DShomshak

Congratulations! You have learned a Great Truth of setting design... by critiquing the work of someone who apparently didn't know it. Also the importance of &scale* in setting design. I encountered that issue when freelancing for White Wolf on Exalted. Very early in that game's design process, important countries were blocked out on the world map before anyone decided on a scale. The result was that many countries became... very large, once the map scale was set. Those of us who came later had to deal with the results. One result was that a writer described a new country he'd created (a young republic) as fairly small, "only" a thousand miles from side to side. I reminded him that was the distance from Chicago to New Orleans. Did he really think of that as a small, compact country? One whose new prosperity derives largely from single mine of a rare mineral? He changed it. Dean Shomshak

Nothing I haven't heard before, but the NYTimes has run numbers on the demographics of districts of Republican Representatives that voted to reject the 2020 election results. Their America Is Vanishing. Like Trump, They Insist They Were Cheated. (msn.com) The most depressing section, though, was this: I have no words. Dean Shomshak

The Laser Harp looks cool, but it looks like it's just a fancy way of pressing buttons: Each laser beam shines on a sensor, and interrupting the beam triggers an electronic tone. Whereas the Earth Harp uses a very old method of making sound, but erases the distinction between instrument and performance space. It would also work well in a Fantasy setting (I.ve postulated similar things such as D&D grimlocks tapping and bowing tuned stalagmites to turn an entire cave into a musical instrumet, or for Exalted a lesser elemental dragon of water that pierced an island with tubes to create a giant organ played by waves and tides.) Dean Shomshak

A man who styles himself 'Vox Day' (Vox Dei, "Voice of God") sounds so vain he's just setting himself up to be scammed. And the premise of his comic book "Rebel"? <eyeroll> Though I suppose he and the scammer Wolfgramm could have been in on it together, in which case he is actually very smart and it's just the backers who are stupid. Dean Shomshak

EDIT: Truss' defiance was yesterday's paper. Today's paper featured Vladimir Putin and his rubber-stamp parliament declaring martial law in occupied Ukraine, and emergency powers for all of Russia's regional governors. Experts speculate about laying the groundwork for even greater repression. I wonder if Putin isn't taking a step (albeit perhaps unintentionally) into turning governors into provincial warlords. And that never ends well for the central government, or the populace at large. Dean Shomshak

Huh. My morning paper had an article about Liz Truss defiantly saying she "wasn't a quitter." So much for bravado. On the BBC a day or two ago, I heard an MP snidely say that in the modern Conservative Party, everyone gets to by Prime Minister for 15 minutes. I had been wondering about the "shortest premiership" thing. Yesterday I checked my almanac's list of British PMs and found that several of them lasted less than a year. I was planning to look up the specific lengths today. Dean Shomshak

The essence of Russell's Teapot is a critique of religious belief: that belief in unobservable deities is as absurd as belief in unobservable orbiting teapots. Never mind the philosophical critique of the critique: They are in the wikipedia article. Let's play with the connection between gods and impossible objects. At some point, space travelers or probes or whatever *do* find a teapot between the orbits of Earth and Mars. It's hard to see how anyone could have put it there. It is an absurdity -- or a miracle. Somehow, the Space Teapot is brought back to Earth. (Maybe a special probe is launched. If only one space agency knows about the teapot, there might be a "cover story" about retrieving space dust, or the like, a followup to the "Stardust" mission of several years ago.) All physical tests show the teapot is ordinary china. But it is a portal to the realms of myth and deity. Whoever drinks tea made in the teapot is possessed by a god. Did gods exist before? No way of knowing, but they exist now. (This would also make a good "Shared Origin" McGuffin for a Champions setting.) Dean Shomshak

As an interested layman, I suspect our resident practicing scientists would take exception to such a claim about their field. But this is not the time or place for such a discussion. Getting back to assault's premise: The wikipedia article quotes other philosophers who refer to Russell's "celestial teapot." Such an item sounds like it would be right at home in Exalted, where anything connected to the gods of the setting's Heaven, Yu-Shan, may take the adjective "celestial." A Celestial Teapot could be an item of divine chinaware, once a possession of the God of Tea but lost in the sky. Perhaps the Celestial Incarnae were holding a tea party on the Daystar when an argument broke out and Mars, the Maiden of Battles, lost her temple and threw the teapot at Luna. She dodged, of course (Luna is slippery that way) and the teapot sailed out to lodge among the stars of the Firmament. Anyone who can retrieve it will be able to make the veritable Tea of the Gods, the best tea in any of the worlds. But such perfection is dangerous for mortals. If you survive, it might enlighten your Essence -- but avoiding addiction to Celestial Tea might be an even greater challenge. A teapot between Earth and Mars in a Fantasy version of our contemporary world? I'll have to think more on that. Dean Shomshak

Oh, and while I'm not really up on Neoplatonism -- I only did a brief survey as part of a writing project for Mage: the Awakening -- I'd guess there's a big difference beytween the Neoplatonist idea and the inflation multiverse idea: I gather the "One" of Neoplatonism is divine, while the perpetuyal Big Bang of the multiverse hypothesis is just a mindless force of energy that spits out universes. Not divine, unless the god is Azathoth. (Which could be a cool point to build a "Cthulhu Now" scenario around. Theoretical physicist studies Neoplatonism, goes MAAAAD... Sort of an updated "Dreams in the Witch-House.") Dean Shomshak

Ah. Yes, the parallel is a bit clearer. Not that I think Plato or Plotinus were Onto Something, cosmologically speaking, or that modern theoretical physicists are secretly into Neoplatonism. But yes, it's interesting how some ideas seem to return -- at least in a loose sense. And it's enough that now I want to run a scenario in which Plotinus was a time traveler or talked to a time traveler. So thank you. Anyway, to give a *very* quick extension of Cancer's description of cosmic inflation, based on the various science articles I've read about it, showing how it leads supposedly competent scientists into very odd fields of philosophy and mysticism... Alan Guth & Co. proposed a brief period of inflation during the Big Bang to make the observable universe homogeneous. IIRC, the brief period expands a region of space the size of a proton to the size of a basketball, or something like that. Then another phase change happens and the universe resumes "normal" expansion. But other physicists pointed out: How do you get the inflation to stop homogeneously, everywhere at once? If even the tiniest bit of the young universe is just a little late, it keeps inflating untio it's as big as the rest of the universe that stopped inflating. Okay, so part of that "freezes out" as another bubble of normally-expanding space-time, but again, a little bit probably keeps inflating, and so on, with no way to stop it, bubbling out new universes... forever? And if you accept this, why do you assume our universe was the first? Can you even be sure it had a beginning? If you say, "Well, it had to," I don't see hgow anyone could measure and determine when it was. Some physicists think this ain't a bug, it's a feature. One of the awkward aspects of the Standard Model is that it includes numerous physical constants whose values are apparently arbitrary -- but if they were the teeny-weeniest bit different, the universe would just be a haze of elementary particles, or all the matter would be in black holes, or otherwise not not capable of producing beings like us who could observe it. Ah, but if the Big Bang never stops banging and spitting out an infinite cascade of new universes, with those physical constants randomly set, eventually some of them will have properties that allow for the formation of atoms, stars, planets, life, and us. (For more on this particular line of argumentation, look up the "Weak Anthropic Principle.") Except this also revives an old argument that intersects science and philosophy, based on thermodynamics. In brief: If enough particles carom around at random for enough time, they will produce anything that is physically possible. And indeed, given infinite time, will do so (vide Alan Guth) an infinite number of times. This was first enunciated by the physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, who is one of the biggest names in thermodynamics. He suggested this as an explanation for why the universe was not in a state of maximum entropy. Yes, the universe inevitably runs down, he said, but in an infinite universe with infinite time, eventually enough atoms will randomly come together to form a region of low entropy so planets, stars, etc. can exist for a while. It didn't take long for other scientists to run the numbers and find that it was more likely that atoms would randomly come together to form smaller entities than the observable universe of Boltzmann's day. Like, say, a human brain just floating in the chaos and hallucinating that it's a person with sensations and memories. Given infinite space and time, it is indeed vastly more likely that you, reading this right now, are such a "Boltzmann Brain" than that you are an actual human being on an actual Planet Earth. Big Bang cosmology brushes away the Boltzmann Brain hypothesis by making the universe finite in time and, I assume, space. The perpetual inflation multiverse brings it back with a vengeance. If you want a fuller exposition, consult the Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain One critic says that Boltzmann Brains fail the "Monty Python Test": It's too silly. I see the point. A line of argument that ends by demonstrating that I am only a momentary hallucination appearing in quantum chaos and destined to dissolve back into it a nanosecond later seems rather self-undercutting. And even if it were true, so what? What am I supposed to do with this? But that the Inflation Multiverse leads to it is one reason why -- though I am neither a physicist nor a philosopher -- I confidently predict that inflation will turn out to be Just Plain Wrong. Dean Shomshak

The nomads don't bother the rivrside farmers? That's something that needs explaining, IMO, as Real History includes so many instances of hostility between pastoral nomads and settled farmers. (OK, hostility between everyone and any neighbors, but still.) Farmers take the best land that nomads would like to use for grazing animals; but being immpobile, it is sooo easy for the highly mobile nomads to rob them and retreat. And settled folk tend to have stuff worth stealing, too. Call me cynical, but I think any case of enduring peace between peoples requires more explanation than cases of enduring, or at least episodic, war. Dean Shomshak

Not even at gunpoint. Dean Shomshak

If you're going for a Fremen vibe, the desert folk might be working, slowly, to restore the land. Create pockets of soil that can support drought-resistant vegetation, gradually expand them. A bowl or basket of soil is an important ceremonial gift to establish one's goodwill. Especially if an important ingredient for turning sand and dust into soil is the bodies of the dead. "Know that I come in peace, for I offer you the bones of my ancestors." Which also means that soil theft is the most deadly insult imaginable, grounds (so to speak) for a vendetta that lasts generations. The ruined cities are the cities of the ancestors. "When the land is restored, we shall live here again." Perhaps they have ancient tablets or scrolls copied and re-copied that describe and depict the cities as guides for the rebuilding. Or perhaps the elders keep the details in lore-songs and memory-cathedrals. If you visit a city with an elder guide, he or she can tell you the name of each street, who dwelled in the palace of which only sand-drifted stumps of walls remain, describe the long-vanished golden statue in what was once the main temple... It's doubtful the cities would still have any artifacts worth looting and trading, even if they were not sacred homelands to be reclaimed in some future age. But deserts do have commodities of value, such as the frankincense trees of Yemen. Dean Shomshak

Not in the slightest. Sorry. I have no idea what this means, or how it might apply to actual scientists doing actual science such as, say, an ornithologist studying the behavior of puffins. It's probably best to drop the topic. Dean Shomshak

Fortunately, I photocopy articles that interest me. It's in Scientific American, June 2017; author Yasunori Nomura. In the introduction, he quotes Alan Guth, one of the founders of inflationary cosmology, on one of the admittedly philosophical problems that have developed with it: "In an eternally inflating universe, anything that can happen will happen; in fact, it will happen an infinite number of times." You'd have to ask Dr Guth about his knowledge of Scholastic philosophy. 😂 Nomura simply notes that a theory that gives equal probability to every possible event in the multiverse "tells you nothing about what will go on in our specific world." Nomura's own two-sentence summary of his theory is that "The multiverse and quantum many worlds are really the same thing -- superposition -- occuring at vastly different scales. In this new picture, our world is only one of all possible worlds that are allowed by the fundamental principles of quantum physics and that exist simultaneously in probability space." Perhaps his most important claim, though, is that his theory is testable. It predicts a slight negative curvature of space. Current measurements suggest space is flat within current limits of measurement, but that precision could well be improved by two orders of magnitude in the near future. Detecting any negative curvature will support the theory (though not prove it conclusively). "Conventional" inflationary cosmology also predicts negative curvature of space, but "many orders of magnitude smaller than we can hope to measure." Positive curvature, of any degree, would falsify his theory (and, perhaps, all inflationary theories: Nomura says they demand that all universes have negative curvature.) Nomura admits that some of the further implications of his theory, such as time being a local illusion within the universe, are "speculative." But I give him credit for laying out an observation that would make his theory just plain wrong, without trying to patch it. Nomura's article makes a good double feature with another article from earlier that year,February 2017, by Anna Ijjas, Paul J. Steinhardt, and Abraham Loeb. Steinhardt is one of the early architects of inflationary cosmology, but he's now calling bullpucky on it, based both on the observations from the Planck satellite and the broader point that a theory which predicts everything and anything, predicts nothing. The authors make some tart comments about "non-empirical science" suggest it's time to seek other approaches to cosmology. And wow, they set the cat among the pigeons! The next issue featured an angry letter signed by dozens of cosmologists who thought the critique of inflationary theory was most unfair. Nomura was among the signatories. If I really cared, I might spend a few years trying to work up the math and physics chops to at least venture an informed opinion as to who's just blowing smoke. As it is, I'm only at the make-popcorn-and-watch-the show level of interest. I'll look into it again if I think of a novel way to use the theories for gaming. Dean Shomshak

This is a lot like an old fill-in campaign of mine, UNICoRN (United Nations International Criminology Resource Network). In my campaign world, some countries had more heroes, or would-be heroes, than they needed; others had a shortage. So when supervillains start causing trouble in, say, Togo, the government asks UNICoRN for help and UNICoRN tries finding volunteer heroes to respond. I encouraged players to make heroes who were low-power and a bit goofy, such as American Ninja (ninja suit is also flag suit!) or Insectomorph (a.k.a. Bug-Eater Man... don't ask). These were not Earth's Mightiest Heroes; they were All We Could Get On Short Notice. Sometimes they fought similarly loopy villains. At the other extreme, some adventures got very dark (sometimes even on purpose). The "headquarters" consisted of a small office in the UN building with a file cabinet, a rolodex, a phone, a secretary and a morose Brazilian bureaucrat in charge of it all. Alas, I didn't get a chance to run the adventure in which the goofier villains (such as Baroness von Boom and Commander Coleoptera) formed a revenge super-team called CAToBLEPS (Criminal Alliance To Beat Law Enforcement Personnel Soundly). Dean Shomshak

Well, I wouldn't say the problem is with science as such, as with certain scientists who, as you say, link untestable theory to untestable theory in webs of speculation. Though some of this may be an artifact of science journalism: Wild-ass guesses about possible solutions to problems make better stories than careful explanations of the problems themselves. I do respect theoreticians who try to make testable predictions. Like, several years ago Scientific American ran an article by a theoretical physicist working on multiverse theory and inflationary cosmology -- the idea that the Big Bang never stopped banging and is is still eternally spitting out new universes. He links it with the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics: His hypothesis is that these are the same thing. Which sounds very handwavey, but he says the existence of these parallel universes should produce subtle but detectable effects on the structure of our observable universe -- something astronomers can actually look for to confirm or falsify the theory. So I think he's still doing real science and not just playing with math. (I am aware of the arrogance of an interested layman offering judgments about what counts as "real science." What the heck, it's the internet. Mouthing off about subjects in which one has no expertise is part of the fun.) Dean Shomshak

Yeah, that was a bit more of a jump than I intended. I'll try to fill in the blanks. I gather that attempts to explain dark matter using stuff that's known to exist have not gone well. As Cancer says, gravitational lensing studies haven't found enough MACHOS. IIRC there are also arguments that if there was enough normal matter in the universe to supply the needed gravity, this would have altered the proportions of helium and lithium produced in the very early universe, though such arguments are well beyond my Physics 101 level of understanding. Simulations assuming "hot dark matter" don't generate a recognizable universe, so that rules out neutrinos. And so on. So theoretical physicists have become steadily more speculative. WIMPS were one such. (There was an experiment to detect them, based on the premise that once in a very rare while two WIMPs would collide and make particles that could be detected... though it's beyond me how you know what to look for, when you don't know the masses or other properties of the WIMPs.) Or swarms of quantum black holes that are individually too small to be detected through gravitational lensing. Or let's try modifying gravity so it works differently on the necessary scales. Okay, some of these are marginally testable, but the more ad-hoc the proposals, the more I think of how the properties of the luminiferous ether got steadily more contradictory. And when the proposed dark matters become even more otherwise-undetectable, I get impatient and mutter, "Yeah, but legions of angels moving the stars and galaxies would also explain the observations." Because the proposals seem less and less like science, and more like miracles clad in technobabble. It isn't just dark matter. I'm annoyed by physicists making confident pronouncements about multiverses, string theory, what dark energy means for the fate of the universe, and similar speculations. As one of my friends puts it, they've slid from theoretical physics to theological physics. A faith that they can slip the surly bonds of observation and experiment to encompass the universe (and more!) by pure math. Arguing for divine intervention wouldn't be scientific either, but it might be more honest. Not that the "God of the Gaps" hypothesis has a great track record either... Or just admit that at this point, we don't know, and don't even know how to find out. Dean Shomshak

The cover article for the October 2022 issue of Scientific American is "The Power of Viking Women," with the abstract, "Analyses of ancient North Atlantic textiles show that Viking and medieval women wielded considerable cultural and economic influence." No, the old Norse weren't matriarchal as such. But women ran the farms while the men were out raiding and trading for years at a time. More particularly, cloth-weaving was exclusively women's work (with taboos against men even entering the weaving-house), and cloth was of great economic importantce -- to the extent that standardized lengths of cloth were used as money. So not as simply patriarchal as one might think. Dean Shomshak

