Getting paid not to blog
No, I'm not getting paid to blog. Actually, I've been asked not to blog about the stuff I'm working on these days (which is at least partly to blame why I haven't been keeping up... most of the interesting stuff I've got to say is about that!)
Not sure how I feel about that, honestly. I'm doing well enough with the day job that the money I make subtitling isn't that important anymore... so it's kind of, if I'm not enjoying it, why do it? (And a lot of enjoying it is sharing it, as it were...)
Fortunately, I'll have this project wrapped up soon...
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Political Philosophy and Dr. Pepper
So, while out at the grocery store last night, I see on the shelf... Dr. Pepper made with pure cane sugar. Apparently it's their 125th anniversary and they're doing it as a gimmick.
This is not the first time I've had the true Elixir of Life. They've always made a small amount of the stuff, though they didn't market or ship much of it. But every so often, Dad would find himself out near the plant in Sweetwater and he'd bring home a 12-pack of the stuff. The idea of having a whole 12-pack to myself is purely luxurious...
But I got to thinking... everybody knows that the cane sugar version tastes better than the corn syrup version. But it's the corn syrup version we got, because of high sugar import taxes, which were designed to protect the corn market. Even though agriculture is a tiny percentage of the nation's product, and the effect of the tax on the corn market is pretty minimal, and practically everyone I've ever met has drunk a ton of cola in their life... we still get the corn syrup version.
All because Iowa has their caucus first, and the momentum that gives a presidential candidate is worth a good amount (or, at least, is reckoned as worth a good amount...)
And that's why I'm in favor of small government.
It's not just things like health care, immigration, and military spending. The more the government does, the more opportunity it has to choose one interest over another - and usually the narrow interest is going to win out over the public interest. If you don't understand why that's important, go find a can of the real Dr. Pepper, drink it, and think for a second. Every cola you have ever had, your whole life long, could have tasted that good, should have tasted that good. They didn't, because someone in the government thought that buying someone's vote was worth stealing that happiness from you, long before you or I was born (well, maybe not some of us, heh.)
And that's just the Dr. Pepper. There's plenty of issues of broad national concern to worry about, but how many little, everyday ways is your life not as good as it can be? Ways that aren't mysterious, ways that we know well, but for some reason or other aren't followed, because someone got a law passed. How many of the little laws, the inconsequential little regulations, the unanticipated ancillary effects, are keeping our lives from being Dr.-Pepper-with-cane-sugar good?
32 and all's well
Turned 32 today. Woke up and found that the Supreme Court had incorporated the 2nd amendment. Thanks, guys! Boy, that's a hard present to top.
(Not that my Texan rear was short on protections for that sort of thing, local law being what it is. But I still approve!)
Spent the weekend playing Just Cause 2. A little repetitive but still good shoot'em'up fun. Essentially a Grand Theft Auto-esque sandbox game, with the added joy of playing on a tropical island. Terrible writing, of course (and I mean it; this thing is offensive to everyone, and just poorly written and acted). If I was there for the plot, I'd be greatly disappointed. On the other hand, it's not so bad doing missions for different factions when they're all completely terrible people that you, in fact, are planning to screw at the earliest available opportunity, and the main villain is essentially a Kim Jong Il clone, so hooking cables up to statues of him and pulling them down is satisfying.
The gameplay's entertaining, mostly because it's quite kinetic. Between your never-ending supply of parachutes and your forearm-mounted grapple claw, you're what the Bionic Commando wanted to grow up to be. At the top of a cliff and need to get to the bottom? Just base-jump down! At the bottom, need to be at the top? Just grapple up, or parachute-climb using the grapple to keep pulling you along. Soldiers get tired of taking assault rifle rounds to the face, and call in a chopper? Rejoice - it's like they're delivering a gun platform to you via FedEx! (I hijack more choppers...)
Even the cars handle a little better (and it's very easy to leap from car to car to car, just by pressing a button, like you were starring in The Matrix...) Though honestly, I don't jack that many cars - their need to stick to roads cramps my style, and they're only a little faster than a parasail run.
A quick question if I may. How active is the ham community there in Houston? I only ask because I'm going to be moving that direction in the next few months (Yes. I know. Houston in the dead of summer. It happens.), and I was wondering whether it would be worthwhile to refresh my memory on... stuff. I've also been curious what band and output combination I would need to tag back to Phoenix from there. I've got my 8900 finally, so I could try 6m and 10m.
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I, ah, don't actually live in Houston these days... moved to Dallas two years back.
There are two or three ham clubs of good size. Dad's a member of NARS, and the Texas DX Society is pretty active too. On the other hand, he hasn't been doing as much lately (he's right on the edge of retiring and work leaves him pretty tuckered out), and apartment living plus tiny commute leaves me no time to operate up here.
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at July 11, 2010 06:44 PM (mRjOr)
Railgun and the "technocratic nightmare"
From Ani-Nouto:
Watching Index and Railgun, you can't help but get the feeling that not all is right in Academy City. For such an advanced techno-capital, with darned near panoptic observation and super-powered anti-crime units, there still seems to be an awful lot of crime going on. Spoilers below the fold... more...
Part of that is that Academy City is a giant battle arena for the higher-powered psychics.
Consider how many times (in the two series) Mikoto seeks out other people of high power and actively attacks them, or invites their attacks against her. Not just her several attacks against Touma, either.
And she's never investigated or charged. There seem to be two laws in the city, with the other applying to L4's and L5's, who are largely immune to the common law.
It's not like any competent investigation couldn't figure out that it's her doing it. There isn't anyone else in the city who can do some of the things she does (like knocking out parts of the power grid). It's that the investigators are being ordered to stay clear.
Well, essentially yes. If they're working off of the theory that psychics fighting each other result in more powerful psychics, then they want to encourage that sort of thing. With Accelerator, they've instituted a program to build him up with something like a quantized combat paradigm, but they're clearly comfortable having their other psychics get into scraps with each other.
And it's working, no? Psychics do get more powerful with use, subject to some sort of internal limit that differs from person to person. Mikoto didn't start off super-huge, the way Nanoha did, she just grew into it. And if she's so powerful that she can clock in as L5 while still holding back...
