Babylon 5 Geekery

Babylon 5 is probably my favorite science fiction series of all time. In my opinion, its story surpasses Star Wars, Star Trek, and every other SF tale told to date. Like many SF francises, it has a loyal following of geeks who like to obsess about the minutia of the series. We argue over unimportant things like how fast the ships can go, how powerful their weapons are, and whether a B5 telepath could smack down a Star Wars Jedi Knight.

You can learn some interesting lessons from the whole process, though. I sharpened up math skills that I hadn’t used for years and re-learned principles of physics and chemistry that I had mostly forgotten. I can easily tell you the difference between a material’s specific heat and its heat of fusion, and I can remember that you need to start correcting kinetic energy estimates for relativity if an object’s speed starts to reach a significant fraction of lightspeed.

Naturally, people have different opinions and heated arguments develop. The argument between fanatical Star Wars fans and fanatical Star Trek fans over which side has superior technology, culture, etc. has gone on for years. B5 fans entered the game late, but they quickly moved to establish their place with the “big boys”.

This is going somewhere; believe me. You see, the usual method for determining who has the more powerful weapon or the faster ship is to treat these television shows and movies as if they were documentaries of actual events (with a hat tip to Galaxy Quest). Scientific analysis of this “documentary evidence” let’s you estimate the power, speed, or other property demonstrated.

Now, I’m an analyst for the BabTech on the Net website, and we’re working on an update for one of our pages that includes an estimate of a ship’s firepower. In a scene from one episode, one ship melts a line down the hull of another with a laser beam. We can estimate the width of the beam, the length of the line on the hull, and the thickness of the hull to determine how much material melted. Assuming the hull to be steel (an extremely common construction material in modern warships), we can use the thermal properties of iron to estimate the amount of energy required to melt the hull. With this estimate of the energy and the amount of time it took to cause the damage, we can estimate the minimum amount of energy the beam is transferring to its target. The exact results aren’t important, but you can read the analysis if you like.

Another Babylon 5 fansite, the B5 Technical Manual performs a very similar analysis with a couple of key exceptions. After performing all of the steps I described above for analyzing the incident, he finds a result that doesn’t satisfy him, so he makes two additional assumptions:

As we know that the Omega's armor is NOT comprised of iron, and the general
consensus is that the Earthforce armor is at least 20X stronger than our base
material,....

Also, this is a standard discharge, not a maximum burst. Assuming
that a standard discharge is 30% of critical power,....

Without any sound justification, he just inflated his estimate by a factor of about 67. The results of a legitimate scientific analysis didn’t suit him, so he invented additional evidence to make the results fit his expectations.

Ladies and gentlemen, I have just shown you an example of the Intelligent Design / Creationist mentality in action.

Like the author of the B5Tech analysis, ID proponents don’t like what the evidence tells us about human origins, so they twist the evidence to support the conclusion they want or dismiss it without justification. Michael Behe, for example, claims that living organisms are too complex to have evolved naturally, but he has never produced any evidence to support his claim; he just makes dubious analogies to modern technology and arbitrarily rejects any amount of research showing how complex organisms could or did evolve.

In fact, on cross-examination, Professor Behe was questioned concerning his 1996 claim that science would never find an evolutionary explanation for the immune system. He was presented with fifty-eight peer-reviewed publications, nine books, and several immunology textbook chapters about the evolution of the immune system; however, he simply insisted that this was still not sufficient evidence of evolution, and that it was not "good enough."
-- from the Kitzmiller vs Dover trial decision

ID proponents aren’t the only fanatics with this problem, obviously. You see the same attitude in global warming deniers, holocaust deniers, and fanatical trekkies.

The trick for you is to see how biased presenters introduce hidden assumptions, alter evidence, change standards, or fix analytical methods to achieve the results they wanted from the beginning. A good scientific analysis will define its assumptions and methods before presenting and analyzing the evidence, allowing you to judge the quality of their process before you judge their results.

