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Nukes Is Pizzen

Once again, America’s news services do her a disservice. In the wake of the record-breaking earthquake and tsunami in Japan, and the thousands of deaths entailed—two thousand corpses washed ashore, to date, and who knows how many uncounted—a large majority of the news out of Japan is about the frailty of nuclear power, an the possibility, however remote, that damaged nuclear plants will produce a “Japanese Chernobyl.” Even NPR, generally possessed of a sober sense of perspective, has had on a series of experts to explain how little danger the plants actually present, and another series to explain how devastating the economic and political impact will be.

Immense, is the consensus. Nuclear power is still scary to the general public, and with good reason—though the good reasons aren’t necessarily the reasons the public fears. Anti-nuclear activists are enjoying another day in the sun, arguing that Japan’s troubles prove we don’t dare turn to nuclear power for our apparently insatiable energy needs. Often such activists—unsurprisingly, well-funded by industries rooted in coal, oil, and natural gas—urge a greater reliance on fossil fuels to avoid nuclear troubles.

Which has me wondering: granting that nuclear power can never be perfectly safe, and that radiation leaks present a perpetual danger, how do the health risks from nuclear accidents match up against the health risks of fossil fuels? Okay, so coal mines will never produce an angry Godzilla stomping through Tokyo…but then, neither will another Three Mile Island. The main danger of nuclear power is poisoning: a small risk of dramatic exposure and a quick, very nasty death and a much higher risk of cancer. And fossil fuels are pretty poisonous, too; just ask West Virginians poisoned by poorly-regulated runoff, or parents whose kids already exhibit poisoning effects from the BP oil spill, or residents of “fracking” towns where byproducts of natural gas refineries have so infiltrated the water table that tap water can catch fire. Without meaning to pooh-pooh the dangers of nuclear fuel, we could use a lot more hard data on the subject before running around shouting that we need to get back to coal and oil. Right now! Without considering the matter very carefully! Before all our nuclear plants explode! Which they will! Soon!

That would be informative news on nuclear power, all the moreso because reliable information is hard to come by. (You can Google all the claims you like at the click of a mouse, but the sources are generally pretty questionable.) And news on actual Japanese people would be more informative news on the earthquake and tsunami. Worrying loudly, without much analysis, on nuclear meltdowns, isn’t informative news at all.

2011 03 15 mdlake Politics Comments (0) Permalink

I am a Curiousity (Blue)

Eileene tried her mother’s hand at hair dying yesterday, hoping to save the cost of a professional without significant loss of results. (It came out fine.) The dye job is decidedly not natural; it’s a vivid blue. And it looks great. I don’t know of anyone who doesn’t find it appealing. Admittedly, people who don’t like it might be keeping mum out of politeness, and the blue hair would probably be less popular were Eileene also to go in for a radical hair sytle as well as color, but I like it and she likes it and a lot of other people like it. A grand success.

The success is particularly worthy of celebration because Eileene has worried for as long as I’ve known her and probably longer that she isn’t interesting enough on her own, that she needs to look exotic in order to hold people’s attention. That’s nonsense, of course; she has a forceful personality and easy enthusiasm that is impossible to ignore as long as she hasn’t decided she’s not sufficiently interested in you to bother. Between a shaky self-image and a confessedly poor sense of fashion/design/color, she seeks… odd fashions over pretty ones. She’s dawn to “conversation-starter” jewelry over attractive jewelry, t-shirts with cunning decals over t-shirts that flatter her figure, awkward, poofy skirts that make a statement—whatever statement that may be—over skirts that let you know she’s got nice legs. She’s even fooled with “loli” fashions a bit, a Japanese fashion that seeks to emulate toy dolls in overblown Victorian fashion, though never with sufficient commitment to pull it off. Which is just as well. Many Americans, myself included, find loli creepy. The odd-but-not-particularly-pretty effect is often compounded by a taste for browns and blacks other drab colors, the subconscious sabotage that most of us share, telling us we can’t get away with more daring colors and cuts, even when we can. “I want to be daring! Well, more daring than I have been. Oh, maybe not that daring. How about brown? Brown is safe.”

