Movie review: Disney Star Wars #3, Rise of Skywalker

I watched Rise of Skywalker and it was glorious! I have so much to say. It started off slow--I had fallen asleep twice by the time Rey blew up the transport, once for a few seconds and once for quite a bit longer. But then the movie really hit its stride, and every two minutes, like clockwork, it began showing me new ways to be logically, physically, narratively, dramatically, emotionally, or tactically ludicrous. It was glorious, like a movie script written and directed by a middle schooler who hasn't yet learned to "show, don't tell" (i.e. use acting instead of exposition) but that WASN'T THE END OF IT! There was another hour of glorious nonsense to go, and by the end of it I had changed my mind: this wasn't a movie script written by a middle schooler. It was halfway between a movie script written by a third grader, and the incoherent stream-of-consciousness insanity my subconscious spews at me when I'm asleep.

Storm troopers dressed like nuns? Old man Lando hitting on the female version of Finn? Luke and Leia looking like a married couple, no Han in sight? Faceless hordes of Sith death cults? Three COMPLETELY DIFFERENT evil master plan climaxes from Emperor Palpatine in the same scene, none of them so much as acknowledging the previous climax? Kylo Ren going completely mute for the last third of the movie for no apparent reason?

The weirdness is transcendent.

It. Was. Amazing.

This may be the worst movie I've ever seen. Yes, worse than Last Jedi, worse than Thor, *maybe* even worse than Spielberg's AI: Artificial Intelligence. Maybe. I'm not sure. They both left me incredulous with laughter every few minutes, but I think Rise of Skywalker did it more frequently, and for more total minutes.

-Max

Linguistic oddity

Quoting from the play:

Sweeney Todd: [in anguish] Fifteen years sweating in a living hell on a trumped up charge! Fifteen years of dreaming that, perhaps, I might come home to a loving wife and child… [grimly] Let them quake in their boots – Judge Turpin and the Beadle, for their hour has come.

"Trumped-up" means "concocted with intent to deceive; deliberately done or created to make someone appear to be guilty of a crime." Future writers could be forgiven for mistaking it for a reference to the fact-free 2019 impeachment, but it's really much older, and yet still amazingly apt. Is that wild or what? I wouldn't be surprised if some people accidentally started capitalizing the saying, "Trumped-up charge." 

-Max

 
 --

I could not love thee dear, so much,
Loved I not honor more.

Recognizing Revelation

Context: when Abraham was 75 years old, the Lord promised him that he would have a great posterity, and this promise was repeated several times over the years. "This shall not be thine heir; but he that shall come forth out of thine own bowels shall be thine heir." When he was 85 years old, he still had no children. It appears that Abraham and Sarah took it upon themselves to do everything they could to make the Lord's promise come true, via a surrogate mother:

"And Sarai said unto Abram, Behold now, the Lord hath restrained me from bearing: I pray thee, go in unto my maid; it may be that I may obtain children by her. And Abram hearkened to the voice of Sarai... And Abram was fourscore and six years old, when Hagar bare Ishmael to Abram."

But it turned out the Lord had something else in mind. Four years later when Abraham was 90 years old, the Lord gave Abraham the name of his future son Isaac, and ten years after that when he was 100 years old Isaac was born.

Open question: when Abraham and Sarah made Ishmael happen, were they wrong to do so? Did it show lack of faith in the Lord's promises?

My opinion: maybe or maybe not--I don't know what the Spirit said previously to Abraham's heart or in what detail. I don't think the Lord was angry with Abraham for doing as much as he could, but I am also not prepared to say that the Spirit wouldn't have told Abraham in advance that the Lord really, truly, literally meant it when He promised Abraham and Sarah a posterity. Sometimes it's hard for people to believe in things that aren't going to happen until 25 years in the future, but the Lord knows the end from the beginning.

How can you distinguish your own hopes and feelings from the Lord's promises? Only by the spirit of revelation. Yes, I realize that's a somewhat circular answer. To put it differently, "recognizing revelation requires reflection, prayer and practice." It's like learning to use your sense of smell: you know when it's working because it works, but it can't be described fully in terms of words or things you can see.

Ask me in 25 or 100 or 6000 years how things turned out with the things that I am not completely 100% sure of right now.

~B.C.

--

I could not love thee dear, so much,
Loved I not honor more.

Ninja

Today I scared a missionary so badly she actually fell over. I was at the church and everybody from Messiah practice had pretty much left, and Sister Baxter and Sister Peng walked out of the chapel and I looked up from my phone and said, "Hey there", and Sister Baxter fell over backwards.

I'm kind of proud of myself--I've never done that before. It made me feel like a ninja even though I'm sure I don't deserve it. :-)

-Max

 --

I could not love thee dear, so much,
Loved I not honor more.

Type classes in F#!

[Excitement]
Not only do I now know what a functor is (from a category theory standpoint) and roughly how they relate to Haskell type classes, but I ALSO know how to emulate a functor in F# with SRTPs!!!! What does this mean in practice? It means that I can implement a new data structure with different performance characteristics, like a FastList<T> as well as a RegularList<T>, and yet I can just use one map function for both kinds of lists as well as any other list-like data structures I implement.

