DShomshak

I don't know. In addition to US Mail, though, there are also drop boxes where you can deposit your ballot. I don't know if the post office handles those. Dean Shomshak

Also here in The Other Washington, the most important races may be the initiatives. Two stand out: First is an initiative that would ban cities and other local governments from taxing groceries. Lots of scary ads about politicians taxin meat, milk and vegetables. Not that this happened or anyone has proposed it... but Seattle put a tax on soft drinks that contain sugar. The initiative is of course funded by PepsiCo, Red Bull, and other such companies. I voted against it. The other is for a statewide carbon tax. This is Washington's second attempt: The first try, in 2016, failed. The 2016 proposal was revenue-neutral, reducing other taxes to match the gain from the carbon tax. It failed in part because some local Native American tribes and "social justice" groups opposed it, saying they wanted a share of the money for their causes. (Fun fact I just learned from reading Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now that this put Naomi Klein, author of books advocating the abolition of capitalism, on the same team as the fossil fuel billionaire Koch brothers.) The new initiative puts the carbon tax revenue in a special fund and creates a special panel to allocate the money for various projects to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and mitigate climate change effects. The opposition (again, funded chiefly by fossil fuel companies) is running ads calling it a corrupt political slush fund. While I am no expert in these matters, the characterization seems fairly accurate; but since the high-minded previous attempt failed because various influence groups didn't see an immediate payoff in trying to avert climate catastrophe, I guess the slush fund ain't a bug, it's a feature. So I voted for it. I think climate change is a sufficiently important problem that if taking even the tiniest first step toward solving it requires some corrupt patronage, I'll allow it. Dean Shomshak

We vote by mail here in The Other Washington, so I cast my ballot last week. Vote-by-mail has the advantages that it doesn't disenfranchise people with crazy work schedules, and it leaves a paper trail that can be checked later if necessary. The word on the news last night was that the return rate was already at a record high for a midterm election -- close to that of a presidential year (though nowhere near the 93% LL cites). I look forward to hearing the turnout percentages from other parts of the country. Dean Shomshak

Yes, I liked the plot seeds too. It's why I used them in my little Shared Origins booklets. They aren't just a benefit for readers: If I couldn't easily come up with three reasonably original story seeds for a character, I knew the character was too specialized or peculiar for other people to use in their campaigns. Later I'll pull together and post a batch of story-seed summaries of adventures from my past campaigns. Dean Shomshak

Like you said about Kepler, we are beyond mere legend here. We live in an age of myth and fable. Though it's sometimes a sad myth, in that so many people don't realize they live surrounded by wonders. To paraphrase one of Clark Ashton Smith's epigrams, the veil of Isis floats before them, and they see only a petticoat. Dean Shomshak

First, if you have the 5e book Conquerors, Killers and Crooks, start there. Lots of high-tech villains, each with three story seeds. If you don't... For high-tech villain plots, the Scavenger Hunt is a classic. The villain needs three or four rare items to complete his super-weapon; he and his minions steal them one by one. The items could be anything from an Atomic Clock to calibrate the energy matrix resonance, to the Hope Diamond (whose unique chemical composition and fluorescent properties make it perfect as the core of a giant laser). It’s exactly the same plot as the Evil Wizard who gathers rare items for a ritual to summon a Dark God, achieve Ultimate Power, yadda yadda. So what? Comic-book sci/tech is usually just magic in drag. Heck, you can use the plot for a martial arts campaign. The ancient master wrote the secret of his unstoppable technique on a tablet that was broken into three parts/ three scrolls you have to overlay to read/ three bronze ceremonial cauldrons/ whatever. The three parts were scattered by his quarreling disciples/ hidden to keep the secret from the unworthy/ whatever. The arch-nemesis of the PCs searches for the three parts, and they chase after him. I dare say you could create versions for other power/character types as well. Dean Shomshak

