Greg Sanders

Critique: The Four Loves by C.S. Lewis (Chapter 3)

Lewis is consistent in arguing that greater things build from lesser, so affection, the first of the four human loves he considers, is basic but no less important for that (for an introduction to this project, see the prior post).

Affection for Lewis is shaped by persistence, familiarity, and roles. Childhood friends, family members, pets, schoolmates, and beloved nurses or teachers are all listed as examples.

This warm comfortableness, this satisfaction in being together, takes in all sorts of objects. It is indeed the least discriminating of loves. . . But almost anyone can become an object of Affection; the ugly; the stupid; even the exasperating. . . It ignores barriers of age, sex, class, and education.

He then proceeds to cite the four animal friends in the Wind in the Willows as examples of “the amazing heterogeneity of possible between those bound by affection.” 

Co-reader Monica was charmed by one particular passage that notes how affection is enhanced by being different from the classic conception of soul mates or the like:

Made for us? Thank God, no. They are themselves, odder than you could have believed and worth far more than we guessed.

The familiarity that is its basis can also be its limitation. Affection can be tied to the person as we came to know them, good and ill, just as one’s sense of someone’s height may be set by how they stood out when we first met them and not their stature in maturity. Even a change for the better may be regretted. The gift-love of affection is what we can offer and not necessarily what the other person needs. In many cases, for parents and teachers in particular, “the proper aim of giving is to put the recipient in a state where he no longer needs our gift. . . Thus a heavy task is laid upon this Gift-Love. It must work towards its own abdication.”

Finally, the chapter makes an interesting distinction between spiritual health and mental health:

But, greed, ego-ism, self-deception, and self-pity are not unnatural or abnormal in the same sense as astigmatism or a floating kidney. For who, in Heaven's name, would describe as natural or normal the man from whom these failings were wholly absent?

So, how can affection grow into something more dynamic? The next love, friendship, will explore that, but its definitions are far thornier. Nonetheless, I was intrigued by Lewis’s strengths and failings and this next chapter is also the one that justifies the critique. 

Image Source: Nisa yeh on Flickr, used under a creative commons language.

Online video won't replace teachers, but it can help educate

I read a fair number of skeptics of massive online university systems, and they tend to be emphasize that the personal attention and labor of teaching cannot easily be automated. Most of us aren't autodidacts which is why public libraries themselves didn't make schools obsolete.

However, if you're motivated, you can learn things from books alone and I think that video courses, like the Ling Space by friend of the blog and Japan traveler Moti Lieberman, can add something to what we can learn from books. The recent episode on phonemes, the individual sounds that make up language, is a great example of this. Moti is an engaging speaker who actually has taught before, which is the equivalent for this medium of the way good writing can draw you in.

But that misses the real added value that comes from the video: incorporation of sound and images. In linguistics, sounds are very important. For those of us who don't know the international phonetic alphabet, we need someone to speak different pronunciations in languages we don't know for them to really sink in. Pure audio can help there of course, but much as teachers use blackboards or dry erase markers, video can help emphasize what concepts are related to the audio you're hearing.

I found this really valuable, in part because I'm a terrible student of languages. I have some French, less Japanese, and even less Mandarin despite having done classes of varying  duration in all three. I also went through speech therapy as a kid, so I have an intense personal connection with the way the t, and particularly the th sound is made. Language tends to impact us all, albeit in different ways. While I'll never be a full-on student of the subject, some prior parts of my life are making more sense now that I understand some of the underlying concepts. If you're curious at all, I think this might be a good place to start, as it shows what you can get from video that you might not from another non-classroom approach.

Programming note; Planning to resume travel blogging and soon to post on the protests in Hong Kong. I'm sorry for the break, it was driven not by the one night of LWV work but by a larger set of end of the fiscal year deadlines. Happily FY2015 doesn't look nearly so frantic.

The Wind Rises

The wind is rising! . . . We must try to live!
- The Graveyard by the Sea by Paul Valéry

The Wind Rises is the story of an aeronautical engineer, of dreams of flight, of the gifts and price of love, and about the choices we make as the world around us falls apart. It is the last masterpiece of Hayao Miyazaki, the famed Japanese anime director, but the setting is the all too real-world Japan during the interbellum period. The film is subtle and understated: I believe it will reward repeat viewings, but dream sequences and time skips may also leave first-time viewers a bit confused. This fictionalized tale of Jiro Horikoshi, designer of the famed Japanese Zero fighter, does demand patience and an interest in the mechanics of flight, but should be quite accessible to American audiences and those who do not typically watch animation. I recommend it as a true work of art, one that wrestles with challenging questions and largely overcomes its flaws. To go any further requires a deeper discussion of the plot.

Discussing those flaws requires grappling with the thorniest question of the premise: how does it handle the war? In abstract terms, this film is a tragedy. The more you know of history, the more signs and portents are at hand. By the midway point, this is made quite explicit by a Cassandra who intrudes with mentions of just what was happening in the world in the early 1930s. I think that character is key to the film, although a venerable friend found him off-putting.

