Date:	2025-09-14 15:02
Subject:	Favorite Posts
Security:	Public
Mood:	cheerful

If you're new here there's some posts I'd like to share.

Requirements Kill: How projects can be ruined by the sheer number of requirements on them.

Feeds, Seeds, and Gray Goo: Nanotechnological manufacturing will be driven by logistics--and that's what keeps the "gray goo" scenario from being a real danger.

Other engineering essays:
The issues with engineering as a career, the problems with engineering education, and how to become an engineer if you just can't resist it. The reasons to avoid government projects. Don't be this kind of whistleblower. Why licensing software engineers is a bad idea. Even in fiction it's hard to keep ahead of advancing technology.


Analyzing specific spacecraft: Rocketplane's tourist design, the hypothetical Blackstar RLV, and off-equator space elevators.

Medical doctrine: I have issues with the childhood vaccination schedule and the innumeracy of medical researchers. They're not all bad though.

I've written a few pieces of fanfic and a whole bunch of book reviews.

Playing MMOs has gotten me thinking about how we could use one to test changes to our real world and what would be the signs that we're actually living in a simulation.

I've written a few things specifically about World of Warcraft. A rant on the brainpower needed for tanks to taunt mobs. A missing piece of backstory on the Defias. A suggestion for monetizing add-ons within the Blizzard rules. Reflections on how much more the Horde storyline focuses on PvP. And a discussion of how the Iliad would look in WoW terms.

Date:	2012-12-26 18:15
Subject:	The Righteous Mind
Security:	Public
Mood:	thoughtful

Jonathan Haidt has spent his career trying to develop a scientific explantion of human moral drives. An early version of his "Moral Foundations Theory" annoyed me enough to get over 300 words into an unpublished rebuttal. Enough other people actually shared their reactions to force him into revising his theory to account for patterns of morality he hadn't encountered before (i.e., conservatives and libertarians).

The updated version is described in his new book The Righteous Mind and I have to confess he has thoroughly addressed my complaints. Haidt describes moral codes as made of combinations of six foundations the way a flavor is made of the five tastes. The moral "taste buds" are set on spectrums of Care/Harm, Authority/Submission, Sanctity/Degradation, Fairness/Cheating, Liberty/Oppression, and Loyalty/Betrayal. Humans use morality as a tool to bind themselves into groups for pursuit of a common goal: simple survival for a family or forager band, building something for a project team, or an ideology for a political party. Haidt discusses examples of liberal, conservative, and libertarian moral codes.

The best way to check a new scientific theory is to find a dataset not used during its creation and test the theory against that. If Haidt's theory is correct people have been responding to these foundations for thousands of years as they created codes for their cultures. Some of those sets of moral principles should closely match his models. I grew up with the "Seven Deadly Sins" as a guide to what behavior was to be most avoided (the 10 commandments didn't come up as much, not being a sculptor). So if Haidt's foundations match them I'd consider it useful evidence that he's come up with a good working model.

Some of the deadly sins match exactly to their corresponding foundations. "Care/Harm" is violated by someone feeling Wrath. The sin of Pride indicates someone is not accepting his proper place in the "Authority/Submission" hierarchy. The "Sanctity/Degradation" foundation concerns respect for sacred things (crucifixes, Korans, the words of MLKjr) and the human body, particularly sexual violations. So Lust was a much more common source of violations in medieval times than modern provocations such as flinging dung at an image of the Madonna. The "Fairness/Cheating" foundation dictates that rewards should be proportional to the effort people put in. Someone violating that is committing Sloth.

Identifying a sin for the "Liberty/Oppression" foundation seems hard until you realize Haidt isn't defining "oppression" in the libertarian sense of having your autonomy violated buy in the liberal one of having a smaller share of resources than other members of society. That clearly fits with the sins of Greed and Gluttony.

This leaves one member in each set: "Loyalty/Betrayal" and Envy. They're not a close match. Loyalty/betrayal refers to behavior towards one's group while Envy is an emotion aimed at an individual. But envy is "antigroupish" in making individuals work against other members of their own group.

Overall I think Haidt's MFT is a good model of human moral instincts. Different moral codes place varying weights on the individual foundations. Traditional/conservative moralities place roughly equal weights on all six foundations. Liberals focus on care/harm, liberty/oppression, and fairness/cheating (some are actually opposed to the sanctity, loyalty, and authority foundations). Libertarians put an extremely high weight on the liberty/oppression foundation, focusing on personal autonomy rather than equal division, with a lesser emphasis on fairness/cheating and a low one on care/harm.