Blue is not safe. It is decidedly daring, and decidedly a conversation starter. I’ve been present for several strangers asking about her hair. But it’s also proven quite pretty. I look forward to a future in which anime-colored hair is not only acceptable, but common.

2011 03 14 mdlake Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

Breakdown

Teachers are a hell of a lot more than baby sitters. Sadly, babysitting is unavoidably some small part of what we do. I had this visibly proven to me when flooding cut off too many roads: too many teachers were unexpectedly late, and, thanks to budget cuts, we didn’t have enough staff to monitor all the classrooms.

In principle, we could have consolidated students, since many buses arrived late, too. That causes a different kind of disruption, too, on more normal days, as students dribble in during the middle of lessons. But today was not a more normal day, and the staff was caught off guard.

Unsupervised, the students made trouble. We had several fights; I’m sure we’ll soon discover a fresh round of petty vandalism. Too many students to monitor drifted about the halls, either arriving by late bus or simply taking advantage of the chaos. The teachers couldn’t do hall monitor duty; they had to pin down their own classes and, when possible, try to keep an eye on the neighboring classroom. (Good luck with that!) The PA system called everyone into the gym before first period officially ended, just to help staff keep an eye on everyone, but it didn’t do much good: the bleachers hadn’t yet been pulled out, so visibility was poor, and the troublemakers just drifted off between class an gym, anyway. It was a real mess. My status as new, unproven teacher made it hard to pull authority, too.

To their credit, most of the kids just went along, no more desiring trouble than teachers did. Too many were happy to have class canceled, but I think a small majority would have preferred order and lessons to chaos. Unfortunately, a small percentage of bad actors can cause disruptions all out of proportion to their numbers. A bad day.

A day in which no teaching took place, and even precious little of the babysitting which is a prerequisite to effective teaching.

2011 03 11 mdlake Teaching Comments (0) Permalink

Silk Fantasy

I picked up a book tonight about the Silk Road, as a resource for RPG design. I’m considering something in the vein of the Arabian Nights folktales, a breathless whirl from Baghdad to Macao, with the PCs taking the role of retainers to an Arab prince smitten with love for a Chinese princess. With no more than a hand-painted picture to go on, he equips a trade caravan and sets out, trusting to kismet to cover any obstacles. Plenty of exotica: camels, Persian tyrants, the Sunni/Shia/Ismaili religious schisms, Tibetan ascetics, Mongol bandits, a detour into the Himalayas, the perils of the Gobi and Taklamakan, maybe even a djinn! (And, incidentally, the kind of cinematic action that Spirit of the Century is supposed to handle well.) I’ve already read A Thousand and One Arabian Nights and GURPS Arabian Nights; clearly the next stop is an injection of historicity and information on the Silk Road.

The book that I picked up, though…wow! It looked like a proper scholarly tome, complete with footnotes and attributions, but it contains some very dubious information, to say the least. It identifies the Han empire’s flood control projects with the biblical flood, for example, or at least sets them contemporaneously—an absurd assertion, when the Sumerian tale of Utnapishtim, from which the biblical version is stolen, predates the Han by several centuries, and Utnapishtim, himself a figure of the distant past to Sumerian writers, sets the flood long before his telling of it to Gilgamesh. Even granting the biblical flood happened at all…

It’s such a whopper that I had to double-check on the author, who proves to be a librarian rather than a historian, patching her history together entirely from her readings, without reference to anthropology or archaeology. (Her photo on the back of the book has a crazy-nun look to me, but maybe that’s just my imagination at play.)

It also calls everything else the author says into question: her cavalier equation of Chinese place-names to Rome and Roman place-names to China, her assessments of national characters found along the Silk Road, the accurate measurements of the physical risks to explorers and merchants seeking to travel more than one leg of the route. Happily, historical bankruptcy is no obstacle to creating some inventive fantasies, which is my purpose here. Indeed, historical bankruptcy could be an enormous help!

