Consilience #66: Kill All Jedi!

I'm audible for the ninth time. Not only is this 2 episodes in 2 weeks for me, but it also makes a hat trick with #64, the last episode before the hiatus. Time to lay low for a while. There were horrid problems with the recording process, and several times someone (always me, now that I think about it...) got cut off and reduced to staticky garbling. As a result, we had to cut the episode short and Owen and Sue each lost one of their news pieces. Hopefully those can be covered in future episodes.

There is no traffic anecdote. My navigation was 100% spot on for a change, and the route was comfortably (but not suspiciously) easy and clear of traffic. I'll try to cock something up next time.

You can find the file and the show notes for #66 here:
http://consiliencecast.wordpress.com/2013/05/23/consilience-episode-66-learning-to-grow-weed-holy-water-stampeed-and-nigeria-ruins-it-for-the-rest-of-us/

Consilience #65: Resurrected!

I was as surprised to see him here as he was.

I'm audible for the eighth time. After a wee bit of a hiatus, Africa's number 1 (one) science and skepticism podcast has returned. I think we got back into our best possible um-er-ah vocal stride, but I do feel that we were a tad short on detail, and I was definitely not as deeply prepared as I'd have liked. I'm quite sure I didn't get the explanation of Einstein's "beaming" sufficiently accurate.

You'll note also that I abandoned my new Citation Needed segment. I wasn't entirely happy with it to begin with, and the big hiatic gap kind of made it impractical to carry on. So it's out for now, but if you have suggestions on how to make it run more smoothly, or for a better replacement segment, I'm non-literally all ears.

Now, the traditional traffic anecdote. A large part of the hiatus was that Owen moved all the recording gear to a new house (and then eventually decided it would be most practical to store himself and all his stuff with the recording gear). I went to this place for the first time on the Saturday before we recorded, and had no problem finding it, even though it's another part of Joburg I have zero prior familiarity with. And yet, somehow, on the Tuesday we recorded, I still managed to get myself lost for a while. At least that time Owen & Sue let me into the house when I arrived, so silver linings everywhere.

You can find the file and the show notes for #65 here:
http://consiliencecast.wordpress.com/2013/05/15/consilience-episode-65-malagasy-locusts-cellphone-losers-and-dirty-hippie-stoners/

A Good Future, Today

(If you hate Star Trek, skip this post. But then you might just need to skip my whole blog.)

[EDIT: I can no longer endorse the Dauntless, nor honestly suggest that it meets the ideals suggested below. I'm only leaving this here because I don't delete my blog posts. However, there are better STARFLEET chapters that you may wish to consider instead.]

Take a look at this slightly aged but well-made video:

Doesn't that just make you want to rush off and find your nearest Starfleet recruiter? Good news: That's me! Let me recruit you, in my official capacity as Recruiting Officer of the USS Dauntless. Free red shirts for anyone with no first name.

In all seriousness, if you enjoy Star Trek, and science fiction in general, and even more generally all the nice things science gives us, then you should really consider signing up with the Dauntless. It's a Star Trek fan club, but that doesn't describe it well. Liking a TV series isn't the only thing we have in common, as our members share a lot of other interests and activities. I originally got involved with them through the Gauteng skeptics and Consilience, as there's some big overlap between those communities. All the Skeptics in the Pub/Park meetings I go to are full of Dauntless crew. Real science is a key interest for most of us, and there's even a big expedition we're planning for the end of the year out to Sutherland, looking at all the big telescopes.

Then there's gaming. Our Joburg region in particular has a well organised collection of people who're into miniature wargaming, CCGs, board games, paintball and, on occasion, roleplaying games. The other regions have also dipped into these sorts of things, a bit less, but probably only because they don't have as many members.

We also do some useful, constructive stuff. The Joburg region has a big blood donation day every couple of months, down in the South East, and I keep meaning to organise a second one for the North West of Joburg, so hopefully that'll be a thing soon enough, especially if we get some more members on this side of the world. And the Cape Town region is currently leading the charge, putting big Joburg to shame, on collecting supplies for the SPCA. Really, our good works are only limited by our members' time, money, energy, skills and social connections, so we could potentially do a bunch of other useful things too, with sufficient planning and imagination.