Moving on to spoiler-filled reviews, Inkoo Kang in L.A. Weekly and Devin Faraci do speak to the tension in the piece but I think Film Critic Hulk [and the shouting-free SBT] effectively retorts most charges. I sympathize with critics’ desire for a film focused on challenging revisionists (and indeed, Miyakazi has done so in writing). I in fact have one such Japanese film on my shelf, the Human Condition, which I intend to watch before writing up my final thoughts on The Wind Rises. However, The Wind Rises is a subtle knife and not a manifesto, and both have a role in changing minds. While I view it as a great film, I do think the critics hit their mark when they complain of the absence of the foreign victims of Imperial Japan from the piece. Manchuria is referenced and this is a home front piece, unlike Das Boot which effectively depicted a historical a take no prisoners policy. However, I do think that the frontlines that Horikoshi was so distant from could have been depicted in his dreams even as he assiduously ignored them in his waking life.

Flaws acknowledged, this is an important film. We do not live in uniquely dangerous times, but nonetheless the wind rises.

Image credit: Promotional stills taken from pieces by paulselluloid and Barbara Chai.

[Update: Added a positive review that doesn’t use all caps.]

2013 Otakon Plans

We’re getting a late start on things, but have already picked our badges. It wasn’t that hard of a choice as we hadn't heard of anything. Disappointingly, Wolf Children is not a Spice and Wolf sequel. Thus, we both went with Crabby.

The schedule below is tentative. We may decide to shunt things aside for Dealers Room/Artist Alley or go with friends to things that sound cool.  Also, I may work in some Lupin III or Anime Music Videos at random.

I had a few things I wanted to hit Friday evening, but sadly work precluded that.

Saturday

• 1 p.m. Trying to get Yoko Kanno tickets
• 2:30  p.m. 50 years of anime openings (scheduling unclear)
• 3:45 p.m. Ghibli Girls Tribute
• 5:00 p.m . Legend of Korra or Otakon Fan Produced Film Festival
• Dinner
• 10 p.m. Saturday Night Fan Parodies

Sunday

• 10 p.m. Panel to the West
• 11:30 a.m. Ace Attorney All Stars or I want to know more! 30 years of books about anime/manga/otaku or Lining up for Yoko Kanno.
• 1 p.m. Yoko Kanno Concert

Just had my first experience with Capital Bikeshare

Capital Bikeshare is a subscription system in D.C. which allows you to check out bikes at one location and return them to another. If you check the bike in again fast, in 30 minutes I think, there's no charge. I got a subscription when I saw a discount for them earlier, it took a few days to get my pass so you can't just grab and go when first you feel interested. Anyways, this is the first time I've used them in large part because during my earlier attempts I underestimated the force it took to remove a checked out bike.

There is an app called spotcycle that helps you find stations, although it doesn't seem to be integrated into Google Maps in such a way that helps you pull up directions. I ended up just running spotcycle while walking and then pulling it up again when pulled over at a corner near my destination. To the degree that your cycling between familiar locales this won't be a problem but it can be a bit trickier when first starting out.

On the whole I found biking in D.C. and easier prospect than I expected. There's a reasonable number of bikers about and a fair number of bike lanes if you're willing to adjust your route a bit. Tonight, I'd been making a trip to Adams Morgan, a neighborhood notably without a Metro stop, and bikeshare really does seem like a great way to do it.

I'll keep experimenting with the system. I'm curious whether I can use it to get to my occasional appointments at Georgetown University Hospital or as a means of reasonably reliable conveyance to Union Station when the hour is late and Metro trains are less frequent. Time will tell, but I had a good time riding so I'm happy to experiment. Now I just need to bring my helmet into work.

The destinations themselves, Bourbon and Bier Baron, were quite pleasant. I'm not a huge bar person but they both offered a pretty good experience on a Wednesday night.

And there he did both knock and call

We were visited by what we think was a toad on Sunday. He or she was resting directly next to our door bell, and indeed rested there through the night. Despite the title of the post she did not ring the bell or in fact come a'courting but it was still quite neat to see her there each time we stepped outside. Our other unusual stoop guests are slugs. They haven't ever climbed up by the door but they do seem to have a daily commute across our sidewalk. Out of respect for the lengths they go to get from one yard to the next we do actively try to avoid stepping on them. Sadly, I must confess that this required me getting steadily more conscientious about where I rest my feet, especially in the dark. I believe that two slugs over the years were victims to my inattention.

No such fate awaited our toad visitor. Instead she simply left by morning. Perhaps she was acting as a herald of good news, as my laptop arrived restored two days later much to my delight. Thanks again to my mother who was so kind as to loan me hers since our return from Egypt.

The Second City does Baltimore: Review (open through 2/20/2011)

This was my first live comedy show in a while. It wasn't for lack of opportunities; comedy is actually fairly common for D.C.-area fundraisers and as a teen I got a fair number of Capitol Steps CDs. However, I fell out of the habit much as I fell out of the habit of watching TV news. Between the Daily Show, Colbert, funny things on the internet shared by friends, and the sometimes comedic stylings of a range of specialist blogs (for international political economy humor, Dan Drezner is your man) I could get great humor on topics of interest for free. As a result, my standards for humor I was paying for went way up and I let various opportunities pass me by.

