perfidy

The iPad can be a nearly perfect game tool. Computers corrected some of the grievous flaws of the tabletop wargames - insane tedium in setup, overly (if sometimes necessarily) complex rules, and difficulty in modeling the fog of war. But they also took away the physicality of the games - of being able to walk around the game. The touch aspect of the iPad brings back some of the physicality of the games, while the computer handles minutia. Although what would really be awesome would be an entire tabletop running the iOS...

As the proud owner of an iPad, I've been waiting for someone to come up with a good Axis and Allies game. It looks like my wait may soon be over. Here's a demo of a new game called wwTouch, which looks to fit the bill.

Axis and Allies is the perfect middle ground. Complex enough to be interesting, but not so complex as to be unwieldy. Streamlined rules, moderately easy (compared to say, Panzer Leader) set up and clever design of the board and pieces. And still, a physical game, but one whose rules you could easily keep in your head - which allows you to actually act like a general in that you can have an intuitive idea of how things should turn out, and act accordingly. If the matter of the game and how the pieces interact is too complex, you can't internalize your knowledge of the game quickly enough - which means that unless you have hundreds of hours to devote to the game, you're not going to really enjoy it, or learn from it. Personally, I don't have hundreds of hours to devote to anything anymore, let alone wargaming.

As much as I love civ, with its city and empire building, it lacks any incorporation of strategy in the combat mode. It's all a matter of mass and gaming the idiosyncrasies of the combat system. Axis and Allies comes the closest of any game I've played to balancing the economic and strategic aspects well - though I'd dearly love someone to invent a game that really combined the two.

This post was inspired by something Instapundit linked to - an article by Jonathan Last in the WSJ about a new game called Making History II, made with the connivance of historian Niall Ferguson.

[...]where players choose a country and, beginning in 1933, guide it—diplomatically, economically and militarily—through the great conflagration. The new version boasts many intriguing features, not the least interesting of which is the involvement of historian Niall Ferguson.

Prof. Ferguson, author of "The War of the World," says that he spent a lot of time playing World War II games over the years. But he often found these games lacking.

"What drove me crazy was the way economic resources were so arbitrarily allocated to countries," he explains. "Rather in the same way that Monopoly is economically unrealistic (there ought to be a central bank with the power to vary short-term interest rates) all these early strategy games would greatly exaggerate the resources of countries like Japan and Italy, and underestimate the vast wealth of the U.S. so one had a completely false impression of the odds against the Axis."

So Mr. Ferguson worked with the developers at Muzzy Lane to realistically map material resources and economic frameworks. As such, Making History II may be the apogee of a breed which has been quietly beloved of boys and men for half a century: the war-strategy game. While computers have added a level of mathematical sophistication to the genre, the older, hands-on war-strategy games retain an elegant charm.

Sounds interesting, but the game is Windows only, can't download it, and the Amazon reviews say the early version is buggy.  I think I'll wait.  The article also notes that Prof. Ferguson is also a big A&A fan - another point in his favor. I may have to load up my old version of A&A Iron Blitz on the windows virtual machine...

I was going to write about Formalism.  I thought that one beer would be relaxing, get me in the mood, as it were.  Two beers, it turns out, make me sleepy.  I never noticed that before because I usually have one beer, or many, many beers.

While my wife is away schmoozing with music bidness types for her band, and the boy is in Ohio with Grandma - it's just me and the girls.  And since they can be distracted with Dora the Explorer, I actually have a moment to think.

I thought I'd clear out a backlog of interesting stuff I've seen.

• This article at Wired discusses how the Sense of Touch Shapes Snap Judgments.  The bit about holding a clipboard making one self-important - that kind of struck me, and got me wondering what impact over the centuries things like the rosary, or of kings holding sceptres has had.  Could we design worry stones to improve our thinking?
• This bit from the economist on world debt is mildly troubling.  We're in a not good place, and about to jump into bad.  But we might get trampled in the rush.
• Interesting piece suggesting that Germany bail on the Euro, rather than the Euro kicking Greece to the curb.  Personally, and for no economic reason whatsoever, I'd like to see the Euro fail.  Just because I don't like it.  I have a bad feeling, though, that that just might happen, and the economic and political consequences wouldn't be pretty.  I recall that the last great depression started with a stock/bank crisis, and then worsened into a sovereign debt crisis.
• Ran across this fifteen year old piece from CATO on how excessive government killed the Roman Empire.
• I always thought that granting suffrage to women was at the very least tactically foolish.  It may have been a bad strategic move as well.  From Roissy:

Giving women the right to vote really was a bad move:

Did Women’s Suffrage Change the Size and Scope of Government?

Giving women the right to vote significantly changed American politics from the very beginning. Despite claims to the contrary, the gender gap is not something that has arisen since the 1970s. Suffrage coincided with immediate increases in state government expenditures and revenue, and these effects continued growing as more women took advantage of the franchise. Similar changes occurred at the federal level as female suffrage led to more liberal voting records for the state’s U.S. House and Senate delegations. In the Senate, suffrage changed voting behavior by an amount equal to almost 20 percent of the difference between Republican and Democratic senators. Suffrage also coincided with changes in the probability that prohibition would be enacted and changes in divorce laws. We were also able to deal with questions of causality by taking advantage of the fact that while some states voluntarily adopted suffrage, others where compelled to do so by the Nineteenth Amendment. The conclusion was that suffrage dramatically changed government in both cases. Accordingly, the effects of suffrage we estimate are not reflecting some other factor present in only states that adopted suffrage. [...]

