wanton_heat_jet

post-Christian Christmas pageants

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 03:24:34 GMT

It's Christmas time again, and lots of my fellow non-Christians are celebrating Christmas. Those of you with young kids might like to find your way to a Christmas pageant. Where else would your kid get to be a shepherd or a sheep or an angel? They don't put on nativity pageants in public schools any more. So where can a non-Christian kid get to participate in a Christmas show? Try your local Unitarian church. Kids can be sheep, angels, wise men, and even Mary and Joseph. And at a Unitarian church, no one is going to tell your kid that they'll go to hell if they don't toe the line.

spend smart for Christmas

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 22:56:07 GMT

Here's the speech that I wish Obama or the pope would make.

America, you're about to enter your annual binge of consumer spending, the Christmas season. Yes, you do need to spend this year to help the economy recover. The money you spend is your neighbor's paycheck. But times are hard, so this time around spend smart. Avoid gifts that would tend to make us fatter, lazier, and more distracted. Buy gifts instead that make your loved one's healthier, stronger, smarter, better connected, and better informed. Your spending does the nation good by supporting our neighbors. In better times, that would be enough. But these days times are harder, and we need to be smarter. We need to get double duty out of our spending. So buy gifts that are going to make us richer, gifts that are good for us.

See also: Spend smart.

See also: Your civic duty to return your fruitcake.

evolution foot poll

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 21:56:46 GMT

These are the topics and issues that I prepared for the evolution foot polls I ran at Burning Man. The game was that I, acting as emcee, would have the players move right or left to indicate their stance on various topics related to evolution. In addition to straight dichotomies, I would sometimes run a poll on two axes. Players would move left or right in response to one proposition and then move forward or back in response to another.

I was surprised in general at the lack of support enjoyed by the "culture" side on the culture v genetics issues.

These are my working notes, not a summary. Skimming is recommended.

I had several general topics in line to turn to as need be.
Music
Dogs
Star wars
Mind
Soul
Morals
Western civilization

In particular, I had these questions and propositions that I put to the players. Some have followup propositions.

Humans have a special place in the world
...Because they were created by God
...In whose image they are made

Warfare is natural

The technology singularity is coming

Humans will destroy the earth.

Evolution proceeds toward a goal or according to divine intent.
v
Evolution has no goal and proceeds without intent.

Even in a free democracy in which individuals can choose their life careers, men and women differ in their choices about love, family, jobs, etc.

Are these differences primarily the result of how human nature and sex differences evolved.
v
Or are these differences primarily the result of how people are socialized.

On average, men have a stronger built-in tendency to act violently than women do. This tendency reflects the rough and tumble social environment in which humans evolved.
v
In terms of built-in predispositions toward violence, men and women are basically the same, and the reason men act more violently is socialization and the enforcement of gender roles.

As other mammals have evolved many of the same nerve systems and hormones that are associated with feelings in humans, we can presume that many other mammals experience some feelings, such as fear or motherly love, fundamentally similar to our own.
v
Human emotions have an intangible quality that makes them fundamentally different from the emotions of other mammals, possibly a spiritual or cultural quality.

Humans evolved from apelike ancestors.
v
Not.

Humans are the end goal of evolution on earth.
v
Not.

With the advent of cultural evolution, the human species stopped evolving genetically thousands of years ago.
v
The human species has continued to evolve genetically while evolving culturally.

Differences among various races and ethnic groups can best be explained as both cultural and genetic.
v.
Any significant differences between one race or ethnic group and another is bound to be cultural, with no genetic component.

In terms of personality traits, adults who grew up in adopted families resemble their adopted siblings more closely than they resemble their biological siblings.
v
Adults who grew up in adopted families resemble their biological siblings more closely than they resemble their adopted siblings.

Humans evolved brains with a general capacity to learn behaviors but few built-in instincts toward one behavior or another.
v
Humans evolved brains with powerful, built-in instincts that shape individual behavior and society in general.

Your personal life work is more oriented toward the literary, verbal, personal, psychological, or artistic.
v
Your personal life work is more oriented toward the numeric, factual, scientific.

The mind is the human brain at work. The mind is a trait or capability that humans evolved, sort of like we evolved color vision or the ability to recognize faces.
v
The mind reflects the experience of a spiritual or immaterial entity or presence, not merely the physical brain.