The show this afternoon makes me think I may have made a mistake and not just that time when I missed a show by leaving my tickets at home. Second City is a well known Chicago comedy troupe that I'd considered catching on prior visits to the Windy City. They do a mix of scripted skits, songs, and improvisation with highly talented ensembles that are feeder teams to various television comedy shows. For this particular show, they sent two of their writers to get to know Baltimore to give the show a local flavor. I'd say about a quarter of the sketches felt like they could just be performed locally, another quarter might have worked elsewhere but were adapted to Baltimore, and the other half included shout outs but would have been funny most anywhere.

This was a formula that really worked for me. I got most of the local jokes; my mother and her family are from Baltimore and the suburbs and since I moved up to Columbia I hit the city more often for a range of reasons. The real advantage was that it forced fresher material without mandating the headline chasing that can be common for topically oriented shows. The advantage over your average locally-oriented show is that Second City brings consistently intelligent writing and a top notch ensemble. [For the scripted parts, the writers were Megan Grano and T.J. Shanoff. Their introduction to the program was also funny, so I think I will try to follow their work in the future.]

[Warren Johnson was my] favorite actor for his sheer range. His role in the first musical number was questioning some of the rose-tinted glasses nostalgia from perspective of African American Baltimoreans, but his subsequent roles were by no means token and included a wide range of impersonations and shticks.

Favorite bits: the musical numbers (A take on city nostalgia, The Wire: The Musical, a dirge on the fall of the Baltimore Sun set to a tune from Fiddler on the Roof, and a musical revue of Baltimore's past mayors; a real estate agent bit; a crowd feedback session featuring doctors (princes of the city), A-Rabbers (not to be confused with people from the Middle East), and seventh year MICA students. You will notice the local humor pattern here, but that shouldn't be taken as a slam on the rest of the material. Without the range of other bits, which had some of the strongest punch lines, the Baltimore stuff would have risked getting too [incestuous] and some of Kate's friends who didn't have strong local ties did get a bit bored. Overall, most of them had a good time too and I'm really glad they invited me.

This is not by any means a show aimed at children, but for anyone else with any Baltimore ties I'd recommend grabbing tickets while you still have a chance. The venue, Centerstage's Head Theater, offered a fair amount of seating while keeping an intimate feel. It did feel much more like a club than a theater; there was a bar in the back and there were tables with the chairs in the central seating area. We were all quite satisfied with our balcony seating: no tables but just one row so the view is great. If you pronounce Baltimore with the full three syllables and don't care about the local humor, than I'd definitely recommend catching a Second City show when they're doing a theme that grabs you. The tickets aren't cheap but it's an experience you aren't likely to get elsewhere. My only caveat: it is Baltimore by and large from the perspective of the reasonably comfortable middle class; they don't ignore racial issues but the Baltimore of Ta-Nehisi Coates' Beautiful Struggle is mostly seen through the filter of The Wire and a mocking of overwrought fears.

Buy tickets here. Prices go up some on February 11th and the show closes on the 20th.

[Update: Added in the names.]

We will visit over all this pavilion and we will call it... The Land. (2011-01-23)

No sudden but inevitable betrayals here, just lots of neat things to see at The Land pavilion in Epcot.  Hello, this is intrepid guest blogger Kate!

When we first got in to the park, I had my requisite oohing and ahhing moment at the giant silver faceted sphere (actually called Spaceship Earth, after the ride it contains, but we'll get to that later) before we headed off to The Land pavilion.  Our guidebook highly recommended Soarin', a recently installed ride in said pavilion, so we decided to go straight there and get Fast Passes for it so we could be assured a space.

I'll take a moment here to explain about Fast Passes, which we used quite extensively at the Magic Kingdom the next day.  Basically, you take your ticket to the entrance of the ride/attraction and insert it into one of the Fast Pass machines.  It prints out a pass for each ticket.  The Fast Pass has an hour window in which you can return and get into an express line.  So, for example, earlier in the day you might be able to get a Fast Pass for 11:00 to 12:00, but by midday you might be looking at 5:17 to 6:17.  For the really popular rides, Fast Passes run out by midafternoon.  Captain EO was Fast Passed out by the time we got into the park, which couldn't have been more than half an hour after opening.

We got our Fast Passes pretty early, but we still had two hours before our window opened.  We decided to go on the Living with the Land ride, right next to the entrance for Soarin'.  This is a boat ride through several animatronic landscapes, such as a jungle, a desert, and a prairie, followed by some environmental discussion on the effects of humans on the land (i.e. over-farming and deforestation versus conservation efforts) and finally a brief tour through the actual working fish farm tanks and greenhouse right on the premises.  This is possibly the only remaining part of Epcot that's stayed true to Walt Disney's original vision of a place to actually live and work.

For an extra $18/person, you can take a walking tour of the greenhouse, which lasts about an hour.  We were intrigued by what we saw on the boat ride and wanted a closer look.  I admit to a love of greenhouses in winter and an interest in cool biology stuff passed down to me from my mom, a former high school biology teacher.  So we decided to spend the extra money and take the tour.  They gave us nametags to fill out and told us where to meet up for the tour star.

We had about half an hour to burn before the tour started, so we went to see The Circle of Life, a film starring Timon and Pumbaa (with a guest appearance by Simba) that's billed as an ecological fable.  It was a little preachy, but not overly annoying, and I'm a fan of the original Lion King movie, so it was fairly cute.  I admit to being a bit worried that we'd be late for our tour, but the timing worked out perfectly, continuing our streak.

