Lawnmower Boy

Shh, just give the crazy zombie American president what he wants....

Pfft. You call that a curmudgeon? You kids have never even seen a real curmudgeon. Why, in my days, a curmudgeon was something.

So. Does talking to fish count as a power, or not?

i) Bipedalism is very common, even primordial. Recall that animal life belongs mainly to the Phanerozoic Eon (541 million to present). The modern eon begins with the Paleozoic, at the beginning of which, the Cambrian sees the well known explosion of complex, multicellular animals. This well-known, very brief period, may have seen the evolution of many body forms, including many no longer extant, in the course of eighty million yers froma single ancestral form of protist. The synapsids and archosaurs, which evolved, the former definitely, the latter possibly as early as, the Permian period (298--252 million), are the ancestors of all large terrestrial animals today. Synapsids are earlier than archosaurs, in spite of being the ancestors of mammals. I have seen it speculated that the fact that they were ventilated to breathe and eat at the same time is the key to their modern, colossally mentally challenging ability to walk and chew gum at the same time. Nevertheless, it is the archosaurs who became dominant during the Triassic, after the synapsids blew their saving throw at the Permian-Triassic Boundary. Archosaurs are predominantly classified by their ankles (I did not know this!) and the first "bird ankles" appear with the Avemetatarsalia in the Carnian age of the late Triassic. The Dinosauria are, in descent from this, classified as those archsaurs which hold their legs erect under their bodies, but only some of them are bipedal, the therapods, which are extant from the earliest phases of dinosauria, that is, from the above-mentioned Carnian, from 231 million years ago. From there down to ostriches it is pretty much a continuous line, including a steady diminution of size which may have been linear without regards for the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event. Hold that thought (about the extinction event) for a second. What's important here is that, roboticists' difficulties notwithstanding, bipedalism has been common in terrestrial life for half of complex animal life's evolutionary history on the planet. Roboticist, heal thyself. (ii) Tool use, like bipedalism, is very common amongst the complex animals. It is seen, for example, in thirty-three different families of birds. Tool creation is more contentious, but it suffices for now to note the Olduwan cultural horizon, which is associated with Australopithecus and dated to 2.5 million years ago. Intentionally shaped stone tools have been in use for approximately one half of one percent of the history of of complex animal life on this planet. iii) Are these adaptations tardy? Consider that we are apparently too unsure of the origins of ruminance to assert its chronology on Wikipedia, the Cervids , Girafidae and Bovidae arose over the course of ten million years during the Miocene (30 million to 20 million). The ability to digest cellulose through rumination has been present amongst the complex animals for only 6% of the history of that lifeform oon this planet. The implications of this are not small. It is quite possible that ruminant biology is crucial to forcing the modern ice age cycle. But, rumination is only as effective as it is because of the evolution of plant life incorporating phytoliths, notably the graminae, or grasses, which evolved along with the other flowering plants at the end Cretaceous. Before we got all het up about asteroid strikes, the evolution of the monocotyledon was often proposed as the cause of the extinction of the dinosaurs. Now that we know that we are talking about the extinction of the large dinosaurs only, I am more sure than I ever was that this old hypothesis deserved a revisit. Again to summarise, the flowering plants have only been present for a little above ten percent of the history of complex animal life on this planet. But, the monocotyledon were not the first complex vegetable life forms on this planet. The gymnosperms evolved in the late Carboniferous, about 320 million years ago. These woody plants rapidly displaced the earlier lycospids in the Carboniferous Rain Forest Collapse. The lycopsids are notorious for their remarkably thick lignin coats ("bark"), well attested in the fossil record in the Coal Measures. While the collapse is now explained by climate change, the fungi, in spite of being very ancient indeed (to 1.46 billion years ago, perhaps), evolved the Ascomycota, the largest phylum of fungi, in the late Carboniferous, and although the ascomycota exhibit numerous evolutionary adaptations, the relevant one here is the ability to attack lignin. Various evidence has been adduced to show that the Permian-Triassic Boundary was an "Age of Fungus," and if you do not imagine an apocalyptic landscape of vast spider webs wrapping skeletal forests of mushroom-mounded, rotting lycospids under a dark and burning sky, rapidly cooling towards an ice age, then I don't want to know you, man. (Just because my potted history blames the ruminants for the modern ice age cycle doesn't mean that they're the only culprits.) Just to summarise, mushrooms have only been present for half of the history of complex animal life on this planet. To summarise this very long bullet point, many important evolutionary developments in the history of this planet have been "tardy." iv) Because it deserves its own bullet point, even if it is a natural conclusion to be drawn from the above, evolution is also an "arms race" in which a whole series of killer evolutionary adaptations, ones often so successful as to destablise the global climate, have arisen in an at least somewhat natural succession. v) Many of the points made about the "problems" of intelligence are just strange. Bats do just fine hanging upside down all the time. Cats sleep longer than people. In fact, in general, small animals sleep longer than large animals, with the required amount of sleep a function of body weight, not brain size. So is maturation rate, to an extent. Male elephants have their first musth at age 15, for example. Humans have what seem to be something of an outlier here, and there's an old theory that this reflects a "neoteny," the retention of juvenile characteristics into adulthood, these including big brains. Unfortunately, it tends to be wrapped up with some noxious scientific racism. As for the "secondary sexual characteristics" thing, I'm goint to just leave that one hanging. Except to point you to my last link, if you're not following them all. (It's not Wikipedia, but it is NSFW.) The strangest claim is that evolution selects against intelligence. Because, and I cannot emphasise this enough, there is at least one very successful species in our current biome which has a very high order of intelligence. (Spoiler: us.) There are others which are strikingly intelligent, and the evolution of "conscious intelligence" goes back, depending on who you ask, 2.5 million years or 50,000. It's only meaningful to say that our species has won the lottery if this is "tardy." And it's pretty clearly not. As noted above, we can trace necessary precursor traits for intelligence back to the synapsids.