2011 03 10 mdlake Games
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Conversational Gambit

Eileene’s trying her hand at the new Dragon’s Age II game tonight, and I’m helping by sitting near to hand and making snarky comments.

What little we’ve seen so far looks pretty good, a decided refinement on the original Dragon’s Age: Origins. Gear, especially, requires less fuss: you only have to worry about equipping yourself, and not your companions, so there’s no need for a five-minute pause every time you pick up a new weapon to make sure that it isn’t a microscopic improvement onw whatever each member of the team is carrying.

The thing I’ve noticed most so far is the dialogue trees, and I haven’t yet made my mind up about them. Your end of the conversation feels a little more organic, as it is no longer limited to the polite/selfish/complete psychopath trio of responses. The disjoint of abbreviated responses conceal some nasty surprises, however. You might choose to tell a companion “We need to keep moving,” only to see your actual on-screen alter ego say “If you don’t get a grip, we’re all going to die!”

Depending on how the system treats your response, this could be a good thing or a bad thing. If companion reactions reflect the short statement, it’s easier to “read” the situation for the tone—friendly, bitter, greedy, flirtations, whatever—which may make it a bit easier to predict and manipulate your friends, creating the story you want to create in proper role-playing fashion. If companion reactions reflect the longer statement, however, it’s much, much harder to control your speech, and you’ll be “penalized” with highly arbitrary swings of story and relationship. Perhaps all of this is moot; I gather your actions, and not your statements, are supposed to have sole influence on your companions’ attitudes toward you…but if so, where’s the fun of talking to them?

Perhaps we’re seeing in action a sly little device Bioware has employed before: a disjoint between what you intend to say and what you actually say dependent on your stats. Baldur’s Gate players who pumped up their charisma (or something similar) enjoyed more (and generally more profitable) dialogue options; players who neglected their charisma in order to max out their combat stats suffered both from limited response options and from surprising and/or embarrassing slips of the tongue. I hope that is what’s at work here; I missed a lot of Bioware titles, and it might be fun to see it in action. But I suspect to be disappointed on this count. Eileene is playing a rogue and therefore has invested fairly heavily in her cunning score. Her avatar is still saying things Eileene doesn’t intend—although tactfully, it must be noted.

2011 03 09 mdlake Games Comments (0) Permalink

Get In, Stay Out

This past Sunday, NPR continued coverage of the Libyan uprising. The report included a snatch of an interview with a Libyan rebel, whose position was what might charitably be described as “conflicted.”

“We don’t want the Americans here!” he insisted. “This is our country, our war! But when the struggle is over, there will be a reckoning with all the countries that didn’t come to help us. Where is NATO? Where are the Americans?”

Well, they’re sitting anxiously at home, precisely because you and others like you keep shouting that you don’t want them here.

We have powerful motivations to stay out. Our invasion of Afghanistan following the 9/11 bombings transformed America once again from victim to aggressor in middle-eastern eyes; the invasion of Iraq on far flimsier justification spread the change of perception to the whole world, not to mention the crushing drain on the treasury when we could scarce afford one and the strains on a military already larger and pushed harder than we can sustain. Khadaffi is clearly hunkered down and praying for American or European intervention, just the kind of external enemy he needs to deflect anger from his own regime.

When the very people an intervention is meant to help express outrage at the idea of intervention, there is nothing to weigh against these substantial costs and the lessons of recent history.

2011 03 08 mdlake Politics Comments (0) Permalink

Rango

We saw Rango yesterday, an animated comedy featuring the voice of Johnny Depp as a thespian lizard who, plunged into an isolated western town, decides to pretend he’s a much tougher hombre than he is, and the hijinks that follow.

