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Monday, November 9th, 2009
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10:24 am - Because you need to know
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And because I'm the guy who keeps track of such things.
The primary firearm Major Hasan used in the Fort Hood outbreak of Sudden Jihad Syndrome is the 'FN Five-seveN' pistol put out by Fabrique Nationale, the Belgian firearms manufacturer.
The 'caliber' of a bullet is how wide the bullet is. It can be measured in millimeters or inches. The fatter a bullet is the wider of a wound it will make in a person, but the easier it is to stop by either armor or flesh. The fatter the bullet is the more likely it will stop in the target and thus transfer all possible energy to the target. However, the fatter the bullet is, the greater the recoil and the heavier the weapon that has to be carried all day and the less ammo that can be carried.
The goal of the powergamer, I mean, the weapons designer is to have the fattest possible bullet with the most manageable recoil that allows the most ammunition to be loaded and carried; allowing for the probability of protective armor.
The 'charge' of a bullet is how much 'gunpowder' (smokeless powder, really) resides in the cartridge. Where an explosion is a fire with no place to go, the action of a firearm is a fire with exactly one place to go - down the barrel, pushing the bullet. Powder burns at a set rate, therefore the longer the barrel the more powder that can be burned and the more acceleration that can be given to the bullet. This is why cartridges used in rifles are commonly longer than cartridges used in pistols - to fit more powder - and why the velocity of a rifle bullet is generally much greater. Once the bullet leaves the barrel, the pressurized gas from the burning powder no longer pushes it.
In deciding how much powder to use, first the chamber of the firearm must be able to withstand the pressure of the expanding gases. This is a question of metallurgy. If it cannot, the firearm will explode along its weakest point and this happens often enough to people who handload cartridges and put in more powder than their firearm is rated to stand. (Old-school overclocking except it isn't the processor that melts down.)
Second is the question of powergaming. A bullet that moves too fast will travel completely through the target making a narrow, survivable hole. A bullet that moves too slow will not transfer much energy to the target at all; it is also more subject to deflection by underbrush and heavy clothing and has a shorter effective distance. While a bullet going too slow is too weak to penetrate armor, strangely, beyond a certain point the speed of the bullet is also a detriment. A bullet going 'too fast' simply explodes upon hitting body armor and the flinders individually don't penetrate.
You can see the example of this in the development of the .38. First came the .38. Then the .38 Special, which was a .38 with a longer cartridge for more powder for more power and which gained a reputation for reliability in handling and stopping power. Then came the .357 magnum with even more powder; the bullet was made three-thousands of an inch smaller because the greater pressure from so much powder makes the lead itself expand in the chamber. Most all firearms that are rated for .357 Magnum ammunition will also fire .38 Special ammunition as the cartridge is the same size. But never ever fire .357 magnum in a firearm that is only rated for .38 Special - it is likely to explode in your hand. 9mm Luger, 9mm +P, and 9mm +P+ is a similar gradation for the 9mm round.
So we have a lot of information and what we discover is that the design of a firearm is a set of tradeoffs (some of which I haven't gotten into, like how the heaver the firearm is the more manageable the recoil is but you have to carry it all day) and no one firearm can be best for all tasks. But we do know some things.
.45 ACP handgun ammunition appears close to any theoretical optimum for unarmored human targets at close range. The bullet is fat, heavy, and the moderate ACP charge has it move comparatively slowly. .357 Magnum is next, with a slightly slimmer, lighter bullet moving faster. Rifles open up an entirely different set of optimizations considering the different uses of rifles and their carry, but 5.56 mm Nato is commonly known to be slim and fast with the attendant problems thereof, and 7.62 mm more serious.
All of these things are probabilities. The action of firearms on the human body is highly random, with wounds falling into one of a number of broad categories.
1. Narrow hole all the way through
2. Bullet enters, encounters flesh, lead deforms and performs a tail-for-nose swap through body
3. Bullet enters, encounters bone, deflects and takes another course, perhaps exiting body quickly
4. Bullet enters, encounters bone, and breaks apart into many small pieces
5. Bullet enters, encounters bone, breaks bone and pushes bone through body (the worst in general aside from major organ trauma)
All of which brings us to the FN Five-seveN, a firearm I've had some interest in. The Five-seveN uses a 5.7mm bullet, with a 28mm cartridge length. The cartridge is designed as a small, light, medium-to-low power rifle round. It is intended for non-battle troops (engineers, medical, etc) to be able to carry a weapon aimable enough for defense (ie not a pistol which tops out at 25 yards) yet one light enough and maneuverable enough to be carried all day in a dangerous field.
This 5.7mm bullet is small, light, and quick. But by comparison with 5.56 NATO which has a 45mm cartridge, it has much less room for powder. It is notably less powerful than the M-16 which is nowhere considered a powerful rifle.
But the FN Five-seveN is a pistol, not a rifle. It is designed to use the same rifle bullet as above both for ease of use, interchangeability, and because a double-stacked magazine of 5.7mm will carry 20 bullets. They are tiny in width. But they are rifle bullets; compared to handgun bullets, they have quite a lot of powder which would give us rifle-like speeds... except that the barrel on a pistol is too short to get the bullet going that fast. So what you get in a pistol is a slim bullet that is fast but not too fast, with a crisp but not unmanageable recoil, and a big big magazine capacity. And you don't have to futz with different ammo for your pistol and your rifle.
We can see from the above that this is not the best way to kill people. However, it is a good design for an armor piercing round, and that's exactly what it's for. Law-enforcement and military can buy a steel round for the Five-seveN which has a chance of defeating the more average woven vests (but not the trauma plates). But steel bullets put you into wound category 1 - they make neat holes all the way through. They have less chance of deforming, of gripping bone and moving it. They slide right off.