The underlying theme of it all - the sciencey stuff, the fun and games, the stuff that's useful to society - is a desire to push, step by realistic step, towards the idealistic future presented on Star Trek, because it's a good vision, one worth wanting to emulate. It's a world made better by science and reason and getting shit done without crushing jackboots. All these little activities, small things we'd likely want to do anyway, give us a way to express that ideal and do something small but practical to make it real, a centimeter at a time.

None of it's compulsory or obligatory. It's just a nice way of associating with like-minded geeks who're comfortable being geeks. We have ranks, but that's not about control and authority, it's just a fun way to acknowledge your contributions and participation. To add flavour, the whole club is represented as a starship, the USS Dauntless (a name with a rich legacy), which adds a bit of a subtle roleplaying element to all our interactions, and the rank thing fits with that nicely. It's better than just clicking 'Like' on Facebook, because you actually get something out of it, but it's all fun, easy, voluntary stuff, so you need never feel trapped by it. You have almost literally nothing to lose by joining, since Dauntless membership is free.

And we're saving up all of our non-fees for a club house just like this!

The Dauntless is also just one chapter of a larger network of Trek clubs called STARFLEET International, and we're so far the sole chapter in the entire Africa & Middle East region. STARFLEET membership does have a small cost, but that's separate from basic Dauntless membership, and isn't necessary for most members. Again, everything's very casual and easy with us. STARFLEET as a broader organisation does lots of good and interesting things (I'm an especially big fan of their online learning system, Starfleet Academy), but it has two components that bug me: The Starfleet Marine Corps and the Chaplains' Corps. In other words, the subsections for fans of violence and religion who share a preference for strict order and hierarchy. Presumably these are a product of the gun-totin', god-fearin' segment of STARFLEET's predominantly US membership base, and maybe the Federation's principle of tolerance can be applied to including them, but they do seem to have completely missed Roddenberry's ideal of peace and reason. Luckily, both corps are minorities within the global membership, and have effectively no practical effect on the Dauntless's activities, so it's easy to ignore them.

So, join the crew of the USS Dauntless today, and boldly go where you want humanity to go in future, and have a good time doing so.

The Fear of Politics

At least once a month, I spot someone blaming something on politics, suggesting that politics is inherently dirty and bad. This is one clue I use to tell if someone's going to be incredibly tedious to talk to, because it reveals a serious lack of understanding of what politics actually is. I'm sure you don't want me to think of you as tedious and ignorant and cynical and smelly, so let's all clear it up.

Politics is a process that can be summed up as the means for determining "who gets what, when, where, how and sometimes why." It's inevitable and natural and useful, and it emerges any time that groups of people form. The bigger and more enduring the group, and the more competition for resources, the more pressing this process becomes. We can all agree that the shit we like (food, housing, interwebs, sometimes clothing) doesn't just appear out of nowhere. Someone's got to procure or produce it, and this has been true during (and before) all of human existence. Figuring out who has to do what to make sure this actually happens was tricky enough for early humans, because life was shitter and shorter, and one bad winter meant a fairly immediate choice between only feeding yourself, or risking starvation by sharing food with Occ, who offers you only long-term survival advantages.

In a modern society, it's way more complex, as we have billions of people's economic activities interwoven by several different threads, performing way more tasks to provide way more products and services. This is mostly good; I like my microwave food, my microwave, my internet full of porn, my warm bed, my sturdy house, etc., but I don't want to have to make and maintain all these things myself (except my porn; 99% of it is just pictures of me anyway). But it does mean we each have a lot more to consider when judging the impacts of who we do and don't share our world with.

There's also the issue of laws. I quite like not being stabbed in the face, and I think it's a good idea that we all agree not to stab me in the face. It's such a good idea that I'm willing to agree not to stab any of you in the face in return for you not stabbing me. We can make that a law. But this gets complicated too, partly because of the growing complexity of a growing total population, but mostly because we all want different things, and we're good at convincing ourselves that we're in the right. If a starving young street starfish takes a crust of bread out of Bill Gates's rubbish, is that theft? What if he takes it off his plate instead? What if he adds jam too? How about a jacket to keep warm? How about that diamond-encrusted monocle, so he can afford to eat and stay warm without having to repeat this exercise over and over? How about the home entertainment system too, so he can get by for even longer? At what point is it too much? Deciding this legal matter becomes a matter of politics, because even in the most oppressive autocracies, unbearable or unenforceable laws can't last long.

So that's all that politics is: The meta-system by which these social systems are set up, sort of analogous to how the grand system of evolution produces a huge variety of individual biological systems. You might complain about the shitty pectoral fins evolution's stuck you with, but you can't realistically exit the system in protest. It's inevitable, but not inevitably bad. The products of politics may not always be what we want, but if we had no way of getting involved in politics at all, we'd all have to be loners, totally dependent on ourselves and nobody else.

I think some people maybe get confused between the words 'politics' and 'politicians' (by which they probably actually mean only government officials and electoral candidates, an even more limited definition). But that also reflects plain cynicism. Yes, there are plenty of examples of corrupt politicians, but that doesn't make them all corrupt. What's more, what result would you expect when you start taking it for granted that the people you're handing the reigns to are going to be selfish cocks? It's defeatist, or even self-defeatist, to cling to the notion that all politicians are necessarily corrupt. Holding politicians, both in and out of office, accountable for their public choices is an essential part of a functioning democracy, and has obvious-if-trickier use in non-democracies too. Part of this is simply trying to keep on top of what is and isn't factual truth, and this is the point where politics and skepticism can overlap nicely, even though some skeptics are loathe to go there.

I like to think that most people already know most of this, even without a politics degree. None of it's really complicated or counter-intuitive, and a huge portion of our brains' processing power is evolved to think about exactly these sorts of social interactions, so at least some of it should come instinctively. I would hypothesise that most of the defeatist cynics could accept intellectually why they're mistaken, if you really press them on it, but that they're just too overwhelmed emotionally to cope. This overwhelmingness most likely comes from an inability to handle the scale to which global politics has grown. Our Dunbar's-scale social instincts can't be expected to work properly for a society of billions, and any significant time spent pondering this is likely to produce some major mental incongruity between instinct and intellectual understanding, which leads to a shutdown, a refusal to acknowledge the problem.

I may not be right about the causes of this cynicism, but I think the cure is the same either way: Quit yer bitchin' and do something constructive for a change. If you don't see how you could possibly make a difference, then either shut up and accept it, or learn how to do something sensible and constructive (I'd prefer you aimed for the latter). Politics is not magic, it's not something that just happens by itself in a dark box. It's people talking to other people, and if you could follow this post up to here, then you've got at least half the skills needed for that, so stop being so afraid of politics.

Atlas Tugged

I mentioned that my Star Trek roleplaying group is on a break, and since things will be pretty damn different when we pick up again, I thought it was a good time to re-assess what ship they have. The small vessel with minimal crew works really well for roleplaying purposes, because it pushes the player characters deeply into the action with minimal effort, but it's not the only option. TNG did really well to stay focused on the main cast, despite the Enterprise's crew of approx. 1,000. Babylon 5 pulled off the same narrow focus even with a total population of 250,000 on the station, and potential billions more once its focus shifts to long-term plots on specific planets. There are tricks for giving the main cast all the attention while also giving them lots of minions, peers and general cohabitants, which can be used for roleplaying plots too. I really like the small-ship format (see Firefly, Cowboy Bebop, Futurama), but big ships can be fun too. From a roleplaying point of view, Rogue Trader demonstrates that nicely, with thousands of dedicated "peasant" crew to shovel babies into the ship's fusion furnaces and things like that, and surprisingly few NPC crew anywhere near as competent as the player characters.

I prepared my players a list of appropriate starship classes for which I already had the CODA-system rules, including the option of retaining the same ship they've been using all along, and asked them to vote amongst themselves for the one we'd be using next season. There's no consensus that anyone's reported back to me yet, but we've still got another month or so to prepare.

So that's all pretty neat, but hardly a story worth reporting to the entire intarwebs. What I really wanted to write about was a campaign idea I got from my list that won't fit my current plans at all well, but which could still be fun and interesting; feel free to steal this idea if you like it. You'll note my list includes the Atlas-class tug, because I have stats for it and it isn't a completely impossible and inappropriate option to include. But I'm under no illusions that the group will find that an especially appealing choice. It fluffs up the list a little, but by the standard stats, it's unarmed, it's fragile, it's not at all geared to science and exploration, it only carries a crew of 3 and it can just barely hit warp 8. Most of its systems are devoted to the specialist task of tugging other, more important starships around.