I suppose the real question would be, what would the city do if one of its high-L psychics was to become a threat against the city? If you think about it, none of them are - Accelerator keeps his murders on the down-low, as it were, and Mikoto doesn't cause much mischief with her power, beyond the occasional theft from a vending machine.
Or do we have that backwards? It's possible that Academy City is a "bad psychic" trap... if all psychics start off low-level, generally speaking, they'll get enough power to be tempted to misuse it at a point where they don't have so MUCH power that they'd be hard to stop. You get lots of L2 and the occasional L3 mixed in with the punks that Judgment chews on all day. In that sense, though, it's important that there BE punks, gangs, and opportunities for petty crime, because the last thing you want to do is spook your potential psychics into playing nice until they've gained tremendous power.
So Mikoto and Accelerator are, in that sense, end products of a system that weeds out the kind of psychics that will abuse their powers for personal gain (if we ignore what Accelerator does with the Misakas, which were after all purpose-built for him to do that, he doesn't actually go around raising hell...) Different as they are, their value systems clearly don't include them using their powers in a way that would threaten the city, certain circuit breakers aside.
Or am I wrong? Do they end up introducing L4 or L5 criminal psychics at any point?
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at June 25, 2010 06:07 PM (pWQz4)
On Global Warming
I've been meaning to do a post like this for a while...
When people talk about global warming, the legitimacy of the science backing it, etc., they're talking about several different issues and questions all rolled into one. They are these:
1) There are difficulties with temperature measurements. We don't have the luxury of being able to directly measure temperatures from a hundred years ago, or fifty years ago. (Or even five minutes ago, though we do a pretty good job of direct observation these days, so our recent records can be taken as essentially accurate.) Early temperature records were often taken inconsistently, with poor-quality instruments, over only a fraction of the area we might be interested in. Beyond that, we're forced to rely on proxies, such as ice cores and tree-ring data, that don't correlate all that well with actual temperatures.
2) On top of that, the data sets that we've been using for global warming analysis have been normalized in processes that are, well, shall we say not entirely transparent and well-documented? Now, this isn't necessarily instant evidence that they were falsified by crazed global warming activists who want to seize control of all industrial activity (they won't show up for a few sections!) But it does limit the usefulness of those data sets when it comes to analyzing the climate. We're studying a very complex system with relatively poor tools. We know that there are cycles that we only poorly understand, and we suspect that there are additional cycles that we don't understand at all (and we are absolutely sure that there's one big ice age-temperate cycle that we can't even describe properly). Data that's been normalized, especially data that's been normalized by hand, reduces our ability to accommodate questions regarding these cycles. Oh, we need to take into account El Nino-based warming? But do we need to apply that correction across the board, or have some of our observations already been Nino-corrected? Double-correcting is as bad as ignoring it; worse, because then we may think we have reached a solid conclusion when we have not.
3) There are limits to the resolution and utility of computer modeling of a complex system. I'm regularly astounded by encounters with individuals who believe that the computer models are modeling actual, physical processes that are understood in their entirety by the scientists creating the model; in short, they don't understand the difference between the sort of observation a physicist might make in a lab, and the output of a statistical model that takes topographical and temperature data as inputs to approximate weather processes that we can't model in the micro sense, much less the macro sense. In this sense, the models' failure to correctly model the relative temperature stability of the last decade should at least be troubling. Yes, okay, I'm willing to grant that the last decade might be an anomaly in the context of a gradual increase of temperature, but it's not like the models were predicting the anomaly; even now they can't really account for why the expected warming didn't happen, without applying a pretty big fudge factor to account for it without actually explaining it. To the extent that reality doesn't conform to your model, that suggests your model is faulty!
4) On top of that, the models that predict catastrophic warming in the next century do so mostly through the assumption of certain positive feedback loops (event A promotes B, B promotes A, A promotes more of B, etc.) The problem that you run into here is that positive feedback loops don't tend to result in broadly stable systems; if warming tended to suddenly result in a lot more warming, we have to explain why things haven't spiraled into disaster areas when those events have occurred in the past. (Yes, we've been warmer in the past. One can argue that we haven't had as much atmospheric CO2 in the past to go with that warmth, but the CO2 isn't generally involved in the feedback loop. Rate of change arguments don't really have a lot to do with this either - those have more to deal with habitat than climate.)
5) The computer models use pretty loose statistical standards of evidence (mostly 90% confidence levels). Granted that it's not like they can fire up their office mini-Gaea to run experiments. But if you move the error bars up to 95% or so, your error bars get big enough to include the null hypothesis (i.e. they suggest but don't prove warming). Keep in mind that those error bars have nothing to do with the previous sections - they reflect the chance that, if the underlying models are sound, that the statistical analysis is just flat wrong.
6) CO2 emissions can't be limited by country; they call it "global" warming for a reason. Emissions which occur in China or India have the same effect as emissions from your backyard. Thus, taking action country by country to limit emissions is worthless - to the extent that industry can relocate to regions without a CO2-emission legal limit, it does. This has certainly been the experience of Europe under the Kyoto treaty. In fact, arguably it could even make the problem worse, if the industry that relocates is then powered by less-efficient hydrocarbon-burning plants, characteristic of developing nations. (Does nobody remember the fuss with Beijing, smog, and the '08 Olympics?)
7) The chances of getting India or China to agree to an international system of emissions control is significantly less than zero. Well, it's no surprise. India and China have tremendous populations still mired in subsistence farming; these populations need access to energy and industrial goods in order to modernize. For them, the worst-case scenarios presented by global warming activists aren't nearly bad as "just do what you're doing now for the next 50 years". (Subsistence farming -sucks-!) Should we come up with a magic-bullet solution, that allows us to generate the power we need without setting fire to a hydrocarbon, doubtless they will agree to go along (probably asking for significant subsidies to help them make the conversion, but meh.)