While I'm here, a proposal to solve the Greek problem (bearing in mind)

I'm not complaining. I'm talking about this.

So you know how it hasn't rained in Vancouver in two freaking months? No, no you don't. There's enough weird weather around these days to go around. So just one question. How can it not rain when the humidity index is a million percent?

The Castle, AFAIK.

I like this attitude, and will gladly introduce you to recruiters for our "Management Trainee" position, who will gladly explain why* ambition equals a willingness to do unlimited overtime at near-minimum wage at 2 in the morning. *It's because after we let you go for not having enough of the right stuff, you'll be able to get on at the bottom of the "Management Trainee" rung at one of our competitors. Don't worry. Eventually you'll click with someone! Or something else that starts with "c."

Archenemies. On the one hand, it's too bad nothing more ever came of this. On the other, its Mary Sue curve was pretty asymptotic. Narratively, there is nothing better than a secret base. Thinking about this, I ended up sketching a way of using a secret base to echo and develop the themes of a Bildungsroman --a story about the development and maturation of a protagonist or group of protagonists. 1. Welcome to High School/Government Research Lab/Fill in the Blank 2. For [Reasons], Sneak into the abandoned/restricted/haunted wing/sub-basement/you get the idea. 3. Woah, dude. How many times have we been down here doing [stuff]? And now we realise there's a secret door down here. 4. It's full of stars/Vikings/dinosaurs/aliens/otherworldly ecosystems/legacy stuff. 5. There's a building/we build something. There are, however, other stories, and other ways of doing this. I'd say something Freudian about the particular narrative structure I've laid out here, but I hope that most people will recocnise this scenario as a recurrent motif in hopeful dreams. (A little Googling confirms that I'm hardly the only one to have the "finding a secret room in a house" dream.) This is a huge element in Harry Potter, and probably something that any writer of juveniles should consider incorporating as part of the coming of age theme. The problem here is that the RPG campaign, like the comic, has an uncertain and probably shorter-than-expected future, so you probably want to frontload the good stuff, whereas with a novel you can draw it out as long as you want, subject to your publisher, and let's face it, your chances of making it that far are pretty astronomical, so go on, turn your own crank. We don't see this character-development-is-base-development arc in comic books even so often as the transience of the medium would lead us to expect, however, and I think that this i beause comics writers are often going for a different story, involving a little more of the adolescent variety of wish fulfillment. In these, bases spring into being as impregnable and special places apart, where adults can't bug you. This is where you get your absurly over-protected super-bases, and, again, reaching for a popular fictional example, I'll nod to Harry Dresden, who acquires these joints like some people acquire odd socks. (Mainly people who share their laundry rooms. I'm not sure I need a three year old's socks, but there you go.) Then the GM has the very tricky assignment of breaking the shell open, which tends to violate an implicit contract with the reader. Now, if you start with the base-as-complication, knowing that your school/massive public headquarters is a compound under endless siege, there's a new kind of story you can tell, in which the characters are brought together in a pressure cooker environment for maxium soap opera. Welcome to first year residence the Avengers Mansion! In this kind of story, you don't so much get expelled from the shelter of the base by ever-escalating threats as you graduate and leave it behind. This is the kind of story that superhero comics have a lot of trouble telling. In fact, it's the kind of story that's just plain harder to tell than the people who write them seem to realise. Where else are you going to find a story arc where you can lump J. K. Rowling and Leo Tolstoy together as authors who couldn't stick the landing? Perversely, though, it might work best for the dynamics of an RPG campaign (if the players are into soap opera, I guess), because RPG superheroes are always retiring to the suburbs, kids, white picket fences, and whatever else happens to those losers who end up with no time to game. And with that I'd better bring these coffee-fueld ramblings to a close, so that I can go ramble somewhere else.