Which brings us to Major Hassan. By all reports of this moment he had two firearms, a FN Five-seveN loaded with ordinary lead bullets and a .357 Magnum revolver as a backup that he never fired. He fired more than 100 rounds. He reloaded often. He had targets in an enclosed space.
If taken on average of all the bullets hitting people of all kinds, your chance of dying from any one bullet hitting you is about 10%. (Your chance of being 'stopped' and unable to continue fighting is another thing.) Major Hassan's 100+ rounds killed 13 and wounded 29; with at least one known target hit multiple times and still surviving; with many of the recorded wounds being narrow strikes that overpenetrated. While we don't know any kind of hit ratio, I believe it is clear that the FN Five-seveN is beneath the average in lethality and was thankfully an inferior weapon for Major Hassan to have chosen for his assault.
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| Monday, November 2nd, 2009
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11:52 am - On military spending
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On another blog, someone posted the question, "If the healthcare bill is projected to cost like 900 billion over ten years, why don't we look at our military budget? That's 561 billion dollars for this year alone. Isn't that much much more? Why don't we look at what we can cut there?"
Other people already gave the answer that 'provide for the common defense' is in the constitution while the only place healthcare comes in would be 'promote the general welfare.' But this is what I put down:
In the book of Robert Heinlein’s STARSHIP TROOPERS, one of the soldiers asks his drill instructor during training, “Why are you teaching us how to fight with knives, when we have nuclear rockets?” And the answer, given in greater thoughtfulness than I can give here, is, “Some problems can’t be solved with a nuclear rocket, and some problems shouldn’t be solved with a nuclear rocket. If your objective is to disable a guard and sneak into a facility to gain information, an object, or rescue prisoners, a nuclear rocket doesn’t help. Training and a knife is what you need.” And the discussion went from there into a discussion of the graduations of the use of force and the why behind the use of force.
The reason the military costs us the kind of money it does is because the military has to have the capability to use forces from the knife level on up to the nuclear rocket level. And sure, there is politically driven waste and inefficiency in the military procurement process but it is no better and no worse than politically driven waste in any other procurement process. Some things, like the Crusader mobile artillery piece (if I recall the story correctly) are outdated, deprecated, and because we have better stuff that does the same thing and more, stupid to keep but can’t be gotten rid of because of political clout. Other things like the F-22 stealth fighter which no other country comes close to matching and won’t be able to match for years if ever get cancelled because of a lack of foresight and a lack of political clout and a foolish desire to cut for the sake of cutting.
So the thing is, you can ‘look at cutting military spending’ if you want. But it’s stupid to think you can get a lot there. And whenever you try, like Rumsfeld was beginning to do in reorganizing the locations of military bases both here and overseas to reflect current reality, you run smack dab into reams of politics. A military base means jobs and economy and activity, and no Congressman is going to let that go… nor does any foreign country with a military base really want the US to leave no matter how much they kvetch in the papers. Witness Germany when we went to pull out our troops.
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| Friday, October 9th, 2009
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10:37 am - You Cannot Defeat An Opponent Who Receives Infinite Resupply
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When will we learn?
You cannot defeat an opponent who receives infinite resupply.
North Korea received infinite resupply from China. We could win every battle, but never win the war.
North Vietnam received infinite resupply from the USSR and China.
Hezbollah and Hamas receive infinite resupply from Iran, Syria, the United Nations, and a handful of smaller actors.
The Taliban receives infinite resupply from Pakistan's ISI and a handful of other actors.
Without removing the source of infinite resupply, the task is doomed.
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| Friday, October 2nd, 2009
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1:20 pm - Obama - The Five Trick Pony
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In Inayan Eskrima, we have a saying that goes, "A pony who only knows five tricks doesn't last very long in the circus."
This is a mild slam on other martial arts and a personal cautionary tale to ourselves. One of the tendencies in martial arts is to train 'favorite' moves obsessively - honestly because the moves are stock and solid. Those moves become the fighter's moneymakers but to the detriment of breadth.
So your average boxer will have a fast jab, a powerful cross, and a strong hook and uppercut. Your average karate guy will have a subset of front snap kick, front thrust kick, roundhouse kick, side kick, back kick, inside and outside crescent kick. Your average judo guy will have hip throw, arm bar, choke hold (standing and ground).
Take them out of their milieu and they are fishes out of water. When the boxer meets the wrestler who can get under him and take him down, or the karate guy who can kick hard and maintain his distance, he is doomed. When the karate guy faces a boxer who gets too close and punches too fast or gets wrestled to the ground, it is the same; and when the boxer and the karateka retract their limbs too fast and don't allow themselves to be grasped while hitting too hard or moving too much for a shoot it is the the same.
A well-rounded martial art system has answers within it for the problems posed to it by other styles. For a karate guy to beat a judoka, he has to remain mobile, retract limbs quickly, and strike with impact that forestalls closing. It is never a failure of the art, it is a failure of the artist using the art. Either because he did not understand the lessons of the art, because those lessons were not transmitted to him, or because he failed to train properly.
You see these examples in things like the Ultimate Fighting Championships all the time, even nowadays when everybody cross trains in all arts. But everyone still has primary arts and secondary arts and there is only so much time in the day for everyone. In the beginning there were the Gracie brothers who took everyone to the mat and used submission holds. Then everyone learned their techniques and how to withstand them for long enough to do too much damage. Recently there's been a resurgence of fighters like Cung Le and Mirko Cro Cop who hit so hard and so well that they can end a match in one or two strikes even against the master grapplers. Around and around and around she goes.