Another bit of folk wisdom Haidt confirms is "man is not a rational animal, he is a rationalizing one." Haidt discusses the history of analyzing whether conscious reasoning has more effect on our decisions than instinct and did considerable research showing instinct wins whenever there's a conflict. His preferred metaphor is of the rational mind as the rider on an elephant. If the elephant doesn't know where to go the rider can direct it to an option, but if the elephant leans even slightly the rider is busy coming up with explanations for why that must be the correct direction.

Group behavior in Haidt's model involves people subordinating their personal identities to a group one. It can appear in many forms—families, forager bands, church groups, work teams, and even fans of sporting events. Haidt describes a college football game in detail as something designed to produce the feeling of “groupishness” that people seek. Some recreational pharmaceuticals such as peyote and ecstasy have similar effects.

To test Haidt’s theory of groups I compared it to the analysis in the software development book Peopleware. Programmers are usually thought of as loners but Lister and DeMarco describe how cohesive teams produce better in both speed and quality. The authors confessed that they could not come up with any advice for how to help programmers form teams. Instead they wrote the chapter “Teamicide” describing corporate practices that inhibit or disrupt team formation. These all speak directly to Haidt’s theory. First is separating the team members either physically or by splitting their time among different projects. Physical proximity—usually as a dense group—is a key ingredient in forming Haidt’s groups. Other practices correspond to the moral foundations. “Bureaucracy,” “Quality reduction of the project,” “Phony deadlines,” and “Those Damn Posters and Plaques” all degrade the significance of the team’s central focus, the software project they’re working on. Team members need to respect the sanctity of the goal to believe in their team. Likewise “Defensive Management” and “Clique Control” subvert the group’s respect for their supervisors and remove the supporting moral authority of the team leadership. “The Side Effects of Overtime” becomes a straight fairness/cheating issue. Lister and DeMarco’s statement that humans naturally form close-knit teams if not prevented from doing so is another confirmation of Haidt’s model.

The foundations most violated by teamicide are also the ones most likely to be ignored by liberal morality. This matches with the observed preference of the software industry for liberal causes. It seems that people who practice liberal morality still have their behavior affected by foundations they don’t usually respect.

Haidt isn’t shy about his liberal beliefs. His research was partly driven by trying to understand how Republican politicians connected better with voters than so many Democratic ones did. Kerry frustrated Haidt by by his refusal to use all the moral foundations in his messages. Obama did a much better job of fulfilling Haidt’s hopes. The 2012 campaign particularly used the “loyalty/betrayal” foundation in appealing to various groups to get out and vote. Romney’s attempt to appeal to Americans as a whole was less successful.

I suppose some people would find The Righteous Mind to be totally obvious. As someone who’s never had a good grasp of how human minds work it was full of revelations for me. There’s certainly a lot of counter-productive activity in modern life that could be avoided if people had a better idea of how each other would react. The fundamental problem is disagreement over goals. Haidt’s analysis won’t help us come to a consensus on that. It does give me the hope that if we can acknowledge that the other sides in our debates have honest motives for their desired outcomes we’ll be more civil in trying to resolve them. There are compromises we can make if we’re willing to--and if the decision-makers are willing to give up the personal power involved.

Date:	2012-09-27 22:30
Subject:	Interesting Conversation
Security:	Public
Mood:	thoughtful

My papers from my MS degree are up on the web and every so often I get an email about them. The latest was an MIT PhD student doing a thesis on inter-agency programs. She interviewed me for an hour about the problems we had on the NPOESS program getting the military and civilian customers to agree on what they wanted. I'm looking forward to seeing the final product.

Date:	2012-08-27 21:39
Subject:	Quote of the Week
Security:	Public
Mood:	cheerful

"Oh, I'm sorry . . . this is calculus."

celticdragonfly

Date:	2012-06-04 17:15
Subject:	Favorite Wargame Rule Ever
Security:	Public
Mood:	amused

HeatDeath posted this on the SJG boards:

Ad Astra Games' "Attack Vector Tactical", an extremely detailed 3d spaceship combat board game (Picture Car Wars in 3 dimensions, only more complex) has an awesome ramming rule that totally solves these problems.

The problem isn't whether ramming is possible: nav computers make it trivial for anything to ram anything. And the problem isn't how much damage a ram does: ramming should usually destroy both units. But if you give the player unlimited power to order rams, it breaks most games.

AVT's [frankly brilliant] solution is to require the player ordering a ram to stand up at the table and make the actual speech the ship captain would make, convincing his bridge crew that the situation is indeed suicidally desperate, and that ramming is the only honorable and feasible course of action. Everyone around the table votes, and the ram succeeds on a majority vote. Bonus points if someone actually tears up.