More work remains to be done on why women vote so differently, but our initial work provides scant evidence that it is due to self-interest arising from their employment by government. The only evidence that we found indicated that the gender gap in part arises from women’s fear that they are being left to raise children on their own (Lott and Kenny 1997). If this result is true, the continued breakdown of the family and higher divorce rates imply growing political conflicts between the sexes.

Yes, women’s suffrage really did herald the end days of America. The result of giving women the vote has been an ever-increasing nanny state funded on the backs of increasingly sex-dispossessed betas (dispossessed from banging women during their prime years). The elevation of diversity as a moral value and the flooding of the country with incompatible third world immigrants has no doubt been a secondary consequence of suffrage for women, who naturally bring their feminine sensibilities, for better or (more usually) for worse, to the polls. This is why I have argued that the next step in this national devolution toward mindless compassion is the creation of armies of cads. Men want sex, and will do whatever it takes to get it, whether that be good or ill for society.

Hmn.

• and then there's ...  I forgot what the last one was.

I'm also thinking about Formalism but more on that later, after I go have a beer.

My daughter grabbed the basket that the wife was using this morning to pick mountain berries. She put two stuffed animals in it, and told me, "I'm picking cats."

has a new hobby.  And a good one.

From the Oatmeal, source of all kinds of awesome. Like, Seven Reasons to Keep Your Tyrannosaur off Crack Cocaine. And How Long Could You Survive Chained to a Bunk Bed with a Velociraptor? Or after Kicking a Bear in the Balls? And then there is the mighty, Motherfucking Pterodactyl.

It's things like this that make me want to agree with Aretae.

ISS Astronauts, not having any real purpose in furthering our conquest of space, took some time off for photography.  Given their privileged vantage point, something like this was bound to come into view eventually.

And that is a pretty amazing something.

Kristian Birkeland, Norwegian physicist and discoverer of the electric currents that bear his name was the first to suggest an electrical explanation for the aurora.  He spent months in the far north, in the deep cold observing and measuring the aurora and divining their nature.  His theories were for decades ignored in favor of the theories of the English mathematician Sydney Chapman, finally being proven right after the advent of space travel.  Birkeland is something of a hero to the plasma cosmology types - he is an archetype for them - brilliant, nominated for the Nobel, dismissed for decades in favor of ideas that were later proved wrong.

The idea that electrical currents connect the various bodies of the Solar System is central to the plasma cosmologist's conception of the universe.  Birkeland was the first in the chain.  In the write-up for that picture, there's this:

This particular aurora is unique in the sense that it was spotted fairly far away from the South Pole over the southern Indian Ocean, likely as a result of a large ejection of energy that burst from the sun on May 24. The photographer is looking south toward Antarctica, though you can't see the southernmost continent in the photograph.

Interesting, no?  We admit that there are electrical phenomena throughout the solar system - Earth and Jupiter's magnetic fields, the braided electrical currents discovered trailing Venus in her orbit, the aurora - seen on many planets, sprites and elves seen above thunderstorms and shooting into space, the coronal mass ejections and numerous other phenomena on and around the sun and their proven effects on Earth - yet there is evidently great resistance to viewing these as a part of a larger, connected whole.  Gravity is all.

Overheard on the Penguins of Madagascar episode my kids were watching a minute ago.  Truer words were never spoken.

Cory Doctorow over at Boing Boing has a review of The Upside of Irrationality, The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and At Home.  A snip:

...there are sections in which the science of irrationality is readily converted into practical techniques for living better, and these really shine. My favorite is the section on adaptation, that is, the way in which both terrible pain and incredible delights fade down to a kind of baseline normal over time. Ariely points out that adaptation can be slowed or even prevented through intermittent exposure to the underlying stimulus -- that is, if you take a break, the emotional sensation comes back with nearly full force.

Here's where our intuitive response is really wrong: we have a tendency to indulge our pleasures without respite, and to take frequent breaks from those things that make us miserable. This is exactly backwards. If you want to maximize your pleasure -- a great dessert, the delight of furnishing your first real apartment after graduation, a wonderful new relationship -- you should trickle it into your life, with frequent breaks for your adaptive response to diminish. If you want to minimize your pain -- an unpleasant chore, an awful trip -- you should continue straight through without a break, because every time you stop, your adaptive response resets and you experience the discomfort anew.

This is so true.  My mom has successfully managed to do this with books - she is able to read a good book over a period of weeks, parcelling it out into bite sized nibbles.  Me, I can't.  The better the book, the faster I read it, and - as I've long suspected, I get less enjoyment out of it.  I'm better at the miserable experiences, I'll plough right through 'til it's done.

I wonder if the author has any advice for procrastination - once I start a painful job, I'll finish it, but my problem is starting it.  The pain of knowing you're avoiding something that needs to be done is real, but it's less in the short term than starting the thing.