"A pony who only knows five tricks doesn't last very long in the circus." In one of the famous early fights in the UFC, a 400 pound Hawaiian grappler came up against David 'Tank' Abbott; a smaller but thickly muscled brawler with a 600 lb bench press. The grappler advanced into a flurry of boxing punches impacting his head. He laid his hands on Abbott who faded back and slipped the grab, then punched the grappler more on the way out. The grappler's second advance, slightly slower, fared similarly. On the grappler's third advance, he was knocked out cold. Elapsed time eighteen seconds.
The grappler knew one trick - advance to contact and grab. (All kinds of things come after.) It failed twice. He didn't change his tactics. Either he didn't know another tactic or he couldn't think of it under duress. First time wounded, second time injured, and the third time trying the same thing lost him the game.
Which brings us to Obama. If you've been watching, you probably know his five tricks by now. "Let me be clear." The fixed vote (by caucus stuffing/getting your opponent thrown off the ballot/ACORN). Voting 'present' until others put forth their ideas and then stepping forwards to appear the grand reconciliator in whom everyone must put their trust (even though you choose the most socialist solution and aren't reconciling anything). The classic Marxist trick of inviting your opponent to offer his solution in a public debate to a packed hall on what has already been secretly decided against him. And the race card.
A telling point was made recently in an off-handed comment - a professor who had once been Obama's teacher was at some sort of White House photo op. And it came up that Obama had gotten a 'B' on a paper in his class. After he received the grade, Obama went to him and asked for a regrade in the hope of negotiating it up to an 'A'. The professor kept the grade at a 'B' and they joked about it.
But it made me ask - how many other grades was Obama able to negotiate up? How many other grades was he able to get fixed on the basis of, as he himself says, being a well-spoken black male? Is that what got him through Harvard Law after Occidental and Columbia?
But that's as may be. What determines the artist is what he does when his five tricks fail him. When he is called to rely on his breadth. Health care: he tries to appear the reconciliator but we see that he is not reconciling. If he pushes it through it should be disastrous for his future power; if he fails it will likely be a lesser disaster. Iran and Russia have already made their secret decisions against him and left him to be the one making a fool of himself in public. And now the Olympic debacle; he failed to fix the vote, he failed to pack the hall, what was he even doing there? (If you think it had anything to do with persuasion you are sadly mistaken - after all, if you look at Michelle and his speeches they are all about themselves; they are not trying to sell the venue of Chicago which is after all what they are supposed to be selling. They were selling the Obama mystique to the already notoriously corrupt Olympic voting committee - trying to fix that vote, back up with a speech the promises already made behind closed doors.)
Afghanistan is his next grappler's rush. General Stanley McChrystal has laid the trap for him by leaking his report and his needs to the press. They are easy enough for Obama to fulfill although he believes that it will cost him support from the anti-war left (I personally disagree). But if he votes present, there is no other side and no one to reconcile with. There is no fixed vote, no packed hall; only a decision, yes or no. If he says no then McChrystal quits and Obama takes the blame for Afghanistan no matter how he might try to pawn it off on Bush.
Can Obama learn? Does he have breadth?
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| Saturday, September 12th, 2009
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5:43 pm - The flossing, it is effortless
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| Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009
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1:27 pm - A bit on Counter Insurgency
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Wrote this up elsewhere, figured I should have it here. It's a bit of a response to an article on the guy who hosted 'Afghan Star' and claimed that he was 'winning hearts and minds' with the power of song in Afghanistan.
Current working COunter-INsurgency (COIN as it’s referred to) refers to ‘winning hearts and minds’ but calls it by different names and explains it a lot better and you don’t do it with music and dancing.
It’s easy for the US to win the war part of a war. In fact, it’s too easy. We topple enemy third-world governments by disrupting their ability to control themselves and their troops so fast that we don’t kill enough bad guys and we don’t inflict any privation upon the civilian population. It’s like trying to train a puppy by taking away whatever he’s chewing on that you don’t want him chewing; but never saying ‘No!’ and swatting him on the nose. Without negative reinforcement, all the puppy knows is 'chew-toy is up on shelf now - I get it later.'
The problem comes when it’s time to win the peace. The bad guys are still there. All they need is time and money to organize, time that we give them by not hunting them down and money that we allow them by letting them steal it or letting it flow in from other bad actors. The bad guys hide in the general population from where they can take bad actions and then disappear. If we engage in war on the civilian population, we get accused of genocide and support increases for the bad guys.
Current Counter-Insurgency teaches that locally we provide safety for the general populace so they can go about their daily activities, while we continually hunt down the bad guys. Bad guys being bad guys will hurt maim and steal from the general population because they are much easier targets then our soldiers. That makes their support go down, and the civilians begin to point out the bad guys to us on the sly, which helps us hunt them down more. The bad guys start indiscriminately killing civilians accusing them of being ’spies’ which turns more and more of the civilians against them, and so on.
Notice that there’s no music and dancing involved here. Although some cultural outreach and drinking of tea is required.
The next problem comes at the state level. You can get individual cities and towns against the insurgents, but how do you get a decent government in there? You need to institute the rule of law first, and that is a generational project with no antecedents in a tribal-based culture like Iraq and Afghanistan where it is “me against my brother, me and my brother against my cousins, and my family against everyone else.” Without a reasonably impartial law upon which people can rely in a day to day fashion, it is all the rule of force, and no one can trust anyone out of their sight.
That’s what our State department should be teaching and requiring right now, and it is miserably failing. (Allowing the Iraqis to write their own constitution that allowed a reliance on Sharia law was a big failure.)