If a human behavior is natural, then it's wrong to suppress that behavior.
v
It's legitimate and prudent to suppress certain natural behaviors.

Rape is natural.
v
Rape is a deviation from natural behavior.

Sexual orientation is generally built in at birth.
v
Sexual orientation is generally learned.

Homosexual orientation is an evolved trait that one way or another improved the fitness of our ancestors who carried the genes that brought it about.
v
Homosexual orientation doesn't reflect any sort of fitness advantage for our ancestors and is best understood as a deviation from the evolved form.

Given that humans think fire is beautiful...
Humans evolved an appreciation for fire. The beauty that we see in flames is a beauty that we evolved to see there.
v
Humans see beauty in flames for other reasons, but not because we evolved a taste for them.

Humans today are genetically superior to humans of a million years ago.
v
Not

Evolution was God's plan.
v
Evolution just happened.

::All across the globe today and down throughout history, men have been more concerned with dealing with outsiders, especially through violence, while women have been more concerned with dealing with clan members, especially tending to children.
This basic difference fundamentally reflects evolved sex differences.
v
This basic difference fundamentally reflects cultural norms with little to no basis in evolved capacities.

Evolution by natural selection is the best way to account for the appearance of humans on earth.
v
Some process or entity outside the scope of modern science is the best way to account for the appearance of humans on earth.

Human emotions, such as jealousy and friendship, are best understood as evolved behaviors.
v
Human emotions are best understood as learned behaviors.

Engineering the human genome is a violation of the natural order and should not be undertaken.
v
The human genome is one more frontier for humans to explore and master.

Humans are more advanced than the first vertebrates that swam in the oceans 500 million years ago.
v
It's meaningless to talk about one species being more "advanced" than another.

Only humans deserve any sort of legal rights and any rights granted to animals should only be by way of those animals being the property of one human or another.
v
Animals that are sufficiently similar to humans, such as dogs and apes, deserve at least some rights.
v
All animals deserve equal rights with humans.

Hunting mammals of a different species and killing them is OK.
v
Hunting humans of a different race and killing them is OK.

A thousand years from now, there will still be a single human species.
v
A thousand years from now, there will be more than one species evolved or engineered from the current human stock.
v
A thousand years from now, there will be no biological descendants of humans.

Antisocial impulses, such as possessiveness, deceitfulness, and envy, are built-in instincts.
v
Antisocial impulses, such as possessiveness, deceitfulness, and envy, are learned behaviors and children could readily be raised not to express those traits.

Standards of human beauty are basically built-in, evolved to help us identify healthy people and appropriate mates.
v
Standard of human beauty are basically determined by culture.

Human life is more important than the life of other animals.

Animals have basic feelings like ours.

Immaterial soul?

Absolute morals.

Major religions all equal?

Genes and memes. Same system or not?Cultural evolution is biological evolution.

Boss relationship modeled on evolved instincts?

Humans developed as a water transportation device.

There is an afterlife.

There is a God or equivalent.

how to doubt yourself

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 20:39:26 GMT

The Livejournal post that, in recent memory, has stuck with me the most is mylescorcoran 's post about how to doubt yourself. It refers to an experiment that says you can reduce how much your guess errs by if you average your guess with the guess of an imaginary other guy. It's a sign of the advance of modernity that scientists are studying how people can best doubt themselves. Probably I've thought about this post so much because I'm repeatedly making mistakes and realizing that I should be doubting myself more.

dead robin

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 02:09:20 GMT

As the owner of a big yard in the suburbs, I see a lot of nature, and nature is pretty much evenly split between happy growing things and and sad dying things. The advantage is pretty plants and the occasional racoon. The drawbacks include dead birds and doomed ones.

I found this dead cock robin on the ramp under the cedar.

Its breast feathers have apparently been pecked away by another cock robin. Maybe it was pecked to death. Male robins "see red" when they see another male's red breast. Maybe the attack didn't kill the robin outright, but the victim flew away so fast and recklessly that it broke its neck on a window. Or maybe the bird smashed its hollow bones against a window first and died, and then the other males insulted the body. In any case, it's a reminder of how often we males have lived by the sword and how often died by it.

proletariArt studio, Georgetown

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 14:49:07 GMT

My girlfriend, Malice, has opened an art studio in the original Rainier building in Georgetown. Here's a photo gallery from her first Art Attack (what they call the art walk in Georgetown).

proletariArt photos

The Art Attack is the second Saturday of every month, so the next one is November 14. We'd love to see some of you there.

