The Simulationist Iteration 10

http://traffic.libsyn.com/thesimulationist/Iteration_010_-_8_Nov_2012.mp3

Ryan's moment of illumination: dolphins mimicking human speech
Discussion Topic: Fictional Holidays
Second Discussion Topic: How mythological do you want your game setting to be?


Mentioned in this Iteration: 

Homer's world: The Mediterranean in a bowl
Popehat

The Anarchofarian Bible

The Anarchofarian Bible
written by the illustrious Grand Master Doctor Chief Joshua Israel Revelations Treleaven

Thou shalt not knowingly consent to anything stupid. When thou learnest that a practice is stupid, thou shalt cease to practice it. The exception is the Anarchofarian Religion. The Anarchofarian Religion fully recognizes that it is stupid, and yet encourages all of humanity to continue within it, and to follow its precepts, despite how stupid they sometimes sound.

If any nation shall deem to make laws that exclude certain individuals based on religious grounds, it is the sacred duty of the Anarchofarian adherent to claim such exceptions for himself or herself, as long as it is in his or her immediate interest to do so.

For example, if an Anarchofarian wishes to place a kitchen utensil on his or her head during an official portrait, the wish becomes a mandate, and the Anarchofarian is bound by this sacred scripture to carry out the action which he or she has expressed an interest in.

Example two: if an Anarchofarian learns of a religious exception for people carrying weapons into a public area, and the Anarchofarian has a glimmer of true desire in his or her heart to also carry a weapon, the glimmer of desire must be acted upon.

Example three: if an Anarchofarian learns of a religious exemption for some piece of safety gear, and also finds the safety gear unnecessary or uncomfortable, the Anarchofarian must claim religious exemption in order to get out of wearing or using the safety gear.

If an Anarchofarian becomes injured or dies because of such an exemption, he or she is a martyr of the faith.

It is the sacred duty of the Anarchofarian to exploit religious exemption whenever possible and desirable.

Once an Anarchofarian has made up his or her mind to perform an action which would be illegal without a relgious exemption, the Anarchofarian is bound to go through with it, even if presented with argument that the rule in question "is for your own good, really."

Anarchofarianismism takes full legal and religious and ethical and moral responsibility for each individual adherent. Anarchofarians are children of this document, and it is a tenet of the faith that they are incapable of making their own decisions. The only true authority for any Anarchofarian is this document.

The official title for the belief system held by Anarchofarians shall be "Anarchofarianismism". It is the sacred duty of all Anarchofarians to be a total shit about getting this right. It is not "Anarchofarianism". Get it? Double "isms" because we're that fucking awesome. Individual Anarchofarians may use their own discretion in adding a third and more "isms".

That's probably enough dickery on the part of the prophet. Seriously, I could go on a major power trip here and come up with all kinds of crazy rules.

Anarchofarianismism is serious business. We are totally a real religion, and not made up to get through legal loopholes. That would be stupid. I'm pretty sure there's something in the Anarchofarian Bible about not being stupid.

Just to make us sound more like a real religion, we are all awaiting the coming of the Eschaton. We hold this belief sacred, that if we waver in our quest to circumvent rules for the sake of circumventing the rules, the world will end. The world is going to end anyways, but we won't tell anybody that. Hey, check it out, we have our first Secret Mystery! I'm pretty sure no one will read this except true Anarchofarians.

Wouldn't it be awesome if this document went viral and somebody somewhere got it read in a real-life courtroom? Go ye out into all the world and make it happen, Anarchofarians.

Amen.

What if school...

What if:

What if there was a school where all the teachers were kids, and all the students were adults? The adult students are a cross-section of society, some educated, some not, chosen the same way juries are chosen. It's the kids' job to impart knowledge to the adults, and the kids get to evaluate how well the adults retained that knowledge.

What if:

What if schools banned books? (Computers would also be banned.) And instead of spending money on teaching materials of any kind, double the number of teachers, and just have the teachers have a conversation with the kids. Three hours in the morning, and three hours in the afternoon, just talking. No topic is mandated, because over the year, eventually you'll cover enough topics.

Let's All Be Half a Year Older

This is a cross-posting from the Dozens Online forum: http://z13.invisionfree.com/DozensOnline/index.php?showtopic=512

Did you know that in some Asian countries, they count your age as an ordinal number of years you've been outside your mother? In other words, a newborn baby is said to be 1 year old, or in his first year. Consequently, if you ask a person their age (it's not really important which country I'm talking about, but I think it may have been China), you'll get an answer that's inflated by 1.

