Off to Lake Chelan

I'm going to be off for a week. Debbie and I are off to Lake Chelan, Washington to spend the week with her brother and his family. Don't expect updates soon.

Faux Orwell Results

The winner of the 2003 Faux Orwell Writing Contest (see below) has been announced:

shooting the video

larry laurent

los angeles, ca.

It was a bright cold day in February. The frigid wind sliced through Charles Pilkington like bad tequila goes through a nun. A torn-up poster of The Leader was swirling inside a tiny vortex of wind and dust and dirt. Charles ducked into the nearest doorway for a moment of relief. But the wind had no mercy. It had found its way into the deep furrows of Charles' skin, blowing the dust out of his wrinkles. ...

I have to say that I think the winner reads more like faux Chandler than faux Orwell. My own pick would have been Holly Curtis's "Decline of Good British Retail" as a good faux Orwell essay, or perhaps "Walking, There" by Stephen Mills, which serves as an exellent pastiche of a justly obscure early Orwell novel.

NYTimes on Mobile Phone Gaming

Today's New York Times has an article on mobile phone gaming, describing the increase in availability and use of games played on cell phones.

While many developers in the multibillion-dollar video game industry seek to extend its appeal, profile and profits with bolder, flashier and ever more engrossing games - some so difficult that learning curves outlast players - a different sort of video game is quietly asserting itself into the mainstream.

Do not expect thunderous six-speaker surround sound. Forget about hair triggers, menacing artificial intelligence and fully immersive 3-D environments. This is a tamer universe of games with names like Snowball Fight, Bejeweled, Tumble Bees and Bookworm Deluxe.

These games tend to be brief amusements that are almost instinctive. They are easy to learn and can be played on a variety of devices, including PC's, laptops, digital organizers and cellphones. Even a popular digital music player, Apple's iPod, comes with the simple game Breakout installed.

The article points out the low development costs for this sort of game — ~$40,000, compared to several million dollars for a gaming-console title — and the fact that these casual games seem to be crossing the gender barrier that for some peculiar reason games like Quake and Deus Ex seem unable to break through.

None of this is news if you follow Greg Costikyan's blog. What is notable is that the Times is taking note.

And there's no mention of gambling, the grey-market secret of computer game play. But I'd lay odds that someone in Costa Rica or the Cayman Islands or wherever is looking at how to port a video poker game to BREW (the Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless).

LiveJournalers Take Note!

I now have a LiveJournal account, with the username of abostick59. At the present time, I have no plan to post there, though. If you want to read what I'm up to, either follow the LJ RSS feed of As I Please or go straight to the source.

If you want to let me read your secret BDSM villanelles and sestinas or your rants about how your ex spewed the rent money on a Keno binge in the Cal-Neva coffee shop, then add abostick59 to your Friends list. If, on the other hand, you are interested in reading analyses of lowball hands or recollections of dreams in which Jon Singer turns me into a ten-speed bicycle, then you should add my blog's RSS feed to your Friends list.

Of course, as the Scarecrow said with his arms folded across his chest and pointing, some people prefer to go both ways.

And a tip o' the hat to Patti Beadles for supplying the new account code.

Faux Orwell Writing Contest

George Orwell's centenary is this Wednesday. It should come as no surprise to people in the know that I'm something of an Orwell buff. I was quite delighted to stumble this morning across the Faux Orwell Writing Contest.

This year's competition closed on June 1, and results are due any day now. But I commend to you the winner of last year's competion, "The perils of rejecting tobacco," by Nigel Nichols of Luton, Beds., UK:

Even at the peak of the rush hour you can almost always find a seat in the smoking carriage of a train. The air may be a little thicker, the coughing may be a little louder or more frequent and the skin of one's fellow passengers rather more pallid, but it is, at least, a seat. You can then settle back for half an hour or so and read a pocket-novel or simply watch the green fields and terraced houses go by.

Proof that Playing Too Much Minesweeper Is Not Good for You

Minesweeper Faith

When playing Minesweeper, I can click on a square and know that it is clear. How? By logical deduction.

But that logical deduction depends on assumptions. First of all, I assume that the programming of the game is sound and that the numbers on the screen are an accurate and honest count of the number ofmines in adjoining squares. Secondly, my knowledge depends that the logical reasoning that goes into my conclusion is in fact sound. To play effectively, I must believe that what I conclude from my logical reasoning is coincides with the actual placement of the mines in the grid.

I can play Minesweeper. I can make deductions about the placement of the mines, make decisions accordingly, and avoid clicking on mines. It works over and over again.