"proletariArt" also has a Facebook page if you'd rather look for it there.

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 23:42:52 GMT

Not to get embroiled in the nature/nurture business again, but here's a Slog article about female hormones and differential preference for males (link). Basically, when women are ovulating and fertile, they shift measurably toward preferring more masculine lovers (to snag good genes) while when women are not ovulating or fertile they prefer less masculine lovers (to win a loyal provider). Dr. Alexandra Alvergne and Dr. Virpi Lummaa of the University of Sheffield conjecture that "the Pill" might have unintended consequences as it monkeys with a woman's sexual preferences, as well as her sexual attractiveness. (It turns out that fertile woman are sexually more attractive to men.)

Here's my response:

Mate selection is so messed up by so many cultural factors that it's hard to believe that this difference is telling. The difference may be measurable, but it's just one statistically significant factor out of many.

In the 1970s, it was increasingly common to say that sexual behavior was cultural constructed. Any fool could tell that what counts as "attractive" varies across cultures. Politically, a cultural explanation of human differences had the considerable merit of cutting racism and sexism off at the knees. Marx had taught that humans were defined by their societies, Freud had taught that individuals were shaped by their parents, and Skinner taught that behavior is fundamentally learned. Doctors prescribed hormones as contraceptives with little thought that altering a woman's hormones might alter her behavior, especially her sexual behavior.

Turns out that it does.

Women, Burning Man, yang & yin

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 14:07:00 GMT

This essay was on a flier I found on the playa at Burning Man, apparently written by a burner trying to get more women to attend. Our beloved, crazy arts festival in the desert is predominantly male. Like hunting and camping, it probably always will be. But I like what the guy is saying, so here it is. I don't buy into the whole "energy" worldview in a literal sense. The "energy" in a room is the body language and other unconscious communication of whatever Homo sapiens are present, not etheric waves. Anyway, here's the pitch.

If you're a woman, and you've wondered about whether you would enjoy Burning Man, you should go. You should be sure to prepare yourself first, but you should do it.

Burning Man started with a ton of male energy and still has it. The event is strongly yang. The name, after all, is Burning "Man." It's about building things up, and it's about burning them down. It's like all the comforts of camping plus the joy of junk yard derby in a desert. But Burning Man isn't only masculine or even mostly masculine. It is such a powerful event, such an opening of spiritual floodgates, that it also draws in and concentrates a super ton of human energy, neither masculine nor feminine. The whole place ripples with the raw and ragged power of humans unleashed, free to be creative, daring, and generous. There's still a solid tilt toward the masculine. It's still worse than camping. But the he-man component takes second stage to the brazenly human energy that one finds everywhere.

Not only does the human energy swamp the purely masculine, there's also a good deal of female energy at Burning Man. Where yang is excessive, yin always arises to balance it. There's a lot going on at the levels of art, soul, and community, so much that a woman can cut loose with a lot of female energy and still not upset the apple cart. Women, like men, have to keep their most powerful emotions and self-expressions under control in the everyday world. On the playa, however, we can all open up a little. With all the masculine energy at Black Rock City, a woman can safely turn her feminine brightness up a notch or two and it's OK. In fact, it's quite welcome.

In addition, even the discomforts themselves have a positive side. What you suffer by being hot and dirty is your sacrifice to the power of the event. Everyone you meet in Black Rock City has made that sacrifice and is making it with you. There are no fakers. Everyone means it. We are all in it together. There's an automatic bond, a pre-existing connection to each other burner. Being at Burning Man is like being at a gigantic family reunion. You don't recognize anybody, but you all like each other by default.

Burning Man is a challenge, and you should brave it.

More waitresses murdered!

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 15:12:42 GMT

Oh wait. They were just hookers. Never mind. No one cares.

Wisconsin authorities may well have arrested the North Side Strangler, murderer of prostitutes (link).

See original waitress rant here.

Jesus & faith

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 15:23:52 GMT

Jesus taught that one should have trust in the LORD as a loving father. He advocated a level of childlike trust with no fretting for the morrow. By Jesus’ day, centuries of Jewish tradition had established that Jews were to trust in the LORD even when he seemed to have turned his back on his chosen people. In either case, this “trust” is generally translated “faith.” According to Christianity, the proper attitude toward Christ is one of faith. Adoration and gratitude are nice and have their places, but Christians have established faith as the basis of the relationship between the believer and God. The concept of “faith” has come to mean especially blind faith in the unprovable or even in the demonstrably false. Among world religions, only Islam extols the virtue of faith the way Christianity does.

Christians and post-Christians often use the term “faith” as a synonym for “religion,” or maybe as a euphemism for it. One might speak of a public school being responsible to respect children of various “faiths.” But faith, as Christians and Muslims know it, doesn’t appear in other religions. Native American shamanic beliefs and practices constitute a religion but there’s no “faith” in a western sense. In regular cultures, “faith” means something like “steadfast trust.” It means truth to an oath or vow. Being faithful means being true to one’s word. Prudent people put their faith in those others who have proven to be faithful. The original concept of faith is trust in someone or something that earns (or seems to earn) that trust.

But in Christian, post-Christian, and Christian-derived cultures, “faith” has taken on a new meaning. It now means specifically steadfast trust with no hope for evidence. In most cultures, people put their trust in things that work reliably, or that they think work reliably. They pray to their gods, expect blessings, and believe that they get them. In the depth of winter, pagans celebrate their faith that spring will return, as it always have. That’s not faith in an unverifiable God. That’s faith in the gods who bless and inspire your hearth and home. Around AD 100, the beloved disciple’s gospel ignored Jesus’ ethical teaching and based the Christian experience instead on faith in the unseen Christ. With the advance of church doctrine and the power of the bishops, the church placed more and more weight on believing that for which you have no evidence. Most cultures haven’t elaborated this concept, much less put it at the center of religion. With the advance of “reason” since the 1500s, Christian faith took an further step away from faith’s original meaning. Evidence mounted that the popes weren’t particularly holy, that church tradition didn’t reflect early Christian belief, that scripture was flawed, and that the primeval history of the old testament was mythical. In light of these challenges, Christian faith changed from faith in a God that is ultimately unprovable to faith in a God whose church and scripture are frankly at odds with expert knowledge. In the US today, for example, most Christians have faith in Adam and Eve.

Faith has long been a politically useful angle because it can be readily faked. If being Christian required humility, charity, and unstinting generosity, the bishops would have had a really hard time getting pagan kings and their populations to convert. Would the Goths have become pacifists en masse? Would the Charlemagne and the Franks have taken to loving their enemies? No. But as long as “faith” amounts to little more than verbal assent to some doctrine, it’s pretty easy for the pagans to convert, at least on paper.

The Jews started down the path of faith, a path that Christians later pursued to great lengths. For the pagans who lived in the first 1000 years BC, faith in their gods was conditional. They had faith in their gods as long as their gods protected and supported them. When a more powerful god would send a more powerful nation against them and defeat them, the losers would give up their loser gods and adopt the winner gods. This is common sense faith. People tend to be faithful to those who are faithful to them, and they drop gods that don’t hold up their end. The Jews, however, had another way of looking at it. When a mightier nation defeated them, they said that it was all the LORD’s plan, and that the enemy nation was doing the LORD’s work. When the LORD sets someone against Israel, the Hebrew scriptures often refer to this divinely-ordained enemy as a “satan,” literally “adversary,” such as Hadad the Edomite in the book of Kings. This development changed everything because it meant that the Jews were now supposed to keep the faith with the LORD even when the LORD was having some pagan warlord crush them underfoot. While pagans kept their faith with the gods that brought them victory and prosperity, the Jews kept their faith with a god who led them into punishment. Even so, the Jews trusted that their god would redeem and restore them. This faith in the unseen future was the start of faith as Christians and Muslims know it. The Jewish question of faith wasn’t whether the LORD existed. That’s a more recent version of “faith.” Instead, they had faith that it was worth holding up their part of the covenant even when the LORD was letting them twist in the wind. It was faith in a promised but unseen future, and it led the way to Christian faith in a promised but unseen Second Coming.