Nov. 2018 Scientific American has an article about the RELICS study (Reionization Lensing Cluster Survey), which aimed the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes at distant massive galaxy clusters to use them as magnifying lenses in hopes of seeing the very first galaxies. They've done it, finding at least one galaxy they estimate to be only 400 million years after the Big Bang. Its spectrum confirms that it was in the "reionization" period because what was its ultraviolet light (before red shift) is missing: It was absorbed by neutral hydrogen, splitting it into protons and electrons. Even with the gravitational lensing, though, the observers can't see much detail. That must wait for the James Webb Space Telescope. Then, they expect to learn a lot about this early stage of star and galaxy formation. There's also an excerpt of an interview with a blind linguist on the possible difficulties of communicating with aliens who do not use the same senses that we do. I was reminded of the Green Lantern Corps story about trying to recruit a member from a blind species. Dean Shomshak

I've only see ads for local races. The big one is to replace a retiring Republican representative; it's pulling in a lot of outside money becaue the seat is competitive for the first time, well, ever. The attack ads accuse the R candidate, Dino Rossi, of being a career politician (true; he's been at this for decades) who hurts the poor and helps the rich; and accuse the D candidate, first-timer Kim Schrier, of wanting to raise taxes sky-high. So, same-old same-old. Another D running for state rep is accused of being "too radical," with mailers citing various anti-Trump statements she's made, but it still seems fairly mild to me. Perhaps the most interesting local race involves incumbent Republican state rep Michelle Caldier. Her D opponent, another first-timer, has barely run at all: All I've seen is her stement in the voter's guide that she Cares A Lot. Caldier also faced a primary challenge from a perennial local candidate, Randy Boss, who got his start campaigning against tolls on a new bridge and since then has run for something, anything, every cycle. Caldier managed to offend some local Republicans by working with state Democrats to pass practical legislation instead of fighting scorched-earth anti-tax crusades or culture wars, and Boss ran (in part) on this. His campaign also produced a big fat lie about her financial impropriety, which would have been slanderous except the state Supreme Court ruled a while back that in political campaigns, big fat lies are permitted speech. So, I'm voting for Caldier despite the straight D ticket I'm voting otherwise. When your own side attacks you for doing your job well, that's a pretty good recommendation. Dean Shomshak

I'm not sure, but I *think* the castle at the start of Scott's first batch is Burg Eltz, in Germany. I bring this up because I've read that Burg Eltz was built and inhabited by more than one family. In old Germany, sometimes families that couldn't afford to build castles by themselves would share the cost and build a duplex or triplex. This could be a good setup for murder mysteries and other intrigue, if the resident families came into conflict. (The Wikipedia entry for Eltz Castle has more information.) Dean Shomshak

I am suspicious of any argument that goes, "Logically, anyone, anywhere, would have to behave in this particular manner." Classical economics was built on such arguments. When behavioral economists looked at what people actually did, they found that those arguments were a load of fetid dingo's kidneys. The problem with "convergent evolution" as an argument is that it does not predict anything in particular. Take eyes, for instance. Earthlife has evolved eyes, I am tole, at least 20 separate times. This makes sense: It's very useful to sense light. But eyes are not all the same. Just consider the difference between the camera eyes of vertebrates and the compound eyes of insects. It's plausible that an alien biosphere will include creatures with eyes -- likely several kinds. But you can't say more than that. Or flight. Flight is so useful it's evolved several times. But insect wings and vertebrate wings evolved from different starting structures, to very different final forms. What about intelligence and tool use? We now know that nothing in human behavior is truly unique; language, tool use, and other forms of intelligence are hypertrophied, but many other creatures also do them to lesser degrees. So they are likely to appear in other biospheres, too. But to what degree? In what form? We cannot know how typical the human form of these traits are until we see other examples that are developed to corresponding extremes. Dean Shomshak

That reminds me: A few weeks ago, All Things Considered interviewed Sarah Stewart of UC-Davis, one of this year's Macarther "Genius Grant" winners. Dr. Stewart models planetary collisions by firing cannonballs at each other (which is cool enough to deserve a Genius Grant right there). Her research tests various notions about how the Earth and Moon formed from the collision of two proto-planets. Based on it, she believes that the collision did not result in a "Big Splash" (you may have seen computer animations of this). She thinks the two bodies actually vaporized each other, and the Earth and Moon condensed out of the resulting cloud of debris. Dunno how this affects the frequency of Earthlike planets (and I am not convinced by the "Rare Earth" argument that complex life can only appear on a world that is a near-double of Earth), but it may have some relevance. Or at least interest. Dean Shomshak