Photographs taken by Kate and family available under a creative commons license. Slideshow to be included in the second half of the post.

Unexpectedly pleased with the revised WP Outlook section

While I still certainly mourn the loss of Bookworld, I’m happy to say that Outlook seems to have stepped up its game as a result of the merger. There’s been a few good long form reviews, the short reviews are shorter than I’d like but still useful, and the articles have been an often interesting mixed bag.

I’m particularly impressed with the 5 Myths about X pieces.  I often hate those as they tend to beat down a strawman or overstate the contrarian case.  The last few have been pretty solid, and I find that very reassuring.

So kudos.  I hope it keeps up.

Belated addition: Tales from DRCongo

My friends Laura Darby and Adam Singh have been keeping up a blog that I've been unfortunately neglecting.  At present they've got limited net access, but there's a rich backlog telling of their work in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.  They've been working with orphaned chimpanzees whose mothers were often killed by hunters.  Here's the back story if you want to know more. 

Since I'm using a picture of her with a chimp, I'm throwing on the disclaimer she includes with such pictures:

Disclaimer: Chimpanzees shown here are not pets, nor should they be considered as such. Chimpanzees are wild animals that belong in the forest, and the pet trade fuels a vicious cycle of wild chimpanzee slaughter and abuse. Chimps shown here are orphans and must be taken care of in a sanctuary environment that mimics as best it can thenatural environment of chimpanzees and attempts to minimize the trauma already inflicted on the infants.

Chimpanzees do NOT make good pets. They are wild animals, unmanageable in a domestic setting, strong and willful and dangerous. For more information, please visit:

www.hsus.org/wildlife/issues_facing_wildlife/should_wild_...

Picture by Laura Darby used without permission but she's a close friend and this is to promote her blog, so I think she'll allow it.

Sweet little lies

Last Sunday there was a fascinating article on lying in the WPost (not to be confused with the not so fascinating lying in an op-ed column).  It was prompted by the new series "Lie to Me" based on the professional work of Paul Ekman.  Sounds like a fun series, but I think I may check out his books first.  The article draws on his work as well as several other field experts. 

The main argument of the article is that we're bad at detecting lies.  Only about 1% of people are truth wizards and great at doing it.  They have to be able to live with uncertainty. Even those good at spotting lies tend only to be capable of doing it in a professional capacity.  We theoretically could get good at detecting lies in our personal life, but it would mean abandoning trust and it's not really worth it.

So, for the fun stuff, here's the unconscious tells:

• Smiling often means you're hiding your emotions.
• Emblems, e.g. giving a thumbs up, can be useful but only if you can notice it mid-gesture and not the final results.
• Illustrations, e.g. talking with your hands, tends to decrease when you're lying as you're more actively controlling your gestures.
• Manipulations, e.g. biting your nails, are not a good way of detecting lies but are widely thought to be the most obvious tells.
• Leaning forward, nodding, speaking at the same speed and volume as the person you're talking too tends to inspire trust.

There's more including neuroscience. It's worth reading the whole thing.

I think I may study some of these articles before I try fooling with social mechanics for RPGs.  Realism is an unattainable and ultimately unwise goal.  However, social mechanics should at least evoke how these things actually work.  Alternately, one can make a system based on evoking how they tend to work in film and such.  However, I do believe in learning via gaming, so may as well get it right.

Maryland Solidarity

So apparently famous Marylander Michael Phelps is facing some consequences for having been photographed smoking pot.  Doesn’t sound like it’s anything too bad, some sponsorship non-renewals and a three month competition suspension.  Apparently the Sheriff in the relevant jurisdiction is investigating but only because he feels he has to.  I can respect that, but a better solution would just be to not pester famous or non-famous people about this.  I have read that there are actually very few people in jail for possession of pot in and of itself, but I don’t really care about non-violent dealing either.

I’ve never touched the stuff and even if it’s legalized don’t really intend to.  I’ve got strong inhibitions about smoking anything and I’ve no desire to lose them.  But since this is kind of a local story, I think it’s good practice to point out when the emperor has no clothes.

Bleg: Vote Light Rail

For those of you that support better transit in Maryland, the Post is doing an online survey of preferred options for the Purple Line.  Light Rail is handily winning, but since polling is rare for this sort of thing, it’s worth a little effort to run up the margins.  So far there’s less than 900 votes, so if ten of you vote we can move it a percentage point closer to 90%.  Pretty dang simple since it’s a one question poll, assuming you have a Post login already, but I’m assuming most of you that live in the area do.

Now as to the content of the article.  It’s a piece by Katherine Shaver noting the substantial support for light rail despite higher cost.

Here’s the summary of the arguments:

The state's study estimated that by 2030 bus rapid transit would generate as many as 58,900 daily trips while light rail would attract as many as 68,100. A light-rail line's capacity also could be increased more easily than a busway's, supporters say.

Most important, rail supporters say, fixed tracks attract developers who want to ensure that people have a fast and permanent way to ride transit to their shops, restaurants, condominiums and office buildings…

Busway supporters say a bus rapid transit system would bear little resemblance to the lumbering buses to which Washingtonians are accustomed. The buses are sleeker and roomier, proponents say, and outperform traditional models by using exclusive lanes and stopping much less frequently, only at designated stations.