No WoW for a While

I turned off my World of Warcraft account today. It was a tough call, because I enjoy the game, but I'm currently not enjoying it enough to justify the $15/month cost. Maybe I'll take it up again in the winter, but I've got too many other things that will be taking up my time for the next few months, at least.

Shameless Commerce

Having gotten nearly ten thousand hits in a year, I figure that there's an off chance this blog might actually help me pay a bill or two. To that end, I wondered how I might go about putting some ads on the site.

I briefly considered signing up for Google-Ads, but I rejected that pretty quickly. Their system selects ads based on site content, but it it does so rather stupidly. I'd undoubtedly end up with ads for World of Warcraft gold and homeopathic remedies coming out my ears, and I definitely don't want to support such people.

Fortunately, I discovered that Revival Enterprises has an affiliate program, so I can place ads on my weblog that are actually appropriate to my areas of interest. At the moment, the ads are kind of obscure, since I don't really want to emphasize them, but scroll down the right column for some fencing supplies and books.

Dungeon Escape!

Remember the old Dragon's Lair arcade game? Imagine the same thing in flash, with stick figures. There are hours of wasted time in this thing.

Skeptics' Circle 32 Posted

The 32nd Edition of the Skeptics' Circle is now up at Pooflingers Anonymous. It's a big issue, with lots of great stuff.

Cruising for Scientology… Again

My, my... two skepticism articles in one week. Truly the nonsense is flowing freely in the world this week. This little gem turned up during a brief browse of the Internet Movie Database.

Tom Cruise is attacking those who prescribe psychiatric drugs again in the May issue of men's style magazine GQ. The Mission: Impossible III actor, who embarked on an anti-drug tirade in TV interviews last summer on behalf of his Scientology beliefs, has launched a fresh attack on psychiatry, calling for prescription pill poppers to think carefully about the harms they're doing to their bodies. He tells the magazine, "I've always found the 'if it makes me feel better, it's OK' rationale a little suspect. I think it's appalling that people have to live a life of drug addiction when I have personally helped people get off drugs." In the interview, the actor claims he can get someone off heroin in three days through Scientology's detox programs.

-- IMDB News

Will celebrities ever shut up about fields in which they have no qualifications? The Scientology detox program is known as Narconon, and there is no evidence to back the claims that Cruise makes for it. You can get details from the Narconon Exposed website, but here are some of the basics.

• Narconon publishes its own studies of the effectiveness of the program without peer review. There have been no neutral clinical trials of the program’s effectiveness.


• The program was invented by L. Ron Hubbard, who had no medical qualifications of any kind.


• The program’s methodology of “cold turkey” detoxification, massive overdoses of vitamins, and vastly prolonged sauna sessions is inherently unsafe.

It would be interesting to see Narconon’s records opened up to thorough scientific scrutiny to see if they support the program’s claims, and a genuine clinical trial of the procedure wouldn’t hurt, either. Neither of these actions is likely, though, as Narconon is essentially a “faith-based” organization run by the Church of Scientology.

I don’t doubt that Tom Cruise absolutely believes his own rhetoric about psychiatry and Scientology, but that doesn’t change the fact that he’s just blowing smoke; his beliefs stand on feet of clay. It’s almost like an actor giving medical advice because he plays a doctor on TV, but Cruise doesn’t even have that negligible level of qualification.

Jesus on Thin Ice

The news has been aflutter this week with the story of an oceanographer who came up with a hypothesis for how Jesus could have walked on water.

Doron Nof, a professor of oceanography, said a rare combination of water and atmospheric conditions in the Sea of Galilee 2000 years ago may offer a scientific explanation for one of the miracles recounted in the Bible. Nof said a patch of ice floating in the Sea of Galilee — which is actually a freshwater lake — would have been difficult to distinguish from unfrozen water surrounding it.
--USA Today

I really don’t understand why some people feel the need to try to justify Biblical miracles scientifically. Either you believe in miracles or you don’t; there’s just no point in trying to come up with some hypothetical freak circumstance that would make the miracle into a plausible natural event. Such hypotheses generally just diminish the event into something inconsequential, anyway.