I walked out of the theater feeling like I hadn’t witnessed a proper movie, but rather a splicing of other, better-known movies. I hasten to add that virtually all the humor of the film comes from reference jokes, so many moments of familiarity are to be expected, and would be entirely fine as far as they go. A glimpse of Depp and Del Toro’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas pair as they races through the Nevada wastes is a quick laugh; a quick musical cue straight out of Morricone’s spaghetti western scores is fun; the initial appearance of a turtle reprising John Huston’s role in Chinatown feels playful. I was mightily entertained, and if the movie had kept it up, I’d have walked away smiling.

Sadly, somewhere around the 40% mark, the script seems to worry that reference gags won’t carry it to the end, and that’s when the movie veers off course. The Chinatown plot is not a brief reference gag; it’s taken wholesale as the plot of Rango as well, which becomes apparent by the second or third time the mayor shows up. And not in a good way. Because advertizing the story this way spoils the mystery and drama, there isn’t any point to trying to make Rango a proper movie; there is no reason to throw in a love interest, to play up the protagonist’s internal conflict, to try to get us invested in the hapless townsfolk, because there is no hope of creating such an investment. The audience isn’t ever going to care, because we already know how it turns out. There’s a lengthy sequence taken straight out of Mad Max, in which Rango races the town’s water supply in a jug teetering on the back of a careening cart, a gang of crazed moles in pursuit. Eventually, the cart crashes and the jug proves—gasp!—empty, just like Mad Max. Well, duh.

But by this point, we’re expected to care about the vanished water, rather than smirk knowingly and look to the next joke, and the movie gets tangled in its own expectations.

I suspect the insidious belief that animation means “children’s movie,” and vice versa, is at work here. Kids, of course, will not recognize Chinatown and Mad Max and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. But of course, only kids, or parents looking for something to keep them occupied, watch animation. So we need a plot. Quick! Let’s get a love interest in there; let’s treat the villain’s stolen master plan like it’s a big surprise; let’s linger over Rango’s self-image. No time to exploit the film’s merits; we’ve gotta make this sell to the kiddies! With a McDonald’s Happy Meal crossover, if at all possible.

So somewhere around the 40% mark, I wasn’t laughing as hard as I was at the film’s outset. Somewhere around the 50% mark, I began to realize I wasn’t laughing. And somewhere around the 60% mark, I began to resent Dreamworks and its business model, which has done so much for its bottom line since Shrek so unjustly beat out Monsters, Inc. at the Oscars.

2011 03 07 mdlake Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

Watch That Cookie

There’s something that I just can’t wrap my head around concerning the nation-wide assault on public workers’ unions, no matter how hard I try to see things from somebody else’s perspective. I can understand why politicians, especially right-wing politicians, would be eager to cut paychecks in order to balance the budget (or, sadly, to buy more breathing room for wealthy campaign donors without fighting deficits at all). I can understand why wealthy voters would be eager to stop paying for public services; it’s much cheaper to buy their own services and let the rest of the country wither. I can understand why big business would be eager to depress wages generally, and make their own workers more willing to accept what they’ve got rather than leave the private labor pool for better-paying public sector jobs. I can understand why these efforts to break unions would need to be packaged in disingenuous terms for the working stiffs in the private sector—who, after all, comprise our largest voting demographic. What I can’t understand is why the working stiffs are buying the message, no matter how cleverly packaged.

The rallying cry for attacking public workers’ unions is that private sector workers, who largely don’t belong to unions, don’t enjoy the same benefits, nor, increasingly, even the salaries, that unionized public workers do, so public workers’ salaries and benefits should be cut in the interests of fairness.

Now, let’s set aside the independent research that severely harms the assertion that public workers earn more than private workers. They do, but only in comparison to a large, unskilled labor pool flipping burgers. Public servants earn 5% less than non-unionized private-sector employees for identical work, earn 10% less than private sector workers of comparable education levels, and cost 25% less than private contractors for identical work for government needs. Let us imagine, because imagination is the only place where the assertion is true, that (unionized) public workers did indeed make less than (generally non-unionized) private workers for comparable labor.