What this means in effect: I can now do overloading in F#!

My code is about to shrink significantly! And I will be able to add new data structures fairly freely. My code no longer grows in complexity if I add more data structures. (!!!!!!)

Here's the relevant commit: https://github.com/MaxWilson/ShiningSword/commit/1d4cdbac77983ed808f96489083ccc9ecae0377a

Notice how FastList is now a type, not a module, so I just declare FastList<T> instead of FastList.Data<T>, and instead of having to call FastList.Transform I can just call transform.

Limitations: you need to have enough control over the source code to add the appropriate static members for SRTP to operate against, which in some cases for e.g. built-in lists might require wrapping native types in my own types. And all the types involved need to have roughly the same type signature, so you have to follow certain design patters when adding your new types. But as long as you do that, everything just works.

Thanks to Bartosz Milewski and his book (Category Theory For Programmers) and also to Don Syme and his paper on the history of F#, or I would never have thought to attempt this or understood the results even if I succeeded.

-Max
 --

I could not love thee dear, so much,
Loved I not honor more.

How to make 5E more challenging

[Written as a response to a post asking for ways to keep the challenge level high in a D&D 5E game. -M.]

Aside from the obvious things like beefing up encounter difficulty (more monsters, higher CR) and adding more complex battlefields (more vertical movement like platforms, cliffs, pits, dangling ropes, and vertical tunnels), try adding more uncertainty to the game.

Risk = don't know the outcome but do know the approximate odds
Uncertainty = hidden information, don't even know how much risk there is

It's the difference between opening a door and seeing a Death Knight and three Wraiths, and not knowing if you'll win initiative as you Rage and charge into combat, vs. opening the door and seeing three Githyanki and not being completely sure whether, if you charge into combat, it might actually turn out to be three Wraiths who've been disguised under a Seeming spell by the lich who runs this section of the dungeon, or whether that lich or a Death Knight might be somewhere within earshot waiting to hit the party squishies from behind as soon as the party tanks have charged the wraiths and the party has committed their concentration to other spells.

Even if 60-80% of the time things turn out to be exactly what they look like (yup, they're Githyanki! and there's only three of them), the knowledge that it's possible that things are not as they seem can add fun dramatic tension, especially if there are clues that can let you correctly guess what is real and what isn't.

Also, make good use of secret doors, maps, riddles, magic items, and other affordances that can let players make things easier on themselves if they take advantage of them.

You may set up a dungeon level with a Star Spawn Larval Mage, a Star Spawn Seer, three Star Spawn Hulks, five Star Spawn Manglers, and a whole ton of gibbering Star Spawn Grues (60 or so)... tough fight for an 11th level party if they tackle it head-on, right? But then you scatter the Star Spawns around (weird cultic rituals for the Seer in the main hall, Manglers on patrol looking for intruders, Mage torturing prisoners, Hulks bodyguarding the Mage and Seer, and Grues everywhere, everywhere!) so that it takes at least a couple rounds for reinforcements to arrive once they see the PCs, and you make everyone but the Grues patient and smart enough to break contact and wait for reinforcements (especially Manglers, who are good at hiding) and/or to try to surround PCs, and all those extra restrictions on the Star Spawn make surviving a fight with them tough but maybe doable, like the space Marines in Aliens attacking the Alien hive and barely surviving thanks to Ripley and the APC.

Then you also add six or eight 4'-wide (Small-sized) tunnel shafts connecting this dungeon level to the Duergar dungeon level above and the aquatic shark- and Black Pudding-infested waters below, add a Clay Golem or Shield Guardian trapped in stone in a cavern reachable through one of those tunnels, place a riddle containing a command word for the Clay Golem/Shield Guardian somewhere nearby, and put a map for the tunnels in the Duergar's treasure vault where the PCs can purchase it from the Duergar or loot it after killing all the Duergar, and suddenly it starts looking not only doable but gameable and fun.

 --

I could not love thee dear, so much,
Loved I not honor more.

I finally understand Beetlejuice!

I have always enjoyed Beetlejuice but there's a lot of things about the movie that I never got, things which seemed random, including for example the ending, which always seemed kind of abrupt and random to me (why the big deal about the song?). Until...

...until I watched The Exorcist. Well, okay, until I bought The Exorcist and skimmed through it looking for interesting or scary parts, mostly the very beginning and stuff towards the end. (I was testing a mental technique to use against fear, long story.) I feel like I at least got the sense of the show, and I think Beetlejuice can best be viewed as an answer to The Exorcist and its whole genre.

For example, "Beetlejuice" is kind of a weird title for a movie that isn't really about Beetlejuice, right? It's mostly about Adam and Barbara Maitland and their afterlife, including their interactions with the living family the Deetzes. Beetlejuice himself isn't even really in much of the movie, he's onscreen maybe 15% of the time. I think "Beetlejuice" is a linguistic stand-in which is supposed to remind us of "Beelzebub," a name for evil/the devil, and the theme of the movie is basically:

"What if the supernatural isn't inherently scary after all? What if evil spirits are definitely evil, but in a pervy, used-car salesman kind of way? What if possession isn't scary per se? Being made to dance a musical number might be kind of fun, especially if you can't normally sing or dance! What if there's nothing magic or scary about death and what lies beyond it?"