No, not presumptuous. Convenient, in fact. Like I said, it seemed immodest to flog my own work... at least until someone else mentions it> Dean Shomshak

Apart from the Higgs detection, the most challenging recent particle physics experimental results this interested layman has heard about have been negative. After 20 years of increasingly sensitive experiments, proton decay (predicted by attempted Grand Unified Theories) has not been detected. Every year without detection forces theoreticians to revise their estimates for the half-life of the proton, but maybe it's time to consider that protons never decay, and the GUTs are just plain wrong. Re-examine assumptions. Supersymmetry was another big ide pushed by many theoretical physicists. I am not sure how positing supermassive boson counterparts for every fermion, and fermion counterparts to every boson, was supposed to resolve the awkward aspects of the Standard Model, but I'll take their word that it would. Only the Large Hadron Collider is now well into the energy range in which supersymmetry particles were supposed to appear, and they aren't. The theories can always be re-jiggered, but -- again, I hope more theorists are trying to figure out what the next step might be if they accept that supersymmetry is just plain wrong. The failure to detect Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, which would have worked so well as dark matter, is aggravating but perhaps should have been expected. For theists, the inability to find anything that fits the needed properties and observations might lead to this hypothesis: "God is just messing with us." The best positive result I've heard of that might point toward new physics is the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon. Of course some have suggested, "Aha, undiscovered particles!" But I suspect -- based on, well, nothing but esthetics -- that the truth will turn out to be much stranger.

The Masked City and The Burning Page by Genevieve Cogman, continuing the series begun in The Invisible Library. Also good and a lot of fun. I will try to continue reading the series, even though my library doesn't have them in large print. Continuing what I said before about the Exalted-style Fae in the series, these books continue developing the idea of Fae as living stories, or at least gaining their power by acting out story roles. In Masked City, Aunt Isra and the Rider show that those roles don't need to be the self-centered protagonism of Fae such as the libertine Silver and the domineering Lord Guantes. Aunt Isra presents herself as a teacher and storyteller -- but her true role is exposition, giving other characters the information they need to continue their own stories... including, apparently unwittingly, the actual protagonist Irene -- and us, the readers. While the Rider seems uninvolved until the very end, but the story still can't happen without him to move everyone else where they want to go. Dean Shomshak

I had thought it imodest to mention Loezen, but I see LL has done it for me. The last story arc in my second Supermage playtest campaign had the PCs trying to save that world. (Not entirely altruistic: Some Loezenians were escaping to Earth and behaving like, well, D&D PCs.) This involved a visit to an oracle to find how to do this, a treasure hunt to acquire the three elements they needed, and various side-quests to deal with problems along the way. There was time travel (including at least one predestination paradox), allies recruited, enemies fought, and a terrible price paid, but ultimate success. Among the problems the PCs faced were other Loezeniens with their own ideas how to save the world, or at least to save their own skins. In addition to the Loezenians invading Earth, the mage Naktorial had enslaved a whole country and numerous lesser sorcerers to build a Last Redoubt arcology that could survive the sun's death, while Norom Barcaldine, the Prince Who Never Was, sought to trap Loezen in a Groundhog Day time loop: The world would never end, but it wouldn't continue, either. Dean Shomshak

In various books such as Balkan Ghosts and The Ends of the Earth, writer Robert D. Kaplan coined a phrase for decrepit empires: "A corpse in armor." Enough military force to withstand threats from without and within, but also thereby insulated from any apparent need to reform themselves. Rulers enjoy the spoins of power while governance drifts, infrastructure decays, culture stultifies and the people become apathetic. Russia seems to be an extreme case: Even the military is decayed, because what does it matter as long as they have nukes? One of Kaplan's paradigmatic cases for an imperial corpse in armor is the Assyrian empre. It was mighty and brutal for a thousand years, until it wasn't and fell. Two centuries later, as Xenophon was leading his troops on their Anabasis out of the Persian Empire, he couldn't find anyone who could read the Assyrian monuments he encountered. Assyria was that thoroughly forgotten. But corpses in armor tend to emit cultural toxins as they decay. The former Yugoslavia was a smaller corpse in armor, the mutual resentments of its component nations repressed by Tito... only to erupt, more vicious than ever, when Tito died and Yugoslavia fell apart. Russia's decay began long before Putin; in some ways he is a product of the USSR's longstanding rot. But I suspect he is leading Russia to a ruin more terrible than he can imagine. Dean Shomshak

I found this of considerable professional interest. Dean Shomshak