Good news as a smoke-shrouded Vancouver fails to hit projected 30+ temperatures thanks to the rest of the province being on fire. Three big cheers and one hurrah for global warming!

If octopusses are such losers, how come they get all the girls? Hunh? How about them apples, smarty pants? (And don't tell me different, because I've seen the proof!)

Get down from there, Marcus. It's time to come in.

That must have been quite the seduction. -"Herro, I mean, hello, soldier!" -"Are you talking to me? Has anyone ever told you that you have a thicker Japanese accent than actual Japanese people?" -"I do not know what you are talking about, Most Honourable Scientist Person. Am only humble American girl. This one means, patriotic American girl, as true blue as whalemeat sashimi! I mean, apple pie." -"Do actual Japanese people actually say 'this one?' I thought that was more movie serials. Or BDSM fan fic." -"I am as libertarian as Mom wrestlling with octopus in Herbert Rockwell painting! Or, patriotic as roast beef? No, wait, that's England. Anyway, am pleased to meet you Hon-- person who just happens to look like top secret project scientist, of which I am having no knowledge whatsoever. My name is, uhm, Veroni-- No, that's a little too posh, I mean, 'Betty.' Betty, uhm, Doe. Betty Yakaguchi Doe. I have lonely heart." -"I can't help noticing that you're dressed as a geisha girl." -"I buy old clothes at Savings Bond Drive! All out for victory! Banz--- No, wait, that's too much, even for me." --"And you're wearing a mask." --"I am humble and self-effacing. And looking for a boyfriend. Hint hint." --"Well, why didn't you say so? I'm good at math and physics, and I like Asian girls. I mean, I really like Asian girls." --"Okay, never mind, that's too much, even for me. If Tojo wants your secrets, he can seduce you himself." --"You, uhm, have Tojo's number?" "Right here, sailor!" And so was America's greatest military secret fatally compromised.