Tug and "more important" starship, to scale

Why would anyone want to run a game with one of those? You're not going to get a serious shooty pew-pew starship combat game with one, even with heavy modification. (Well, maybe with some creative modification; I was surprised every single episode at how much combat oomph my players were getting out of their little science ship, not too much larger than this Atlas-class tug.) But, you don't need to throw tugs into heavy combat (in any setting, not just Trek) to do interesting things with them.

Think about what a tug is and what it does:

• There'll be a lot of routine "harbour" work, escorting in visiting alien ships, carrying diplomats, explorers and merchants. A great opportunity to introduce plot hooks to draw the players into those sorts of activities, even if only unofficially and tangentially.
• There'll be some salvage and retrieval of wrecks, which creates opportunities for the players to board them to "make appropriate salvage preparations", whatever that might entail, and even supposedly friendly vessels become mysterious places when abandoned. After all, why were they really abandoned? Who's been there since? Is anyone still around? Perhaps there's some pressing safety concern too, the space equivalent of an oil spill, to add urgency to things.
• There may be competition over legitimate salvage rights, or conflict from wreckers and pirates, trying to illegally snatch ships away from the players. I can easily picture the Ferengi filling both of those roles, simultaneously.
• There could even be an occasional search and rescue mission, when dedicated rescue boats aren't available or lack the raw power of a tug. Saving lives can be just as dangerous and exciting as ending them, which is kind of sad, but makes for compelling stories.
• If necessary, an innocuous tug might get away with some interestingly nocuous activities of its own, perhaps as part of a smuggling ring. The Soviets used fishing trawlers for espionage and it's not a huge stretch to see a tug in the same role, given an enemy who won't shoot first and not even bother to ask questions later.

And that's just off the top of my head. Clearly, there's a lot more potential for drama with a tug than there might first appear to be, given an appropriate context. And as I say, it doesn't have to be Star Trek. The New England coast in the 1930s almost literally screams out for a Call of Cthulhu tug story; just think of the non-boat things they might be called on to pull into port. A Firefly game, or perhaps Eclipse Phase, could work even better for a tug game than Trek, with their realistic portrayals of isolation in space, with scavenger fringes and limited resources; there were even a couple of Firefly episodes that touched directly on these ideas already. The rivers of the Empire might pose narrower navigational challenges, but I've learned that they're just as interesting for players to explore, and the River Reik would lead plenty of different tuggable vessels past the players' home village or town. And I believe tug-like vessels aren't completely unknown in Spelljammer either.

The only major concern I have is that the players would have to accept that they couldn't keep any ships they salvage. I can picture some of my own players eagerly drooling over the giant dreadnought they'd just dragged home, like a jack russel that's gotten hold of a huge branch. If players don't want to play the tug campaign, if they want some sort of pirate game or something else instead, then that should be openly discussed and adjusted to, but if they do want to play the tug game, then they need to get comfortable with their tug, and with having to give up anything bigger that comes their way. The GM can smooth this along with a clear idea of who in the setting has the authority and power to remove excess ships, and what (if any) reward they'll give in return.

If I were going to run this for Star Trek (just since that's what gave me the idea in the first place), I can see two very similar things I'd do with it. I'd either go with the original Kirk era, with most of space considered a wild frontier, even within the Federation's borders, leaving a tug relatively isolated and independent, or I'd skip ahead a century to just after the Dominion War, when space is better explored, so there's probably more trade going around, but things are still much more chaotic than they were in the peaceful TNG era, before the war stirred things up. One of the only things I liked about Star Trek IX: Insurrection, was the first scene onboard the Enterprise, where they show how stretched Starfleet has become, with so many ships lost to combat and so many new post-war duties to add to neglected pre-war duties. From a tug crew's point of view, that means waiting for Picard to save the day for you is just as fruitless as waiting for Kirk would have been in the TOS era; they've each got their own excess of adventures to deal with, and you're usually going to be a very low priority for them.

Stick your tug at some remote outpost that's halfway along the route between two more interesting and populated regions, and wait til the traffic starts flowing through, with shiploads of fun and adventure in tow.

[EDIT: I'm a slight idiot, having forgotten the USS Dauntless (1861), from my list of Dauntlesses, which wasn't much of a Dauntless, but which was a tug. It's worth mentioning that it was apparently also used for general river patrols, which seems like a good excuse for getting the players' ship out into space without having to give them a particular mission. Certain stories work better that way, with the action only introduced later on, when home is too far to be much help.]