Appropriately enough, the winter solstice celebrations of the European pagans were an expression of faith, of a sort. When the sun was low, the day short, and food rationed, the pagans celebrations professed their faith in the return of the sun and in the new life of the upcoming spring. Now the winter solstice festivals are called Christmas and given a Christian veneer. See Christmas.

The canonical three Christian virtues are faith, hope, and charity (or love); see also charity and hope.

Despite a reliance on faith, Christians have sometimes endeavored to prove that Jesus is God; see proof.

Link to web site.

Jesus and holy men

Sat, 15 Aug 2009 17:14:41 GMT

Still plugging away on my Jesus project: historical Jesus and Jesus in western culture.

As a little change of pace, I've uploaded an array of articles all on holy men and how they do or don't compare or relate to Jesus. Maybe you're curious about one or more of these men (they're all men). Enjoy, and comment if you got comments.

Buddha

Elijah

Francis of Assisi

Gandhi

John the Baptist

Lao Tzu

Moses

Muhammad

Joseph Smith

Socrates

Zoroaster

Retrospective on gaming at Dragonflight

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 21:09:29 GMT

Last weekend at Dragonflight, Skaff Elias, Peter Adkison, Tim Beach, and I spoke on a panel whose topic was a retrospective on D&D, especially concerning Gary and Dave, who passed away over the last year. I also ran D&D "0e meets 4e," to substantial success.

You can find an audio of the panel at Seattle Geekly.

You can also find it on the iTunes store, "Retrospective on Roleplaying"

Dragonflight game, Sunday

Fri, 07 Aug 2009 16:24:13 GMT

Sunday at Dragonflight in Bellevue I'm going to run a 6-player RPG session. It will be the initial playtest of the OD&D system that I am developing for a short-term, newbie-friendly campaign I'll be starting this fall. It uses streamlined rules like those in OD&D, but overhauled. The idea is not to have the OD&D feel but instead to have the simplicity and directness of OD&D (ability scores, attack rolls, hit points, etc.).

The point of the campaign will be to offer the skeleton of a system and a setting to which the players can add world details. A player playing an elf will be handed the elf mechanics but will able to determine what elves are like in the campaign and how their own elf relates to elf culture and the world at large. Ditto dwarves, fighters, wizards, clerics, and paladins. Elves are reconfigured to be Dex-based sneaky archers, sort of like the thief (which doesn't appear on the class list). Dwarves are Con-based. Paladins are there so that Cha has an class of its own.

The drama of the campaign will be high-level conflict, with the characters caught up in the world-shaping struggles between major contenders for control of the empire. Material should include ancient vendettas, forbidden tomes, secret histories, broken oaths, bastard children, etc.

The game on Sunday will be a roll-out of the mechanics and a one-session world-building experience, all brought to life in a dungeon crawl.

retrospective at Dragonflight

Sun, 02 Aug 2009 00:49:22 GMT

Next Saturday, the 8th, Peter Adkison, Skaff Elias, Tim Beach, and I will be leading a retrospective of Gygax's and Arneson's contributions to gaming, at Dragonflight in Bellevue, at 7:00.

If there's something you would like to say, I'd be happy to pass along insights or comments, or at least to enrich my own contribution by hearing from you. What might you want to share about Gygax & Arneson?

Three Donkeys podcast

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 15:43:59 GMT

I personally recommend podcasts and audiobooks as a way to increase the amount of information coming into one's brain, and lots of you would probably like Richard Garfield and Skaff Elias's podcast about games, brought to us by Tyler Bielman.

Here is the Three Donkeys blog, including podcasts.

Three Donkeys

You can also subscribe on iTunes. I do. Now you, too, can hear Skaff explain the secret to winning Battleship.

Jesus & mystery

Wed, 29 Jul 2009 20:17:23 GMT

latest entry in the Jesus project

Early Christians treated Jesus as something like Orpheus, the god to which a pious mystery religion was devoted. A mystery two thousand years ago, however, was very different from a mystery today.