AddenduM: I posted a thread about Sard. It's currently just one page back, if anyone's interested. Dean Shomshak

The October 13, 2018 issue of The Economist has a little article on the Fermi Paradox in what it says is the current preferred form: not "Why haven't aliens visited?" but "Why haven't radio telescopes detected them?" It notes an argument made in 2010 by Jill Tarter, that the Milky Way is so huge that radio searches to date have been the equivalent of dipping a drinking glass in the ocean at random and hoping you get a fish. A paper published last month in arXiv by astronomer Jason Wright and colleagues updates the argument. They find Dr Tarter's estimate is too stingy: They say human efforts at alien-hunting amount to dunking a bathtub. Dean Shomshak

I'm glad you included "My own" as an acceptable answer, because that's the one I must give. ? It's set about 400 years in the future. Humanity has colonized other star systems, but all are within 25 light-years of Earth. FTL exists, in three modes, but the only mode that allows moving large quantities of people and goods is relatively slow. Aliens exist, but only a few are near enough for humans to interact with them. The World Governance Board, a parlliament of megacorporations, dominates human space, but its grip is slipping. It just doesn't have the resource base it once had, since the devastation of Earth in the last great war. Colony worlds are going their own ways, sometimes clashing with each other. Oh yes, the great war. The Cladist Wars. Genetic engineering enabled various utopian groups to create offshoot races of humanity, collectively referred to as cladists. This did not go over well with baseline humanity, eventually resulting in war. The cladists lost, but in the last war they deflected a Kuiper Belt Object to slam into the Earth, killing 95% of the population through immediate impact effects and starvation afterward. Earth is a post-holocaust world. The cladists were nearly exterminated in retribution, but humanity is still recovering from the war's damage and is deeply traumatized. I postulated several worlds to follow different SF subgenres. The only one I managed to run a campaign in, however, was Sard, the Planetary Romance world. Not quite Barsoom-like. More like Darkover, say. Swords and blasters, psionics for magic, but Sardians can visit the wider universe and people from outside can easily visit Sard. After my own setting (working title of Star Horizon), my favorite is... the setting created by some of my friends. It started as Traveller, but over 40 years of play it's diverged wildly. The "Terran Empire" setting for Star Hero bores me. Too stable, too derivative of Star Trek and Traveller. The "Alien Wars" prequel setting is more interesting, because it's a society in crisis -- both the onslaught of the Xenovores, and the social tensions that will lead in time to the Terran Empire. After that, the only non-media-derived SF setting I'm personally familiar with is the "Big Ideas, Grand Vision" setting created by Anders Sandberg. I first encountered Mr. Sandberg on a White Wolf forum, where he contributed homerew for mage: The Ascension. BIGV explores various transhumanist ideas that interest him, as well as other social speculations. The chief weakness of the setting, IMO, is that it didn't give much notion of what PCs would do in it. You can probably find it with a Google search and judge for yourself, though. It supplied many ideas I incorporated into Star Horizon. I too would be interested in hearing about really exciting SF settings, for I too have not seen many. DS

Oh -- and I've encountered a few people who argued, "The world is so big and humans are so small. How can anything we do affect it?" This comes, I think, from an instinctive innumeracy held over from the 99.9% of human history when no community exceeded a few hundred people, and the total human population was in the millions. Look at the Earth from space at night, and you realize that seven billion of us (and rising fast) are no small thing. As a further addendum, I don't doubt that some people on the left do use climate change as a screen for their own social/political/spiritual agendas. But that's not the fault of climatologists. And some people on the left show their own areas of science denial, for reasons that are just as irrational as anything on the right. Dean Shomshak