In another example, a preacher told my youth group years ago that there’s a place in the Sea of Reeds where if a strong wind blows in the right direction, it will literally part the waters and make a dry path across. If the Biblical translation were a bit off – the Red Sea was really the Sea of Reeds – Moses’ parting of the waters would actually have been possible. The rub, of course, is that the water is never more than a few inches deep in that spot to begin with. Talk about a pointless miracle.

Any attempt to scientifically justify a miracle is pretty much doomed to failure. You could probably find ways to simulate any given miracle with a modern illusionist’s tricks or a wildly improbable set of natural circumstances, but that’s totally missing the point of the story, a waste of a scientist’s time, and an effective way to offend religious sensibilities for no good reason.

Biblical miracles don’t need rational explanation. In fact, there isn’t supposed to be a rational explanation: that’s what makes it a miracle. DUH!

What science can do is evaluate modern claims that a miracle occurred. The claims of faith-healers and psychics are certainly subject to scientific study. They may claim that their abilities go beyond the realm of known science, but that’s really irrelevant. Science can determine – through double-blind clinical trials and similar experiments – whether modern psychics, faith healers, and the like can actually do what they claim to do; figuring out how it happens would then be a subject for further study.

So, Professor Nof, could you please stop pointlessly annoying Christians with unlikely rationalizations of religious stories? Save your time and credibility for useful research, eh?

Scott Kurtz Understands Skepticism

Scott Kurtz, the author of PVPOnline, started a series of cartoons about administrative foolishness with the March 31 issue of his online comic. Before this storyline, I hadn’t actually thought of the character Max Powers as someone with a “woo woo” mentality.

I’ll stop with that little bit of description, since I don’t want to spoil the joke.

Spring Coronation

Spring Coronation has passed. All Hail King Godwine and Queen Francesca. For those who didn’t hear the story yet, Queen Diedre was kidnapped on her way to set up a shrine to house some saintly relics, and King Boru abdicated so he could go to her rescue.

I realize that it’s important business, but coronation is actually a pretty dull event if you’re not a peer, which means you have meetings to attend with the new crowns. There were also a couple of heavy fighting tournaments during the day, but that’s it. It’s probably not feasible to have much more going on, since those meetings tend to tie up the most productive people in the kingdom for most of the day, but I can see why people who aren’t peers don’t feel very motivated to go to coronation.

I would like to thank Duchess Katrina, the Honorable Lord Gareth, the Honorable Lord Reinmar, the Honorable Lady Lora Greymare (new award!), Lady Francesca, and of course my Lady Fjorleif for helping me organize the White Rose Ball. I felt rather overwhelmed by the ball, since there’s a lot more protocol and ritual to it than I realized, but with their help I think it came off fairly well (but only fair; thanks from crowns and others notwithstanding, I’m a bit disappointed with myself). I’ll add a special thanks to the Meridien Musicians Guild for providing live music, including two rounds of Hole in the Wall.

Next weekend we’ll be doing demos with the Shire of Loch Cairn at the Winchester Dogwood Festival.

Skeptics' Circle 31

Exercise your mind. The 31st Skeptics' Circle is now up at Terra Sigillata.

Gulf Wars XV: Photos from the Field Battle

Lady Ysabel de Saincte-Croix has sent me some of her pictures from the Rapier Field Battle at Gulf Wars XV.


She also sent along a few more pictures from the Rose Tourney, both of Capitan Ricarte Berenguer Halcon de Catalonia (known as "Hawk") and myself approaching my doom against the bearer of the Iron Ring of Gleann Abhan.