I think the key argument is capacity.  The buses are basically maxing out around 60k whereas Light Rail can go a good deal higher.  Basically you can only run any sort of transit so often, so once you hit that point raising capacity means longer vehicles which means rail.  There are busways in the DC Metro area that certainly could use moves towards bus rapid transit, but in an already developed area like the DC Metro area it’s so dang politically hard to get the designated right of way, even for busses, that you might as well fully exploit it.  This is particularly the case when you have a county owned right of way like the Georgetown Branch which is perfect for rail because it was already a rail line in the past.

Anyways, please take a minute to vote.  The more overwhelming the margin, the easier to convince officials of public support.

Purple Line hearings on Wednesday at UMD and Saturday at Montgomery College Silver Spring Campus

For those of you unfamiliar with the project, it’s an addition to the D.C. Metro transit system that would connect the inner-suburbs.  When the Metro was designed it took a spoke approach to let commuters get into and out of the city.  However, at this point, a lot of travel takes place between the suburbs and would be well served by a dedicated light rail line..  For more, see purplelinenow.com.

The environmental impact study just came out and their seeking citizen comments.  Here’s some scheduling details and an alternative for those who can’t make it:

You may also email testimony by January 14, 2009. Simply send your comments to[email protected] with "Purple Line DEIS Comment" in the subject line and include your name and address in the message.

 

I put my three minutes worth of speech in at the New Carrolton event this past Friday.  I mostly covered all the ways I could have used a good high capacity line while growing up in this area and waiting most of my life for anything to happen.  On Sunday a post editorial does a pretty good job of explaining the advantages of doing light rail over bus.

The report does conclude that bus rapid transit is more cost-effective than light rail. But those numbers are based on estimates through 2030. Light rail requires a bigger capital investment initially but is sturdier and, in many cases, more cost-effective in the long run. If Metro, which has operated for more than 30 years, is any indication, the Purple Line is likely to operate far beyond 2030. Light rail also provides more flexibility in the probable event that ridership exceeds estimates — just add more rail cars. Even critics of light rail acknowledge that the trains will be significantly faster than buses.

If you want a quick way to show your support, here’s a petition to elected officials and the Purple Line Facebook group.

Image from http://www.innerpurpleline.org/

Warm is good

Fiance pointed me to this article in the Baltimore Sun on the connection between feeling warm and how you judge other people:

To their surprise, they found that people who held a cup of hot coffee for 10 to 25 seconds warmed to a perfect stranger. Holding a cup of iced coffee had the opposite effect.

If you want to make a good impression, advised study author Lawrence E. Williams, a University of Colorado at Boulder assistant professor of marketing, a fresh cup of coffee "may bias the situation in your favor."

Interesting. Also I think this hypothesis was anticipated a few years agoby the Grand Theft Auto series.

Why do we like Hamlet?

Noah Millman of the American Scene has a spectacular review of Hamlet as staged at the Stratford Festival. I would love to catch that staging, although I doubt I will. Nonetheless, this is the best piece of criticism I’ve read in a while and I read a fair amount of good criticism.

A sample:

Why do we take to Hamlet [the character]?

The false but easy way to make the necessary connection with the audience is simply to make Hamlet more appealing – play him as less brutal to Ophelia than the text directs; cut lines that play up his brutality; and so forth. The more true but also too easy way to make the connection is to play up Hamlet’s weakness, his psychic vulnerability – make us believe that, on some level, he really is mad. Carlson takes the harder, truest route, and aims to win us over by sheer display of intelligence. His Hamlet is peevish and dispeptic, but he runs rings around everyone else in the play. He does not want to be alone, but he is alone, perforce, and that loneliness has made him bitter. And you can see him, over and over again, trying to find someone who will not disappoint him, and finds only Horatio...

Read the whole thing.

The blog itself, the American Scene, is one of the conservative/libertarian blogs I read for good writing and insight into that part of the opposition that argues in good faith. This sort of piece is my reward.

Top 10 subways

Wired has a 10 photo spread on the world’s most impressive subways. Sadly, though not unreasonably, Washington doesn’t make the cut. I’ve ridden six of the ten, I will not be satisfied until I’ve ridden all of them. The picture below is of Moscow’s, I knew that it was impressively engineered and timely but had no idea it had any stations this opulent.

Via Yglesias

Photo by Vanity Press used under a Creative Commons license

Review: Maps at the Walters Gallery in Baltimore

This superior exhibit is a must see for map lovers. It covers most things one could want, history, modes of presentation, imaginary and heavenly realms, and honestly a bunch of maps that are beautiful in their own right. The map above is actually of the ARPANET back when a map of this scale was still possible.

The exhibit closes June 8th, so this is your last chance. The Walters is a few blocks from the Centre Street Light Rail station or can be reached on a pleasant walk up Charles Street from Baltimore’s downtown. (Baltimore does have some dodgy areas, but Charles streets has been restored as an arts district.) It’ll probably be crowded, based on this Saturday, so you’ll likely want to be there at 3 or earlier and maybe be prepared for a fifteen minute to half hour wait. Well worth it though.