The heyday of mystery religions was, not coincidentally, the first three centuries of the Christian church. As Christianity was spreading through the Roman empire, so were religions devoted to Demeter, Dionysus, Orpheus, and others. Christianity resembled these cults in general, with initiations, common meals, personal religious experience, and personal salvation. Of the major cults, Christianity most closely resembled the one devoted to Orpheus. Like Jesus, Orpheus was the son of a deity, and he had descended into the underworld and returned. Orpheus’s cult followed a set of sacred scriptures comprising Orpheus’s teachings, and it required an abstinent lifestyle. While the Dionysaic and Eleusinian mysteries involved the whole community in festivals, the Orphics were concerned with the individual sinner struggling to live a pious life, in preparation for the judgment that comes to each soul at death.

The word “mystery” originally referred to cult secrets that only insiders know. In this sense, the concept is akin to the term occult, which originally meant “hidden,” as in “forbidden books of occult lore.” It refers to the eyes and ears being closed, alluding to secrecy. Today, Christians use the term to mean something that even they don’t really understand. The true nature of the trinity, for example, is a mystery not because only Christians understand it but instead because _not_even_ Christians understand it. The concept of mystery is now used as a dodge. What sense does the trinity make? It’s a sacred mystery! How can bread and wine turn into God’s flesh while still looking and tasting for all the world like bread and wine? It’s a mystery! Roman catholic priests even added the phrase “mystery of faith” to Jesus’ words of institution, said at the point in the mass when the bread and wine turn into God’s flesh and blood. More recently, why have Catholic priests been raping so many boys and young men? It’s the mystery of sin! In 2002, in response to explosive Catholic sex scandals, Pope John Paul II pled “mysterium iniquitatis” (mystery of iniquity), when in fact it’s no mystery at all that you get into trouble when you take unmarried men and assign them private authority over vulnerable people, and then cover it up for decades.

For another pagan religion that is strikingly similar to early Christianity, see Mithraism.

progress on historical Jesus project

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 15:44:08 GMT

Meanwhile, I've continued working on a project describing the historical Jesus in a cultural context, who he was, who he wasn't, and how he's appeared in western culture for the last 2000 years. The material I've done so far is up on my web site. Below are several links that could serve as good starting points or those who are curious. Every page has a link to all other pages, so you can roam at will.

Introduction only worth reading if you're going to read a lot

Biographical sketch who Jesus was and wasn't, a great first page

Table of contents review all topics

Equality Jesus' fundamental contribution to western culture

God and how Jesus landed the job

Mary of Magdala and whether Jesus got lucky

OD&D at Go Play NW

Sat, 04 Jul 2009 15:54:41 GMT

I played in a rather odd RPG at Go Play NW. It's a third-party version of the original, three-book D&D rules set. There are apparently several such innovations. Castles & Crusades might be the best known. We played Swords & Wizardy. I rolled up an elf and adventured through a dungeon. The DM was Wilhelm Fitzpatrick, the Dragonflight events manager.

The game has a lot of warts, but it played really fast. Combat was arbitrary but it was blessedly fast. We didn't use miniatures. That's a break with tradition, but it seems to represent a bald refusal to be realistic and or attempt simulation. The interesting thing is that we can now approach the original D&D rules knowing everything we know about game design and role playing. Used judiciously, the system works and is simple, just what you need for a more story-oriented game. I think there are some interesting possibilities along these lines.

The problem with such games is that there's a lot of bad stuff that people are nostalgic for. For every bad rule that you might want to strip out, there are people who won't think your OD&D is original enough if you don't have it. Swords & Wizardry even has two AC systems that it uses side-by-side: the old-fashioned 9-down system that they have to include for tradition's sake and the 10+ system that they have to include because it's just clearly better.

Swords & Wizardry free PDF: http://www.rpgnow.com/product_info.php?products_id=62346

Another version is Labyrinth Lord: (http://www.rpgnow.com/product_info.php?products_id=29547&it=1)

Microlite74: (http://www.retroroleplaying.com/content/microlite74) (added 5 July)

For the 1E version, there's OSRIC (http://www.yourgamesnow.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=362)

And for Gamma World fans: Mutant Future (http://www.rpgnow.com/product_info.php?products_id=56282)

Added 5 July 09: For the record, the "bad stuff" I'm referring to is stuff like: too much arithmetic (5% XP bonus, copper pieces, etc.), wonky XP progression per class, too-random character creation, and poor class balance. It also has the problem that didn't get fixed until 4e: all spells are daily, which makes spellcasters play too differently from the fighters.

Dragonflight, August

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 22:21:55 GMT

I'm going to be at Dragonflight XXX (August 7 - 9) somewhat briefly. Dragonflight offers a lot of gaming, and it's in better digs now than it used to be. Looks like I'll be on a panel and run a game, possibly only on Sunday. That's a busy weekend for me.

powerful men and their sex scandals

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 14:57:53 GMT

Republican governor Mark Sanford admits to his affair, not long after Republican senator John Ensign has done the same. Why don't these powerful men live up to their own standards and keep it in their pants? Or if they can't live up to their own standards, why don't they make the politically smart, calculated choice to keep it in the pants?

Back when we thought we had souls (or were souls), this sort of hypocrisy required an explanation. Now that we know that our brains have evolved to pursue numerous, sometimes conflicting goals, without an overall master and commander at the helm, it needs no real explanation at all.

More on this topic on a rant on my web site: Thomas Jefferson, the slave-raping hero.

Go Play NW

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 20:46:47 GMT

On Saturday, probably in one of the short afternoon slots, I'm going to run a game at Go Play NW, a local indie game con. It's Pantheon, one of robin_d_laws 's many fine games, this one published by the inimitable James Wallis. Each player takes the role of a pregenerated character in a genre-specific story, and together they free-form the plot from beginning to end. Characters are prose only, no stats. In this story, called "Grave and Watery," the genre is "underwater monster action movie," and it should seem familiar to anyone who remembers The Abyss or DeepStar Six. Thematically, the underwater monster movie is also a lot like Alien. At the end of the game, the team scores points according to a secret schedule, accruing points for each in-genre element they included in their story.

"Pantheon" is a vehicle for Robin's keen insight into story, genre, film, and games. It's also inspired, in part, by an observation I shared with him: horror RPGs do not reward you for doing the stupid things that characters in horror stories do. Wouldn't it be cool, I suggested, if a horror RPG somehow rewarded you for checking out the noise in the basement by yourself even though the light just went out?

I've played Pantheon before, with Peter Adkison, Richard Garfield, Skaff Elias, and others. By the book, the game is competitive, but I want to see if my variant cooperative version will play better.

If you want to sign up, you'll need to get on the Go Play NW web site and sign up once I officially post it on the wiki.

My understanding is that at the con there will be no panel on why women don't flock to tabletop hobby games, which may be for the best all around.

encyclopedia britannica online = wikipedia ?

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 16:43:33 GMT

The other day I improved EB's article on creationism.

Turns out that EB online has a feature by which one can suggest an edit to an article. You can't edit directly, as on WP, but your proposal gets floated by editors who decide how to respond. That's mighty open-minded for a hoary old standby like EB.

hurray for the status quo

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 14:42:40 GMT

The political opponents of ev psych accuse its proponents (e.g., me) of wickedly supporting the "status quo." This accusation is bizarre, but I know where they're coming from. I remember being a young man impatient with society's imperfections and hostile to the "establishment." But over the last 20 to 25 years I've acquired a different understanding of the status quo. Now the status quo looks a lot like a process of continued (if uneven) progress. That's a status quo I can get behind! We've been making progress on all the big issues I care about: racial equality (Obama!), gender equality (Hilary Clinton! Sarah Palin!), gay rights (gay marriage!) and religious pluralism. If this isn't the status quo that liberals are looking for, whose status quo would they prefer? China's? Saudi Arabia's?

Yes, progress is spotty. Reagan's 80s-era drug war in particular has been a disaster, and Bush's adventure in Iraq doesn't fit with any kind of international justice or even selfish national interest. But review the broad strokes of history and the modern West looks like a place of ongoing progress, with the sort of liberty and peace that others across the globe would die for, and sometimes do.

Evolution is cleverer than you are

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 17:53:21 GMT

"Evolution is cleverer than you are."
-- evolutionary biologist Leslie Orgel

The idea that men and women are psychologically different on a biological level has been a controversial topic on this blog, but it doesn't come as a surprise to most people. One big surprise that has come out of the last 30 years of research is how smart genes are and how fast evolution happens. Scientists used to think that natural selection was slow and clumsy. We now see it as faster and more precise than we had imagined.