8) It's not a magic bullet, but we do have a method of producing significant electric power without burning hydrocarbons; it's called nuclear fission. It works with current technology, it has a good safety record (especially if you discount Russian engineering design, and if you compare it to the radioactive emissions caused by, say, coal plants). France has embraced nuclear fission as a source of the majority of its domestic electricity and had no problems for decades. The failure of global warming activists to embrace nuclear energy is, well... illustrative, and has a lot to say about the objectives of a lot of those who fall under that umbrella.
ALL of these segments are independent of each other, more or less. We could perfectly resolve the political situations, but if the original data is sufficiently crappy, so too the science based on it. The data could be perfect, but fed into statistical models that just aren't up to the modeling job. The models could be predicting today perfectly, but the positive feedback mechanisms that they've posited for the future might simply not work that way. The science could be 100% flawless, but good luck convincing a Chinese peasant that because of that, his family should starve in the next famine.
Sorry that I went on a bit of a political/scientific jag there. Holiday from Haruhi DVD subtitle formatting (damn you, Minoru Shiraishi!)
To start, a general comment on the first five points collectively- I may be mistaken, but your comments give me the impression that you believe that anomalous temperatures in the last century are the primary, or even sole, piece of evidence for climate change. But even if we couldn't measure modern temperatures as all, we would have cause to be concerned-
Firstly, Human activity has increased the concentration of greenhouses gases in the atmosphere. That's pretty straightforward to measure and I don't think anyone disputes that.
Secondly, Greenhouse gas concentrations change the radiation balance of the Earth, which in turn changes the surface temperature of the Earth. This is pretty basic physics which has been understood for over a century- you can look at the absorption spectrum of these gases and see that they transmit visible light but absorb the kind of infra-red radiation given off by the surface of the earth.
So it's pretty well understood that some level of global warming should occur, and in fact was predicted as early 1896. It's only in the past couple of decades that the effect has been strong enough for us to directly measure- but those measurements should be taken as confirmation of the predictions of physics and not as our first indicator of a problem.
That's not to say that the measurements aren't importantly- firstly, it's good to have further evidence in support of that theory, if the temperature record were in stark contrast to what we'd predict we'd want to reevaluate the above argument to see what we might be missing. Also, it's important to understand feedback mechanisms- if the direct effect described above were all that was happening, we'd expect the effect to be much smaller than we are seeing, and measuring temperature changes helps us understand these mechanisms.
On to some of the individual points- 1,2- You bring up some excellent points about the difficulties involved in taking accurate temperature readings, not much to add here. 3- Again, good points about difficulties in computer simulations. But you say that you are concerned that we haven't been able to predict future global temperatures accurately, while I would say there are some very good reasons to think that it would be impossible to do so. There are completely unpredictable events which have major forcing effects on the global temperature. For a dramatic example, see if you can find a plot of the temperature record around the end of the 19th century. There is a pronounced dip around 1883 when Krakatoa exploded- the temperature was depressed for a good four years following this event. Without knowledge of these and other forcing effects I don't think it's possible to predict global temperatures, at least not on a year by year basis- the best one can do is check after the fact whether the temperature record is consistent with one's model. That's not nearly as strong evidence in favor of a model as prediction would be, but I think it's the best we can do. 4- You argue here that systems with positive feedback loops are generally unstable, but that is not, in fact, correct. Certainly systems with very strong feedback loops can be unstable, but that's not a general quality of feedback. Consider a simple system where a temperature of x results in a forcing of f*x. The feedback effect of this term will be of order f^2*x, and higher order terms will give the series x*(1+f+f^2+f^3...). Now for f greater than or equal to 1 this gives the kind of runaway effect you describe, but in general the total effect can be any arbitrary multiplier- for example if every degree change resulted in another half degree, the total effect would be to double the size of any change. Certainly there is no reason to conclude from positive feedback effects that things will spiral out of control. I think the concern is more that we would have difficulty living outside of a very narrow temperature band- if feedback effects result in the temperature changing a couple of degrees, we'd have problems coping, not because it would continue to compound but just because that would be enough. 5- I don't think any computer simulation can prove global warming with 100% confidence. But don't you think 90% confidence would be plenty to worry over? If the Earth had a 90% chance of being hit by a meteorite that would change the climate several degrees I think it would be well past the time to be concerned.
6,7- Largely in agreement with you about the political challenges ahead.
8- I'm very much pro nuclear power. Even if we can develop cleaner energy sources down the road, I can't imagine that happening quickly and we need something during the transition period. I'm as upset as you are that it hasn't been embraced.
Posted by: Dudest at June 16, 2010 08:25 PM (/OnPc)
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Well, keep in mind that "greenhouse gases" and "CO2" are not equivalent. CO2 is a greenhouse gas, but there are others, and in fact other gases have a much stronger greenhouse effect (relative to their concentration in the atmosphere) than CO2 does. Methane, for example, has a very strong greenhouse effect associated with it; it doesn't get a lot of play because it has a very low concentration to start with, and most of that comes from the intestinal tracts of agricultural livestock. (Granted that people talk about released methane deposits from the sea floor as a possible global-warming related problem...)
The real kicker, though, is that numero uno when it comes to greenhouse effect is water vapor. But water vapor's inherently tied up with weather; the atmospheric content of water vapor is not a phenomenon that can be measured or understood properly except in the context of weather, and not climate-average weather but is-it-raining-tomorrow weather at that. Which means that it's not modeled well, because the models can only approximate the effects of weather, not actually model it.
But that's potentially huge, and yeah, it could go either way - if climate warming resulted in an increased amount of water vapor in the air, that would suggest a positive feedback event. But if the increased water vapor caused increased cloud formation, that would tend to increase atmospheric reflection, affect the albedo, and become a negative feedback event. And... you see how it rapidly becomes complicated.
Honestly, the idea that a couple of degrees of warming would inherently cause problems is bunk. Too much heat is bad in an "oh god it's hot, I want shade and a cool drink" way, but it's not the civilization-killer the way another ice age would be. It's something we could cope with until such a point as better options than setting fire to a petrochemical become available...
Your comment regarding statistical probability is a little odd. No computer simulation could prove global warming to 100%, simply because of the uncertainties present elsewhere in the data. The 90% means that, if everything else is accurate (i.e. if the temperature measurements are accurate, nothing's being double-accounted for, and the models are 100% accurate representations of reality), there's still a 10% chance that the model's results have nothing to do with reality. For that sort of thing, you generally DO want a 95% statistical chance or better; certainly you'd demand it from the FDA or from an engineer building a bridge.
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at June 16, 2010 09:04 PM (pWQz4)
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I certainly hadn't meant to imply that CO2 was the only greenhouse gas, and I'd agree that the effects of water vapor are incredibly important. Another good example of the kinds of input that are impossible to predict ahead of time, making predictions on a year by year basis impossible. As you say, the final effect of increased greenhouse emissions depends in a detailed way upon the feedback mechanisms.
I think you are dramatically underestimating how bad more than a couple degrees change would be for much of the world. My understanding is that a four degree change would result in sea levels rising by about half a meter, which is enough to displace about 1.5 million people. I'd also be concerned about the effects on our food supply.
We're agreed that computer simulations estimates can only be accurate up to the degree that the assumptions built into them can be trusted. But why assume that any flaws in the assumptions mean it overestimate the risk of climate change, when it is equally likely that any existing flaws cause us to underestimate risks? Uncertainty just makes things more variable- it certainly doesn't make them any safer.
As for how much risk we should tolerate, I have to say I find your reasoning odd as well. The accuracy we expect from the FDA and bridge builders stems from how much risk we are willing to tolerate- we will not accept a 5% risk that a drug is unsafe, or that a bridge will fall down during use. We would never say that a drug must be shown to be more than 95% fatal before we would ban it, or that a building must be shown to be more than 95% likely to collapse before we would condemn it. So why would we say that not only is 5% risk of global warming not enough to take action, as we would with an unsafe drug or building, but that even a 90% risk is not enough, and that we must wait until we have shown with over 95% certainty that we are taking a risky action before we become concerned?
Posted by: Dudest at June 16, 2010 09:43 PM (/OnPc)
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You're still conflating statistical certainty with probability. The 90% isn't "this has a 90% chance of happening". It's "there's a 10% that even if we're totally correct in our methodology, understanding of climate, data handling techniques, etc., that we're still completely wrong - that the data set that we have is insufficient to the point where it doesn't say anything about climate change at all."
It's not done at 90% because we're incapable of running the calculations at 95% statistical probability. It's because the error bars at 95% are so large that they include the null hypothesis. (Remember, when you're dealing with a statistical model of an event of unknown probability, you're just saying "the mean is somewhere within the error bars"; you're NOT saying "it's smack dab where I think it is with a normal distribution of chance either way", and it's a common misconception to assume that.)
Over 100 years, possibly displacing a million people isn't of a whole lot of consequence. That's maybe a quarter Afghanistan or half a Sudan. I mean, not great, to be sure, but we regularly tolerate refugee-producing events of a similar scale, but which would be vastly easier to solve. If you're worried about a refugee problem, spending money on carbon is the least efficient way to go about it. (The same goes for third-world health outcomes.)
Food supply? We've got large amounts of land which are currently of only marginal value as agricultural land, because it's too cold; a few degrees of warming turns big swathes of the north US, south Canada, and endless miles of Siberia into arable land. For there to be a serious issue with food supply, there would have to be widespread dessication events of the type which alarmists are fond of alluding to, but which the scientists are not predicting (their climate models just don't include those details, after all). Sure, there's some costs involved in repurposing various types of agricultural land, but in a world of agri-subsidy, the overall risk is pretty minimal.
A lot of the above arguments aren't indictments of the motives of the people involved in advocating for carbon emission controls. The models aren't deficient because of a conspiracy to lie about the results of the models; they're deficient because what they're trying to do is really hard. But it's still possible that they can be, simultaneously, the result of the best science available to us, and not sufficient to prove the case. I'd go further than that, actually. They're definitely not sufficient to prove the case.
That said, the argument about nuclear is pretty much a direct indictment of the motives of those advocates. You're correct that we know enough that there should be some concern. We have a potential solution, or at least something that we can do that would both help ameliorate the problem, and can be justified on grounds having nothing to do with climate change. But as we agree on this point, I won't belabor it.
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at June 17, 2010 03:46 AM (mRjOr)
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"conflating statistical certainty with probability"- I don't think I am, but perhaps I'm drawing an inference from what you stated that you didn't intend. You've stated several times that if the error bars were extended to allow a 95% confidence level that they would include the null hypothesis that climate change was not occurring- and I inferred from this that at a 90% confidence level the studies you are considering do not have this possibility within their confidence range. On the other hand if those models predict climate change with less than 100% probability we have to further discount that rate by 10% to account for the chance that we have a false positive, the issue of statistical certainty you brought up. Could you clarify whether you in fact meant for the possibility of no climate change to fall within the 90% confidence interval, because I'm getting a different impression from your later comments than I did from your initial comments.
I still think you are being incredibly blase about the risks involved in climate change. We're basically engaging in reckless geoengineering by changing the chemical concentrations in our atmosphere, and our best guess as to the consequences is that they will be dangerous to us. If we are highly uncertain about the consequences, that should make us more cautious, not less. You say that our climate models don't go into the details of the effects on our food supply- you shouldn't take that to mean that we will definitely be able to handle any problems, it means that we are going in blind and thus that this is extremely risky behavior. Also, why do you assume we have 100 years to deal with any population displacement? And could you provide some evidence that tackling global warming, for example by switching to nuclear power, would be the least efficient way to handle a refugee problem?
I'd agree that this is an incredibly hard problem, but I'd also say that the scientists working on it are aware of the issues we're discussing here and have been careful to avoid making any claims stronger than the evidence supports. I'd also agree that we don't have absolute proof of climate change, and I don't see how we could ever be completely certain without the sort of "office mini-Gaea" you jokingly referred to earlier, but I think the preponderance of evidence is in support of this theory, and that even if we think there is only a small chance of it occurring, a cost-benefit analysis would support taking steps to prevent it. I think you are rightfully skeptical of our ability to predict future temperatures accurately with current models, but I think this is not our sole or even primary piece of evidence for climate change.
(Lastly, this is kind of an aside, but- why the concern with the possible motives of people in favor of taking steps to curb climate change but against nuclear power? I mean, yes, there are some very silly people in the world, and some of them will take a knee-jerk stance of whatever they perceive to be the green solution, and there are also some people who will take a knee-jerk stance against doing anything about climate change for equally silly reasons. But why should we worry about either camp for a second, when we can just focus on the actual evidence? Supposing some people come to the right answer for the wrong reason, should that make us hesitate at all if we independently came to the same answer?)
Posted by: Dudest at June 17, 2010 05:07 AM (/OnPc)
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A quick explanation of how the confidence intervals work - the size of the error bars and the level of confidence are inversely related. At a greater level of confidence (that is to say, the percentage chance that the statistical data underlying the model is sufficient to indicate that the results of the model are significant), we have greater error bars - we're more sure that we're barking up the right tree, as it were, so long as we're willing to expand the definition of "right tree" to a bigger clump of trees, any one of which could be the one we're supposed to be barking up. We can narrow down that clump of trees (our error bars), but at the same time, we have relatively less chance of being barking anywhere like in the right area at all.
It's not so much that I'm blase about the risks, as that I recognize that there's a lot of terrible things going on in the world. Amazingly, a lot of those things don't have anything to do with global warming. If the suffering of refugees is what moves you, there are far more refugees being created by other causes than global warming (and causes that might, just might, be amenable to change with less than a mythical concerted effort world-wide). If poverty is what moves you, there's a great amount of poverty in the world as it is, and to put it bluntly, almost all efforts to prevent global warming will make it harder for impoverished nations and peoples to industrialize and enjoy the fruits of modern society.
You mention a cost-benefit analysis; the UN did one as part of a development conference a few years ago, to see what sort of expenditures in poor African nations would promote the most overall well-being. If I recall correctly, water sanitization and mosquito netting came in at 1 and 2, or possibly 2 and 1, with a whole raft of development projects coming in after those; global warming amelioration was dead last by over three orders of magnitude (which is to say, each dollar you spent on mosquito netting was worth more than $1000 you spent on CO2 reduction).
The reason I mention motive is that there are several potential solution spaces, if you'll allow me to use that term; a lot of people seem to have already come to the conclusion that the correct solution space is to limit industrial activity to generate less CO2 (as opposed to expanding nuclear power, or direct amelioration through geo-engineering, or "just deal with the effects"). Given the limited utility of the reduce-industry approach, given the geopolitics and economics involved, you'd expect it to be the least popular based on merits alone. Certainly, some of the anti-nuclear bias is just plain anti-nuclear bias, but to a degree, you have to ask, is it just that some people aren't interested in solutions that don't result in turning off the lights and shutting down plants? Certainly some people have been advocating for just that, long before global warming was an issue...
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at June 17, 2010 03:33 PM (pWQz4)
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Your description of a confidence interval is exactly how I thought they worked, so I'm not sure where the confusion is coming from. Perhaps I can clarify my earlier comment- I wasn't saying that the model estimated a 90% chance that global warming was real and a 10% chance that it wasn't. I was saying that if it says global warming is real with a 90% confidence interval, then with a 90% chance we are "barking up the right tree" and global warming is definitely real, and with a 10% chance we are "barking up the wrong tree". If that is the case we have no idea what the chance of global warming being real is, but it has to be between 0% and 100%. Using conditional probabilities we can bound the chance of global warming being real between 90% and 100% chance in that scenario. Now, that's all assuming that the simulations predict global warming with certainty- I took you to be stating that but I'm not certain about that part.
That UN cost-benefit analysis you mention sounds very interesting- I'm going to try to track that down, and I may ask you for a link if I have trouble finding it. Frankly, it would be quite a relief to me if it were to turn out that the worst case scenario were not as bad as I had thought. I am under the impression that we could potentially be driving ourselves extinct, which is a possibility I find terrifying, and I would be very happy if I were to discover that this is not actually a possibility.
I guess I still don't see other people's motivations should be a concern here. I feel like the task before us is to find out how risky climate change is, do a cost-benefit analysis, and determine what the best course of action is. Suppose that as you say, there are people who want to limit industrial activity for it's own sake and are just using climate change as an excuse to push that agenda. I can't see how that would in any way cause us to adopt a different course of action.
Posted by: Dudest at June 21, 2010 08:59 PM (/OnPc)
Endless H8 continues
Leaving aside the issue of the commercial wisdom of Endless Eight, they're actually doing interesting things with the cinematography.
One of the manifestations of this is in the wardrobes. Not only did they re-animate each episode, but the characters aren't wearing the same things - and that's something that takes some extra work, since you have to build up a new character model for each outfit. As it is, it adds to the believability if outfits are largely determined by what the character happened to grab out of the closet that day.
However, they overdid it a little. It makes sense that the day-to-day wardrobes are going to vary. It makes sense that Haruhi's taste in yukata choice is somewhat arbitrary and can turn out differently depending on what she had for breakfast that day. But while we can assume some variety in the closets and in the yukata store, the characters shouldn't have that many different swimsuits. How many bikinis does Haruhi own, anyway?
It's also notable that they've gone to the trouble to throw in some Kyonservice for the ladies; he's posing like a shirtless Calvin Klein model at a couple of points. Dunno, personally I don't swing that way, but maybe someone's enjoying it.
The episodes are still a pain in the butt to work on (too much similar dialogue...), but eh, what can ya do?
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Technically, it could still be just the one swimsuit...Haruhi is just changing it every day. Heck, I'd be surprised if Nagato *owned* a swimsuit before the E8 segment.
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Didn't she pack one for the summer outing? That happens before Endless Eight.
For Nagato, it's completely plausible that her swimsuit would be generated when needed and only then. (Pattern variance would be harder to justify - but if she's mercurial about which mask to choose, well, maybe she has some fashion sense buried in there too.)
But that doesn't work with Haruhi or Mikuru. And if the swimsuits are changing as part of the "world is changing" stuff, then Haruhi is doing something much more complex and iterative than just resetting the clock...
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at May 25, 2010 04:02 PM (pWQz4)
As for how much Haruhi was doing, that's part of what I enjoyed about the E8 arc. Of course, I'm speaking from the point of view of not being familiar with anything other than the Haruhi anime. Maybe it's all explained in the novels. I always get the feeling that Haruhi is subconsciously "tweaking" the world around her all of the time. The level of nitpicking, then, that she was doing in E8 was very specific: something she wanted to happen wasn't happening (or whatever), but the actual course of events made her happy...so she kept changing the insignificant things.
Again, I may be way off base, I'm not familiar with the original material. And I'm sure a lot of people would say that finding meaning in nothing is a perfect description for E8!
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Woah, you drew the Endless Eight straw? Are you to be congratulated or pitied? Did they offer you subsidized therapy for the after-effects?
I owe an obligation buy, but I'm not sure I'll watch the Eight episodes. I sat through Endless 5 twice -I got disoriented when queuing up 6 & didn't realize it was the same episode repeated until most of the way through the second time.
Posted by: Mitch H. at May 24, 2010 01:06 PM (jwKxK)
Note to self: post more than once a month
April turned out to be busy. A wedding to attend in Mobile, lots of car repair stuff, etc. Molars are all healed up, though, so that's one less thing to worry about. And I finished painting another squad of orks... so that's 20 down and well over 100 to go. Heh.
Been watching a real mix of anime lately. Rewatched most of Moyashimon the other night. Been keeping up with Ichiban Ushiro no Daimaou for silly, and finished Hanamaru Kindergarten, but I haven't really tucked into anything new lately. Still need to finish the back end of Railgun, too...
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The Power of Positive Painkillers
Against all expectations, I'm not hurting. It probably hurts less now than it did before I got the teeth cut out...
Of course, I'm also just a little loopy (not tremendously, but maybe two drinks short of sober) and I'm really not up to eating anything crunchy, heh. But I was braced for much worse than this - the last time I helped someone out after they had wisdom teeth out, he was literally pounding the walls because of how much he hurt. I've always had a good pain tolerance, though, thank goodness.
Update: Was loopy enough not to hit "post" above. A few hours later, pain medication still doing the trick pretty well. Spent a lovely evening with my dear mother, working on a jigsaw puzzle.
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Yeah, when I had mine out in 2004 it wasn't nearly as bad as I had feared. Barely even touched the pain prescription, actually, though that was more because I tend to be really stubborn about taking painkillers.
Out of curiosity, did they do they surgery under general or local anesthetic?
Posted by: Andrew F. at April 03, 2010 03:50 AM (kjl/L)
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I had braces as a teenager, and my orthodontist looked at the X-rays and said, when my wisdom teeth came through, I was going to be in for a world of hurt. So they actually took out my rear molars then instead.
Never liked my orthodontist much, but I have to say, my wisdom teeth came through without so much as a twinge.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at April 19, 2010 05:37 AM (PiXy!)
They cut into my gums, broke the wisdom teeth into pieces, and extracted them before the wisdom teeth could push through and mis-align all my newly-aligned teeth.
...yes, I slept through that procedure.
Posted by: Mikeski at April 20, 2010 01:33 AM (GbSQF)
Tooth or dare
Going in Friday to have my wisdom teeth removed. One of the buggers came in crooked and is busily cutting up my cheek every time I open my mouth wide... This weekend will probably be spent uncomfortably healing.
As if I didn't have enough hobby stuff going on, Steven reminded me that Civ 4 was a load of fun, so I got it reinstalled. I had always backed significantly off the video quality in order to get everything to run smoothly; with the new hardware, I can set it "max everything", -windowed-, and it runs completely smoothly.
Diplomatic strategy plays a much bigger role in Civ4 than it did earlier on in the series. Technology trading is still important, to be sure, but the religion aspect throws a monkey wrench in traditional strategies. You can help pacify otherwise-aggressive neighbors by spreading your religion to them. More problematically, most civs will declare the first religion they get as their "state religion" - there's benefits to having one, especially early on - and they hang on to that one like grim death. It can be easier for you to convert yourself to their religion instead!
Interesting week in EVE, as a new large-scale conflict kicks off; a motley group of alliances is conducting an offensive against the Northern Coalition, mostly for the crime of being steeenking rich and out of boredom. Hostilities weren't due to start until tomorrow, but the attackers were moving their main capital fleet as a single unit (and essentially unscreened - there's a limit to how many ships you can have in a single system in EVE before the server hardware starts screaming).
Somehow, either through infiltration or just good scouting, the NC got wind of the move, and dropped a strong attack fleet with a full support element on the capital convoy. Only five percent of the attacking capitals were destroyed before the overloaded system node crashed completely, and the attackers (they need to get some clever name so that it's easier to refer to them!) wisely stayed logged out rather than attempting to log back in to a busy node chock full of attacking capital ships and screen.
A note about EVE combat - since every ship in the game is fitted with short-range faster-than-light drives for in-system travel, one of the major challenges in combat is to keep your opponent from using that drive. (It's not instantaneous, and you can't maneuver in mid-jump, but by the time your opponent figures out where you went, you can be on your way somewhere else...) The necessary modules that create warp disruption effects or fields are rarely mounted on capital-class vessels (which are huge and slow and expensive as hell), since usually capitals operate in conjunction with screening elements which are more suited to that role. Without interdictors and heavy interdictors in their screen, the attacking fleet couldn't prevent the NC capitals from breaking off action when heavily damaged, whereas the NC attackers had the necessary vessels to lock down individual attacking capitals and pound them until they popped.
The corporation I'm a member of is a client of one of the major NC members, so this is cause to celebrate. It's also one hell of a morale hit for the attackers - even before things got underway, they were already faced with system overload, un-fun levels of lag, significant casualties, and a big disruption to their timetable. Morale's important in these things, because large-scale wars tend to turn into grinding attritional battles; both sides are wealthy enough to absorb big losses, but the power to continue the offensive is also largely based on the ability to keep pilots showing up on a regular basis... bored or frustrated pilots find other things to do with their spare time.