Free Plugs for SCA Supplies

I've expanded the SCA Links list in the sidebar to include some vendors who have provided me with consistently good products and service for my SCA equipment needs. Gipsy Peddler is a popular clothing vendor that makes doublets and gusset shirts that are legal for fencing in every kingdom to the best of my knowledge. Revival Enterprises sold me a particularly nice set of gloves that are serving me very well so far, and the very lovely lady in the picture also dances quite well (which is a serious prejudicial factor for me). Ageless Fashions sold me a very spiffy new doublet which will hopefully show up in some pictures here before long.

If you're looking to get into the SCA, particularly with a late period (1500's) persona and an interest in fencing, these vendors can definitely help you out.

Hoodia Gordonii: Fact or Fiction?

It’s interesting to see what ads will end up on your screen as you browse the internet. An ad for Hoodia Gordonii ended up on my sitemeter page when I was reviewing to see where my visitors were coming from this week. Hoodia is apparently a “Miracle Cactus” that reduces your appetite, helping you to lose weight.

Does it work? Well just listen to this little piece of anecdotal “evidence” that is sure to convince you…

“The San Bushmen of the Kalahari, one of the world's oldest and most primitive tribes, have been eating the Hoodia plant for thousands of years, to stave off hunger during long hunting trips.”

How does this mean that it actually helps suppress appetite? Eating almost anything that’s non-toxic would help the San Bushman stave off hunger during long treks through the desert; special appetite suppressant qualities aren’t required.

Does this plant do any more than just help fill your stomach? Is there any legitimate evidence that Hoodia capsules are more effective at suppressing appetite than a placebo of, say, cellulose? Well, let me direct your attention to the fine print…

“Please Note: The statements contained on this site have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration.”

Not exactly a sterling recommendation.

This particular gimmick product may have some merit, though. I was able to find a study result on PubMed that indicates that one of the compounds in Hoodia actually does have appetite suppressant properties.

“…third ventricle (i.c.v.) administration of P57, which reduces subsequent 24-h food intake by 40-60%, also increases ATP content in hypothalamic slice punches removed at 24 h following the i.c.v. injections.”

Granted, they’re talking about injecting this stuff directly into the brains of mice, but the fact that it does have a significant effect on subsequent food intake does suggest that the compound is an effective appetite suppressant.

What the study shows is that nerve cells in the hypothalamus of the brain have an increase in ATP content after being exposed to the P57 compound from Hoodia. ATP is the “ready fuel” for cellular activity (as opposed to sugars, which need to be converted to ATP before they’re ready to use), so a generous supply of ATP in the hypothalamus gland of the brain might logically convince you that you don’t need to eat anything for a while.

So Hoodia capsules aren’t necessarily a scam, assuming they contain effective concentrations of the active ingredient at a reasonable price. I think it’s important to show that legitimate products will actually survive the exercise of some critical thinking skills and a search for some credible evidence. Hoodia isn’t effective because it has the endorsement of San Bushmen; it’s effective because the chemicals it contains actually do reduce your appetite, a claim that science can test and show to be true.

News articles:

• CBS News
• BBC News

Gulf Wars XV: Ready to Rumble

Yes! At last we have freed the digital camera from the tangled mass of belongings stuffed into the van at the end of Gulf Wars, and I have downloaded its contents. Alas, battery trouble kept us from getting everything that we might have wanted to display on our own camera, so I will yet need to acquire some photos from Lady Ysabel and Lady Francesca before my picture collection is complete, but I can at least share some highlights of the war.

We spent our Monday at the war setting up camp, a thoroughly exhausting affair which kept us from doing much of anything that day. I did manage to put on my slob garb to go down to the main hall for dancing Monday night, but I didn't take the camera with me. That waited until Tuesday, the night of the Meridien Ball. Naturally we took the camera to that ball, as I was the host. Furthermore, my beautiful Lady Fjorleif provided the refreshments, which you can see on the table to the left, including the tray of truffles which I helped make myself (seen at right). I can only hope the dancers enjoyed this aspect of the ball, since I was far too preoccupied announcing dances and otherwise organizing the activities to monitor the depletion and replenishment of the snack bar.

Alas, our camera's batteries died before my lady could take more than one short film clip of the dancing itself. I do, however, have a link to the movie of the dancers doing the Korobushka (18 MB AVI file).

I do however have a marvelous segue from dancing to fencing, because one of our musicians for the ball was the lovely Lady Stephanie (seen at left), who I also faced on the fencing field. Lady Stephanie plays the vielle, a precursor to the modern viol, and she's a pleasure to watch as well as to hear. Furthermore, she's deadly quick and accurate with a rapier, apparently an extra benefit of bow work on the vielle. She's also not shy about making you feel guilty for ever winning a fencing bout against her, so steel your souls rapier men of the Knowne World.

Now that we're on the subject of fencing, we'll move forward to Thursday morning of the war and the Ansteorran Ladies of the Rose Sponsored Tournament. The principle of this tournament is that each Lady of the Rose (any Lady who has been Queen of one of the realms of the Knowne World at least once) may sponsor two rapier fighters for the tournament. As I have done for the past three years, I represented Duchess Katrina of Iron Mountain. Various other Countesses and Duchesses from around the Knowne World also sponsored fighters for the tourney, and the Queen of Ansteorra sponsored any fighters present who didn't already have a sponsor. Alas, there lies my one complaint with the tournament. Meaning no disrespect to Her Majesty of Ansteorra, I believe that sponsoring every fighter who bothers to show up somehow defeats the purpose of showing the necessary chivalry and courtesy to earn a Rose's favor. I understand that Her Majesty didn't want anyone to feel left out, but I think this is a tournament in which some people should be left out to preserve the feeling of exclusivity that it has traditionally had. You don't have to be a good fencer to enter, but you do need to be sufficiently gracious to earn a Lady's favor. That said, I didn't meet any uncouth fencers during my four rounds in the tournament.

As luck would have it, I drew Don Silvane for my first round fight. Why I always draw someone essentially untouchable for my first round I'll never know.



All I can say for myself about this bout was that I at least made him work for it, and that I remembered to properly call my tip cut as he and I agreed to do before the bout (he tip cut me on the chest, causing me to forfeit my right arm). This turned out to be my longest bout of the day, and I ended up leaving the field alive but armless. I fought two subsequent rounds against relative newcomers, and the bearer of the Iron Ring of Gleann Abhann finally slew me in the fourth round. Alas, the camera had no battery power left by this point, so I shall have to obtain some of the pictures that Lady Francesca took and post them at a later date.

Bright and early Friday morning, I rose and armored myself for the Ravine Battle. Upon my arrival at the field, I discovered that the number of fighters on the Meridies and Gleann Abhann side of the field was substantially smaller than the number of fighters on the Ansteorra and Trimaris side. In fact, I think the contingent from our Northshield allies outnumbered the combined fighters from Meridies and Glean Abhann. This did not bode well, although we raised our spirits by considering it to be a "target rich environment".

For those not familiar with the Ravine Battle, it's essentially a game of Capture the Flag (or Capture the Three Flags, in this instance). In the middle of the field are three flags with banners for both sides; the objective is to reach the flags and raise your own banner. Thanks to an ingenious little pulley-and-weight system developed by Lord Tormod (I think), the flags automatically fall to "neutral" if there's no one holding the rope to keep one side's flag raised. Fighters killed in the line of the battle can walk back to a staging area at their end of the ravine to be "resurrected" as reinforcements. The battle continues for half an hour or so, and marshals stationed around the field with digital cameras take pictures of the flag poles at approximately five-minute intervals. At the end of the battle, the marshals count the flags showing for each side in the pictures, and whichever side had the most flags raised in the pictures wins the battle.