The natural reaction of the (generally non-unionized) private worker and voter should should be “Hey! How do I get that pay and those benefits myself?”

(The answer of course, is to unionize. By my sources, unionization makes a difference of somewhere between $700 to $900 a month in the paycheck, not to mention less measurable benefits like safer working conditions, shorter working hours, job security, and retirement packages. Union membership has declined steadily since the Reagan revolution, and wages and benefits for all workers, but especially in non-unionized fields, have declined precipitously with membership. The staggering disjoint of wealth distribution since 1980 alone should give strong impetus to re-creating unions.)

But so effective is the right-wing propaganda machine, that the generally non-unionized private worker and voter is asking, “Hey! I don’t have those benefits, or that salary. How can I make sure that guy can’t have them either?”

That’s just crazy talk, spiteful and self-defeating.

An online acquaintance related a bitter joke recently. A banker, a teacher, and a non-union worker are sitting at a table, hungrily eyeing a plate of a dozen cookies. The banker grabs eleven of the cookies, sweeps them into his pocket, then tells the worker, “Watch out for that teacher. She wants to take your cookie.” And no matter how hard I try, I can’t imagine what frame of mind produces the suspicious looks so many conservatives obligingly turn on the teacher.

2011 03 03 mdlake Politics
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Pencils Out

Okay, I’ve had it with kids neglecting to bring a pencil to class. They prefer to call it “forgetting,” as in “I forgot we have a quiz every Monday” or “I forgot pencils are useful in school.” I’m not handing out my pencils so they can forget to return them, and I’m certainly not buying them boxes of fresh pencils out of pocket, and I’m getting tired of the delay and distraction of cadging around for a fellow student with a spare.

So I’m turning to the ancient practice of draconian reaction: If you need me to provide a pencil, you lose a point off your homework grade for that day.

O, the howls of protest! O, the great wailing! O, the unfairness!

And in principle, it is unfair: grades are supposed to reflect understanding, and understanding is not (directly) affected by bringing a pencil. But I note that (1) we aren’t just teaching mathematical technique; we’re teaching life preparedness, which includes bringing a pencil to activities that require one; (2) the loss of one point off a 10-point daily homework assignment isn’t going to have any impact on your grade unless you do it pretty well every frickin’ day; and (3) the kids nevertheless care about that one point, far more than they care about finger-wagging or detentions or any other toothless reprimand.

It’s like regulating multinational corporations. All the chastisement in the world, all the bad PR, all the nominal fees, all the minor lawsuits are just part of the cost of doing business. But hit them in the pocketbook, and get instant behavior adjustment. (Presuming congressmen can be found to write stiff penalties into law, and presidents can be found willing to pursue violations.) Because corporations care about money, in a way they will never, ever care about morality or reputation.

And students care about grades. Already I’ve seen a better rate of bringing pencils to class. We’ll see how long it lasts.

2011 03 03 mdlake Teaching Comments (0) Permalink

Sorrow Without Torment

The weather here has been pretty cruddy of late. An aggressive winter dumped several feet of snow on us in two or three big blasts (depending on how you count blizzards on two successive days), but New Jersey winters are pretty mild, all told, and the weather warmed and the massive snow banks retreated. In their place stand angry crusts of ice, prickling with with icy spines and—because this is New Jersey—laced with filth and grit.

And in place of the winter cold we have…nothing. Not cold enough to be called winter, but definitely warm enough to be called early spring, either. There is no scent of rain in the air, no hint of green in the trees, and such greenery as can be seen in the lawns looks more like last year’s corpses than this year’s new shoots—where there isn’t simply a patch of mud or crust of ice.

The overall effect is eerie, as though we’ve somehow dropped out of time. This is what the weather in limbo would look like: neither warm nor cold, neither wet nor dry, neither sunny nor stormy, but some sort of bland and distasteful “none of the above.”

2011 03 02 mdlake Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink