There's a national election here on the 7th of May. That'll be fun, I always enjoy the process. I never reveal who I vote for, but I also definitely won't vote for the two leading parties (ANC and DA) on principle; I think a two-party democracy is as pointless and doomed as a one-party democracy. With that in mind, I'd like to add my objections against the Vote No campaign, which claims that the way to oppose ANC corruption is for voters to spoil their ballots, i.e. to vote for no party.
Mathematically, this is bullshit. A spoiled ballot actually helps whichever party is already in the lead.
Consider a nice, simple situation in which there are only 4 voters. Let's say 2 of them vote for Party X. That's already giving X a really solid start; whatever the other 2 voters do, X has at least 50% of the votes. If the other two voters vote for Parties Y and Z, X gets 50%, Y gets 25% and Z gets 25%. Simple, yes? It's a cake cut into four slices, and X wins 2 out of 4 slices.
Now let's say our Z voter instead spoils the ballot. This is like throwing away one slice of the cake and pretending it was never there. Now X gets 2 out of 3 slices (66.7%) and Y gets 1 of 3 slices (33.3%). If Y spoiled the ballot too, then there would only be 2 valid slices of cake on the plate, with 100% of them going to X.
This is the situation with South Africa's elections. Only valid, unspoiled ballots are counted as part of the whole cake. Spoiled ballots are junk. Any opposition voter who spoils their ballot is in a very real sense just feeding the ANC a greater percentage of parliament. And if you're like me and don't like the idea of a two-party hegemony, then failing to vote effectively for an alternative party, also gives the DA a lesser but still real boost.
So, vote. Vote well. Vote non-No.
Tuesday, 15 April 2014
Thursday, 13 March 2014
Thoughts on sodium acetate "instant ice"
I've just completed a practical demo with my kids that wasn't a complete success, and part of the reason for that seems to be a lack of good practical guidance online about how best to execute it. So I thought I'd better record my failure, both as reference for my future self (Hey, future self! Looking damn sexy!) and for others who might be trying the same.
The demo was the instant ice effect of sodium acetate, where you pour a liquid onto a surface and it immediately solidifies into a phallic tower. I first saw this on QI last year, and meant to get around to trying it, and then I had one student in particular who was most insistent that I should try it, after their teacher last year apparently failed at it.
The reason it's supposed to work is that sodium acetate in solution has a muchhigher lower melting point than pure sodium acetate, so the solution can be super-cooled, and when the stuff in solution meets a pure crystal, it triggers crystallization of the lot, sort of pulling it out of solution. The main problem I has was in getting the solution to the correct concentration. Too much liquid and it keeps the sodium acetates too far apart, and you just make the table wet. Too little liquid and it solidifies on its own, surprisingly quickly. The best how-to guide I've found for this so far was Helmenstine's write-up on About.com, and that suggests waiting til the boiling mixture of sodium acetate and water has lost just enough water that crystals start forming on the surface. Trouble is, boiling water doesn't leave a nice clear surface, and I had to take it off the flame to settle it before I could tell crystals were forming. Not expecting this, I left it too long and the crystals there quickly grew out of control once it was off the heat.
Getting the balance just right seems to be key, because when I did finally get something like the right effect, my solution was still too 'wet' and the crystal tower was really just a crystal puddle. At the same time, as the liquid rushed out, too much sodium acetate got left behind, 'freezing' along the length of the test tube and down the neck of the funnel. That looked cool, but wasn't what I was aiming for. I'm not quite sure how to keep the solution more evenly concentrated.
Also, for cooling, I used a beaker of ice, with the test tube of solution stuck in it. That went ok, but couldn't have helped the even concentration, as the top half of the test tube was sticking out and presumably not cooling at the same rate. Silly mistake to watch out for next time.
One advantage I did have was starting out with a jar of acetic acid. This saved me all the horrible trouble of boiling off vinegar to get some.
I'd welcome any feedback on how to handle this better, if you can spot anything.
The demo was the instant ice effect of sodium acetate, where you pour a liquid onto a surface and it immediately solidifies into a phallic tower. I first saw this on QI last year, and meant to get around to trying it, and then I had one student in particular who was most insistent that I should try it, after their teacher last year apparently failed at it.
The reason it's supposed to work is that sodium acetate in solution has a much
Getting the balance just right seems to be key, because when I did finally get something like the right effect, my solution was still too 'wet' and the crystal tower was really just a crystal puddle. At the same time, as the liquid rushed out, too much sodium acetate got left behind, 'freezing' along the length of the test tube and down the neck of the funnel. That looked cool, but wasn't what I was aiming for. I'm not quite sure how to keep the solution more evenly concentrated.
Also, for cooling, I used a beaker of ice, with the test tube of solution stuck in it. That went ok, but couldn't have helped the even concentration, as the top half of the test tube was sticking out and presumably not cooling at the same rate. Silly mistake to watch out for next time.
One advantage I did have was starting out with a jar of acetic acid. This saved me all the horrible trouble of boiling off vinegar to get some.
I'd welcome any feedback on how to handle this better, if you can spot anything.
Saturday, 22 February 2014
Troon Ewtral
I've been a very, very busy lad. Teaching full time is very definitely actually full time, and finishing my work day at 16:00 rather than the conventional 17:00 is mainly a safety measure designed to keep me from frying my brain completely. I get no breaks, and most of the time I don't even get a seat. But I'm loving it, and I get the impression that most of my kids are enjoying my lessons.
But I've preserved my weekends and evenings (perhaps even trying to cram too much into those) and it's been a socially very busy time too. DeeTwenty [EDIT: I no longer associate with DeeTwenty and can not endorse it in any way] has become my second home, a great place to roleplay, to play with shooty pew-pew spaceships, or just to hang out and watch movies; I only wish that certain people (who know who they are) would settle their differences and restore the unity of my social circle once more. Obviously my personal convenience and enjoyment is the most important thing here.
But I'm also in a D&D group that has not (yet) used DeeTwenty as its venue. We're using the Pathfinder rules (which I'm not massively keen on, yet I've spent oodles on its rulebooks) to run a whole lot of 2nd and 3rd edition Forgotten Realms adventures. It's been great, and the group is very experienced and fun, including some players (and the GM) who I've been roleplaying with since high school.
And this brings me, slowly and convolutedly, to the point of this post. My main character in that game, Ploon Kloovs, is a true-neutral gnome alchemist, and true neutral is a bit of a tricky thing. D&D reduces all questions of ethics and morality down to 9 basic alignment guides, based on a 2 dimensional wossname. On the one axis, there are the extremes of good and evil, with neutral between them. On the other axis, there is law and chaos, with neutral between them. Any character or monster's moral alignment can be described by its coordinates on each axis, e.g. Lawful Good, Chaotic Evil, Lawful Evil, Chaotic Neutral, Neutral Good, etc. True neutral is the exact center of both axes, a.k.a. Neutral Neutral, or simply Neutral. It's an oversimplification of real behaviour and real rationalisations (or lack thereof), but it's supposed to be used as a tool to help broaden and deepen character roleplaying, a flexible guide, and not as a rigid straitjacket of predetermined behaviour.
It's a harder one to play than any other alignment, except maybe Chaotic Neutral, because it can be hard to distinguish between Neutrality and Chaos (since both represent some absence of clear and obvious Law), and it's hard to intentionally create genuinely chaotic behaviour. The trouble, I think, is that True Neutral really represents two different sorts of behaviour.
On the one hand, there's passive neutrality, neutrality that results from failing to engage with the world one way or another. This is usually the alignment of unremarkable, unnamed background NPCs, the generic peasants who technically exist throughout the Forgotten Realms, but who nobody's ever likely to interact with. On the other hand, there's a more active neutrality, where bold actions are taken, but then balanced out by equally bold actions in the opposite direction, resulting in a net moral effect close to zero. This later model is probably more appropriate for player characters, who have to act in some way or else they might as well not bother being present.
I think a good analogy is pH neutrality. Gold is neutral to acids and bases because it just doesn't react with either very much. Water is neutral to acids and bases because it reacts quite actively but to the same extent with both. Water and gold are both neutral, but for very different reasons, and so they exhibit very different flavours of "neutral" behaviour.
So this is how I've been playing Ploon, with the more active sort of neutral, and it seems to be confusing and frustrating the hell out of the other players. They happily accept it when he lends a hand fighting evil vampires, but object when he tries to steal and destroy their pet vampire. They're annoyed when he insists on checking on the safety of an obscure village that merely has a slightly odd lack of spiders, but pissed off as fuck when he wants to wipe out every living thing in a market place. (To complicate matters further, Ploon is pretty openly racist, a firm and active believer in gnome supremacy; at the same time, most of his adventures end up helping humans, elves and others more than any gnome.)
To an extent, it makes sense that the other player characters would have a problem with Ploon's actions, since they all have different alignments and different goals. It would be weird if the other players all played their characters as fully accepting and appreciating all of Ploon's actions. But beyond that, I think the other players have some out-of-character problems with the concept, with some telling me that they find Ploon to be simply chaotic, not neutral. But this simply isn't so: I have strict rules by which I decide how I'm going to direct Ploon's actions to fit his neutrality, and he's definitely, definitely followed the letter of the law just as often as he's ignored it. I manage this by keeping a running tally of every good, evil, lawful and chaotic action he takes, and I intentionally aim to keep them balanced. I think the other players only notice this when Ploon does something inconvenient, and they're less likely to find lawful and good actions so inconvenient or objectionable - though there was that time Ploon insisted lawfully and goodly on offering the +5 Sword of Awesome back to its rightful owner, when another player character wanted to keep it for himself.
I don't think True Neutral is the sanest alignment to play, and certainly not the one most conducive to party unity. It's also clearly not much like me, as I don't like massacring merchants and every time I take an internet test to tell me my D&D alignment, it comes out as Neutral Good. But it's certainly a fun challenge to play, worth a try every now and then. The trickiness of balancing exactly in the middle is, if nothing else, a good way of learning to tell the other alignments apart more clearly. And one interesting thing is how little a lot of people distinguish between them when deciding who to swing their swords and spells at; being a game of hitting things a lot, there's a lot of (quite enjoyable, as fiction) brutal violence, and it's a hell of a stretch to argue that much of it is really valid as any sort of "good" behaviour, whatever may be written on the top of the character sheet. This was further revealed when Ploon's Neutral Good cousin Zook appeared for a few sessions and merrily talked her way through several conflicts without the need for drawing a weapon. The other players present found this a bit odd and surprising. Perhaps that revelation is what bugs them most?
But I've preserved my weekends and evenings (perhaps even trying to cram too much into those) and it's been a socially very busy time too. DeeTwenty [EDIT: I no longer associate with DeeTwenty and can not endorse it in any way] has become my second home, a great place to roleplay, to play with shooty pew-pew spaceships, or just to hang out and watch movies; I only wish that certain people (who know who they are) would settle their differences and restore the unity of my social circle once more. Obviously my personal convenience and enjoyment is the most important thing here.
But I'm also in a D&D group that has not (yet) used DeeTwenty as its venue. We're using the Pathfinder rules (which I'm not massively keen on, yet I've spent oodles on its rulebooks) to run a whole lot of 2nd and 3rd edition Forgotten Realms adventures. It's been great, and the group is very experienced and fun, including some players (and the GM) who I've been roleplaying with since high school.
And this brings me, slowly and convolutedly, to the point of this post. My main character in that game, Ploon Kloovs, is a true-neutral gnome alchemist, and true neutral is a bit of a tricky thing. D&D reduces all questions of ethics and morality down to 9 basic alignment guides, based on a 2 dimensional wossname. On the one axis, there are the extremes of good and evil, with neutral between them. On the other axis, there is law and chaos, with neutral between them. Any character or monster's moral alignment can be described by its coordinates on each axis, e.g. Lawful Good, Chaotic Evil, Lawful Evil, Chaotic Neutral, Neutral Good, etc. True neutral is the exact center of both axes, a.k.a. Neutral Neutral, or simply Neutral. It's an oversimplification of real behaviour and real rationalisations (or lack thereof), but it's supposed to be used as a tool to help broaden and deepen character roleplaying, a flexible guide, and not as a rigid straitjacket of predetermined behaviour.
It's a harder one to play than any other alignment, except maybe Chaotic Neutral, because it can be hard to distinguish between Neutrality and Chaos (since both represent some absence of clear and obvious Law), and it's hard to intentionally create genuinely chaotic behaviour. The trouble, I think, is that True Neutral really represents two different sorts of behaviour.
On the one hand, there's passive neutrality, neutrality that results from failing to engage with the world one way or another. This is usually the alignment of unremarkable, unnamed background NPCs, the generic peasants who technically exist throughout the Forgotten Realms, but who nobody's ever likely to interact with. On the other hand, there's a more active neutrality, where bold actions are taken, but then balanced out by equally bold actions in the opposite direction, resulting in a net moral effect close to zero. This later model is probably more appropriate for player characters, who have to act in some way or else they might as well not bother being present.
I think a good analogy is pH neutrality. Gold is neutral to acids and bases because it just doesn't react with either very much. Water is neutral to acids and bases because it reacts quite actively but to the same extent with both. Water and gold are both neutral, but for very different reasons, and so they exhibit very different flavours of "neutral" behaviour.
So this is how I've been playing Ploon, with the more active sort of neutral, and it seems to be confusing and frustrating the hell out of the other players. They happily accept it when he lends a hand fighting evil vampires, but object when he tries to steal and destroy their pet vampire. They're annoyed when he insists on checking on the safety of an obscure village that merely has a slightly odd lack of spiders, but pissed off as fuck when he wants to wipe out every living thing in a market place. (To complicate matters further, Ploon is pretty openly racist, a firm and active believer in gnome supremacy; at the same time, most of his adventures end up helping humans, elves and others more than any gnome.)
To an extent, it makes sense that the other player characters would have a problem with Ploon's actions, since they all have different alignments and different goals. It would be weird if the other players all played their characters as fully accepting and appreciating all of Ploon's actions. But beyond that, I think the other players have some out-of-character problems with the concept, with some telling me that they find Ploon to be simply chaotic, not neutral. But this simply isn't so: I have strict rules by which I decide how I'm going to direct Ploon's actions to fit his neutrality, and he's definitely, definitely followed the letter of the law just as often as he's ignored it. I manage this by keeping a running tally of every good, evil, lawful and chaotic action he takes, and I intentionally aim to keep them balanced. I think the other players only notice this when Ploon does something inconvenient, and they're less likely to find lawful and good actions so inconvenient or objectionable - though there was that time Ploon insisted lawfully and goodly on offering the +5 Sword of Awesome back to its rightful owner, when another player character wanted to keep it for himself.
I don't think True Neutral is the sanest alignment to play, and certainly not the one most conducive to party unity. It's also clearly not much like me, as I don't like massacring merchants and every time I take an internet test to tell me my D&D alignment, it comes out as Neutral Good. But it's certainly a fun challenge to play, worth a try every now and then. The trickiness of balancing exactly in the middle is, if nothing else, a good way of learning to tell the other alignments apart more clearly. And one interesting thing is how little a lot of people distinguish between them when deciding who to swing their swords and spells at; being a game of hitting things a lot, there's a lot of (quite enjoyable, as fiction) brutal violence, and it's a hell of a stretch to argue that much of it is really valid as any sort of "good" behaviour, whatever may be written on the top of the character sheet. This was further revealed when Ploon's Neutral Good cousin Zook appeared for a few sessions and merrily talked her way through several conflicts without the need for drawing a weapon. The other players present found this a bit odd and surprising. Perhaps that revelation is what bugs them most?
Tuesday, 14 January 2014
Alive
I don't like not having internet in bed. I've got my phone, but it can't stretch to doing too much more than email. And I can borrow internet at my parents' place, but that has several obvious limits, like not being in my own house.
I start teaching again tomorrow. I have a wild mix of emotions about this, but they've all been drowned in a slurry of bureaucracy. I spent 3 days back in Pretoria last week, trying to sort out my qualifications, and 2 hours this morning just renewing my driver's licence. Most of the rest of today has been sunk into slow progress on further studies.
But I've had a great time since moving back to Joburg. No doubt that this was the best choice, even if the future remains murky. I've done so much gaming! Also, I somehow became first officer of the Dauntless. Still processing that one.
Hopefully I'll get around the blogging more often again. Hopefully this damn heat will fade and we can get the rain I've been hoping for for months.
I start teaching again tomorrow. I have a wild mix of emotions about this, but they've all been drowned in a slurry of bureaucracy. I spent 3 days back in Pretoria last week, trying to sort out my qualifications, and 2 hours this morning just renewing my driver's licence. Most of the rest of today has been sunk into slow progress on further studies.
But I've had a great time since moving back to Joburg. No doubt that this was the best choice, even if the future remains murky. I've done so much gaming! Also, I somehow became first officer of the Dauntless. Still processing that one.
Hopefully I'll get around the blogging more often again. Hopefully this damn heat will fade and we can get the rain I've been hoping for for months.
Sunday, 3 November 2013
Back to the Front
In the pattern of the last two seasons of our Star Trek roleplaying campaign that I run for the Joburg crew of the USS Dauntless, this is the now-traditional inter-season post. It's pretty damn late, considering we ended the last season at the end of July, but better late than stuck in Pretoria forever. (Because I'm leaving Pretoria! Huzzah!)
The third season (confusingly but officially known as season 1 of the Edge of Apocalypse sub-series; a million points to the first person to correctly guess the title I've already picked for the next sub-series) focused on the Dominion War, in parallel with Deep Space 9's 6th season. This ongoing war storyline was a major shift in style for the episodic and peace-loving Star Trek franchise, but it was handled really well and ended up fitting perfectly. It contrasted starkly with the awkward and largely pointless Bajoran religious plot thread the series had tried to mangle in from the start.