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Had to check my calendar again
It's snowing. It's technically spring. I'm just a little disturbed. (I did, however, go outside and throw a snowball, just to have done it.)
I've been having a hobby overload lately. Plenty of games to play (between EVE, Crysis, FF13, and the Dawn of War expansion, I'm spending a lot of time playing). I've got a pile of books to read. I've got a small army of orks to paint, build, and otherwise fool with. There's... not actually a ton of anime to watch this season, but I've been letting it build up, and there are several series I want to go through yet haven't found the time to.
Add to this about 10 hours of overtime a week, and my schedule is loaded fairly heavily.
I enjoyed EVE well enough back in the day, but quit when I got tired of puttering around in high-security space (where there's not much to do but mine and run fairly-uninspiring missions) and getting shot at by pirates in low-security space (a nearly-deserted ghetto where players can hunt other players but not claim territory). A friend got me back into it, and I resolved this time to attempt to play in 0.0 space (the "way out there" territories where there are no laws or rules but those enforced by players). Good decision - joining up with a 0.0 corp gives even some of the boring stuff like mining or shipping goods around an extra frisson of excitement. And the profit margins out there are high enough that you can absorb the occasional ship loss, so long as you're not some kind of Norse berserker pilot.
FF13 is interesting so far, if very firmly set on rails. The characters are somewhat hit and miss (Vanille I would happily drown, for example), but Lightning is working for me, precisely because she is not nice. Extremely not nice. She doesn't like the other characters and lets them know it (sometimes with rejoinders that aren't so much jerky as "downright hurtful".) But she's not some kind of super-tsundere, just an unhappy loner. I was worried that Hope was going to be a Shinji all game long, but he pulled his head out long enough to decide on something to do (even if it's extraordinarily stupid, but what hey, even he knows that). Sazh is just fun.
Enjoyed a few episodes of Hanamaru Kindergarten; it's shocking how you can take a creepy concept like Kodomo no Jikan, throw in some Potemayo, and get something good out of it. Think I'll watch some Railgun next, even if it has less Misaka than I might otherwise prefer...
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Starting: Nogizaka Haruka no Himitsu
Three episodes in, and I'm enjoying it so far. Fairly standard unlikely-romance story... male lead bumps into impossibly-perfect female lead while the latter is doing something embarrassing, doesn't make a big deal about it, and cute romance blossoms. The "embarrassing thing" in this show is anime fandom, but at least so far, it's more of a prop than anything else (not to mention license for the show to do some thematic validation pandering to otaku, but oh well.) It could have been motorcycles or sumo and the show would still be cute.
Few more panty shots than... well, I'd be lying if I said "comfortable with", since goodness knows I'm inured to that sort of thing by now. But as usual, I wish they'd refrain from the little sister ones! Come on, guys, you've got plenty of attractive older characters to show off (and this show does, heh); could we skip the loli-service for once?
I don't have a deep reason to keep watching, but I enjoyed it enough to keep going for a few more episodes. (Well. It has maids... But that's not a deep reason!) From what I've heard, the writing took a downturn in the second season, but there's still plenty of episodes before I get that far!
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Regarding copyright: Sorry for the delay, I dug through what is LITERALLY a foot-thick stack of paper and finally called my lawyer. He explained to me it was a "finding" for our case and was being considered as a "published finding." I was confused, apparently. Supposedly this means that we could apply this finding to any case we brought on material we have copyrighted, but it would not count as precedent for other copyright holders. I'm not certain of the ultimate fate of it, but we had some big guns on our side in the Copyright Office. By the end we weren't dealing with phone answerers but people pretty high up on the food chain who clearly understood that there was going to be a lot of manga and anime being published in the USA in the future and it was an issue that needed attention. I might add that we were never once treated in an inferior way just because we were "comics and cartoon dorks," which frankly surprised me.
As for Nogizaka, it's very good natured and cute but I found a little went a long way.
Posted by: Toren at February 24, 2010 09:32 PM (O0/8k)
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Thanks! I really appreciate that you went to the effort.
I had doubts that it was an established precedent after reading Pournelle's discussions of copyright and fanfiction; if the production of derivative works automatically assigned the copyright to the original creator, then a few of the legal cases he mentions couldn't have been brought at all (mostly situations where fic authors were accusing the creators of SF serials of taking their ideas/work for additional episodes, coincidental or otherwise.) That's not to say that it shouldn't BE an established precedent, of course; it makes sense and would be easy on the paperwork.
I find Comiket fascinating. It's a huge copyright free-fire zone, but... not really, right? The whole thing is gray-market at best, a festival dedicated almost wholly to things which violate IP laws (and take the original work of nice people and do terrible, terrible things with it), and yet everyone generally plays within a set of commonly-understood rules without stepping on each others' toes. I don't know that you could pull that sort of thing off here, the legal culture's just too confrontational.
I also have my doubts that CR could waltz through a copyright case. Steven pointed out the unclean hands doctrine, but CR's history of violations isn't so much checkered as spattered.
Gotta agree about Nogizaka. I don't have a tremendous desire even to finish the last couple of episodes in S1, honestly. Too much other stuff I ought to be watching...
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at February 25, 2010 03:22 AM (mRjOr)
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Well, see, there I was, minding my own business, reading comments about loli-panchira, and suddenly a copyright discussion broke out. Were the panchira copyrighted?
Posted by: dkallen99 at February 25, 2010 02:04 PM (1PFDl)
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My bad. I didn't have Avatar's email so I hijacked this post.
Posted by: Toren at February 25, 2010 05:22 PM (O0/8k)
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Hijack away. I enjoy that kind of discussion more than panchira anyway.
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at February 25, 2010 06:52 PM (pWQz4)
Home! And it's still snowing
Even now, big clots of the white stuff are falling outside.
Frankly, it's a little nicer here than in Chicago. It never really got deep in downtown Chi-town, mostly because they have a fairly efficient snow-removal system - the offending flakes were melted on heated sidewalks, plowed from the road, and stomped into a filthy slush on a minute-by-minute basis. Here it's just piling up. (Though not on roads - it's not cold enough to stick there.)
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Chicago!
