Notes on Traveling

I like waiting in airports. The furniture and topography are designed for waiting. In the hours before a plane leaves, or during a layover, there are no expectations. No one asks anything of me, nothing is due. I read, I wander, I spy on other passenger. Calm. Undemanding.

At the smoothie place, at the bottom of the menu, it says, "Ask about our non-dairy options." I ask.
The woman responds, in a flat Carribean accent, "There is no non-dairy."

Both ways, I sat directly in front of the lavatory, window seat, the whole row occupied. This is the spoils of buying the cheapest possible ticket. In the past, I have disdained paying more for short-term comfort, but I foresee that changing. As I age, I won't pay more for comfort. I'll pay more to avoid discomfort.

Quote Marks

"Have no fear of perfection. You'll never reach it."
--Salvador Dali

Drop Your Religion

There are only a few messages of wisdom in the world. I'm not careful enough to have categorized or listed them. Maybe I could try.

One of them is, "Stop looking so hard, and you'll find what you seek."

The bulk of our effort is trying to find inventive ways to tell these few, basic things to each other. Sometimes it's like we're in an arms race; people try to stem their openness to truth, while other people create new ways to slip truth by, around, through. Once a teller is successful, the listeners learn to defend against that avenue for next time, even as they offer genuine thanks for this time.

So this is pretty good, and you'd probably be better off having read it. It starts:

There is only one righteous way for you to be saved if you’ve spent too much time in the Church. You must lay your religion down. Lay it down hard. Drop it. Leave it on the trail and walk away from it. And you have to mean it. You can’t fake this. You have to renounce religion and leave it for good. As far as you know, you’ll never pick it up again.

Thanks, rlp.

LiverBEST

Thanks to genetic diddling, senior citizen mice have livers that don't age.

Published in today's online edition of Nature Medicine, researchers at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine at Yeshiva University in New York City also say the older organs function as well as they did when the host animal was younger.

The researchers, led by Associate Professor Ana Maria Cuervo, blocked the ageing process in mice livers by stopping the build-up of harmful proteins inside the organ's cells.

I am getting skeptical about reports of genetic efficacy though. I've been hearing this "only 20 years from now" story for... 20 years. When do I get to stroll through lava? When can I shoot lasers from my eyes? Where's my superpowers, dammit?

"Our findings are particularly relevant for neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's," she said. "Many of these diseases are due to 'misbehaving' or damaged proteins that accumulate in neurons. By preventing this decline in protein clearance, we may be able to keep these people free of symptoms for a longer time."

Oh well. Thanks to the sacrifice of millions of mice, I vote for their replacing dogs as man's best friend. Rover will get my slippers, but Squeaker's great-great-great-great grandpa cured Parkinson's.

Bad dog! Bad!

Laugh It Up, Fuzzball

I was checking out the new Google rival Cuil today, and I entered my name, like you do.

It gave me some of the same stuff Google usually gives, but it also included a link to my bio at wookieepedia.

I didn't even know I had one of those! Haw Haw!

Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn, dead at 89

Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn died yesterday.

My first exposure to this great writer was in college, when my speech professor, Mr. Collins (a man for whom teaching "speech" took second place to teaching "clear thinking"), sent us to the library to read a Solzhenitsyn essay.

We had to answer several questions about the reading. The questions required harder, fuller thought than I had ever given to anything, and I'm fairly confident that in my second year of college, I did a genuinely sophomoric job of answering.

A question that stuck with me -- more than the essay itself, even -- was, "How can you tell from reading this that Solzhenitsyn is a Christian?"

I had to infer from the question that Solzhenitsyn was a Christian. There was nothing overt in what he wrote. In my limited experience, there was not the usual whiff of "Christian" about the writing -- by which I mean, "vetted by the Southern Baptist Sunday School Board."

After that class, out of curiosity, I read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and a few other essays he wrote, more of which bounced than stuck with me. What did stick from his writing was a dignity, clarity, and foremost truth -- the kind of truth that you do not (cannot) hear from people who have not had close, hard brushes with Truth itself.

I'm sorry you're no longer with us, Mr. Solzhenitsyn, but I'm glad you're home.