I can think of three quick reasons why I love maps. First they have a lot of information and allow for exploring. Second they’re often very pretty in their own right, this can be particularly true for maps from around the middle of the last millennia where artistic techniques had advanced and expectations seemed quite high. Finally they can be strategic puzzles. Maps are often made up for travel, trade, and war and with careful study you can figure out how to do better at any of the three. There’s a reason that I picked the two games I’m playing now, Rondo of Swords and Advance Wars: Days of Ruin. I love map-based games and units aside, each level can be a map puzzle in its own right.

Picture from http://www.thewalters.org/maps/exhibitions_images.html

Stupidest bike path in America quite close to my house

So on this fairly flippant note, I’m introducing another new addition to my blog-roll: Greater Greater Washington under the policy section. The blog follows DC area transit and development issues with a particular interest towards making metro-DC area communities people would actually want to live, shop, work, walk in, and ride transit to.

So on to the silliness:

After playing a video of a bike lane in Los Angeles that suddenly disappears only half a block from where it started, Slate V started a national contest to find the stupidest bike lane in America. The winner? A 20-foot dead-end patch of road that invites bicyclists to go the wrong way down a one-way street. And it’s right here in Silver Spring, Maryland.

Here’s the video, well worth watching if only for the real craziness in Europe:

I actually see this on my walk to the Metro every day but I never really thought anything of it. I’m not actually sure if that is a one way street, the neighborhoods in that immediate area tend to use Do Not Enter signs to establish their own fiefdoms but don’t necessarily restrict the flow of traffic within the nieghborhood. I vastly preferred the policy in the neighborhood I grew up in where there’s Do Not Enter signs that only cover commuting hours in the standard direction.

RE-5 Round 2 pro-N'Gai Croal link round-up

N’Gai Croal, among other links, passed on a new set of arguments on the RE-5 thing:

• EGO...trip: ...while allies stand beside us against the zombie hordes dissenters

As another N’Gai defender I’ll try to add some value by giving a little more detail on those arguments. That said, I don’t want to fully wade into this again until I’ve played RE-4:

• I thought Bus’s post was particularly good in calling out the ugly arguments while at the same time noting that there’s room for reasonable disagreement.
• Savetherobot notes that as with the Olympics games can’t really be totally divorced from politics.

Here’s my post from back in August again. I completely agree with N’Gai, although our arguments are slightly different. He focuses a bit more on cinematic elements while I focus more on how past zombie and Blackhawk Down games and films tried to avoid being problematic.

Finally, in a worthwhile new strain Shawn Elliot over at 1-Up provided some detail on the Call of Duty 4 comparisons. That game also apparently didn’t have any civilians.

This is one reason why we find no NPCs in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare’s middle-eastern cities, even as the game’s missions lead players through the very homes and workplaces of vanished people. And should Infinity Ward have decided to populate its levels with anyone other than armed militants it would have faced the challenge of preventing players from shooting innocents -- a circumstance undoubtedly closer to life, but one that would have risked depicting American and British soldiers as war criminals, as well as forcing players to restart missions after each incident of indiscriminate fire. The trade-off, of course, is that COD 4’s unnamed Saudi Arabia is inhabited exclusively by angry Arab gunmen.

That said, based on the Yahtzee review of game the game does address the problematic nature of the situation brilliantly by other means. Specifically it shifts between the perspective of American troops and British special ops guys and critiques both. Maybe RE-5 will to. I’m told RE-4 did make the peasants pre-infection sympathetic and to inject some pathos into their death.

However, we’re talking about trailers. So for comparison sake here’s a trailer for Call of Duty 4, the whole thing has a complex vibe and offers a mix of urban warfare and plot machinations. We don’t actually see many of the bad guys in the warfare bits but we do see their weapon fire so it seems like it also doesn’t have much in the way of shooting down mobs armed with a few melee and thrown weapons. So my guess is that N’Gai didn’t complain about CoD 4 because the situations are dramatically different. CoD 4 actually addresses the context they chose.

[Quick clarification, Shawn Elliot wasn’t saying that N’Gai needed to talk about Call of Duty 4. In this case, I’m responding to other people who were. Elliot was just doing a quick explanation as to why games choose not to include civies. I’m just trying to expand on the comparison a bit.]

More Endorsements

On the issue of Time’s most influential person web poll, I think I’m going to have to go with Stephen Colbert based on this:

If this video convinces you to back Stephen vs. his nemesis Korean pop singer Rain, vote here.

I would also vote for the Black Drum fish, but I don’t think it was nominated.

We're number 1!

Prevention magazine awarded my hometown of Silver Spring with the #1 spot on ratings of ten walking cities in Maryland list. I’m kinda puzzled why Takoma Park didn’t make the list. They do a good job as well. Could be that they have population requirements. Fun fact: Bethesda got the number two spot. At the bottom was Ellicott City (despite its acknowledge great core), ninth was Columbia.

Here’s Silver Spring’s blurb:

Experts cite countdown signals--allowing walkers to know how much time they have to cross busy streets--at crosswalks and a vibrant downtown with movies, dining, and shopping as part of the reason Silver Spring earned 3 out of 4 for walkability. This city has more mass transit users than anywhere else in the state; at 12.34%, its national rank is No. 8. A low number of cars per household also helps the city earn first place in Maryland.

Local politics is exhausting

Went to a meeting of the South Oaks Evanswood Citizens Association tonight and am now pretty exhausted. We were debating the Purple line, there were three proposals, one offering conditional support for any option, one supporting a tunnel only, and one generally opposed. Vote tallying is still going on but after about two hours of meeting I was ready to go home.

Based on applause, I’m not sure if the vote is going for us, but us pro-Purple Line folks matched the other side speaker for speaker at least. Said my piece in under my minute even, I take some pride in not filibustering. The event was moderated pretty well, the President kept things moving and was reasonably strict with time limits.

I think Community Associations on average are leery of any change that comes with trade-offs. It’s easy to just assume that all of your concerns are unique and should take top priority with the county’s limited funds. That said they are an important part of the process. Without local organization, then low cost high return concessions would be overlooked.

Anyhow, turnout was great and it’s nice to see democracy in action.

Fred Thompson, sexy?

Several bloggers have linked to a post by Garance about whether Fred Thompson is actually sexy.  She says no and backs it up with pictures.

But the idea that Thompson is some kind of swoon-inducing example of mature masculinity strikes me as a classic example of how straight men are completely unable to assess each other’s visual appeal (emphasis mine).

Straight women, on the other hand, are very acute judges of masculine appeal (even if we still date schlubs for other reasons), and there’s been a quiet rebellion brewing among the female political columnists against the idea that Thompson looks like anything other than how he actually looks, which is like a rather run-down older man. (See Michelle Cottle here and Gail Collins here.)

Matt Yglesias also notes that Sen. Thompson does better with men than women (among Republicans) so the alleged sexy isn't bringing in any votes.

Anyhow, I am also a classic example of the a straight man unable to assess the visual appeal of other straight men.  I've had this confirmed my multiple independent observers including the subject matter experts of both genders.

I tend to think this only results in false positives.  I've never really thought that some guy widely thought to be sexy had no appeal at all.  However, I figure when judging based on what you think others would find sexy, it's easy to incorporate other traits you find admirable but aren't really sexy as such.  I'd expect white male privilege makes us particularly vulnerable to this, but it may well be true for other groups as well albeit to a lesser extent.

Greg's guide to plumbing

Not that long back I bought a drain snake to clear the clogs from my kitchen sink.  That little adventure ended up requiring me to replace the U pipe below my sink, but was on the whole successful. 

The trick is knowing that the turning mechanism is not a way to feed the snake, instead it just makes the head on the end turn.  Clockwise turning is good for drilling into clogs, counterclockwise for maneuvering through pipes.  I'd have never figured this out if my friend Omar didn't explain it (the instructions on the thing were most unhelpful).

Anyways, since then the only plumbing problems I've had are the occasional leak.  My approach has been to put a bucket under the leaky pipes and wait until the leak stops.  Its taken a couple weeks, but this approach, bizarrely, has worked twice.  I'd figured I'd eventually have to call a plumber but I've managed to dodge that expense.  I'm not sure how the leaks just stopped, but I'm certainly not complaining.

A bit overwhelmed at work

So here's a quick round up of neat stuff.

Joel Achenbach discusses science findings that:

• Velociraptor had feathers.
• That 'hobbit' find may be a genuinely different species of humanoids.
• Most new studies, particularly those in controversial areas, are false.

There's a missile bunker available on Ebay for $1.5M.  Great gift for up and coming mad scientists, evil geniuses, introverts, Fallout fans, and the like.  Sadly a bit out of my price range so I won't be getting it for my girlfriend's birthday.  There's a terrific graphic with a layout of the base.

The Post also had the first article I can recall on cheer-leading that actually cheered me. It was about an increasing number of teams that and other groups that actively recruit from the disabled.  Nothing ground breaking here, just a nice story of a good idea spreading.

Fun facts from Slate

Slate's Human Guine Pig columnist has taken up her toughest challenge yet: golf.

There are about 30 million golfers in the United States. According to the Wall Street Journal, 3 million Americans pick up clubs for the first time each year, and an equal number put them down. Two million quit outright, half a million go on hiatus, and the rest die! (Maybe Americans' life expectancy would increase if the CDC stopped investigating salmonella outbreaks and started shutting down golf courses.)
...
A 2000 study from the British Journal of Sports Medicine found more sudden deaths occur in golf than any other sport.
...
All this is nothing compared with golf's psychological toll. Sportswriters' descriptions of the golfer's psyche make you think they're covering a Marine engagement in Anbar province. While playing a round, golfers spend only about 1 percent of their time hitting the ball, reports the New York Times. For the rest, writes the paper's Damon Hack, they are "churning and burning" as they "think about what might happen." He tells of one pro who had to give up the game because, as a friend explains, "he's kind of seen too many bad things to recover from." The Washington Post's Thomas Boswell, who says the game is infernal, quotes a golf psychologist who says she knows professionals who end up wondering, "What did I do wrong to deserve this?"

As a side note, belated Happy 60th Birthday to the U.S. Air Force.  At a previous birthday celebration, I was told that the unofficial motto of the Air Force was "Fore!"  Similarly, it is often alleged that Air Force bases are chosen for their proximity to golf courses.

I personally am content to leave golfing to trained military professionals.  I have a hard enough time at bowling, which involves a similar mental block: "A study in the journal Neuron says that the mind rebels against the body performing a repetitive movement exactly the same way each time—the researchers hypothesized that we evolved to evade novel threats so evolution created a brain that favors physical improvisation."  I enjoy mini golf well enough and am mercifully mediocre at it.

Limericks with horrible puns

Last week, the results from the Style Invitational over at the Wpost had two limericks that I thought had exquisitely bad puns. (The contest was just to use a word starting cl- through co-). Because I'm trying not to drive away my fairly limited readership, I'm reprinting them below the cut.  I actually liked both of these way more than the winners.  Although it's not like Chris Strolin was robbed, another submission of his got first place.

What I want to be when I grow up

There's a truly impressive career survey at http://www.careercruising.com/ (you'll need a login and password, but do a little googling and you'll find it).  To get the best results, you may have to take the interest portion more than once.  Doing it my third and final time didn't make much of a difference though.  The letters in () are grades based on my skills.  The rankings are based on my interests. 

Legend: Jobs I've done, Jobs I've considered, Jobs I have no interest in

1. Economist (B) [Fun, but I like politics.]
2. Television and Radio Reporter (B)  [Could be cool]
3. Business Systems Analyst (B)
4. Public Policy Analyst (A) [What I do]
5. Librarian (B) [What my Mom did.  Sorry librarians, I know you're sick of hearing that]

Three Good Things

Ragnell, celebrating the second anniversary of her blog, is trying to spread a three things I'm happy about meme.

Here goes:

1) There's a new Suicide Squad Mini by John Ostrander, original creator of the squad.  From his blog: "The first issue of the new SUICIDE SQUAD mini, RAISE THE FLAG, will be out this week, I think, and newsarama has a preview (although the pages are somewhat out of order). Okay, everyone who has said that they wanted to see a new Squad written by me -- I need you to prove it to DC this week. Let's sell this sucker out."

Apparently there's also going to be an interview on Suicide Squad in the October issue of Wizard.  "with [John Ostrander], Bob Greenberger, Luke McDonnel and Karl kesel about the early days of the SUICIDE SQUAD. A cool sidebar has modern top writers such as Geoff johns, Christos Gage, Gail Simone, Brad Meltzer, and Greg Rucka talking about the influence those squad issues had on them."

I'm a huge fan of the Squad.  The basic concept is a government program that uses B and C list villains and trouble heroes to pull off dangerous black ops missions.  Several of the characters in the current run of Checkmate either originated or rose to prominence in the Squad. 

2) I have a new phone.  I've also made the jump to Verizon which has improved my reception.  Now I can make calls in the subway or even my office.  Imagine that.  I needed to make the switch because my old phone, loaned to me a few years ago by my friend over at Power Leveling, was really at the end of its life.  Calls got dropped after a few minutes, the 7 and hang-up keys worked only half the time, and it needed to be recharged just about every other day.  I'm glad to have a camera phone again, but the feature I'm most excited about is the QWERTY keyboard.  I've never actually learned to text quickly with a numerical keypad, and I'm already much faster with this phone.  I may later pay extra and get all the email functions and such, but for now I'm saving my money for point 3...

3) I'm finally making arrangements for my trip to China.  I'm going for the first time in late October and have narrowed my choices down to two tours that both getting into rural China and not just tourist hot spots.  I'm currently trying to make the call whether to take a week of leave without pay and pay an extra $2k or so to get a 29 day rather than a 15 day trip.

Learning not to read the newspaper

FOr most of my life, I've had pack rat tendencies.  I can pile up newspapers, magazines, books, papers, various things I always intent to do.  I often ended having to just purge backlogs because I was acquiring new material faster than I could process the old.

I've gotten much better, but I still have a small newspaper backlog and a much larger magazine backlog.  Part of the trick is slowing my rate of acquisition, I've canceled some subscriptions and generally have gotten much more conservative about committing myself to new things.  More important, I'm slowly learning how to not read the newspaper.

I get the Washington Post every day.  I tend to read the front page and the Style section (plus Dilbert, who resides in Business).  I've got about an hour a day on the metro to do my reading plus some less efficient time while walking.  On some days I take another section or two based on interesting headlines.  Most days I can finish both and then make a bit of progress on my backlog from the weekend sections.  However, some weekends I'd travel or the like so old newspapers would pile up.

I've gotten the backlog pile down by training myself to not read certain articles.  I read less profiles in Style, skip most of the political horse race coverage in the front page, and try to just skip news articles that I don't need to know the in-depth story on.  I sometimes skim, but I tend to feel guilty when i do so, for some reason it's often easier to skip articles entirely.

The main thing I worry about is that I'll start over filtering my news. In Earth, by David Brin, there's a mentor character that intentionally sets her news aggregation programs to bring in random articles and viewpoints contrary to hers.  I tend to think that's an admirable sentiment.  The closest I come to implementing it is reading most every article that makes the front page unless I know I can miss it.  In essence I'm trusting the Post's editor's to be my news aggregation program. 

Most of my online news comes from clicking on interesting headlines in Salon or Slate (and sometimes TNR), blogs, and scanning newspaper sites when big news is breaking.  In all those cases, my self-selection bias is pretty darn high.  If paper form newspapers ever really did go away, I'm not sure how I'd fill the gap.