Humans have continued to evolve in the last 70,000 years that we've been "behaviorally modern." For example, three separate human populations have evolved some ability to digest milk sugar even as adults. Without necessarily affirming any individual claim, Wade recounts various hypotheses about the recent evolution of new traits within certain populations. The higher IQ of European Jews might be due in part to selection pressure put on a population that was forced to survive through business and scholarship rather than labor. The genetic diseases that Jews are prone to might be a side effect of genes that code for less-limited neuronal development. Two genes implicated in brain development have arisen recently, 40 KYA (thousand years ago) and 6 KYA and spread through Indo-European and East Asian populations. Other ethnic groups probably evolved other genes that do the same beneficial thing for brain development that these genes do, so they don't prove any sort of racial superiority. (Nicolas Wade, Before the Dawn)

Our genome includes recent genetic adaptations to diseases, ice ages, and other stressors. You may have heard that the genes for sickle cell anemia protect people from malaria. So does favaism, a genetic susceptibility to fava beans. (Survival of the Sickest, Sharon Moalem. This one is a little iffy overall but the instances of adaptation to changes in the environment over the last 70K years is pretty good.)

Fathers imprint the X-chromosomes of their sperm on a molecular level, causing certain genes to express themselvesfathers actually alter the X-chromosomes that they pass along to make them more "feminine." The X-chromosome in a woman's egg is just as likely to end up in a boy's genes and a girl's, but the X-chromosomes in a father's sperm will only ever express themselves in girls. So men have evolved a system for (slightly) adjusting the X-chromosomes that they put in their spermatozoa. You can see this effect among women born with just one X-chromosome. Those whose X chromosome comes from the father test higher on certain "feminine" traits: That's just the wildest example, but he also documents many ways in which genes and hormones affect behavior. Pinker also shows how the brain is predisposed to learn some lessons and not others. Behaviorists viewed the brain as a sort of neutral learning machine, but it's not neutral at all. We're soft-coded to learn certain things (e,g, speech), coded with the neutral potential to learn other things (e.g., writing), and coded with a resistance to learning other things (e.g., abstaining from sex). (Pinker, Blank Slate)

A woman's brain, far from being a neutral medium that society can mold as it likes, develops through the life cycle, mediated by hormones, to (for example) make her more intuitive and to get her to bond with a mate and especially with her children. The same can be said for a man's brain, but there's a lot more going on hormonally for a woman than for a man. (Brizendine, Female Brain)

Our sexual instincts and morphology are markedly different from those found in our nearest relatives. In terms of behavior, a huge disconnect from previous sexual politics is that males and females bond as couples and raise children together. In terms of morphology, a female's sexual display now comprises everything from her hair to her toenails, and is always active, compared to a chimp female's display, which is associated only with estrus and is frankly genital-focused. A woman's hidden ovulation seemingly disconnects copulation from reproduction. These and other changes are startling and recent. (Leonard Shlain, Sex Time and Power. This one gets pretty iffy toward the end.)

I've already mentioned the ability of women to detect the immune-system genes of their mates and to seek other men if their mates' genes are too similar to their own.

The more we learn about the brain, about genes, and about our species genetic heritage the more clear it is that our genes, hormones, and brain structures are doing a lot of precise evolution, interaction, and mediation, far more than we used to think possible.

cock robin and the crow

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 22:39:24 GMT

My fondness for crows is well-documented, but today I've become a fan of the American cock robin. Like their cousins the jays, crows are loud-mouth bullies, and I appreciate their tendency to mob bigger birds. The easiest way to spot hawks along the freeway is to look for dive-bombing crows. Usually there's a hawk sitting in a tree below them waiting for the crows to get tired so it can beat a retreat. Though bird and mammal lines diverged long ago, I feel a kinship with the mob of little guys out to take on the big guy.

But today it was a robin that had the bigger bird on the run, and the bigger bird was a crow. (Take that, you bully.) The robin shot like a missile right behind the crow, which beat wing to get away. They flew around behind some trees, and when I walked over, the robin came hurtling around the trees and dived at my face. What a hot-blooded bastard! He swerved off, thank god, but that's some real pluck. My hat's off to the feisty little thing.

Coincidentally, I'm also fond of the robin's distinctive chirp.