It's hard to judge how well my plots have fitted into the grander scheme of the war, but then it wasn't quite meant to. The pressed convicts left over from the earlier Maquis sub-series were intended to go off on sneaky covert operations, a Dirty Dozen in space. They've been doing Starfleet's odd-jobs and dirty work, using an even older, clunkier starship than the one theystole acquired back in their Maquis days. I sent them off to subvert diplomacy and snatch up psychopathic telepaths; I had a big blob creature swallow their ship; I threw swarms of Jem'Hadar at them, and even occasional Tribbles and Borg. Oh, and Hobbits. In return, my players blasted whole mountains to lava, re-introduced dread diseases and stoically kept their old clunker in combat against terrible odds, fighting (and winning) til their ship was no better than scrap.
I was also impressed at the improving quality of character roleplaying I'm seeing. We've been at it for nearly a year now, so I guess everyone's quite familiar with their characters. In fact, our next scheduled session, the start of the next season, will be a day short of the campaign's first anniversary.
The next season starts from an interesting cliffhanger. Our crew, while sneaking around behind enemy lines in the Gamma Quadrant, have had their ship shot out from under them and then the Bajoran wormhole leading back to the Alpha Quadrant vanished before they could flee through it. I look forward to seeing how they get out of this mess. If they do, they get rewarded with a shiny new Intrepid class starship, which will be nice.
We're also getting a new venue, moving into the shiny new DeeTwenty gaming club, because it's awesome [EDIT: I no longer associate with DeeTwenty and can not endorse it in any way]. This does imply some cost per player, but technically we've been putting the cost entirely on whoever our host has been up til now. And it's not like it's very much, especially once you account for the free coffee and myriad other activities the club offers. I'm planning on going there regularly for Monday night roleplaying, monthly Skeptics in the Club, Sunday morning Attack Wing, and whenever the generic boardgames sessions end up happening (I guess any time we feel like it?). There's also been some initial talk of getting a Warhammer group set up, which could get me back into that. And those are just the things I actively intend to get involved in, not the impromptu whims. So there's plenty I'll be squeezing out of my membership fee.
But I digress. Space. The final frontier. Getting back to it. In a couple weeks. It'll be great.
The third season (confusingly but officially known as season 1 of the Edge of Apocalypse sub-series; a million points to the first person to correctly guess the title I've already picked for the next sub-series) focused on the Dominion War, in parallel with Deep Space 9's 6th season. This ongoing war storyline was a major shift in style for the episodic and peace-loving Star Trek franchise, but it was handled really well and ended up fitting perfectly. It contrasted starkly with the awkward and largely pointless Bajoran religious plot thread the series had tried to mangle in from the start.
It's hard to judge how well my plots have fitted into the grander scheme of the war, but then it wasn't quite meant to. The pressed convicts left over from the earlier Maquis sub-series were intended to go off on sneaky covert operations, a Dirty Dozen in space. They've been doing Starfleet's odd-jobs and dirty work, using an even older, clunkier starship than the one they
 |
| Pac-amoeba wants delicious subspace field |
I was also impressed at the improving quality of character roleplaying I'm seeing. We've been at it for nearly a year now, so I guess everyone's quite familiar with their characters. In fact, our next scheduled session, the start of the next season, will be a day short of the campaign's first anniversary.
The next season starts from an interesting cliffhanger. Our crew, while sneaking around behind enemy lines in the Gamma Quadrant, have had their ship shot out from under them and then the Bajoran wormhole leading back to the Alpha Quadrant vanished before they could flee through it. I look forward to seeing how they get out of this mess. If they do, they get rewarded with a shiny new Intrepid class starship, which will be nice.
We're also getting a new venue, moving into the shiny new DeeTwenty gaming club, because it's awesome [EDIT: I no longer associate with DeeTwenty and can not endorse it in any way]. This does imply some cost per player, but technically we've been putting the cost entirely on whoever our host has been up til now. And it's not like it's very much, especially once you account for the free coffee and myriad other activities the club offers. I'm planning on going there regularly for Monday night roleplaying, monthly Skeptics in the Club, Sunday morning Attack Wing, and whenever the generic boardgames sessions end up happening (I guess any time we feel like it?). There's also been some initial talk of getting a Warhammer group set up, which could get me back into that. And those are just the things I actively intend to get involved in, not the impromptu whims. So there's plenty I'll be squeezing out of my membership fee.
But I digress. Space. The final frontier. Getting back to it. In a couple weeks. It'll be great.
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