In Japan, there exists some of the world's longest-lived people. Some say it's a matter of genetics. Some say it's their diet of fish and rice. And others cite the respect and esteem in which they hold their old people.

Since it's trendy to generalize and denigrate North Americo-European culture, I'll do so here: we just don't afford our elders the respect they deserve. Further, too many of us balk at the idea of being considered older. In this post, I'm suggesting everyone add half a year to the age they tell everyone they are. When asked "how old are you?" Calculate your answer by your half-birthday from now on.

I realize this won't be popular. People around North America and Europe seem to think it a great compliment to be told "you look ten years younger than your actual age". Feh!

Of course, before age 21, everyone looks forward to birthdays, because they represent getting to be able to do new things. Drive. Drink. Vote. Etc. After 21, the only thing to look forward to is the retirement age, at which you can start collecting a pension. And before you get to be part of that sweet deal, your other milestones include things like prostate exams.

Anyways, the meat of my proposal is that we should answer the question "how old are you?" by rounding to the nearest year. That way we're not privileging cardinals over ordinals. Every year on your half-birthday, your age advances by 1. Your age does not advance on your birthday. You can still celebrate your birthday, if you want, but you are no longer permitted to say "well I sure feel different now that I'm 29 instead of 28. That sentence is reserved for your half-birthday.

Incidentally, you are no longer permitted to ask anyone on their actual birthday "do you feel older?" Now you must ask this question on their half-birthday. In fact, any day will do, but half-birthday is the new comedically appropriate time to ask this timelessly droll question.

Speculative

By the end of this century, and before I am dead, we will learn that there are other civilizations in our galaxy. They will be busy being industrious, sending communications back and forth to one another, and they won't have noticed us yet. The Milky Way Galaxy will turn out to be a bustling place, full of life. It is vast, and mostly empty, but then so is the Pacific Ocean, and yet we consider the Pacific the highway of the world.

We should cherish these times while we still have them. We should cherish the ability to look up at the sky and wonder and simply not know what sorts of things are out there. Because soon we will know, and it will be exciting, but it will also be scary, because the things out there are extremely powerful.

We will discover amazingly advanced civilizations that will boggle our imaginations. However, we will be impotent to communicate with them, and we will only be able to glean what information we can from their transmissions. They may have perfected encription and compression to the point where we cannot distinguish their communications from meaningless noise, and the only evidence of extreme intelligence will be the artificiality of the signal.

We will discover that our world is much larger than it ever has been. As big as our planet is, our galaxy is so much bigger, and so much more inaccessible. We will be able to witness industry on a galactic scale, but we will be unable to participate. We will be like the Pacific Islanders building airstrips and artificial airplanes out of bamboo in the hopes of attracting the far-off flying planes. We will have our own mathematical cargo cults, the smartest among us will only build crude decoys that we will broadcast as the weakest of signals, in the hopes that a passing extraterrestrial freighter might stop and leave us some precious cargo.

What manner of cargo? My point is of course that we cannot know what the universe has in store, and we might never know. We will know by the end of this century that there are others out there, but it will be another millenium before we can send and receive signals. It's the beauty of this century that we are allowed to dream of what may come, with no actual knowledge, and never again will we be in this position.

So what manner of cargo? Well, first of all, we'll be looking for encription codes to unlock the secrets of the communications, not meant for us. After encription codes, we'll be looking for secrets of physics and the universe. Perhaps we will learn that there is nothing more to learn, that indeed the speed of light is a fundamental limit, that no new subatomic particles are available to discovery. Perhaps we will learn that the galactic overlords themselves are conducting a SETI project over millions of years to search for, and communicate with intelligences in other galaxies.

The kind of cargo I will be looking for will be the physical specifications for building things like quantum computers, and engineering designs for building spaceports, space elevators, and spaceborn shipyards. Perhaps instructions sent to automated facilities, which we can intercept, interpret, and reproduce. Perhaps there will be instructions for fusing hydrogen into any element desirable, simply, easily, and cheaply. Of course, all of these technologies, even with knowing how they can be done, will cost so much money to implement, requiring interplanetary infrastructure, that we will take centuries to reproduce them, if we can at all. Atomic fusion reactors built in the spaces between planets and asteroids, require thousands, perhaps millions of miles of space.

