Thursday, October 26, 2006

The Micro-Pundit:  iPod Volume

File this one in the “Well, Duh!” pile:

The New York Times reports that it’s not how long you listen to your iPod, but how loud you listen.  No shit, Sherlock!  If you listen to music at 11 all the time, you’re going to blow your ears apart far faster than if you listen to your music at 4.  And if you listen to your iPod in a noisy environment, you’ll turn up the volume so you can still hear the music over the noise.  Which is why I’m so interested in the new Sony Walkman MP3 players with noise-cancellation built right in.

Now, I admit that this article had an intersting bit of information that I didn’t figure on, namely that it didn’t matter if you used earbuds or full-ear headphones.  I always figured that full-ear headphones blocked out noise a little better than earbuds, so you wouldn’t have to turn up the volume quite so much.  But I guess not.  Ultimately, though, loud is loud, and loud hurts your ears.

Until someone shows me a pair of earbuds that have the same dynamic range of a pair of Grado audiophile headphones, I’ll stick with my Grados, at least for working where the noise isn’t all that bad in the first place.

Friday, October 20, 2006

Surrendering Iraq?

Yesterday, I read an interesting post over on The Moderate Voice about how retreating from Iraq is a surrender.  The post, and the myriad comments to it, got me thinking about the language used here and how it matches up with what’s been said before about Iraq.

First off, there’s the word “surrender.” According to my American Heritage Dictionary (2nd Ed), this is the applicable definition:

surrender

to relinquish possession or control of to another because of demand or
compulsion

(The Mirriam-Webster Dictionary online definition is very similar.)

So, are we “surrendering” if we leave Iraq?  Well, that depends on whether we can be said to have possession or control over Iraq at present.  According to the Administration, we have never desired possession of Iraq, and our military is there only until the Iraqi government asks us to leave.  If that’s the case, then by the Administration’s own argument regarding possession, we cannot be “surrendering” if we leave Iraq.  This leaves control.

Can we be said to control Iraq?  Again, according to my dictionary:

control

1. to exercise authority or dominating influence over; direct; regulate

2. to hold in restraint; check

Are we exercising authority in Iraq?  Sure - we have around 141,000 soldiers in Iraq at the moment, and they’re a great source of power and military authority.  The U.S. military’s ability to get things done (building schools, for example) means that they have a significant amount of power to direct and regulate, so they are definitely exercising authority.  I guess the question becomes whether they’re a dominating influence.  Given recent relevations of the failure of the Army’s Baghdad anti-violence plan, the take-over of the city of Amara to the Mahdi Army, and the increasing number of coalition casualties, I’d have to say that the answer is “no”.  Similarly, we appear to be unable or unwilling to check or restrain the actions of the Iraqi government, so Prime Minister al-Maliki can be pressured into backing off his pledge to disarm the various Iraqi militias and to release a criminal who happens to be an ally of Muqtada al-Sadr, the leader of the Mahdi Army militia.

So I guess I have to say that in one sense (the control/authority sense), we can be said to be “surrendering” if we retreat from Iraq.  Of course, in 4 other senses (the posession, control/dominating influence, control/restraint, and control/check senses), we’re not in a position to surrender Iraq at all.  If you apply some simple mathematical modeling to the definitions, you find that we’re not “surrendering” in 7 out of 8 senses of the word!  So, then, why are we “surrendering” if we leave, even though the definitions themselves only barely apply?

Simply put, American’s don’t surrender.  We’re taught from an early age that surrender is dishonorable, even unthinkable, so the word strikes a deep cultural note in our collective psyche.  And with the careful implantation of phrases like “islamic fascism,” the word “surrender” enables the Administration and its allies to point to how the U.S. didn’t surrender to the Japanese or the Germans or the Italians in WWII, that we didn’t surrender to the British in 1776 or 1812, that Lincoln didn’t surrender the Union to the seccessionists, etc.

In a nutshell, it’s great politics.  Don’t fall for it.

Thursday, October 19, 2006

The Micro-Pundit:  Flat Tires and Doing the Right Thing

A while back, there was a guy hauling nails (the kind with wide plastic heads that are used to anchor isulation to basement walls) along I-25 near Colorado Springs when a box or two of nails blew off his truck in the wind, smashed open, and scattered nails all over I-25 during morning rush hour.  Because of the plastic heads, most of them landed point up, and so every car that came along until the nails were cleaned up got between 1 and 20 nails in each tire.

Not pleasant, and the nails fouled I-25 right up for something like a half hour until they had all been swept off the road (this was over a year ago, so I don’t have a link to more information).