The character arc of the movie is for the characters (especially Adam, Barbara, and Lydia) to realize this, accept it, and resume living their lives without worrying too much about death.

I think there are other tie-ins to Exorcist-like themes as well, such as the random wedding-proposal from Beetlejuice to Lydia, which in a movie like the Exorcist would be painted as a horrifying act by Beelzebub which co-opts an innocent girl as the Devil's Bride forever, and mortals are helpless to resist, mwahahaha, but in Beetlejuice it's a clownish affair which the characters successfully fight off by playing by the rules and eventually by ramming Beetlejuice with a toy car and then a sand worm. Beetlejuice/the Devil has more powers than the Maitlands have, but ultimately he's just one pervy creep and he can be vanquished.

Also, Juno's line about Beetlejuice being her ex-assistant who's now been fired makes more sense in this context: Juno is a thematic stand-in for God, and Beetlejuice getting fired = Lucifer's fall from heaven.

Anyway, no wonder the ending always seemed abrupt and random to me, and no wonder I always enjoyed the movie anyway! I already bought into that premise from the very beginning. It was preaching to the choir all along, in my case. But now I understand the Exorcist-like viewpoint it was trying to disprove.

-Max

 --

I could not love thee dear, so much,
Loved I not honor more.

Reality and Myth (D&D setting trope)

Observation: the biggest reason why non-spellcasters like Barbarians suffer at high levels is because WotC builds mechanical synergies into the game, and many, many of these synergies are spells, so if you invest 20 levels in Barbarian you are giving up lots of potential spells, including high-level spells like True Polymorph.

Design goal: without removing any of a spellcaster's mechanical power, provide a roleplaying or setting reason why you'd even ever want to be a Barbarian or a non-spellcasting Rogue or whatever.

Solution: Break the campaign setting into Real and Not-Real areas. In Real areas, everything works pretty much in real life. The inside of a building is always smaller than the outside, your reflection is just a reflection and can never reach out and strangle you, black cats crossing your path don't really bring you bad luck, and faerie/vampire folklore is just superstition. None of that stuff is real. This is where PCs' home bases will tend to be, as well as civilization, shopkeepers, and a limited amount of political intrigue--but no dungeons and not very much treasure. Magical monsters cannot come to Real places or they cease to exist.

In Not-Real areas, also called Fable or Myth, all bets are off. Not only do magical creatures appear, and unlikely coincidences like stumbling across an ancient crypt stuffed to the brim with both undead monstrosities and treasure that somehow hasn't already been looted by someone else, but the DM will make your life interesting in other ways as well. Karma can come back to bite you, the inside of a dragon's cave can be far, far larger than its outside, genies can grant wishes, and faerie-tale logic applies.

Here's the catch: using magic breaks reality and transforms Real places into Not-real places, so magic-use is heavily stigmatized. It's not that you can't cast Zone of Truth in a fully-populated city, it's just that doing so turns the city basically uninhabitable by people who aren't prepared to get eaten by Unreal monsters. It's like contaminating the city with nuclear waste. Accordingly, spellcasters (who are always marked by a campaign-specific universally-recognizable physical characteristic, e.g. a brilliant-white lock of hair, and are referred to as Mythmakers) are stigmatized and generally unwelcome in society even if they aren't actually planning on creating any Unreality at the moment. They are dangerous.

There are also outlying Fringe areas, settlements which are mostly Not-Real but where the dwelling places (insides of homes) are Real, so people are safe from monsters in their beds at night but may occasionally have to send for help from adventurers (highly-expert people who are often Mythmakers) to deal with the Mythical problems threatening their livelihood.

Result: if you want more freedom to get involved in politics or society in Real places, pull non-magical heists, have a real job as an important person's bodyguard protecting him from assassins, etc., play a non-Mythmaker character like a Barbarian or a Samurai or a Rogue, or a Ranger who has never cast a spell (and so isn't marked as a Mythmaker yet), and hang out in Reality. If you want to do dungeon crawls and kill monsters, play a Mythmaker and hang out in Fable where everything is Not-Real. Or play a Chaotic Evil Mythmaker who uses illusions and stuff to disguise his nature and just doesn't care about the collateral damage to reality he's causing with his spells. It's all part of the same setting but everyone has a niche. 
 

 --

I could not love thee dear, so much,
Loved I not honor more.

D&D: On the Feeling of Agency

[This was written in response to a Reddit post which claimed the following:

Some examples of what is versus what isn't player agency:

What is good player agency:

Rogue: "I check the chest for traps."

DM: Okay, how are you inspecting it?

Rogue: "I'm gently running my dagger along it, feeling for anything out of the ordinary."

DM: Okay, roll an Investigation check.

Rogue: "20."

DM: "Yeah, you find the poison gas trap hidden on the chest."

Rogue: "Okay, I want to disarm the trap."

DM: Roll a Thieves' Tools check.

Rogue: "15."

DM: "You were unable to disarm the trap."

Rogue: "Okay, but I still want to open the chest."

DM: "You want to open the chest, knowing full well there's a trap?"

Rogue: "Yes."

DM: "Okay, roll a CON saving throw."

---

What is not good player agency:

Rogue: "I want to check the chest for traps."

DM: "As you approach the chest, it shoots out deadly poisonous gas and you breathe it in and immediately fall to the ground, gasping for air as you take your final breath and pass into the afterlife."

Rogue: "What the [deleted]"

Notice how for the second example, the Rogue didn't get to control their character at all. The DM didn't ask how they were doing what they were doing, the Rogue didn't get to make a single skill check or play the game. They were simply a character in the DM's story that they wanted dead. No saves, no checks, no damage rolled. Simply dead.  

My response below. -Max] 

While the example isn't terrible, I think the OP does not fully articulate why the interaction is unsatisfying. Here's a definition:

Player Agency (n.): "the feeling of empowerment that comes from being able to take actions in the [virtual] world whose effects relate to the player's intention" -Mateas, 2001

"Agency is an experiential pleasure. As such, it can fade in and out; it can fail altogether. Agency is not automatic, and so simulated environments should be cleverly constructed to help users/players get there." - Steven Dow (2009)

The reason the instant-kill example is so unsatisfying is not because the player doesn't get to roll enough dice, it's because based on the information given, the outcome feels arbitrary and the player feels helpless, as if his decisions didn't matter.

How could you transform example #2 so players gain the feeling of agency? Different methods lead to different feels for your campaign. The OP suggests a skill-centric approach where the DM is careful to make the player's investments in Investigation and Thieves Tool skills matter, as well as investments in feats like Resilient (Con) and Tough. The damage would presumably be carefully-calibrated to not actually kill a high-Con Barbarian (e.g. 5d8 damage, not 20d20), because the OP is clearly trying to highlight a game where resources and build choices matter, so survival-via-sufficient-HP instead of survival-via-Thieves-Tool-Expertise will be a viable strategy.

Another way to build a high-agency campaign is by giving the players lots of information: hints and foreshadowing. Imagine that the players have encountered many corpses of other adventurers who died clutching their throats in front of chests, and maybe solved a riddle or two hinting at how in this place, breath is death, and that only the Necklace of Amun-Ra (which is a Necklace of Adaptation that prevents you from having to breathe) can save you. If the players choose not to enter the Tomb of Amun-Ra to retrieve the necklace but instead try to immediately open up the treasure chest they find outside the Tomb... then when someone dies to the poison gas, that will not feel arbitrary and the player should not feel helpless, even if the poison damage was great enough to kill a medium-sizeed dragon (20d20, DC 22, save for half). The death was clearly a result of the players' decision to be impatient, and the results of being impatient were plausible: increased danger. In a campaign like this one, build choices matter less, and an impatient or foolish player's PC will probably die relatively soon even if he has 18s in every stat, whereas a savvy player's PC might make it all the way to 20th level even with no initial stat higher than 14.

It's important to note that in order for the prior scenario to feel high-agency, the DM has to react appropriately when the PCs go off-script and do something creative. If instead of trying to pick the lock, the PCs try to cut a hole in the chest with an axe, does the DM say "No, you can't" to force them back to the original dilemma? Or does something logical happen: either the trap goes off anyway, or they accidentally ruin some of the treasure inside the chest? Their ability to go off-script (with appropriate consequences) will influence feelings of player agency, even when they choose to stay on-script.

Yet another way to provide agency would be to make moral choices matter: do you risk opening the chest yourself, or do you animate a zombie and make the zombie do it for you? Or make a prisoner of war do it? When you need information that could greatly decrease the risk of danger to you in your treasure-hunting, how far are you willing to go to get it?

Agency is an experiential pleasure, and a given DM has to think carefully about the ways in which he is prepared to offer agency to those players.

More here:

http://hackslashmaster.blogspot.com/2013/10/on-theory-defined-player-agency.html

 --

I could not love thee dear, so much,
Loved I not honor more.

Is Anger Ever Appropriate?

[Written in response to the questions, "In what situations is anger desirable? Is it ever acceptable or encouraged?"]

I can think of a handful of situations where feeling and showing anger is appropriate and useful. In a situation where:

1.) You're communicating with someone too immature to understand rational argument;

2.) You don't feel any enmity or hostility towards the person;

3.) They have done something wrong and you need to communicate the seriousness of the offense;

In this situation, it could be useful to allow yourself to feel anger in such a way that the other person can tell. For example, if your three-year-old child breaks the family rules and runs outside the house alone and into the street, I don't think it would be harmful for the child to perceive that "mommy and daddy are really mad that I broke the rules and they say I could have been killed." Similarly, if one child is harming another child (hitting, biting), I can imagine that it might be more appropriate for certain children to feel that "mommy and daddy are mad that I hurt [other child] and they said I shouldn't ever hurt them ever again" instead of "mommy and daddy are sad that..." It probably depends on the child, but I can certainly imagine children who would pay more attention to anger than to grief.

When the Lord shows anger in the scriptures, all the cases I can think of fit this pattern. He is dealing with someone immature (like the Israelites), he still loves them, and they've done something very wrong.

If the other person weren't immature I think anger might still be okay to feel (as long as #2 and #3 are still satisfied) but it's not helpful per se. If your spouse does something that makes you mad, you can say, "I really, really didn't like it when you [did XYZ]", but you wouldn't lose any effectiveness if you weren't angry when you said it. In the case of an immature person though I think being calm can result in them missing your point. Immature, irrational people respond more readily to emotion than to logic, and if you give them the logic without the emotion they won't hear what you're saying. "That behavior is inappropriate in this context" doesn't mean the same thing to them as "STOP IT!!!!!".

-Max

 --

I could not love thee dear, so much,
Loved I not honor more.

Robert Cialdini

[from an email discussion]

Cialdini's writings are extremely interesting. Here's an interesting story from one of the early chapters of Pre-Suasion, emphasis mine:

In part, the answer involves an essential but poorly appreciated tenet of all communication: what we present first changes the way people experience what we present to them next. Consider how a small procedural difference has improved the bottom line of the consulting business of a Toronto-based colleague of mine. For years, when bidding on a big project, it wasn't unusual to get price resistance from the client, who might propose a 10 percent or 15 percent reduction. That was frustrating, he says, because he never felt comfortable padding the budget to cover this kind of potential pushback on costs. If he did agree to the cut, his profit margin became so thin it barely paid to take the business. If he didn't acquiesce, he either lost the job or produced partners who were initially disgruntled because he wasn't willing to work with them on price.

 

Then, during one proposal meeting, he accidentally hit upon a maneuver that rid him of the problem forever. It wasn't a step-by-step attempt to specify or justify each of the expenses involved in his services; he'd long since given up on that approach, which only brought scrutiny to the bill. Instead, after his standard presentation and just before declaring his ($75,000) fee, he joked, "As you can tell, I'm not going to be able to charge you a million dollars for this." The client looked up from the written proposal he'd been studying and said, "Well, I can agree to that!" The meeting proceeded without a single subsequent reference to compensation and ended with a signed contract. My colleague claims that this tactic of mentioning an admittedly unrealistic price tag for a job doesn't always win the business—too many other factors are involved for that—but it almost always eliminates challenges to the charges.

 

Although he stumbled onto it, my friend is not alone in experiencing the remarkable effects of merely launching a large number into the air and, consequently, into the minds of others. Researchers have found that the amount of money people said they'd be willing to spend on dinner went up when the restaurant was named Studio 97, as opposed to Studio 17; that the price individuals would pay for a box of Belgian chocolates grew after they'd been asked to write down a pair of high (versus low) digits from their Social Security numbers; that participants in a study of work performance predicted their effort and output would be better when the study happened to be labeled experiment twenty-seven (versus experiment nine); and that observers' estimates of an athlete's performance increased if he wore a high (versus low) number on his jersey.

The remarkable thing about this story to me is that it shows a case where persuasion expertise can help a businessman be more ethical (no pressure to pad the initial asking price).

The whole book is full of fascinating stories and ideas. I highly recommend it to anyone who regularly interacts with human beings in a professional or personal capacity. 

-M.
 

 --

I could not love thee dear, so much,
Loved I not honor more.

What is Dungeons and Dragons? (Not collaborative storytelling)

It's popular to describe D&D as "collaborative storytelling", but I think that's misleading.

You can derive a story from the events of the game, after it's over, but that's true for many games from Cops and Robbers to Clue. Fundamentally, roleplaying games like D&D are about giving players meaningful decisions to make within the context of a fantasy adventure, which means making choices with consequences that are clearly related to the player's intent. The more meaningful decisions you make during an evening of D&D, the more memorable the experience: players will tell stories about what they did and what happened because of what they did.

Nobody wants to collaboratively re-enact all the events of Lord of the Rings, even if it is a great story in book form. If you don't get to make choices which change the outcome, that's not a game, and you'll have no story to tell after the game is over. But if Frodo and Sam get killed by Ringwraiths back at the Shire, and then the Ringwraiths send the Ring back to Sauron on a flying dragon which gets ambushed by giant eagles ridden by Legolas and Gandalf who then flee westward over the oceans with the Ring to buy time while Aragorn and the dwarves make peace with the goblins of the Misty Mountains and persuade them to betray Sauron and join the West in exchange for mining rights and patents of Gondorian nobility... if that actually works and you save the world that way, you might have a story you'll want to remember.

-B.C.

 --

I could not love thee dear, so much,
Loved I not honor more.

Ethics of being good-looking (continued)

Maybe it's just childish to take appearances too seriously? Don't forget they are temporary and mutable. But maybe it's not wrong to mutate them to be pleasant sometimes? And it can help you influence lower levels.

~B.C.

Radioactive Taiwan: Followup

[Back in 2004 I heard about a case where a bunch of apartment buildings in Taiwan were accidentally constructed out of (mildly) radioactive metal. This was not discovered until ten thousand people had spent one to two decades living in those buildings. The common perception of radiation, called the LNT theory (Linear-No-Threshold), says that radiation is always bad for you even in small doses, and suggests that cancer rates among these people should have been sky-high. Instead cancer rates were unusually LOW, about 3% the normal average even for people living in non-radioactive buildings. There was a followup study done in 2007 that I skimmed, which concluded that the effect seemed to be real and that cancer rates for all types of cancer except leukemia really had drastically dropped (leukemia rates went slightly up) and that more study was needed.

Today it occurred to me that I never found out if further research had been done, so I went looking. I found a bunch of papers including this one from 2018. I'm no expert but it looks like the phenomenon seen in the radioactive Taiwanese incident is holding up in other studies, and LNT is losing favor in the scientific community. -Max]

Abstract

The effects of low-dose radiation are being increasingly investigated in biological, epidemiological, and clinical studies. Many recent studies have indicated the beneficial effects of low doses of radiation, whereas some studies have suggested harmful effects even at low doses. This review article introduces various studies reporting both the beneficial and harmful effects of low-dose radiation, with a critique on the extent to which respective studies are reliable. Epidemiological studies are inherently associated with large biases, and it should be evaluated whether the observed differences are due to radiation or other confounding factors. On the other hand, well-controlled laboratory studies may be more appropriate to evaluate the effects of low-dose radiation. Since the number of such laboratory studies is steadily increasing, it will be concluded in the near future whether low-dose radiation is harmful or beneficial and whether the linear-no-threshold (LNT) theory is appropriate. Many recent biological studies have suggested the induction of biopositive responses such as increases in immunity and antioxidants by low-dose radiation. Based on recent as well as classical studies, the LNT theory may be out of date, and low-dose radiation may have beneficial effects depending on the conditions; otherwise, it may have no effects. [emphasis added. -Max]

Keywords: low-dose radiation, hormesis, adaptive response
Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6121451/

 --

I could not love thee dear, so much,
Loved I not honor more.

Hawking Radiation

While the following post doesn't quite get me to the point of understanding Hawking radiation, it gets me much closer to the point of understanding what Stephen Hawking was attempting to say in A Brief History of Time: now I know what he means by "virtual particles" and that I need to read up on Feynman diagrams to understand the argument.

Source: https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/higgs-field-and-the-casimir-effect.405738/#post-2736124 

Graphically in a Feynman diagram a virtual particle is a particle that does not escape to infinity; so its line has two ends (two vertices) where it meets with another line or lines. Now draw a circle and two vertices on the circle. This is a vacuum fluctuation where at one vertex a pair of virtual particles is created out of nothing (vacuum); the two particles propagate to the second vertex where they annihilate into nothing (vacuum). Usually this is a mathematical [artifact] and is "subtracted" from the theory.

Near the event horizon something strange happens. One of the two virtual particles tunnels through the horizon whereas the other virtual particle is eventually sucked into the black hole. The particle outside the event horizon does not annihilate with the other particle, so it escapes to infinite and is therefore not a virtual particle. The confusion is due to the fact that we compare a process in flat space (with two virtual particles in a vacuum fluctuation) with another, different process in curved spacetime (with one real particle). That's why its strictly speaking not a virtual particle that becomes a real particle, but a particle that is created by tunneling (similar to the alpha particle that tunnels from a nucleus causing alpha decay).

The mathematical reason is difficult: in order to set up quantum field theory one must define a vacuum state. In curved spacetime this is no longer possible uniquely. So what we call virtual particle when its located inside the event horizon is a real particle when it is located outside the horizon. One can evaluate this vacuum ambiguity mathematically. In doing so one finds that one has to redefine the vacuum state outside the event horizon in such a way that is contains real particles with thermal spectrum.

A similar effect is the so-called Unruh effect. It simply says that if an observer at rest observes vacuum w/o particles then a constantly accelerated observer observes thermal radiation! So the same volume of space contains no particles at all or thermal radiation - depending on the observer. Again the very notion of vacuum is no longer unique. The two effects are closely related as in the Unruh case there is again a "kinematical horizon" which means there is a region of spacetime from which no signal can reach the accelerated observer. This is not due tothe eometry of spacetime but due to the acceleration only, but nevertheless it is a horizon.

Reference: https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/higgs-field-and-the-casimir-effect.405738/#post-2736124

-Max
 

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I could not love thee dear, so much,
Loved I not honor more.

Global warming evidence(?) and positive feedback loops

Article: https://issuesinsights.com/2019/07/29/will-the-global-warming-hysterics-never-tire-of-being-wrong/?fbclid=IwAR2jf6xiN7uOIcjst3kv1mbX4aFKSa954Y3mNmENKxR7cv_hDEJMQ712xkw 

 
But some remember those frenzied forecasts. Following is but a small taste of a smorgasbord of baloney:

Al Gore once declared that "unless drastic measures to reduce greenhouse gases" were taken within the next decade, "the world will reach a point of no return," eventually suffering "a true planetary emergency." That was 13 years ago.

Gore is of course the same fellow who in the mid- to late-2000s kept telling us the Arctic Ocean would soon be ice-free. The ice, which is still there, had grown thicker and had wider coverage in 2014 than when Gore made his prediction. Earlier this year, before the growing season had ended, Wattsupwiththat reported the "2019 Arctic sea-ice extent is already higher than the previous four years and six out of the last 14 years."

In January 2009, former NASA scientist and corporate witch hunter James Hansen swore that the incoming president had a mere four years to save the world.

Later in the year, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown (the Thames, again) said there remained "fewer than 50 days to set the course of the next 50 years and more."

Also in 2009, 124 months ago, the prince of Wales worried out loud the world had "less than 100 months" to save itself.
2009 was a particularly looney year. Elizabeth May, leader of the Greens in Canada, wrote "we have hours to act to avert a slow-motion tsunami that could destroy civilization as we know it. … We need to act urgently. We no longer have decades; we have hours."

While speaking to then-Secretary of State John Kerry in May 2014, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius warned that "we have 500 days to avoid climate chaos." Nearly 1,900 days have passed since. The chaos is in the foreign minister's head.

In 2015, mayors from around the world signed a statement that said the "last effective opportunity to negotiate arrangements that keep human-induced warming below 2-degrees" Celsius had arrived.

Almost 20 years ago, in Y2K, the British Independent quoted a climate researcher who said in coming years the children of England "just aren't going to know what snow is." Thirteen years later, that same newspaper told readers to "stand by for icy blasts and heavy snow."

Commentary by Max:

Predictions of climate disaster have always rested upon the implausible assumption that earth's climate is an unstable equilibrium, when everything we know about earth's history and planetary systems indicates it's more likely to be a stable equilibrium. If heating led to further irreversible heating, the Earth would already have turned irreversibly into a furnace way back in the Medieval Warm Period. Climatology's arguments in favor of positive feedback loops are extraordinary claims, and we have yet to see extraordinary evidence. It's hotter than it used to be but in all likelihood this is about as hot as it's ever going to get, and the history of the past two decades bears that out because it's no longer getting even hotter--there is no temperature-driven positive feedback loop.

Also carbon dioxide has diminishing returns. At some point you're already capturing about all the energy in the CO2 bands, and increasing CO2 levels cease to matter (in terms of temperature at least--high CO2 levels do still make air feel less fresh, while increasing plant growth rates, and extremely high CO2 levels can give you a headache or eventually even kill you).

-Max
 
 --

I could not love thee dear, so much,
Loved I not honor more.

Pre-marriage Discussion

[Responding to questionnaire taken from https://www.marriagebuilders.com/choosing-the-right-one-to-marry-2.htm?fbclid=IwAR2lOe9xcmN-U825aaUkY9yhADyYaGLxThLn4DHvM91krQZriQWK7JLpfj8. My responses to B.F. in brackets.]

However, you can make up your own version of the PREPARE test if you like. It won't be as sophisticated as the one a professional counselor would give you, but it could give you a rough idea of where you might have serious conflicts. But more importantly, it would help you understand how you would handle those conflicts after marriage.

Ask yourselves these questions:

1. Do you want to have children, and if so, how many? [Ideally I'd like four daughters named Samantha (Sam), Alexandra (Alex), Riley, and Jill.]
2. What religion do you want for our children? [I would like our family to be completely committed to the teachings of Jesus Christ, especially as taught in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.]

3. When our children are disobedient, how will you discipline them? [Ideally I'd like to raise my eyebrows and let them suffer the consequences of their own foolishness. I'm open to other approaches, especially when they are very young, but that's how I'd prefer to handle it. I'm a big believer in freedom of agency.]
4. How do you want to spend our vacations and holidays? [I'm not sure. For my own sake I'd probably just want to stay home, read books, and relax, but I expect that for the girls' sakes I'd want to frequently do things that give them new experiences, indoors, outdoors, and in the worlds of the mind.]
5. How much money do you expect me to earn? What if I never earned any money? [It would be fine with me if you never earned any money. In fact as a matter of fiscal discipline I would prefer it if we never, as a family, relied at all upon any money that you happened to earn even if you did feel like getting a professional job. That way you'd feel completely free to take any job you wanted, or leave any job you wanted, without any economic repercussions to family welfare. My goal is to make enough money for you to have that complete freedom.]

6. What kind of house would you like to own? Where would you like to live? [My mild preference is to have a house with no yard so there is no yardwork. If you decide that you want a yard because it looks nice I will do my best, because what's important to you should be important to me, but it's possible I might never learn to enjoy doing yardwork so please be patient.]

7. Do you expect me to make love to you whenever you want? If not, would you EVER expect me to make love to you? Would you leave me or have an affair if I never made love to you? [I don't think I would feel cheated if you never made love to me as long as we had a good friendship. That would obviously be inconvenient for our daughters, because they'd never get born, but as far as I'm concerned it's not something I feel like I need. I am not saying I won't feel physical desire for you and won't WANT to reach out to you that way, because you're super-cute and very desirable--but I don't think I would resent it if you hypothetically said "You're my best friend Max but I'm just not into touching and I think I never will be." I could be completely happy, I think, with a 100% verbal relationship with you, as long as I can count on you when I need you.]

8. If you don't like one of my friends, would you want me to give up the friendship? [I'm really not sure. At minimum I'd want to understand why we have different perceptions of this person. How is it possible for me to not like someone you like? I can imagine circumstances where I might try to persuade you that someone is bad for you, and if I successfully persuade you then I expect that you would give up that friendship voluntarily, but I don't think I would expect you to give up a friendship without being persuaded first.]

9. What should our budget priorities be? How will we make financial decisions? [This is a complicated subject. Let's talk about it at more length.]

10. Would you support me financially if I wanted to educate myself for a new career? [Sure. I know you've sometimes considered becoming a veterinarian, for example. If you want to, we'll make it happen, in as many different careers as you feel interested in.]

 --

I could not love thee dear, so much,
Loved I not honor more.

Pre-Copernican geocentrism

Something I learned from the book Lost In Math, by physicist Sabine Hossenfelder:

People love to make fun of pre-Copernican geocentric models of the universe, but it turns out that there were some interesting arguments against heliocentrism, back in the day.

For one thing, scientists back then knew how to do trigonometry, and they noticed that the stars (unlike the planets) didn't seem to move, which meant that either (1) the stars were fixed in position relative to the earth, not the sun, or else (2) the stars were implausibly far away, thousands of times farther away than any of the planets, far enough away that their parallax motion was impossible to detect.

It wasn't until much later that we developed instruments sensitive enough to detect that yes, the stars really do show parallax motion as the earth goes around the sun. But if you went back in time to the 16th century, and you didn't bring any of those modern instruments with you, you'd have a pretty tough time answering that argument.

This is good in the sense that it teaches you something true about the way human beings search for knowledge, including the fact that people can be wrong without being stupid.

It's an interesting book.

-Max

Ref: https://www.amazon.com/Lost-Math-Beauty-Physics-Astray-ebook/dp/B0763L6YR7/ 

 --

I could not love thee dear, so much,
Loved I not honor more.

What Is Pornography?

The definition of "pornography" I would give to my kids is "pornography is material produced by one person in an attempt to gain power (money, attention, etc.) over another person by manipulating their physical desires."

This definition makes it possible to talk clinically about accidental exposure to pornographic material, and without feeling shame. Case in point: I was on a web site today, skimming an article about Soviet whaling practices, and I kept seeing these highly-inappropriate bikini ads from a company called Venus. The body language of the models was aggressively sexual, and unlike most Google ads, these ones didn't have a little X in the corner for easily closing the ad and opting out of seeing it in the future. The ad bugged me enough that I held up my hand to cover the screen while I searched for ways to disable it, which I _think_ I was able to eventually do after some trial and error. (I clicked on Google Ad Choices, which sent me to Criteo's web page, and I told Criteo not to show me that product again, and reloaded the page--no luck, still the bikini porn. So I clicked on Google Ad Choices again and opted out of Criteo entirely, and reloaded the page, and this time I saw some ad for a hotel or something, so maybe it worked.)

Whoever was selling those bikinis is clearly trying to gain power (money, attention) by manipulating physical desires (aggressively sexual stances, making it hard to opt out), and therefore it's pornography. To them it's just business, probably, but they don't care about the damage they inflict on other people as long as they get their money. And if I had kids, I would want them to know that, and to be able to react to ads like that one by (1) realizing that they're under attack, (2) taking countermeasures, (3) feeling free to calmly discuss the attack with family members without feeling ashamed of the experience.

Am I always successful in fending off such attacks so calmly and disinterestedly? No. I was just lucky today. Do I want my kids to be even better than me at my best? Yes, I do.

-Max
 
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I could not love thee dear, so much,
Loved I not honor more.

TED talk on connectivity vs. addiction

Hi [redacted],

I was thinking about our conversation about addictive behaviors and phone usage. Here's a short talk that might change the way you think about certain things and/or which might help you communicate your concerns about social media to your kids. I will summarize it to save you some time but it is worth watching:

One of the most interesting things about it is the story he tells about where our ideas on addiction came from: rats in a cage that would basically take heroin until they died. But that's only because the cages were boring. When you put rats in a cage with lots of other rats and a rat amusement park and lots of other fun rat things to do, they basically ignore the heroin.

The insight: at its core, addiction is how people escape from their cage (life) when they don't have anything to feel connected to. They connect to their addiction.

One application: social media can be helpful to the extent that it facilitates real connections to your friends, family, etc. and harmful to the extent that it functions as a cheap substitute for connection which prevents you from developing real connections. Spending lots of time on Instagram trying to generate likes = fake connection. Using Instagram or Facebook to arrange a weekend rendezvous with friends and share a few photos of the event afterwards = real connection.

Link: https://www.ted.com/talks/johann_hari_everything_you_think_you_know_about_addiction_is_wrong?language=en

Hope you like it,
Max

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I could not love thee dear, so much,
Loved I not honor more.

Priorities

March 21, 2019

My thought process today after work:

I want to play Dominions 5, but I'm trying to cut down on screen time for my own sake and the kids' sake, so... I could go to the temple!

But wait, I think I'm almost out of clean church shirts. It's still early in the evening, so maybe I have time to do a load in the washer and dryer and be at the temple by 7:30. But I know realistically that if I try that, it will take twice as long as I expect, so maybe I should just go tomorrow (oh, I'm busy) or some other day--

Then my left brain said, "...wait. This is stupid, Max. Heavenly Father cares more that you do the right thing and help some people receive their saving ordinances today when you've got the chance than he does about whether your church shirt has some dried sweat on the neck. Go to the temple first, and do your laundry some other day."

Good point Dante! So let it be written. (So let it be done.)

-Max

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I could not love thee dear, so much,
Loved I not honor more.