If the vote fails, the bridge crew throw the captain in the brig and the unit is removed from play.

Date:	2012-06-01 11:24
Subject:	"Firefly: The Musical" Review
Security:	Public
Mood:	cheerful

When I saw the announcement of "Firefly: The Musical" I immediately wanted to go see it. Once I got there I had qualms--was this going to be good entertainment or just an attempt to take advantage of Browncoats' willingness to throw money at anything with the word Firefly on it? When the cast finished singing the theme song those qualms were gone.

The Highball is more bar than theater, but a corner of it was curtained off for the show. The audience all had a good view of the stage. I didn't notice any problems with the acoustics but can't speak for the back corners. There was minimal scenery--the actors were as likely to use mime as to pull out a table for a scene.

The pre-show was a series of videos including songs from other Whedon works (Dr Horrible and "Once More With Feeling") and fan vids. The projector also had some use during the play. A starfield was projected for all the bridge scenes and a clip of the river ambush opened the show.

The Firefly actors are a tough example to live up to but our local heroes did well. Stephen Robinson (Wash) and Jason Vines (Jayne) stole most of their scenes. Robinson's comic timing gave us a classic showstopper--the audience was laughing so hard at an offhand wink that another actor was frozen, waiting for us to quiet down so she could say her line. Michael Thomas (Mal) had the toughest role--stepping into the shoes of an actor talented enough to anchor a multi-year prime time series isn't easy--but he held the stage and kept us engaged with the story. Linsey Reeves (Inara) did a nice job of showing a professional liar telling clumsy lies. Adam Mengesha (Book) solidly lays down the law for our captain. Sabrina Jones (Saffron) got to display her range from naive country girl to seductress to cold professional.

The crew introduced themselves singing the theme song together. The settlers' celebration was the setting for Mal and Inara's "I Won't Let You In" duet (a lovely song reprised at the end). That was the saddest of the songs as the couple explained their reasons for rejecting love. Jayne's "Guns and Women" was hilarious as our favorite thug dithered over which he was more attracted to. Saffron steamed up the stage with “Let Me Have My Wedding Night”. Then we switched to vaudville as Wash sang "When Did This Stop Being Funny" and got great laughs with some really bad jokes. Inara had another duet with Saffron, flirting in the ways "Only a Woman Can See". The action climax was Jayne saving the day with "One Shot"--a duet with Kaylee who felt she only had one shot with Simon. The soundtrack will be coming out on CD, including an additional song: "Special Hell".

On top of the songs the script added some grace notes to the original, usually going for laughs. Kaylee vamped on Simon in the background when the script allowed (and then in the foreground during the climactic "One Shot" song). The deleted scene from the original was included, giving Simon and River their best moments in the show.

This is not a good way to introduce your musical-loving friend to Firefly. The play assumes you've seen the episode. This let them save time and effort by not explaining setting changes or having scenery to show which room they're in. As much as I'd like better visuals this is a small scale production. A $5 ticket doesn't get me a Serenity marionette sailing across the stage. For someone who hasn't seen the show they're going to be very confused when the carrion house crew walks onto the stage and makes some cryptic remarks. Rewriting the scenes to provide the necessary context to that and other bits wouldn't be that hard--but there's probably not enough newbies in the audience to justify spending the time.

"Firefly: The Musical" was a wonderful show, well worth driving for hours. We were apparently the fans who'd come the farthest to see it so far (Fort Worth to Austin). Given that they've had to double the run of the show to deal with demand someone will probably beat that. With luck the Institution Theater will be inspired to tackle another episode--"The Message" and "Objects In Space" would work well in their format ("Out of Gas" would be great but harder to translate).

Strongly recommended to all Browncoats.


Upcoming shows

Photos from the show

Date:	2012-05-15 22:21
Subject:	Castle Ficlet
Security:	Public
Mood:	silly

( A possible first scene for Season Five of CastleCollapse )

Date:	2012-05-02 22:50
Subject:	Boardgames Leaping Up At Me
Security:	Public
Mood:	cheerful

Steve Jackson is running a Kickstarter for the "Designer's Edition" of Ogre. I'm an Ogre fan from way back. I still have the counters from one of the $2.95 Microgames, even if the rules and map have vanished over the years. GEV was my favorite of the series--once infantry could fight from cover and make overruns I was hooked. I even sold Pyramid magazine an article with more rules and scenarios, naturally titled "Poor Bloody Infantry". So I'm in on the Kickstarter for a copy of the game. It's running wild. They'd originally wanted $20k to support printing and distributing (and to enable pre-orders). Now it's coming up on half-a-million dollars and Evil Stevie is frantically trying to come up with stretch goals to justify having this pile of money dumped on him. He's got some nice ones too, including a Tom Smith album of Ogre theme music. Which just got unlocked.