To play Minesweeper requires faith. My faith is borne out again and again. The confirmation of the faith is simple and quick.

Poker Faith

The mathematics of permutations and combinations and the principles of probability that underly the game of poker are extensions of logic and deduction from the same foundations of mathematics that underly the game of Minesweeper. I must believe in the soundness of the reasoning that goes into them, and I must believe in the honesty of the game, if I am to play poker with any sense of it as a genuinely winnable game — "winning" here meaning more or less that in the long run I'll win more money at it.

A big difference between poker and Minesweeper is that with the latter game, my faith in mathematical reasoning is immediately confirmed. The stochastic nature of poker, on the other hand, means that I can play a hand "correctly" (i.e. in such a way as to maximize my expected win) and lose — or for that matter play very far from correctly and win. The mathematical reasoning that tells me that this cell is definitely free and that one definitely contains a hidden mine is far less definite for poker, saying only that if I play a particular hand in particular circumstances many times over, on average I should expect my average win or loss to be close to a particular value.

To play poker requires faith; but that faith must bear up to the challenges of short-term results. Faith takes a substantial beating at the poker table. ... but the mathematical reasoning in which I place my faith tells me that to lose faith is to lose.

Once last year, while playing in side games at the World Series of Poker, in Las Vegas, I took a substantial loss at a $20-$40 high-low split seven-card stud game. I kept having to throw away hand after hand that started well but caught bad cards on fourth street, or got punished when I caught that fourth good card but caught worthless bricks on the last three cards. Again and again I committed my money to a pot only to see it vanish into hopelessness. I busted out of the game and returned to my hotel room in a terrible state. I raged at my losses, pummelling my bed with a pillow, screaming with frustration with each blow. How could this have happened to me? I was playing as well as I knew how, and I had lost, badly. The law of averages was on my side; what had gone wrong?

And then I wondered, just how unlucky had I been? I took out pencil and paper and began to calculate roughly how often I should get a decent starting hand, and how often that hand will catch good or bad on fourth street. The numbers I worked out showed that I ought to be catching bad a majority of the time, and that in fact my luck had been bad, but not outrageously so.

I had undergone a crisis of faith, and through something analogous to meditation and prayer found the balance I needed to stay the course.

Faith and Science

Even the most zealous adherent to logical positivism must eventually rely on her faith in positivism to accept and believe in a number of invisible and undetectable things. That is what is so troubling about quantum mechanics, for example: reason and careful scientific observation lead to conclusions about the nature of the world and the fundamental entities that make it up that run deeply contrary to common sense and daily experience. The practice of empirical science demands a great deal of belief in invisible things, phenomena not apparent to the senses except through elaborate constructions of instruments, and so on. Such belief is rewarded by confirmation, by consistency of results, and so on. Quantum-dependent devices such as semiconductors work. So do vaccines and epoxy glue.

An ordinary human being cannot work things out from first principles all the time. She has to trust her memories, trust consensus faith in consensus constructions, and so on. "I have studied this carefully and determined it for myself" devolves into "The person who asserts this has good credentials, and there are people out there who might have checked this out, and until someone says otherwise it's a good bet that this is true." One cannot accept the validity of science without making many leaps of faith. Above all, one must have faith in the consensus of the community of science.

And then there is Gödel's theorem. In its strictest form it states that in a self-consistent theory of numbers there must exist propositions that, while true, are not provable within that system; any number theory in which all true statements are provable will be inconsistent, and so all false statements are provable in it as well.

The larger implication of Gödel's theorem is that this situation of unprovable truths is the case in ANY logical system. (Handwaving proof: an isomorphism exists between said logical system and a number theory. Gödel's theorem can be proven in that number theory, and so the isomorphic proof stands in the logical system under consideration.) So there exist truths that cannot be proven under a given logical system. In particular, there exist truths that cannot be proven within the logical system that comprises science, rational empiricism, and logical positivism.

In other words, it is scientifically inevitable that there are truths that exist outside of science. If they can be reached at all, they can only be reached by faith.

Does my brain and my sensory apparatus constitute a logical system? If so, then there are truths than I cannot perceive or deduce from my perceptions. What if I include the things that I can make and use in this logical system? Then there are truths that cannot register on my instruments any more than I can perceive them directly. This strongly suggests (although it does not in fact prove) that there exists truths that I cannot perceive or comprehend. The faith I place in logic, therefore, tells me of the likelihood of the transcendental, the ineffable, beyond the reach of reason, philosophy, or even emotion.

The Four-Year-King

Kevin Andrew Murphy writes, in the comments on Electrolite: Unvarnished truth is all well and good for college students, but I somehow think there would be strong objection to "Mistresses, Slaves and Blowjobs — Our American Presidency!" becoming a standard text in the country's elementary schools.