Some people would have looked at the car-nage and fled, hoping not to get nailed for the severe tire damage that occurred to something like 15-25 vehicles.  Others would have called their lawyers and tried to insulate themselves from liability as best they could.  But the contractor didn’t do that.  He got out of his car and started passing out business cards and did so until he ran out of cards.  He told everyone to have the tire dealer call his business up and bill him for the tire replacement.  And when he’d run out of cards, he called the local tire dealers and told them to bill him for anyone who came in with damaged tires due to the nails, whether they had his card or not.

The guy stepped up, said “It’s my fault, and I take responsiblility for it,” and paid thousands (maybe tens of thousands) of dollars to fix it.  He did the right thing, and to hell with the economic consequences.

I hope the incident didn’t stress his company so much that it drove him out of business.  I hope he’s doing well, because doing the right thing is too often directly or indirectly punished in our litigious society.  And taking responsibility for your actions is “so 1960s.”

Good luck to you, sir, even if it’s a year or two late.

Tuesday, October 17, 2006

Second Life Reporting

Yesterda, the New York Times reported that news agency Reuters is dispatching a real reporter into the virtual world of Second Life.  What is most interesting about this is that the company has created a Reuters news building in the virtual game world, and the reporter Adam Reuters is going to be reporting exclusively on events that happen in the world of Second Life.

This is right up there with using real money to buy virtual weapons for World of Warcraft, or investing in a virtual space station that then turns real virtual real estate into real income for the gamer, or having real economists comparing the above situations to currency trading between dollars, yen, pesos, pounds, euros, etc.  All of these things have happened and been reported in the MSM (although the last was in the Utne Reader, which may or may not qualify as mainstream).

Monday, October 16, 2006

The Miscreant’s Dictionary:  “Enemy”

enemy

1. one that feels a desire to harm others, to see others suffer, or who feels a deep-seated hatred toward another; a personal opponent

2. an opponent as defined by the Republican and Democratic Parties

Monday, October 09, 2006

GM + Google Maps = “Real” Cities

I’m a Game Master, or GM to people who role play.  That means that I run the games that people play, and I enjoy GMing emmensely.  But I’ve always had problems creating cities that look and feel real.  My maps have always ended up looking like the standard grid-iron pattern that is so prevalent in the United States.  Which, considering that I’ve ususally run ShadowRun, which is largely N. America based, that wasn’t a real problem.  Except when I too my characters to Europe, or Asia, or even just some of the older cities in New England, where the maps aren’t even remotely grid-arranged.

Which brings me to Google Maps.

I’m in the process of creating a new Dungeons & Dragons world, and I’ve decided to base some of the cities off of real cities today.  One city is Kyoto, and I plan on using a shrunk-down version of the real city.  Which means I can hunt down and spend money on a real street map of a city that I plan on tweaking pretty dramatically (we’re not playing in a modern setting, even if I’m using a modern city), or I can use the street map from Google Maps and then assign different areas of real Kyoto to the functions I want - diplomatic area, cultural district, imperial palace, etc.  If you look at the city zoomed WAY in, you can even see how the individual buildings fit togeter and create realistic alley-ways in a realistic city.  And in case you want a realistic town but want to relocate it to, oh, Mars, you can grab a town from somewhere like Nepal and use that for your town on the side of Olympos Mons.

Which brings me to an even cooler function of Google Maps.  If you do a search for “Kyoto Imperial palace” in Google Maps, you’ll get a blown up version of the map.  Click on Satellite and the letter “C” in the left pane and then zoom out one notch.  You’re now looking at an overhead shot of the original Japanese imperial palace.  And if you’re careful, you can reproduce the entire grounds and building exteriors, to scale, and with a rough idea of how many floors the different sections have.  Sure, you’ll have to create your own interiors (unless you happen to find an interior map somewhere - I couldn’t find it on-line), but you still get a good idea of where you could put medievil defenses, sleeping quarters, a “throne” room, etc.  And you can use this for parks, lakes, rivers, ports, etc.

Very cool stuff.

Monday, October 02, 2006

The Micro-Pundit:  “No Comment”

I was listening to NPR on the way home from work this afternoon, and I heard an interview with former Attorney General John Ashcroft.  I listened while Melissa Block asked the same question of Mr. Ashcroft three times in three different ways, and each time Mr. Ashcroft answered a question that was different than the actual question he was asked.  It took a related but different question for him to finally answer the way he was supposed to:  “I have no comment on that.”

“No comment.” If you’re a politician, and you’re not ready or willing to answer the question you just got asked by a journalist, don’t avoid the question, don’t answer the question you wished the journalist had asked, don’t restate the question in a way that twists it all around so it looks like a Mobius strip - just say “No comment” or any one of the millions of reasonable varients.  Hell, I’d prefer to be lied to - at least then I know you respected me enough to take the effort to deceive me.  But answering a different question than the one you were asked just makes me think that you consider me to be a moron and incapable of connecting question and answer rationally.