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| Thursday, August 27th, 2009
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2:29 pm - Ted Kennedy: The Hard Line
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One can be stupid, which is a lack of intellect. Or one can be foolish, which is a lack of wisdom. For example, I would never call Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg stupid though I would call her foolish. I have read her writings and they are skilled, insightful, logical, and tight even though they choose to ignore inconvenient facts so as to willfully come to the ideologically predetermined endpoint. Having read Justice Sonia Sotomayor's writings I can call her stupid but not consistently foolish. She does not care to reason logically. She merely acts by predetermined reflex and her writing indicates that any attempt at reason is a meager justification after the fact.
One can be muddle-headed, and fail to see the obvious consequences of one's actions. One can be mistaken about events in the past and events likely to happen in the future. One can be a liar about one's motivations: in the lead-up to the current Iraq war President George W. Bush famously floated several trial balloons of causus belli (Saddam is violating the cease-fire agreement, Saddam is engaging in corruption with Oil-For-Food, Saddam is engaging in genocide against the Marsh Arabs) until one stuck and garnered support (Saddam has an illegal chemical/biological weapons of mass destruction program). When one does so the goal and methods are always the same, it's the just motivations that flow amorphously just like they are with our current Healthcare issue: (we must insure the uninsured, we have to bend the cost curve, we have to punish the evil insurance companies, we need to outlaw preexisting conditions so everyone can get coverage). And when you lie in this way one always must surmise that you have a hidden motivation about which you are lying because if you did not, you'd state your case and stick to your guns. President Bush wanted to invade Iraq to destabilize and remake the Middle East in a positive way and Iraq was the easiest low-hanging fruit to start with seeing as how it would physically isolate Iran. President Obama wants to bring Healthcare under state control because it is 15% of the US economy and provides countless political levers of power for the state. No matter what the reasons that are given, all legal and all true, the unspoken motivation is always the highest yet it cannot be spoken because it is politically unacceptable.
One can be a flip-flopper and change one's position with the wind. One can be a direct panderer and state one position to one prospective audience and the opposing position to the next in the way that Arab eminences speak soothing, conciliatory words in English but then recite the words of terror to their audience in Arabic. One can lie flat-out about the events of the past, only to be shamed with the video of one's past statements or events comes to light. (Of course, a politician has no shame.)
But there is a hard line. And that line is treason.
Ted Kennedy crossed that line when he sent ex-Senator John Tunney to the Soviet Union to offer his aid first against Jimmy Carter and then against Ronald Reagan. He did directly give aid to our enemies and sought unbidden to give yet more in order to gain his personal advantage.
We are all human, and until we cross that hard line, that glowing red no matter how dressed with the frosting of good intentions, we can be forgiven. But not Ted Kennedy.
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| Thursday, August 20th, 2009
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12:49 pm - Summary of Israeli-Palestinian Bargaining Positions
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| Sunday, August 16th, 2009
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12:19 pm - On GI Joe
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It is a delightful thrillride of an action movie. They'll sell you the whole seat but you'll only need the edge. It has shout-outs to the previous works, but it is different. It has shout-outs to Firefox, of all things, not to mention doing Jedi lightsaber combat better than the first three prequel movies. (Which isn't surprising considering that Snake Eyes is played by Darth Maul and he has an actual martial artist to play off of.)
Some parts of it which were a strength were blandified. Some parts of it which were not have been heightened.
Let me say what it is not. It is not a realistic military movie, it is not a realistic superspy movie, it is not a realistic clandestine organization movie. The original GI Joe, especially the long-running comic book series, would sometimes touch these genres and do them very well. (The movie touches these genres too, as if to say, 'yes, these characters have those skills on their character sheet and could holiday in those genres if they wanted to' but that's not this movie.) This is a science fiction movie, and it takes place in the not too distant future.
And here is where we get to the critical point. The thing about science fiction is that in classic science fiction, we posit one dramatic technological change. The rest of the world pretty much goes on the way it was going, and we extrapolate from that one change. In GI Joe, that one change is 'nanotech'. And that's okay, even though nanotech is an utterly broad field. They represent it fairly well and they hold fairly true to the source material where in the beginning the bad guys have a new technology and cream the good guys but as time goes on the good guys gradually learn various limitations of the new technology and realize an orthodox but little-used strategy will completely reverse the field.
But in this movie we have about seven radically new technologies which don't connect to one another. Two or three we might accept, but seven is beyond the pale. It starts looking like an asspull, and when that happens we get distracted. We don't want to be distracted because that breaks the magic spell where we are all twelve again and the toy planes are zooming around.
I could list the seven of them, but the problem with them is that they aren't related in any way. If they were all in some way related to nanotech the same way that everything that Iron Man does is related to 'something built into his suit' that would be one thing, but they clearly are not. It's kind of like when Stane tags Stark with the audio-stunner device in Iron Man. They have to explain it because it doesn't fit anywhere with anything. And it's good enough but it's still a little jarring. It would have been 5 times smarter for Stane to put something in Stark's drink and laugh and then have Stark, drugged, stagger down the stairs and fix himself because we've already foreshadowed how Stark can drink all day and all night and keep right on ticking even when Rhodey is snoozing and groggy.
And the ending of the GI Joe movie is even more wonderful, and sets everything up for the next movie even better.
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| Monday, August 10th, 2009
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11:11 am - What people are missing on the Health Care debate
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They are missing the government/'public' conspiracy.
See, if you remember the big Mortgage Meltdown, the seeds of it were lain in the Community Reinvestment Act. First you set up a legal framework with which to punish the banks, and then 'community minded public groups' sue under the law to force the banks to change their behavior. Of course, both the government and these 'community minded public groups' like ACORN and other socialist/communist paid-for front organizations are working hand in hand behind the scenes.