Avram Grumer follows up with It is one of the duties of the office, after all. The president is a solar fertility deity; if he has lots of sex in office, then the economy will thrive. Clearly Dubya's not up to the job.

Avram is not alone. This morning, in the SF Gate's "Morning Fix" email newsletter, Mark Morford writes:

It is worthy of comparison. It is worth noting. Under Mr. Libido, under insanely maligned Clinton — under, in other words, a sexually aware and energized leadership — the nation was largely at peace, attained record budget surpluses, record low unemployment, international respect and admiration. Women's rights were assured and gay rights were protected and Clinton was welcomed like a freakin' rock star abroad, and, from what I understand, he still is.

He was widely loved and admired and respected and hey, here's a guy with an actual libido, and a whip-smart mind, and is unafraid to use either, rightfully and wrongfully. He's actually human, flawed and screwed up and heartily sexual and libidinously active and sorta proud of that fact and wow, what a concept.

And now we have Shrub. And now, it is all reversed, inverted, painfully ingrown, like a bad karmic toenail. ...

Because there is a direct and undeniable correlation between a nation's level of sexual awareness or repressiveness and its overall national level of openness or uptightness, its overall feeling of patriotic constipation. Just ask, say, Afghanistan.

There is a direct relationship between how we are now a divisive and frigid BushCo nation, in a state of perpetual war, saddled with a gutted budget, in an economic tailspin, how national morale is in the gutter and international respect for the U.S. almost nonexistent, and the overall cheerless and desolate climate of sexual education and awareness among our current leadership. Oh yes there is.

The cliche is, "I couldn't have said it better myself" but this is Mark Morford we're talking about, whose spell-checker should be grammatically enhanced to flag every adjective and subordinate clause for deletion, just so he can decide to cut at least some of them out. So: I could say it better myself, but the point is that Morford did say it.

Maybe we should take this the whole distance. The worldly avatar of the solar fertility god is the dead and resurrected king. Perhaps the insane compulsion to destroy Clinton was part of this dynamic. And maybe it ought to be part of the dynamic. Maybe the President of the United States should be encouraged to screw like a rut-crazed weasel during the term of office, and then disposed of when that term is finished.

Admit it: wouldn't it warm the cockles of your heart if you knew that the Shrub would be burned in a wicker man on Twelfth Night, 2005?

The X-Men and Their Discontents

(Disclaimer: this is entirely in response to the movies; I last regularly read the X-Men comic book in the Hank McCoy and Warren Worthington days, before Chris Claremont took up scripting. [err, McCoy and Worthington were characters, not authors!])

I find myself having a philosophical problem with the setup for the X-Men. We are told over and over again that the dichotomy between Prof. Xavier's X-Men and Erik Lehnsherr's Brotherhood of Mutants is like unto that between pacifist Martin Luther King, Jr., ("I have a dream....") and extremist Malcolm X ("...by any means necessary!") (Yes, I know this is gross oversimplification.)

Prof. Xavier's theory is coexistence and mutual understanding, but his practice is separatism: get troubled mutant children out of human society and into the isolated cloisters of his school. What's more, the X-Men look to me a lot like a private paramilitary group or militia. Prof. X. talks the talk of a moderate liberal, but he walks the walk of extremism. The real difference between Prof. X and Magneto lies in some of the details of the execution of their programs.

I'm also troubled by the way the mutant question seems to trump (almost) every other kind of difference or otherness we might see. Does it matter to Storm, who asserts she is driven by anger, if the reason she might be mistreated by a grocery store clerk is racism rather than anti-mutant feeling? What about within the team — what does it mean to her that she is expected to follow the lead of Cyclops, a rich white man who wears his privilege like a chip on his shoulder? The only difference that seems to matter among the X-Men is social class: the antipathy between Wolverine and Cyclops seems to me to be obviously class-based, the love triangle having Jean Grey at the apex seeming secondary.

I can't help but feel that the screenwriters killed off Jean because of her leanings towards polyamory, in a manner analogous to the way homosexual characters, even sympathetic ones so often get killed off in het-authored drama and melodrama. The final climax of X2 seemed broken and shoddy to me; I thought that the writers pulled a bunch of rabbits out of hats in sequence without explanation to contrive her altogether gratuitous death.