A variety of reasons, I think. Or at least so I've heard. I heard an interview with a scientist who's moonlights trying to explain climate science to Evangelicals; she considers herself devoutly Christian as well. She said that many Evangelicals see the whole environmental movement as pagan Earth Worship, so they disbelieve anything they associate with it. I have also seen plenty of letters to the editor in my local newspaper from Christians who insist that humans cannot possibly change God's creation on such a scale. If you admit that humans are so mighty, Evangelicals see this saying that God is not Almighty, and that is blasphemy. All within the broader context of the conflict between "Things happen because of natural law that doesn't care who you are or what you do" and "Things happen by the will of a God who cares a great deal who you are and what you do." So if many Evangelicals see climate science as stealth paganism, there also seems to be a camp of conservatives (or libertarians who caucus with them) who see climate science as stealth Communism. It's all a ploy to undercut capitalism and impose a tyrannical World Government that will dictate everything you do and crush the heroic entrepreneur. Again, there's an element of power struggle over who gets to be recognized as a social authority figure. Do a bunch of goddamn liberal ivory tower academic scientists get to tell rich successful captains of industry what to do? And there's a populist spin as well: Do those elite scientists get to say you can't have your SUV? Again, I've seen letters to the editor that angrily declare that "Nobody tells me what I can and can't drive or what light bulb I should use!" There may be other camps within climate change denialism (besides the pure self-interest of the fossil fuel industry), but these are the two I've encountered. Dean Shomshak

Ah, the Democratic Party. Have they ever been surpassed at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory? Dean Shomshak

Washington state went all Vote By Mail and it seems to be working well. So nice not having to find where they put the polling place this year, free up time on Election Day, stand in line (OK, that only happened in one or two Presidential election years, usually we could go right in). And as our Secretary of State reminded us in an interview yesterday, it's so nice having a complete paper record that hackers can't touch. I vote every election, including all the down-ballot races. I'm lucky that I have some lawyer friends whom I can ask if they've personally worked with judge candidates. Dean Shomshak

My first Champions setting incorporated a great many characters and concepts from the mystical side of the CU. No, wait. That's technically true, but the causality is backward from what it sounds. The mystical CU incorporates a great many characters and concepts from my first Champions campaign. I wrote The Ultimate Super-Mage way back when, based on about 20 years of mystic-heavy campaigns. Steve Long liked it enough to port a lot of it into the CU. My current campaign setting, the Millennium Universe, jettisons all of that. It's all homebrew, except for a few villains whose write-ups I ported in Steve Long does it very well and why reinvent the wheel. (Backgrounds are changed, though). I've always preferred the Marvel style, and my settings reflect that, with one important exception: I have never used "anti-mutant prejudice." My current setting is called the Millennium Universe (because supers start appearing, at least in public, in 2000). I posted a thread about it some time back. Oddly, when I Google it I only get a link to the second page, but it's all archived and available: Millennium Universe Overview - Page 2 - Champions - HERO Games Dean Shomshak

Or let’s try an opposite approach: Mutants are new and truly random. For one thing, that means most of them don’t come from the Western world, and most of them come from poor or modest backgrounds. Gravitar and Menton aren’t scions of old aristocracy; Gravitar comes from a village in Mali and Menton was born in a Mexico City slum. A third of all mutants are Chinese or Indian. Globally, mutants represent the Rise of the Rest. Power is no longer restricted to a few hegemonic states that use the rest of the world as the playing-field for their competition. Within countries, it means power is no longer limited to people from the right families or castes, the people with money or connections, who went to the right schools or came up through the company or the Party. And the gatekeepers of the old order are scared spitless. Some of them try to coopt the living weapons of mass destruction. Recruit them into the military or spy service, give them jobs in the company or the crime syndicate, whatever. Pay them well and hope they don’t try to take over. But a lot of the mutants won’t let themselves be bought off so easily. Even the heroes are laws unto themselves. That’s where IHA comes in. Its financial and political backers vow that random individuals will not become laws unto themselves. Governments and corporations will not negotiate as equals with Wal-Mart greeters and peasant farmers. This version of IHA might go after other supers who seem dangerous, but it concentrates on mutants precisely because their appeaance cannot be controlled. In ostensibly democratic countries, power elites cannot come out and say, “Serve or die.” IHA supplies the threat to supers who won’t be coopted, but it’s deniable. Heroes who delve into IHA's backing don't find it easy. While some of the money comes from direct donatins by bigoted believers, a lot of it comes from blandly named shell companies and foundations that don't have to disclose their own funding sources.. If the heroes can penetrate the black boxes, they find a remarkable collection of business leaders, sovereign wealth funds, PACs -- even crime bosses. The list might even include their own country's military, or a company that touts how it hires mutants and turns their powers to profitable use. Anyone else? Dean Shomshak

When adapting IHA to different campaigns, it may be useful also to the role of mutants. As mentioned, Marvel uses mutants as a metaphor for socially disfavored minorities. (I would debate the appropriateness of Marvel’s execution, but that’s not relevant here.) Or as LL mentions, mutants can represent the fear of hidden Otherness, especially in one’s own children. (From what I’ve seen of very early X-Men, I actually think this “atomic horror” aspect was more the original intended meaning.) But those are not the only possibilities, and what you choose can influence how you treat IHA – including the very important matter of who funds it. Maybe it’s my own prejudice, but I think that whatever their prejudices, people with big money tend to be rather calculating in the causes they support. Let’s start by looking at the big-name mutant villains of the CU. Three of them (Graviton, Holocaust, Menton) are white people from privileged backgrounds. Not exactly great stand-ins for oppressed minorities. (Okay, I’m guessing about Holocaust’s race. His 5e and 6e write-ups don’t say. Geoffrey Haganstone, son of a Pennsylvania senator and his socialite wife, is not provably white. But that seems most likely.) But they are excellent characters for a theme of “Born To Power.” In this treatment, mutants are not as new as people think. Past mutants used their powers to become rich and socially prominent, and their descendents inherited that social status as well as a chance of developing super-powers. The model for mutant villainy is less Brotherhood of Evil Mutants and more Hellfire Club: Many of the world’s mutants act covertly to protect and increase their wealth and power, as their ancestors have done for generations. (See also the classic Champions module, The Blood and Dr. McQuark. The Blood are exactly the sort of super-powered lineage I’m talking about, albeit of different origin.) The rate of superhuman mutation is greater now; increasing numbers of mutants appear outside the old families and knowing nothing about them. For the general public, the paradigm for “mutant” is the teen whose suddenly-activated mutant powers cause havoc. But some people know differently. And some of those people fund IHA. The backers of IHA are very rich, but they have seen some avenues of social power closed to them. They found there’s more than old money behind the business and political dynasties that balk them: Those dynasties have powers that these nouveau-riche entrepreneurs, financiers and politicians can never gain. And they hate it. IHA is their weapon against the mutant dynasties. Attacking some shmoe who used his pyrokinesis to rescue someone is only a means to an end. The battles against mutants who go public, whether hero or villain, are just practice for the real battle when the soldiers and Minuteman robots descend on the Hamptons, the artificial islands of Dubai, and other haunts of the super-rich and the hidden mutant aristocracy. There's one different spin on the IHA. Let's see some more. Dean Shomshak

I oversimplified or overstated.. Here, I'll type in the paragraphs from page 26 of the article: On more general matters of judicial philosophy he was, for what it's worth, more forthcoming. When he interprets the constitution, Mr Kavanaugh told the judiciary committee, he considers himself bound by the document's "original public meaning, of course informed by history and tradition and precedent." This view, that the constitution has one meaning, the one it was originally taken as having by its readers, and that singular meaning is best found by close study of the text, is known as originalism. Scalia was for a long time its most prominent exponent on the court (its most ardent advocate now is Clarence Thomas). Partly because Scalia regularly and persuasively expounded on its merits it has gained much currency. This is particularly true on the right--Mr Thomas is the court's most conservative justice--but holds to some extent across the ideological spectrum. Justices pay far more heed to specific wordings today than they did in the Warren Court's heyday. As Elena Kagan once put it, "We're all textualists now." Associate justice, no peace However some, such as Eric Segall of Georgia State University the author of an upcoming book on originalism, worry that originalist language is often used by justices to uphold positions quite at odds with the philosophy's seemingly hand-off tenets. "Justices use the rhetoric of originalism to mask political judgement," Mr Segall says. Past proponents of originalism argued that courts should strike down laws only in cases of clear textual error. Today, argues Mr Segall, proponents of originalism want to "shrink the federal government and deregulate the economy, but there is no reasonable originalist argument for that kind of strong judicial interference with our political system." So, the article itself does not say originalism is a fraud; it quotes someone who seems to be saying that originalism is used fraudulently. I grant it's an important distinction. Other people who know more about these things than I do can perhaps supply examples. Dean Shomshak

Well, when one of my friends attended pharmacy school he had a roommate who said that black people were stupid, lazy, etc. This surprised my friend because his roommate came from Ethiopia and had the darkest skin he'd ever seen. He said, more or less, "Um?" The roommate explained that as an Ethiopian, he came from an ancient and glorious civilization and was, therefore, not black. Not black American black, anyway. A completely different race. Oookay... My friend thought it best to let the matter drop. Dean Shomshak

Speaking of astronomical paradoxes past... Some years back, Scientific American published a nifty article about why many astronomers initially rejected heliocentrism. It was more than just religious dogma: Whatever advantages the theory offered for describing the Solar System seemed outweighed, they thought, by the difficulties it created for describing the stars. I *think* this is a link; I couldn't follow it with my crappy slow connection. The Case against Copernicus - Scientific American Short version: Parallax Lost. Astronomers measured the angular size of the stars. It's very tiny, but nevertheless a measurable disk. (Easier once they had telescopes, of course.) OTOH, they could not measure a parallax. That gave them a minimum distance for the stars and, therefore, a minimum size for the stars. In a geocentric cosmos, there would only be a daily parallax -- a displacement of apparent position based on the rotation of the Earth. By that calculation, stars were about as big as the Sun. Heliocentrism added a second, yearly parallax. A much longer baseline meant that stars had to be much farther away for no parallax to be measured with the instruments available. Correspondingly, that meant stars had to be much bigger. In fact, every star had to be thousands of times bigger than the Sun! Astronomer George Airy resolved the paradox when he realized that when a very thin beam of light passes through a lens, it spreads a little. Doesn't matter whether it's the lens of the eye or the lens of a telescope. Thus, the paradox was based on a systematic error in measurement: The angular size of the stars was wrong. Eventually, telescopes and instruments got good enough to measure yearly parallax and the true distance to the stars was known, and therefore their true sizes. Paradox gone. I keep this history in mind when I read about dark energy, inflationary cosmology, and other "frontier" topics in astronomy. Even things we think are straightforward measurements might be wrong. Dean Shomshak

In its coverage of the Kavanaugh fight, the Sep. 22, 2018 issue of The Economist included a brief history lesson on the Activist Court. In the first few decades of the 20C, the SCOTUS was very conservative, or at least very pro-business. Struck down minimum wage laws, hostile to unions. Changed fairly sharply after FDR attempted his court-packing scheme: FDR failed, but the Court started giving its stamp of acceptance to laws it formerly struck down, and reversing other precedents; the biggest perhaps being overturning of Jim Crow laws. Then the Court swung decisively left in the 1960s and 70s, with Rov. Wade as the high point of "liberal activism." A century later, it's swung back hard right, with what effects we can only guess. (The article also mentions that the "Originalist" claim is, not to put too fine a point on it, an utter fraud.) As the article and people here have mentioned, any attempt to curb the court's right-wing activism -- or retake control, accepting that it is as partisan as Congress -- carry rather horrible risks and consequences. So, what now? The article's author didn't know, and neither do I. At this point, the only curb I've heard is Chief Justice Roberts' institutionalism: I am told that his joining in some pro-Obamacare decisions indicates he doesn't want to put the Court in the middle of fights between branches of government or other cans of worms. Dean Shomshak