. This can also include molecules, allowing a person to heat or cool objects
Clairvoyance: The ability to see things happening somewhere else. In this game, someone that can do clairvoyance can also see the past, future, and even obscure the same events for other clairvoyants.
Body: Control of the one’s body. This ranges from increased longevity and healing to the development of physical abilities like strength or eidetic memory.
Teleportation: Hard to do and not particularly dependable in this game, teleportation allows a person to instantaneously move from one point to another.

If I wanted to be consistent with the Dogs’ conflict resolution system, I’d have created a “psi” attribute and had all the psi abilities be traits instead. Because I didn’t, I’ve had to rethink some things.

Dogs uses escalation to create tension. Each conflict has the potential to move from words to hands to handheld weapons to guns. With each level comes a higher level of tension and a greater degree of damage if everything goes wrong. I like the idea. Unfortunately, each level comes with using a specific attribute combination and (for the setting) the progression from hands to guns is totally intuitive.

Since the setting I’ve got has a different style of attributes and a setting that is less intuitive than the Old West, I simply can’t do it that way.

What I’m doing instead is:
The person who starts the conflict chooses the attribute it’s based on by his/her actions. If it’s verbal, that makes it body plus the appropriate traits. If it’s a telepathic attack, that makes it telepathy plus the appropriate traits.

At any point, another person may escalate the situation by bringing in another attribute, forcing everyone to reroll from the beginning only now (for example) the attributes in use are telepathy and telekinesis. Also, the potential for fallout has gone from d4 to d6. Bring in another attribute and it goes up to a d8 and later a d10. By the time 4 attributes are involved, it’s gone up to d10 and no more attributes can be brought in. You’ve no choice but play out the hand or give.

Thus, people continually have to choose between bringing in their best abilities and suffering fallout. By the time any decent number of people are playing, you’ll have most abilities in use and the corresponding results will be unpredictable and potentially disastrous.

An Addition:
I’m adding something to the post conflict portion of things that I call “Bargain with Fate.” Basically, rather than actually take an outrageous amount of fallout, you’ve got the option of suggesting some task or action that pushes forward one of your destinies that you defined in character creation. Suggest something that works with the story so far, set a time limit (within X number of game sessions) and grab some dice out of the common pool for the task. I’m not sure how many dice are in the common pool, but I’m thinking that if you don’t even try to do the task, they disappear forever. If you do at least try, they go back into the pool. If you succeed, you add to them. I don’t know how much though. Still working on that.

Why add this? A couple reasons. Unlike Dogs, the basic unit for this game is a story arc and not an episode. This is a mechanic that may encourage characters to take action on their goals. It may also mean that an episode may be taken over by someone’s need to do something, but that’s okay. I can workaround it.

Another reason is that thematically this game tries to be a starspanning, bomb throwing epic. When you’ve got a few characters with big visions, you’ve got a dynamic between a person’s vision and the effects of that vision on everyone else. Having people grab dice from a common pool means that you can take common property and lose it, add to it, or at minimum make it temporarily unavailable. It makes what’s true on a large level true on a personal one as well. Whether it’s a good idea is still open. Can’t know till I try it…

Posted by Jim at September 3rd, 2005

Kristen is training for the Grand Rapids Marathon. As part of her training schedule, she ran a 15 mile run this morning. While she was running down College, she noticed live chickens in the street and photographed them with her phone.

Note: The picture has been mildly messed with in Photoshop for clarity. I admit though, that even after the messing around, the picture is not much better than Loch Ness Monster clarity level.