Or maybe there will be some kind of physical cargo. Interstellar freight lines, broken into asteroids, summing to masses greater than Jupiter, space trains millions of miles in length, travelling in convoys across the galaxy. Iron, gold, silver, titanium, platinum. Shooting in streams of matter from one end of the galaxy to the other. Just one of these asteroids worth more than the combined wealth of our entire planet.

Or perhaps supercomputer components, built at the quantum level, and integrated with software the likes which we cannot even imagine.

Or perhaps interstellar cargo will simply be streams of hydrogen atoms, or photons themselves. If technology is physically possible to transform matter and energy, perhaps the cargo lines of the galaxy are intense beams of light. If matter can be transformed into light and back again, then it should be most efficient to transport all cargo as photons. In that case, we're fortunate that we haven't been struck by such beams already. Unless they're part of what we have been seeing as the spectrum of cosmic rays, they've been passing through us this whole time, and we don't know how to receive them.

So we should count ourselves lucky to live in an innocent age. We don't have to be jaded about the industry of the galaxy. We don't have to worry about the stability of the galaxy because of interstellar pollution.

Better Mandarin Chinese Romanization

A simple proposal for improved Chinese romanization.

For many years now, longer than I've been alive, China has been becoming increasingly important to Western and English-speaking people. Along with the importance of the country comes the importance of Chinese-language terms, names, and concepts that cannot be expressed with existing English words, or possibly even spelling.

I am thinking specifically now of Mandarin Chinese, Beijing dialect, which is represented by Hanyu pinyin. Hanyu pinyin is currently the best development for translating the sounds of Mandarin in the Roman alphabet for pronunciation by English speakers. Hanyu pinyin translates the aural language quite well. One challenge though, with translating Mandarin is that it is a tonal language. Hanyu pinyin approaches the challenge with diacritics placed above the latin vowels. A rising tone looks like an acute accent: á. There are three other tones also: ā ǎ à.

Unfortunately, what often happens in newspapers and other articles is that the tone marks are removed. Some people have argued that this is because of the technical limitations of print, but I don't think this is the case.

I think it's done because tone markings are pretty much nonsensical to a typical English-speaking reader. They can work out a basic pronunciation for a Chinese borrowing by applying the English rules to the letters that appear, but the accents are meaningless at best, and misleading at worst, since these symbols are used with totally other meaning in languages that might be more familiar to English-speakers, notably French with its acute and grave accents. This leaves most typical Mandarin borrowings only partially complete with regard to sound.

Again unfortunately, for the slightly more educated English reader, one who does have a passing familiarity with the Mandarin language, a Hanyu pinyin term stripped of its tonal marks is rather meaningless also. If the term is a proper name or a brand name, there is little chance of the average English speaker being able to guess or even begin to look up the Mandarin meaning or proper pronunciation of the name. It stands alone as a neologism in the English language, and it is not likely to be able to ever be connected back to the original Mandarin.

What I propose then, instead of tonal marks, which Academics add and newspaper editors strip away, is that Hanyu pinyin should be adapted to use silent final consonants to indicate tone. Newspapers are less likely to strip away a silent final consonant, since the average English reader is used to words with unpronounced finals. These would allow the middling-educated reader, like me, to glean more information about pronounciation from a popular article, and therefore be better able to look up the word in a Chinese-English dictionary, or even recall it from memory. And less-familar readers would be no worse off.

Here are my simple rules:

1. High steady tone. No extra consonant. This would look the same as the stripped newspaper version of Hanyu pinyin that appears everywhere already. Yāng => Yang

2. Rising tone. Follow with u, w, or y. Put a "w" after the vowel if the vowel is a, u, or ü (expect this to be replaced by "u" or "yu" in some publications). If the vowel is i, put a "y" after it. If the vowel is e, put a "u" after it. In the case of a vowel pair, go by the second vowel. If the vowel is followed by n or ng, the silent y or w goes before it. Example: Yáng => Yawng

a -> w
e -> u
i -> y
everything else -> w

3. Falling-rising tone. Double the vowel*. If it's a vowel pair, double the last vowel. Example: Yǎng => Yaang.

Special: In words where "oo" and "ee" appear, I suggest diareses, when possible. Example: Hě => Heë (acceptable variants: Heè, Heé, Hee). Bǒ = Boö (or Boò or Boó or Boo)

4. Falling tone. Put an h after the vowel. Yàng => Yahng

5. Neutral tone. Put an apostrophe after the vowel. (Optionally, this can be left off, making it visually identical to the first tone, but this is not too much of a problem since the neutral tone can be determined by context.) Ma => Ma'





*[Note that doubling the vowel is already used in a select few cases, for example, the Chinese province of Shaanxi would be distinguished from Shanxi only by the tone mark, but the official Chinese romanization doubles the vowel to represent the falling-rising tone.]