I'm in Chicago, Mon-Wed, on business; we're going to be offering Relativity hosting for clients, so it's off to the Kcura headquarters for training.
Not much to say so far. Our flight stopped in Kansas City, where the snow was really coming down (not enough to stop us from taking off, but enough to make 'em de-ice the plane). It's freezing in Chicago, but there's not actually any snow hanging around downtown; I'm assuming that the heat island effect warmed things up to melt it off, because there was plenty still on the ground coming in to the airport. We're supposed to get a couple of inches tonight, though, so that ought to be fun to trudge through in the morning. (Fortunately the hotel's only a block away from the training site, and we've the promise of good deep-dish pizza to keep us interested...)
Don't think I'd want to live here, though. Urban downtown doesn't do anything for me. Hard to drive in, hard to park in, and I can't imagine walking everywhere in the winters they get up here.
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Argh, wish I had known! Duckford's not that far from Chicago, after all. Though the "couple of inches of snow" would have played hob with any plans, as it's closer to 10" up here.
If it ever happens that you're in the neighborhood again, lemme know!
Posted by: Wonderduck at February 09, 2010 10:02 PM (G8/ak)
Video card fall down, go boom
The 5770 card I'd placed in the new machine didn't survive 24 hours; it choked and went stone dead. It has been replaced... with a 5870. The store didn't have any of that model of 5770 when I went back, so I figured, eh, why not spend a little extra for a much better card? (Well, because it's not just a little extra. Guess I should put some overtime in this month... or more like, I already did.)
Today's Supreme Court decision was pretty interesting... the court essentially tore the throat out of McCain-Feingold, so now campaign finance is up in the air again. Interesting stuff, really, opinions all over the place. Take a few minutes to read up if you've got an interest.
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Time for an upgrade
The home PC is ill. Trying to keep WinXP running and trojan-free is getting ridiculous - even being properly cautious and keeping everything updated isn't enough. It's time for a wipe and reinstallation.
...and if I'm going to go to the trouble of wiping everything, I might as well install stuff on completely new hardware, right? So I went down to the local Micro Center and dropped quite a bit too much money on some nice gear. I'll get the old machine working one last time, long enough to get any data I haven't already backed up off and onto the external HD, and then it's format and forget for that box.
New machine will be an Intel i7 860 on a Gigabyte motherboard, 4 GB RAM, Radeon 5770 video, 1 TB HD, and the usual bells and whistles (notably, I don't usually do much in the way of audio.) New case with a nice external SATA port if I ever need to go in that direction, and boy don't I wish I had some of those for the office.
I may configure the old box as a file server, but honestly, I don't know if I have the need for one. Another possibility is as an HTPC in the living room, which might be interesting...
I've opted to pass on the Blu-Ray drive on the new box for the moment. I hardly have any of those now, and I've got a perfectly functional player in the PS3.
With any luck, when I get home tonight, I'll be able to get the new box up and running, with everything moved off the old box that needs moving. The real question is... what to name it...
Edit: Especially when it's glowing an eldritch blue! Darned quiet for as many fans as it's sporting, though. I'm posting from the new box now, which needs about three tons of software installed, and I'm still working out getting Win7 configured up.
Posted by: Andrew F. at January 20, 2010 09:35 PM (if/sI)
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Not entirely certain, to be honest. Admittedly I haven't really had a chance to play around - most of my time has been spent reinstalling software, pulling the video card that didn't survive the burn-in period, and swanning around in a battleship in EVE Online. I'm also affected by a cursor size bug in the video drivers, which is annoying but not Microsoft's actual -fault-.
I don't find the security controls annoying at all, personally. If I'm doing something to install something, I expect it to pop up, and so eventually when it pops up when I'm not expecting it to, it's going to stick out like a sore thumb. On the other hand, I haven't tried using any software that regularly attempts things that set it off.
I'm still busy training it, though. (No, Windows Media Player, I don't want you starting for anything unless I specifically click on you, which I won't ever do.)
Once I get a chance to play with the desktop some, I'll probably do a post or two on it.
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at January 21, 2010 05:02 AM (mRjOr)
I just leave UAC turned off. No less secure than XP, and I never had any major issues with malware on that OS. It's pretty trivial for malware to circumvent UAC on 7's default setting, anyway.
Posted by: Andrew F. at January 21, 2010 04:37 PM (if/sI)
Home from the holidays
A very good Christmas in Houston this year. The whole family was able to get together, along with Jeff's new wife Manesha and her brother Manesh. (Uh. I almost wanted to ask their father "why did you hate your children so?" But my dad's first name is Aubria, so I guess it's not unique...)
Picked up the Carcassonne tabletop game (played it with the folks, and it's quite fun, while not taking too long), as well as novels by Pratchett, Banks, Erikson, and Hamilton. Biggest gift was a nice adjustable easel table, which turns out to have had a broken pen tray for the bottom... except I'm going to be using it as a hobby desk for painting 40K figures, and thus wasn't even going to put it on anyway. Funny how those things work out sometimes. There's also a nice magnifier/light for when I'm doing really finicky detail work. (And, of course, I can plop the table down in front of the TV and catch up on painting and football at the same time, though I don't think I could manage subtitled anime that way.)
And clothing, of course, but I actually asked for that; I'm getting old enough that getting clothing for Christmas is pretty nice (and my hobbies are esoteric enough that sending Mom out to get stuff for them is kind of a crap shoot. "Uh, I need a... stomper? And a DVD of Spicy Wolf?")
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What do you mean, I won?
Went down to the local comic store today for a 40K tourney. They called it on fairly short notice, and Sunday's not their regular tourney day, but ten guys still showed up with a thousand points and a few dozen dice. Three games later, I, uh... I won!
I'd like to say "well, it's because I read my Clausewitz," or something pretentious like that, but there was a lot of luck involved. (I mean, I did read my Clausewitz. I actually enjoy military history. But Clausewitz had very little to say on the subject of orbital insertion as a factor in squad-level combat...)
If anyone's interested, blow-by-blow is below the fold. Sums up easy, though - I had a great time, I won about $60 in store credit (spent, heh), and I'm definitely coming to the next one. more...
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