But the thing of it is, you can't vote ACORN out of office. You can't attack it politically or through the media because it is a 'community group of like-minded individuals expressing their First Amendment rights'. You can't punish it legally even when it crosses the line because the media will naturally support it even if it is in the wrong - even a theoretically Republican Justice Department would be setting itself up for a firestorm of bad press. (Of course, a leftist Justice Department is actively protecting it.) It is immune to all normal forms of attack.
That's why such laws are set up this way. The government can't be blamed.
Health care is going to go the same way. Obama can claim over and over again that 'the government will not take away your current health insurance.' And many pundits have stated quite reasonably that what will happen is exactly what happened in Hawaii, Tennessee, and Massachusetts. When the government makes available a public insurance plan that is cheaper than the private health insurance plan (because the government can pay for the excess out of the general fund and print money to cover shortfalls not to mention denying care without being sued) then employers will naturally switch over to the public insurance plan.
Get it? The government didn't take away your private insurance. Your employer took away your private insurance. Obama keeps his promise even though it's exactly the same thing, just one step removed.
What people aren't getting is the next step of the plan, the part that involves a 'public' organization.
Any company that issues stock has what is called 'a fiduciary responsibility' to its stockholders. If you've read Cryptonomicon, a company's job is to maximize shareholder revenue. If a company takes an action that does not maximize shareholder revenue, the shareholders can sue to stop that action or force another, because it is after all their money being wasted. Sometimes these lawsuits are good, sometimes they are bad, sometimes they are political weapons used by minority stockholders who cannot otherwise enforce their will, sometimes they are a threat to tie the company down in litigation over some decision and make them spend money they don't have so as to force a settlement or other action.
ACORN and similar groups will be the stockholders. Any large company who tries to keep their employees on a private plan will be targeted. It will be very easy to make a case for fiduciary responsibility - you have X employees on the private plan which costs Y and you would save Z if you switched them all onto the public plan. And the public plan is guaranteed by our government to legally be at or above all legal requirements by definition. Why, if you attack the public plan in this court you are attacking the government itself; in fact you are attacking this courtroom. See how far that gets you.
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| Wednesday, July 29th, 2009
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4:23 pm - On Loyalty
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The recent Harry Potter movie got me to thinking and so I've been doing a little rereading of the base materials. And a little piece with Harry Porter and Rufus Scrimgeour (the new Minister of Magic) got me to thinking, when Rufus makes his last play for Harry's help and Harry turns him down showing him the back of his hand (where scarred is 'I must not tell lies') and says, "I don't like your methods."
Loyalty is a touchy and deep subject.
One of my favorite sayings from my father isn't pithy. We were discussing one's word and one's loyalty, and he said, "Consider the price you get wisely when you break your word. Once you break your word to someone, they can never trust you again the same way." Implied in this, and what came out in the rest of the discussion, was that one should make sure it was a big payoff, it was a never-have-to-work-again kind of payoff. It was interesting the way he put it and it stuck with me. (Implied also but only implied was that if the payoff isn't that kind of large, you should never break your loyalty.)
Once, when I ran live action roleplaying games for a charitable organization, I was putting together a game for a convention. Somewhere upwards of 150 players for three days of play. We had six months to prepare and lots of volunteers and I'll bet you can guess the story from here. Most, about ninety-five percent, of the volunteers flaked out and did none of the prep work. (Only about fifty percent flaked out at the actual site because they'd bought their tickets to go to the convention and couldn't show up there and play in the game that they were supposed to work without working it. Welcome to unpaid volunteer work.)
But one memorable person in particular helped out and pulled through. When I was in my time of need and time was growing short he put in a couple of 16 hour days, not to mention doing similarly at the convention itself. He had paid attention to all the earlier email briefings and could explain it to those fifty percent who were on the mailing list but didn't understand them. He was incredibly useful, and I remembered this. When it came time to assign a minor position in this charitable organization I chose him.
And in that position, which required perhaps an hour of hopefully amusing email replying per month if one was generous, he did nothing. For about a year and a half.
I didn't 'fire' him, see, because I remembered that loyalty. I remembered what he had done for me in my time of need and that was much more important to me than his performance in his minor position. I felt that if I had another time of need, I knew that he would be there.
(At the end of that year and a half I was fired from my unpaid volunteer position myself in a story that is too stupid to relate and his position was reorganized our of existence.)
My favorite crisp saying on the topic was said by the founder of my martial arts system to a compatriot who had fallen on hard times and it was, "As long as I have a piece of bread, you'll have half a piece of bread."
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| Thursday, June 25th, 2009
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11:48 pm - Yet More Not Quite Catblogging
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So we have had Gracie for between one month and two, and I notice that her face is darker than I recall it being. It is both less glossy and the dark patches are more exaggerated. And on a critter who saves up a week of cuteness for sudden momentary bursts, it saddened me. I do know that she will get older (and bigger) and her colors will dull somewhat as she does so. But to have it happen after the first month was not what I was looking for.
We are also learning her particular mood and style. As snakes go she is a bit shy when being initially picked up but then becomes inquisitive and relaxed. And while at first she was relaxing ever yet more and more with steady handling to the point where we can often pick her up without tenseness at all, suddenly that peevish behavior returned in spades. She suddenly became much easier to startle during handling and become tense. Add this to the idle fact that she had not yet defecated in the month plus that we had owned her and we were beginning to wonder what was wrong.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/36374159@N06/3662256288/ is what was going on.
Once Gracie's eyes got cloudy, we knew she was setting up to shed and that was what had her irritated. We upped the humidity in the cage and let nature take its course which in this case meant her sitting around miserable until the right time came and then she crawled back and forth across her raspy log over and over until the scales all peeled off. Because she is young and different parts of her are growing at different rates, it came off in bits and clumps as opposed to the 'perfect' sheds one might see on an older snake or happen across dramatically in the wild.
The wonderful thing about snakes as pets, besides that they really only crap once a month, is that they provide to their owners a metaphorical kick in the pants three or four times a year. One gets to see the wisdom of nature in a combination of sloughing off accreted external trash and re-emerging as the old you in a better skin. It is the burst of improvement, the breaking of plateaus. They find their inner selves and bring it again to the forefront, to do battle with the world outside. The being remains the same; only fresh, gleaming, and new.
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| Friday, June 5th, 2009
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11:24 am - Saturn, the story of
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For those of you with long memories, one of my first posts here was on how my Saturn SC2 crashed. It was the first car I bought new and as such was one of those life milestones that always leaves its mark however faint.
The big thing about the Saturn brand of automobiles was that at its inception, the president of GM offered the various union employees a deal that went like this: You uproot your lives and move your families to Tennesee, the region of this new plant, and I'll give you a chance to help make great cars.
The sneaky thing about it was the unspoken part, which is, "You guys like making cars, right? You want to make the best cars possible?" The employees who actually took him up on the deal were, in fact, the employees who were motivated by the chance to make really great cars. The hidden question created a self-selection process. It was not that timecard-punchers need not apply, it was that they naturally would not apply.
And so Saturn ended up with the best of the best in terms of employees. The technological choices they made were competent but not stunning - a decent engine and molded plastic dent-resistant body panels. The customer service choices they made were innovative at the time - no-stress, haggle-free pricing, a lengthy inexpensive contract for service/upkeep at the dealer which always included a car wash and vacuum, all the little touches were taken care of. But back on the assembly line Saturn incorporated many 'japanese' management innovations like employee empowerment, and used the Tennesee location so as to have flexible work rules and not be bound by tomes of union-required negotiation.
So it was the choice of employees which resulted in a car of astounding reliability, reliability that had, at the time, become the province of Japanese cars. The Saturn brand ended up as a hybrid of japanese and american styles - not quite as small as japanese economy cars so Americans could fit in them rationally, not quite as weak as japanese economy cars so Americans wouldn't feel powerless, and all that reliability so that an American buyer could get all the benefits of the japanese car without suffering for them. The early Saturns routinely lasted 200k+ miles and only got better from there; unheard of for GM.
In fact, this conceptual separation of Saturn from GM, their own dealer network, their own supply chain, their own ethos; was so powerful that Toyota stole it right back with the Scion brand. They devised an automobile platform different from their usual, with a different customizable style and view, the xA, the xB, and xC (and more now). While the insides borrowed heavily from their other platforms, they took the no-haggle pricing and dealership perfection ideals to similar levels.
Saturn, in its heyday, was successful. Not madly successful, but successful. It filled the niche of an honest, trouble-free American economic but not economy car. It was a steady seller.
So what happened? The unions, mostly. They began kvetching that Saturn got the best stuff, the best models, the best engineers, and that the reason why the other GM brands were failing is because of too much emphasis on Saturn. They began legal maneuvers and boardroom activities. Eventually GM was required, or chose to before they were required, to make new Saturn vehicles (Astra, Sky, Ion and so on) in ordinary GM union plants. And the obvious happened.
After my Saturn was totalled, I immediately went back to the Saturn dealership that I had bought it at. I tried to be faithful. I drove what they had available.
The cheapest line was more expensive than what I wanted. And they all felt tinny and cheap. The humming purr of a well-tuned engine and a chassis that was strongly put together simply wasn't there. I believe that Robert Heinlein had a story about E. E. 'Doc' Smith helping him evaluate a used car by careening down the highway with his head pressed against the car's frame to listen for squeaks and feel for shakes, amongst other tests, and the car that 'Doc' Smith helped him get lasted generations. Since then I've done the same - the Saturn SC2 came through with flying colors as did my current Scion xB. But the Astra, Sky, and Ion all failed, and I couldn't buy them. I just couldn't.
And the blame must be laid at the feet of those employees. The clock-punchers. The ones who didn't care. The ones who were not craftsmen, but were just doing a job, protected by legality.
The Penske Automotive Group, run by Roger Penske, will be purchasing Saturn. Theoretically they will not be building cars, but will be purchasing those made by GM - at least, not immediately. Maybe he can bring it back to what it once was. Maybe.
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| Monday, May 18th, 2009
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7:43 pm - Not Quite Catblogging
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| Sunday, May 17th, 2009
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5:14 pm - Crucial update
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Pet acquired.
She is a standard burmese python, quite young, with a smoky nose and delicate mien. We picked her up at the herp show at the world-famous Cow Palace yesterday, and today I got all the fixins'. Of course they cost a bit more than the snake herself.
She must have been thirsty because she made for the water first thing, and is now happily swimming and soaking. Looks like I got the right size bowl.
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| Saturday, May 2nd, 2009
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11:11 am - Why I like Huntik: Secrets and Seekers
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For those of you who do not follow the intricacies of saturday morning cartoons, this past year has had a new show called 'Huntik: Secrets and Seekers.' And I find myself liking it. Is it new? Is it innovative? Maybe. I mean, we can go through and play spot-the-tropes and we will. And we can go through and see where and what they stole from other more iconic shows to show how the mishmash gets into place.
Let me set it up.
We begin with a dreamy, intelligent-but-does-poorly-in-school white male kid named 'Lok Lambert' who is off at boarding school in Italy. His father, a puzzle and game designer, is mysteriously missing. He's interested in a fiery red-haired good-at-school wealthy European girl named Sophie Casterwill. In their first study meeting they knock over an old urn Lok's father left to him, revealing a mysterious amulet and book of secrets. Sophie recognizes the amulet but doesn't tell Lok, who grabs it and feels strange. Men in suits attack with magic powers.
That's greatness right there. We have the mysterious background of the classic heroic origin, the untapped potential beginning to awake, the hero's companion (an obvious riff on Hermione Granger) and right into a fight scene whose reason is clear - explanation. We have a fight not to have a fight but to reveal. We show, don't tell. Lok, our viewpoint character, is awed by seeing wacky magic powers for real for the first time in his life but never TOO awed. He's seen movies and he's an American so it doesn't matter to him if these guys who look like Secret Service agents complete with earpieces can shoot freeze-beams out of their hands and jump from building to building.
It is interesting that the villains are slightly constrained by not wanting too many people to see them shooting beams from their hands but only slightly - we're currently in Italy so it's not like the police can do anything to anyone.
Over the next twelve minutes of the first show we learn that anyone who touches one of these amulets becomes awakened, becomes what is called a 'Seeker'. Amongst other things they have access to a number of simple spells like superleaping from building to building, running up walls, and firing impact-beams or cold-beams from their hand (it helps to actually hold the amulet and sort of point it, but it's not necessary.) We learn that Sophie Casterwill just so happens to be from a long line of these Seekers, not to mention judo-throwing the occasional Suit-clad mook around. A cute little pint-sized flying gargoyle connected to all this mess shows up to help Lok out and guide him to one 'Dante Vale' who is the top Seeker currently around around when Lok splits up from Sophie in an effort to get the book to safety.
At the dramatic climax comes the big reveal, the final purpose of the amulet. They are used to summon the creature inside them, called a Titan. Not exactly the classical Titans, they refer to pretty much any monster from any real or made-up myth. Some are stronger and better than others and some do different things, but in general they fight amongst themselves and alongside the people who are fighting. This would be awesome for our heroes except that the Suits have them too...
Let's start taking it apart. One, the orphan hero with untapped potential. Check. Two, the smarter woman companion, check. The cute magical animal is three, and the mentor-figure (Dante Veil) is surprisingly young, hip, and active; for four. The combination of superleaps, running on walls, and power-beams is standard mystic martial arts like you'd see in any anime, except this was made in Italy. (Or at least conceived there by Iginio Straffi, who also did Winx Club - his Europeanized/Americanized version of Japanese 'Magical Girl' anime). And finally, the big kicker - summoning a Titan from an amulet is just calling out your Pokemon from your Pokeball. These are the basic elements.
It is a classic example of taking things that we know people like, that we know work, stirring them together in a pot and seeing what you get. If you do it right, you get delicious goulash. If you do it wrong it doesn't congeal. So the question is, how do we get it to congeal? What makes something like this work?
I read a brilliant interview of Satoshi Tajiri, the inventor of Pokemon and therefore the Pokemon craze. The money line was this. "I was trying to think to myself - what do kids like? And I realized that kids like picking up tadpoles from the pond and putting them in their pocket and bringing them home and showing them to other kids and making friends with them. And everything followed from there."
Huntik has this. First you pick up the amulet, then you try to 'master' it. And it isn't as easy as thinking really hard (ie, character grimaces on screen). The critters are displayed to have personalities and to do better at certain things. When Lok gets a violent fighting-type critter later on in the series, it never does what he wants it to when he's nice (and Lok is a genuinely nice guy as are all American heroes). He has to be violent and aggressive himself to get it to do what he wants it to do.
Huntik has 'Everybody Knows Kung Fu.' Once you get an amulet you have wacky kung fu powers. At one point they visit Lok's mother, and he learns that she too has been a Seeker (now retired) and has had kung fu powers and summonable monsters all his life, but was just waiting to tell him when he got old enough which was going to be very soon indeed (after all she did send him to a school where she knew he'd meet Sophie Casterwill). Amazingly, this scene contained surprisingly little angst and a lot of affection not to mention that his mom demonstrated that she was personally awesome in combat just before.
Huntik riffs acceptably on the monomyth, the Heroic quest. Our hero Lok is not very reluctant. He tends to learn by doing instead of by sitting in school or training in a bland room. Sophie, the companion, does learn through study and hard work and she actually has some rare magical spells to her name. Dante Vale is less the greybeard mentor than he is the leader of a team that includes Lok and Sophie, and after a few episodes picks up Zhalia Moon, a sarcastic Seeker with a dark secret; and while he is awesome personally, he can only be in one place at one time and that leaves plenty of stuff for Lok and Sophie to do. As the team proceeds on the Trail of Trials, they learn things about themselves and their enemies and they pick up more Titans and learn how to use them. At least once the bad guys get their hands on a Titan before the heroes do, although it's not the end of the world.
If this was all there was to it I would call it average. But it is above average and here is why. Not everything is explained.
The show is called 'Huntik: Secrets and Seekers' and to the tongue I find the title clumsy. 'Huntik' refers to the Huntik Foundation, a gathering of vaguely good Seekers who pay Dante Vale to be their top operator (and he doesn't come cheap). They have nifty computer toys, a good database (Pokedex) of the Titans and their ancient powers, and safehouses that never seem to stay safe for very long. But they are hunters, and they are hunting for something. What it is, we don't know, or we know in only a general fashion as 'more Titans'. All Titans have fighting powers and movement powers but some have special abilities and that's pretty open-ended. (Lok's first titan, the one his father left him, is not a good fighter but can latch onto him like a body-harness and fly; and as we know flight is always broken.)
Secrets is key. Dante Vale leads the team to uncover 'secrets'. Like what really happened to Jason and the Argonauts? Is the Golden Fleece a Titan with the ability to heal? Scylla and Charybdis are definitely monster-titans. But you won't know until you go there, now will you? Lok, being the son of a puzzle designer, is really good at them and it gives him a chance to shine often whenever the Indiana-Jones style puzzles come on. Secret doors, traps, riddles, mind-games, it's all there.
Seekers is what they are doing. They are active. They are seeking. When they don't have anything to do, the Huntik Foundation has something for them to do.
The animation is odd. It is not american or japanese. The people are tall and slim. If you saw Winx Club it is the same style, this oddly blended Italian style. The voices and lines are different. The characters speak in a fairly real way for people who happen to be engaged in magical jiggery pokery. They make mistakes and sometimes seem off-balance during the fight scenes like real people do when jerking around and struggling. The cutting and fading from one scene to another is not smooth and often catches people in the middle of delivering a line, which makes me imagine that it was does first in Italian and then dubbed into English though I believe this is not actually so.
It is that imperfection which increases the reality of the show. A friend of mine once commented that he preferred college football to professional football because professional football was too professional. It's too polished, there are no mistakes, reversals of fortune are rare, most games outcome can be predicted by the oddsmakers so well that something like a 'point spread' had to be created. College ball has mistakes. You never know what's going to happen. Players are in their processes of learning and growing right before your eyes. Huntik has that imperfection about it.
Secrets, again. Not everything is said. The Huntik team might go after the Golden Fleece and sail their speedboat through the boat-crushing walls. Do they go back and search for the Titan that's doing it? Nah, too dangerous. Our primary mission is more important. And so the rock-crushing titan is lost, or just unimportant, the same way so much of our daily lives is unimportant and can't, or shouldn't be researched. Do you need to know why oranges are ten cents off per pound this week? Probably not. If they were half price you might want to know because they might be bad, but not ten cents. It brings an illusion of verisimilitude, even if it might be entirely a creation of it being a 23.5 minute episode and there's just not enough time in there to state and restate everything.
Imperfections, empty holes, secrets, and not being told. This is what captures my imagination, and what I hope, captures the imaginations of children. I can easily imagine myself at the age of twelve playing Huntik the way I and my little friends used to play the Six Million Dollar Man, making up wacky plots that we'd get sent by the OSI to uncover with our bionic powers or the way kids nowadays play Avatar the Last Airbender with their elemental powers or Naruto with their ninja powers ("I got you with my shuriken-jutsu!" "Noyadint! It was just a substitution-jutsu!")
If there are no holes, what's there to imagine? What's there for me to fill in with my own imaginings?
I'd like for Huntik to succeed and be renewed for more seasons. It's a rough go, though - they switched its timeslot already, which is not a good sign. The general downturn in advertising may strike it. I haven't seen a lot of toys. Still, I haven't seen the whole of the first season yet, so at least I'm not done.
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| Thursday, April 16th, 2009
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11:38 am - I think we all know where this is heading.
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From http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/5160120/A-Copper-Standard-for-the-worlds-currency-system.html
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A 'Copper Standard' for the world's currency system?
Zhou Xiaochuan, the central bank governor, piqued the interest of metal buffs last month by calling for a world currency modelled on the "Bancor", floated by John Maynard Keynes at Bretton Woods in 1944.
The Bancor was to be anchored on 30 commodities - a broader base than the Gold Standard, which had caused so much grief in the 1930s. Mr Zhou said such a currency would prevent the sort of "credit-based" excess that has brought the global finance to its knees.
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So, copper will be the base of the currency, and it'll fit neatly with our smallest coin, the copper piece. Moving up through silver and then to gold (as precious commodities relating to their electronic and other manufacturing utility) up through platinum, and then more exotic materials like iridium, rhodium, and praesodymium.
I can hardly wait to run a game where the players stumble upon a strange bunker where the wealthiest treasure is minted, coined iridium pieces and the documents that they magically translate clearly state it as the highest currency.
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| Tuesday, March 31st, 2009
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8:08 pm - How you can tell when Obama is lying
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I mean, aside from when his lips are moving. It's already been said that Obama's every promise comes with an expiration date. But.
Whenever Obama prefaces a statement with, "Let me be clear," that's how you know you are about to get a whopper. When he says, "Let me be perfectly clear," it's gonna be a doozy.
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| Saturday, March 21st, 2009
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3:48 pm - What was Starbuck?
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1. An angel, sent back in the form of Starbuck, to help move things along.
2 and the explanation I prefer, is that Starbuck's character was killed by a set of bad dice rolls in a combat scene, and because the dice were rolled out in the open, they couldn't be easily fudged. The Gamemaster had a bunch of backstory and prophecy worked up for Starbuck's character, didn't want to let go of it, and didn't want the player to bring in a new character so late in the game and so behind on experience points, and so brought her back to play out the story arc. (Which clearly got away from him and only ended because some of the players were leaving for college, but that's another story.)
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5:26 am - Cattlecar Gaglactica
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What I was desperately praying for:
Cavil has Hera and is threatening her on the bridge. Baltar goes into his rousing religious speech, ever so gradually swaying Cavil, making him believe. 2/3 of the way through in the middle of a phrase BLAM Adama shoots Cavil in the back of the head having casually walked up behind him. (Or, for bonus points, Roslyn shoots Cavil in the back of the head, thanks Baltar, and says, "I've been listening to you for so long that I know exactly when you're about halfway through and have everyone going.)
Aside from that, they were totally set up for when they were doing the big mind-melding thing and transmitting the information back to the Cylons having Hera sneak up and put her hand in the water. Her magical human/Cylon information plus the Cylon song plus her special opera house stuff would all get transmitted and downloaded to all the Cylons when they were defenseless, instant resolution of everything. (They did it in 'V' but it's classic mythology stuff.) That would be the whole point of everyone's visions involving bringing Hera to the center of the opera house. It was even set up beforehand, showing that Hera could do Cylon projection and communication and had the music.
All in all, epic fail.
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