So I'm trying to get a boardgaming friend to make time to actually playtest some of the new scenarios. And I've signed up for Board Game Geek Con this year (made easier by the November drill being moved to a different weekend). And I'm coming up with an idea for the scenario contest.

Date:	2012-03-24 19:23
Subject:	Getting Some Use out of the GMing Skills
Security:	Public
Mood:	mischievous

It's been 4.5 years since I've GMed a tabletop role-playing game. The skills haven't completely atrophied though. I applied some of them today running a command post exercise for my battalion. One of the exercise inputs was a Facebook rumor that the derailed tanker car of chlorine gas was actually a tank of ethanol, with the whole evacuation an excuse to keep people from getting at the 'shine. Alas, they went into rumor control mode before I could justify sending in a pickup truck loaded with some empty 55-gallon drums and a welding rig.

Date:	2010-12-03 15:10
Subject:	Laura Safely Home
Security:	Public
Mood:	relieved

I just brought celticdragonfly home from the hospital. A little later than they'd planned to discharge her, they were worried about her O2 sats. She's resting comfortably and trying to keep from talking. Should be back on solid food in a few days.

I couldn't find our bell, but we have a hobby horse that whinnies. So if she needs something she just has to squeeze its ear.

Date:	2010-11-01 10:55
Subject:	A New Federal Holiday
Security:	Public
Mood:	mischievous

We need to make November 1st a Federal Holiday. It can't be All Saints' Day, that's religious. But we could have White House Day to honor John Adams moving into the first White House or Taxation Without Representation Day to make us remember the British enacting the Stamp Tax. But whatever we pick I want this day off so I can stay up late at the Halloween parties and have a day to recover.

Date:	2010-10-24 23:18
Subject:	An Application At Last
Security:	Public
Mood:	mischievous

XKCD has figured out a practical application for the Turing Test.

Date:	2010-10-23 17:37
Subject:	GIP
Security:	Public
Mood:	amused

The Warcraft folks announced how big the Big Bad of the new expansion is. I responded with a wisecrack. amiyuy was amused enough to make an icon of it.

I like it. :D

Date:	2010-09-13 23:26
Subject:	Eclectic Reading
Security:	Public
Mood:	thoughtful

Rational Optimist
Matt Ridley wrote this book as a rebuttal to the ever-present, ever-changing prophesies of doom for the human race. Right now global warming and peak oil are the most popular ones, but there's still people talking up overpopulation or pollution as likely to cause a global collapse. Ridley doesn't just go after the individual theories. He's describing a comprehensive theory for how we got to our present level of wealth and power from our Stone Age origins.

In short: Trade is the root of all good. People specializing in producing something can make more of it and trade it someone else who has something they want, benefiting both parties. Keep increasing productivity and we have the extra time needed to create art, fight for freedom, or just enjoy life more without fearing next year's drought. It's not a completely new concept (Nonzero has a good take on the same issues), but he does a damn good job of pulling out evidence to show how far back trade goes, and how far things could spread geographically. Tasmania is a scary example of how a population could regress when cut off from its trading partners. Without a steady flow of tools and ideas from the mainland, the islanders couldn't maintain the technology to feed their original population and their numbers declined until they hit the minimum technology the island could support by itself.

It's not just physical goods--exchanging ideas is more important. Combinations of ideas are more powerful than individual ones. The combinations produce new ideas . . . which Ridley describes as "ideas having sex." Give that free reign and soon your society is prospering and expanding.

I strongly recommend this book for everyone. If you don't have time for the book then watch Ridley's TED talk or read his article introducing his ideas.


Girl Genius
My favorite webcomic has won a second Hugo! You don't have to buy a book to read this, it's all online. But I'm still buying the books. They beat hell out of waiting for the webpage to load page after page. If you haven't read it, start from the beginning. Mad scientists are fun. Lots of mad scientists running around gets scary. Or funny. It depends on the experiment.


Darkship Thieves
The protagonist of Darkship Thieves is a teenage girl visiting a strange new culture. But she's only superficially Podkayne of Mars. Actually she's got a lot of the Stainless Steel Rat in her, much to the dismay of many other people in the book. The setting is a few centuries into the future, with a nasty government controlling Earth to prevent technology from growing to a Singularity. Even with the fancy spaceship and biotech it's much more realistic than the typical space opera I read.