Yeah, I shouldn't have snapped at poor Cosmosemeritus. It's getting politics in the FRP, and who needs that? I'm really reacting to the blithe assertions of your average (bad) SF/Fantasy author who blithely repeats goldbug truisms. And to put it in perspective, I'm thinking of Leo Frankowski, and with apologies to any fans of his who might be out there, that's just not a fair comparison. The distance premium reflects the (fairly substantial) cost of moving bullion coin. A British shilling in Antwerp (after the recoinage, or long before) has two values: there's nothing stopping you from taking it to the silversmieth to be melted down; but the British government pays a premium on the bullion price specifically to prevent this. So if you move it back across the Channel, you can buy more bullion than its face value, less the cost of moving it. At least, if the prices of bullion are comparable in Amsterdam and London! This is a pretty important issue when Britain is maintaining an army on the continent, which means translating British tax receipts into some kind of financial instrument which you can use to pay for forage on the Continent. (British coins won't do, for reasons discussed below. But what about notes drawn on British lenders, payable in British coin? These will have to be bought by people spending currency-of-Antwerp, looking to buy things in London. This creates an "exchange" rate in Amsterdam between thaler and pound, which, in turn, determines the relative price of bullion in the two cities, and so determines the profit you can make --if any-- buying bullion in one city and selling it on the next. Oy!) Now, around the time of the recoinage, the crisis is that all British coins in circulation are old and heavily "clipped," that is, reduced in weight, either by wear or deliberate mutilation. And by "all," I mean that good coins are being hoarded, while bad coins are kept in circulation. As coins keep circulating, they keep wearing down, so that owners of good, newer or long-hoarded coins pracitcally have to cilip them so as not to take a loss. Moreover, if the British government wants to buy them back by issuing coins of the old pattern, people will just hoard (or clip, or even export) them. The solution, as you say, was recoinage at a penalty. At the other extreme, it appears that the Roman Empire did it the other way around. Bring it gold, and it would give you more than its weight in coins. This was possible because i) The Roman Empire had a monopoly on bullion mines; and ii) the political structure of the Roman Empire was based on the Emperor bribing rich people (don't let's have any illusions about the social status of Roman soldiers, by the way) with other rich people's money. It didn't work out terribly well in practice, and we've been trying to work out the monetary-fiscal implications for a long time. For the record, it seems likely to me that the western Roman Empire was gradually demonetarised from the centre; that Britain, for example, left the Roman Empire and the Roman economy for lack of Roman coin --which is why we find clipped Roman coins in late Roman Britain, and nowhere else. (So there's two scenarios from Britain bookending the "medieval era" in which we like to FRP. With knights, no guns, all okay.) Again, and I can't stress this enough, this kind of detail has no place in fantasy roleplaying. Unless you decide to create a scenario where the dragon's hoard is somehow related to the fate of kingdoms via the international currency exchanges. Which you could do. It might actually be kind of interesting --dragon hoards play heavily to the Medieval fear that rich people were burying all their money, so that no-one would have anything to spend. (As Lord Keynes said, much later, a situation where there are not enough houses for everyone to live in, but at the same time the houses that do exist are too expensive for anyone to buy.) And it would make a change from orcs attacking inns.

No, no, no. You're reading it as """. It's actually ".".

Is this where we come to burn the witches? Because I want to start with corporate IT.

I started writing a longer post in response, but it got all badfun. It veers into modern politics, after all. There are people who really do believe that the value of money is "intrinsic" to its weight in "precious metal," and not only are they wrong, which is a pretty trivial concern even today but it tends towards delegitimising taxation, which is important. I guess that was kind of a spoiler. Taxation is the source of the value of money, and coining tells you, right away, of the existence of a state. And once its coins are in your pocket, it is interested in you. You can see where the badfun comes in. "Congratulations, players, you have seized the dragon's hoard of coins, which are the instantion of the power of the emergent state!" Wrong or right as a question of political theory, players tend to prefer a more libertarian setting. This being said, if you want to go the realistic approach, a coin should trade at an increasing premium the closer it is to its issuing authority --providing that issuing authority acts in good faitn and accepts it as payment in taxation and as legal tender in regulated markets. If you want to go the fantasy approach, the Dark Lord's "red gold" coins can corrupt everyone they touch. Their presence in a merchants pouch or a dragon's hoard is a sign of sinister forces at work. Here, quite arbitrarily, is a discussion by the one and only John Locke, of the situation prevailing in Britain just before the recoinage of 1693. If your head is swimming at the end with talk of the "value of money," and the cost of bullion in coins, and the exchange of gold and silver, and the relationship of interest rates to "the uncertain and doubtful clipped coinage," then this old-timey economist will have done his work.

This is not the case. It absolutely does matter what kind of coin it is. There is even such a thing as exchange rates between the bullion coins of different jurisdictions.

Well, that's fine and all (even if the scientists will be upset that they can't even pee in the water fountains anymore), but what about when it's her time of the month, and she fires off the doomsday device?