Pathfinder Campaign Setting

A MOMENT OF SELF-PROMOTION

Paizo is a game company operated by several people I like and respect. One of those people asked me to contribute to the Pathfinder Chronicles Campaign Setting a while ago, and I metaphorically leapt at the opportunity.

I have come to find most fantasy pastiche settings tedious these-a-days, but Pathfinder sparks. In addition, I'm part of an all-star cast of writers on this thing, and for once, I'm pleased with my work on an RPG product, instead of slightly sickened.

It goes on sale in a couple of weeks, so if you're of a gamer persuasion, look into it. It's going to be pretty great.

4th edition: The Sting of the Smalltime

As geeks, comic books and games are our Big Time. These industries are the recipients of our grail-like yearning.

But these industries are still so very small, with a correspondingly small amount of money compared to other entertainment channels.

Because these industries are so small, even though they might have the very best content talent, they don't have the best business talent. To wit: People who want to make hobby games for a living top out at Wizards of the Coast. People who want to make money for a living top out where the money is -- brokerage firms, marketing firms, insurance companies, banks.

This means that the hobby game business usually has inexperienced or experimental marketing and business talent. Even if you DO have state-of-the-art game design, you don't have the best people selling to you.

So you get a company that -- even if they have correctly identified what they need to do -- has severe difficulties delivering on it.

Enter 4th edition. Lots and lots of people have said lots of things about the new game, and if you care much, you've already read them, so I'll skip to my verdict: It's a fine game. It's a fun game. I don't love it, but I bear it no ill will.

However, the game itself is not what is interesting or lamentable about 4th edition. It's the business.

The great flaw with 4th edition D&D is that no one was particularly asking for it.

Third edition D&D was and is a serviceable game, which the market was still using and enjoying. The market was not ready for an upgrade (and unlike the Vista comparisons, many will never be ready for this particular upgrade). I predict the market will absorb 4e tolerably well. But they didn't ask for it.

Now compound this flaw with where we started. When you're primarily pushing a product on brand equity, you better have some damn good sales people out front, because the product will not sell on merit. You're selling its D&D-ness, not its betterness.*

Wizards doesn't appear to have damn good sales people, and as I said up top, they probably can't. Anybody who's really good gets called up to the majors.

So we have a boatload of ice chests in Anchorage. But the people who can sell fridges to Eskimos are already out in the field, working for GE. The ice chest manufacturers must hawk their own wares, with predictably mediocre results.



*This is not to say that they didn't try to sell it based on its betterness. The game design staff -- seemingly the vanguard of the marketing effort -- tried to convince the market of the game's betterness. But they've been unable to convince a portion of the market, and so the real force in sales comes from brand equity, i.e., "This is all the D&D there is! Buy it!" Eventually, you need to come to the sober realization that even if YOU think the game is better, mixed reception means it is not, in fact, empirically superior.

Or Something Like That

The road to hell is paved with the best laid intentions of mice and men.

Fungus Eating Radiation

I'm ready to jump on whatever ecological holocaust bandwagon drives by, because I've been trained to expect the worst. Yet, I'm also an unaggressive contrarian, which has the upside-down benefit of making me a quiet optimist. My wife doesn't understand it either.

When ecologists say that nuclear waste will pollute the Earth for 10,000 years, I think, "Really? I think nature's more resilient than that." A couple hundred years I can buy, but 10k seems like somebody did some envelope math and then issued a press release with a lot of exclamation points.

Sublime mathematical models can only tell you what you tell them. And you don't know jack to tell them about large-scale ecological consequences.

For instance, global warming: I'm ready to believe that something scary is going on, but what exactly? And is it really all that irreversible? And is it so terrible if it isn't? Maybe. But nobody knows. Nobody knows how to know.

I bring this up because Cosmos Magazine is reporting that inside the busted Chernobyl reactor, fungi are converting radiation to biomass. A reactor exploded and nuked the town in 1986. The place isn't pristine, but in only 22 years, wildlife has started the cleanup job without our help.

Among the many things that we live with every day and barely even begin to pretend to understand are fungi. For something so common, so edible, so vital to nearly every ecosystem on Earth, we don't know exactly where they will grow in the wild, or when, or how. There is historical data and best guesses. But what we don't know could fill a book...mobile. They are pretty much the garbagemen of Earth, but nobody saw this coming?

Maybe we're not so screwed after all.