Best of all, Sarah Hoyt is coming to fencon this weekend! This is the first book of hers I've found and I'm hoping I can find some of the out of print ones beginning the other series in the dealers' room. With luck she'll be reading from the sequel to Darkship Thieves there.


"Jerry Smith's War: 2025."
I don't read many short stories these days, and this one isn't a great piece of fiction. But it is a well done scenario exploring how changes in technology and infantry tactics can revolutionize the way we wage "Small Wars." Useful reading for anyone expecting to be involved in a war in the coming decades.

Date:	2010-08-12 22:04
Subject:	Looks Like the Football Team's Running that Too Now
Security:	Public
Mood:	irritated

I just got a catalog from University of Southern California Bookstore. I flipped through out of idle curiosity. Turns out there were no books offered at all.

Date:	2010-08-10 01:11
Subject:	Books and Movies I Like
Security:	Public
Mood:	cheerful

Toy Story 3

The kidlets love the Toy Story movies, so I took the older two out to see it on the big screen. Very well done story. It builds on the theme of the original two movies that toys exist to be played with. They avoided turning Andy into a jerk and even gave him a very sweet moment at the end. I heard a lot of adults crying during that scene. It was awfully scary for a kid flick, though. It was much rougher than I expected it to be. This is the first time I've ever been asked to not get a movie on DVD. She said she was afraid it would be too scary for her baby sister but I have my doubts.

To answer joyeuse13's question, TS3 does tie into the Declaration of Independence. The non-Andy part of the story has our heroes overthrowing an evil toy dictator*. The dictator makes fascist speeches. Barbie rebuts him with an appeal to the "consent of the governed." I loved it.

* If you don't want spoilers you should've seen it by now. Besides, it's Disney, you know they win.


Inception

I want to go see this a second time so I can check for details, especially the wedding ring. It's a fantastic movie, something much more complex than I expect to see coming out of Hollywood. It's actually good science fiction, a story based on a new idea that looks at the implications of it in a realistic way. Unlike other SF movies I've seen playing with dream-vs-reality it avoided having massive logic holes.

It doesn't consider all the implications. We came up with a long list of possible applications for the dream sharing technology. Not least of which is what a good dungeon master could do with it. The potentials for psychiatry and education would be much more important.

Inception also managed to be a good movie as well as good SF. Interesting characters, great visuals, and action sequences that didn't confuse the hell out of me. All this while avoiding stupidity such as making Ariadne a replacement wife for Cobb.

I expect we'll be getting the DVD and having a whole bunch of rewatches to settle arguments.


Ukiah Oregon series (Alien Taste, etc)

At first this reads like a young-adult novel of a boy taking on a man's job (tracking down lost kids and kidnap victims) and growing into his full maturity. And, in a certain sense, it is. But goes way off the normal track of that kind of story in amazing ways. If someone described the premise behind this book to me I would have skipped it because it would obviously break my disbelief suspenders. Wen Spencer made it work for me, mostly by making the protagonist as shocked and amazed by the discoveries about his own nature as the reader is. Even when stuff got over the top I cared enough about these people to want to know what happened next. Alien Taste stands alone well but I read the rest of the series as fast as I could.

Date:	2010-08-01 17:04
Subject:	Inception: A Caper Flick
Security:	Public
Mood:	cheerful

( Sorta spoilers for the movieCollapse )

Date:	2010-07-15 16:57
Subject:	Gender Imbalance in Industry
Security:	Public
Mood:	cranky

ESR on why women are such a small minority of programmers and other high-tech professionals:

Women, in general, are not willing to eat the kind of shit that men will swallow to work in this field.

Now let’s talk about death marches, mandatory uncompensated overtime, the beeper on the belt, and having no life. Men accept these conditions because they’re easily hooked into a monomaniacal, warrior-ethic way of thinking in which achievement of the mission is everything. Women, not so much. Much sooner than a man would, a woman will ask: “Why, exactly, am I putting up with this?”
(snip)
If we really want to fix the problem of too few women in computing, we need to ask some much harder questions about how the field treats everyone in it.

Date:	2010-06-24 08:45
Subject:	Those Little Milestones
Security:	Public
Mood:	amused

Jamie's gotten really good at reading. He's at a stage where he can look over my shoulder and read out loud whatever he sees. So I had to turn on the profanity filter in Warcraft.

Date:	2010-06-19 13:36
Subject:	Crying Wolf
Security:	Public
Mood:	amused

Alanna has a new trick to get attention--claiming to have an sudden owie. She'd be more convincing if she didn't keep doing this while standing still on a padded surface. Last time she did this I went over and asked "Did you hurt your wolf bone? Is your wolf bone hurt?"

"Yes."

So I kissed her on the forehead.

"All better now!"