This is all crazy talk. It's well known that people didn't travel in the old days. A man who'd been twenty miles from his birthplace was counted well-travelled; go fifty, and they were burnt as witches. (Bizarre behaviour, plus also a shortage of firewood.) Travel 100, and you were beyond the protection of custom and kin, and, as likely as not, butchered alive and devoured for your tangily exotic flesh. And that's if you could travel. As is well known, due to customary agricultural practices, all inhabited landscapes consisted of yards-deep mud interspersed with deep, bubbling pools inhabited by oddly Muppet-looking, heavily-fanged predators. Conversely, uninhabited landscapes consisted of sterile, rolling, sandscapes of dunes. (Think the less-frequented parts of major Southern California beach destinations within an easy drive of the Troma production offices.) Obviously, you weren't getting very far in that! Not that you had very long. Average life expectancy was 21, and bearing in mind all those people who died of common, easily-preventable childhood diseases such as progeria, amnesia, consumption or anaphylactic shock, people were basically dropping dead in their tracks every few steps. Not much point in travelling anywhere when anyone with half a consideration bone in his body (usually removed by leaching back then, but that's another story) was arranging his funeral so that the corpse wagon drivers wouldn't have to bother, being busy all the time, what with the plague and all. Speaking of, even if you could travel, you'd just be carrying some horrible, old-time epidemic disease like smallpox or beri-beri, which would inevitably kill a hundred percent of the people you met, even if you survived. Not much point in telling a travel story when everyone who hears it, dies. Am I right, or am I right? Not to mention that even if you could tell your story, it would be a) incomprehensible to everyone, it being that no-one could understand the accent of the next village over, the dialect in the next county, or the language across the river. You could write it down in a univeral written language such as Latin, Arabic, Persian or Classical Chinese, but since no-one except Old Wu in Anyang, Abdul in Baghdad, and Lenny in Rome could read, there wasn't much point. But if you did actually communicate your story, you have to bear in mind that you were telling it to powerful people, who were famously paranoid and arbitrary. Why, if I had half a mind, I'd tell more stories about vagrant storytelllers being executed by slicing with crucifiction by drawing and quartering for chance lines like, "The sky is blue." Pro-tip: Never say that to a khagan whose favourite colour happens to be green, if you prefer not being able to see your pancreas with your own eyes. Mind you, communicating requires a working mouth, and once your teeth are all out from rot, that tends to take a back seat compared with the more important tongue-work of getting that gruel down your throat without choking to death. Sure, you could mime it --if your hands had not fallen off from leprosy, as, let's face it, they probably had. You could scratch it with a stick on a clay tablet with your toes, to be sure, but that's only since the Scientific Revolution, when Newton invented sticks. So, yeah, this old Chinese story is just that --a story. I don't even know when it was forged. In the Nineteenth Century, by nationalist agitators? In the Twentieth, by Marxist propagandists? In the 21st, by a cabal of Silicon Valley libertarian pirates? Either way, we can be sure that it doesn't reflect what the ancient Chinese court thought about Rome. Obviously. I mean, if they were curious about Rome, they could just get their alien astronaut buddies to give them a ride over in their flying saucer.

Leaving the roofs off means that you get to replace them faster!

In breaking news: mental illness called "being crazy" because it leads to people doing crazy things. Holy Crap, I almost got suckered into talking about race relations in America. Out of here, dudes.

That can't be a model of a university bureaucracy. It hasn't knocked down an old building and put two new ones in its place yet.

Incompetence in business? that's unpossible! The market makes us efficient! (Our AM and DM are touring stores today. Sometimes I'd love to travel with him: DM: "So. You know that there's a stream of running water on the floor of your deli here, right?" SM: "I guess that must have just started." (Nearby deli employees do the Eye-Roll-of-Complete-Agreement.) AM: "Ugh! Bugs! Get them off me! Get them off me!" SM: "Don't worry, they're under control. We get the janitor to vacuum them up every night." [bakery manager, watching what's going on, gives the "Don't come over here yet, we haven't managed to hide the caved-in floor yet" signal.] ---I might be exaggerating here. I think we reported the cave-in...