To an average English speaker with no Mandarin, "yawng" or "yahng" reads exactly the same as "yang". They're equally foreign, and yet the letters are familiar enough so that they can make a guess at pronunciation.

They might be fooled into thinking that the spelling affects the quality of the vowel, but I'm not worried about this for two reasons. First, English readers usually get the vowel wrong already. "Yang" should almost rhyme with English "long", but English speakers usually rhyme it with "hang".

Second, I feel that the benefit of distinguishing the tones is worth the drawback of losing some clarity of vowels. I have been led to believe that the quality of the tone is as important to Mandarin speakers as the quality of the vowel. Perhaps in some cases it is even more important to get the tone right than the vowel. I think it's better to get both components of the word partially right, than to get only one partially right (the vowel) and completely ignore the other (the tone).

Some examples:

Máo Zédōng (Mao Tse-tung) => Maow Zeudong

Hú Jǐntāo => Huw Jiintao

Jiǎng Zhōngzhèng (Chiang Kai-shek) => Jiaang Zhongzhehng

Mǎ Yīngjiǔ (Ma Ying-jeou) => Maa Yingjiuu

Zhōngguó => Zhongguow

Běijīng => Beiijing

Táiběi (Taipei) => Taiybeii

Puzzles in Role-Playing Games

This was posted as a comment on Rodrigo Lopez's article here: http://www.majorspoilers.com/gamer%E2%80%99s-corner-puzzles

My theory on why puzzles don’t work in role-playing games is that the two are just related and unrelated enough to be weird together.

Let’s try and think of some analogies. Here’s one: CG faces. There’s a certain sweet spot, or hump, between totally unrealistic and totally realistic, where CG faces become really weird. Unrealistic faces, like on toy cowboys and anthropomorphic cars, work fine. But people react badly when they think you’re trying to fool them into thinking a face is, or could be, real.

Here’s another analogy. Puzzles in RPGs are like taco sandwiches. You don’t butter a taco and put two slices of bread around your taco.

And a third analogy. Many of us get really pissed off at writers who pull the “it was all a dream” trope in a comic, novel, video game, television series, or movie. It’s kind of like the inverse of breaking the fourth wall. Instead of having four walls, there are now eight walls, as well as the possibility of an infinite regression of inner narratives.

Basically my point is that a D&D game is already a kind of puzzle. You can think of any RPG encounter as an elaborate versions of Chess puzzles, where the PCs themselves are the pieces. A good Chess puzzle makes creative use of the space of the board, and the conceptual space of what is allowed by the various theories of piece movement.

In Chess puzzles, it is virtually inconceivable that you would have the pieces stand in the centre of the board and hand the players a substitution cipher, and state that the Chess puzzle will be won when they complete the cipher. In that situation you might as well just get rid of the Chess board and play a different kind of puzzle.

I haven’t actually implemented this, but I have a theory about a sort of Denny’s placemat-and-crayons type of D&D adventure. In which combat and role-playing are just two of the half-dozen or so activities that make up the entire evening. Basically instead of personifying your characters, you are asked to look at them from six or seven different angles, sometimes from far above, sometimes close up, sometimes over longer periods of time, and sometimes over shorter periods. Your characters might not even resemble themselves when you change the lens you’re looking at them through.

What this also means though is that a character sheet might be insufficient to really represent all the facets of a single character. On the other hand, we already know that character sheets are notoriously complex and contingency-based, so it should be possible to use some of those numbers in interesting ways that aren’t always necessarily moving the players around on a 1-inch grid.

I don’t mean to denigrate the 1-inch grid though. I think the game can be perfectly rewarding if it is cast as a series of puzzles that all play out on a 1-inch grid. I still think there’s infinite possibility there.