I came out of the theater holding dialogues in my head with various characters; what I wanted to say to Jean was, "You may feel different and alone, but there really are other people like you. Perhaps you should spend time in their society so you can find out who you really are." I tend to shy away from identity politics in general and would rather not play the identity-politics card with regard to my own polyamory; but Jean's treatment in this movie, second in a series trumpeted by so many as comfort and consolation for young people who get ostracized as different for whatever reason, left me feeling uncomfortable and unhappy.

Updates from the Dream Diary

6-1-2003

A bunch of us — me, Debbie, Mike Ford, Elise Matthesen, and others — are staying in a mountain chalet that has been converted into a hotel. The place is full. We're waiting for something to happen. There is a certain amount of clambering about the rooftop and eaves of the place.

While walking along a corridor on the top floor, I hear a sound: the chopping sound of helicopters. I look up through a skylight and see a helicopter gunship hovering above the chalet. It's Governor Jerry Brown and his military escort. [In waking life, Brown is the former governor of California, and is presently the mayor of the city of Oakland.]

Governor Brown has arrived for an important meeting with us, and we aren't pleased that he has brought a military force with him. Debbie complains to me "It is just like he had driven here in a tank."

The hotel manager is in a swivet: there is no room left in the hotel for Governor Brown, let alone his retinue. We discuss what we can do about this. I offer to share a room with some of our companions. The trouble is that the rooms have only one bed each. Who is willing to share a bed with me. Can I sleep on a sofa?

We walk the hotel corridors looking for the right room for the Governor. I discover that the hotel in fact has lots of empty rooms, completely unfinished — no furniture, no plaster on the walls, no plumbing, nothing but bare stone walls.

6-3-2003

A lot of dreams last night, all of them involving a trip to the World Science Fiction Convention being held [in this dream, at least] in Melbourne, in Australia.

First we arrive at the airport — broad, flat concrete, with a blocky terminal. We have to walk a ways from our airplane to the terminal. The sky is clear and the sun is hot; the weather feels tropical to me. I think that we must be near to the Great Barrier Reef.

Someone asks me if this is my first trip to Australia. I surprise Debbie (who is traveling with me) by saying "No." I had visited once before, traveling many hours for a visit that lasted less than a day. [I think I was remembering in this dream another dream that I had a year or so ago in which I did just that. Debbie shouldn't have been surprised, though, because she was with me in that dream, too.]

We get settled in our hotel, which turns out to have a casino in it. Debbie asks me if I mind being here and not being able to play poker (the implication being that we can change hotels if this is a problem). I say that it isn't an issue, and I walk through the clamorous casino floor, observing that they don't in fact have a poker room after all.

In a later dream that night I'm talking to Cynthia Gonsalves, who turns out to be chairing this Worldcon, having been runnning things from a distance until the day it opened. Then I'm walking through the hotel, which is now a sprawling, open series of small buildings connected by shaded walks. In one building is a restaurant, in another a gift shop, guest rooms in yet another, and so forth. I walk through a lot of hotel, but never actually get to the convention.

6-5-2003

It's the ending of a science fiction convention — perhaps Minicon. Steve Brust is selling books in the dealer's room. I buy a book that he's written. The price is $3.95. I hand him four $1 bills, and he gives me a nickel in change. Steve also gives me a dealers-room badge, so now I have access behind the scenes.

I go back to our hotel room to pack up our own stuff. Debbie is waiting for me, because I'm the only one who can unhook and put away our oscilloscope and other electronic equipment.

We wind up at Steve's house after the convention, and Steve has large quantities of books for sale, many many copies of individual books. In a large display of books I see stacks and stacks of Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light, which I point out with delight, and next to them (completely out of character for Steve, it seemed to me) stacks of books by Marion Zimmer Bradley.

6-6-2003

For some peculiar reason having something to do with tax laws I have decided to go back to my high school, finish my senior year, and graduate. Apparently this will save me a great deal of money, and some foundation or other will cover my tuition. (I went to high school at a private boarding school in Hawaii.) All of the action of the dream takes place before the school year actually begins. I sort through my things to pick out what I'm going to take with me. I take my cat Rocky with me, and he comes back from a mandatory visit to the vet in Waimea with a dire diagnosis and promise of substantial veteranary bills to come. No matter — I can write a check for them right now!

I ponder the irony of a forty-four year old with a Master's degree in physics taking classes with a bunch of teenagers. The course work will be a cruise, and I'll have plenty of time to update my weblog.

Strangely enough, one of my roommates from my first year at Caltech turns up (can't remember his name — he was the guy working on an environmental engineering degree). We go jogging together. Later on, I wind up in a party in a bar for the current crop of graduating seniors. My eye is caught by a number of eighteen-year-old women in white cocktail dresses wearing leis around their necks and hibiscus in their hair.