As it happens, counting the flags in the pictures wasn't really necessary, since Meridies and Gleann Abhann never raised a flag for the entire battle as far as I know. We certainly never had one up after the first five minutes, as there were two enemy fighters in queue waiting to fill gaps for every Ansteorran or Trimarin fighter we "killed". Indeed, I pretty much gave up trying to actually reach a flag after fifteen minutes and started looking for ways to keep the other sides' fighters from getting bored. We formed up in spearheads trying to break holes deep enough through the enemy lines to actually reach a flag and raise it if only for a moment. I was often the point of one of the spearheads, and I actually made it through the front line a couple of times, but I never made it all the way to a flag.

Despite it being a forgone conclusion (or possibly because it was a forgone conclusion), this was actually the nicest and most fun Ravine Battle I've ever participated in at Gulf Wars. In past years there have been a lot of hard shots during the battle and some hard feelings after, but this year everyone killed me nicely, and I had a great time.

Saturday morning saw a reversal of fortunes for the Ansteorrans and Trimarins. The Kingdom of the Middle turned against their former allies, and the Ansteorran-Trimarin numerical advantage evaporated for the Open Field Battle. This is not a resurrection battle; any fighter "killed" on the field is out for the rest of the battle, which ends when only one side's fighters are left on the field. The winner of the Field is the winner of two out of three battles, and our side won the first two in fairly rapid succession. I personally died almost immediately in the first battle, but I lasted most of the way through the second.

The Field battle was not as nice as the Ravine battle, partly because a light rain started toward the end of the first fight, making the field a bit slick, but probably more because the evening of the sides made tensions a bit higher. The worst things I saw, though, occurred in the "friendship" battle fought after the war point was decided. I saw one fighter chasing another backwards toward the field pavilion, the retreating fighter obviously having serious trouble maintaining his balance; the retreating fighter actually fell as he got close to the pavilion and very nearly hit his head on an iron tent stake (a nearby lady fighter jumped in to catch his head before he hit). I'm sorry, but this is a game not a real fight; it's stupid and negligent to press someone who is obviously dangerously off balance; we almost had a very serious injury on the field that day. End of brief rant.

Alas, I'm all out of pictures, but I did attend a very nice ball hosted by Rose Eriksdottir on Saturday night. It was an extremely pleasant end to a very busy week, and I'm looking forward to exhausting myself again next year (when I expect to be Dance Master for the War, so there!).

I should have more pictures in a future post. Ciao.

Back from the Wars

Yes, I have returned safely from Gulf Wars, and a very fine time we had. The Kingdom of Gleann Abhan put on an excellent war, in spite of having to recover from a major hurricane. I might add the Kingdom of Ansteorra (essentially Texas) knocked everyone else silly with volunteer points and attendance, in spite of having their own hurricane (the oft-forgotten Hurricane Rita) to recover from. As Larry -- the owner of King's Arrow Ranch -- said, "It's nice to look at all this craziness and be able to say things are getting back to normal."

Alas, my camera hasn't been unpacked yet, so the full war report will have to wait a day or so.

En Route to Gulf Wars XV

I'll be writing very little this week, as I am already on the way to Gulf Wars. Over the weekend, we're staying with my sister-in-law in South Alabama, and on Monday we'll have a relatively short drive over to Lumberton, Mississippi to get to the event itself. I was going to put up some pictures of my niece, but I seem to be having some issues posting images with my sister's web browser. Maybe tomorrow.

The Kegging

As a few of you may know, I will be away in the Kingdom of Gleann Abhann for Gulf Wars next week. If I have the presence of mind to carry my camera about the site with me, I shall endeavor to have some good pictures upon my return. I will be running the Meridien Dance Revel again this year on Tuesday night, and my good Lady Fjorleif has volunteered to prepare some refreshments for the revel. One of these will be a ginger ale, which you can see being siphoned into a cornelius keg at right. That's the kind of keg that soda companies used to deliver their concentrates to restaurants before they switched to disposable plastic bags-in-a box.

This beverage will be much like any other ginger ale you might find in the grocery: sweet, fizzy, and non-alcoholic. Unlike some of the common brands, however, the gingery potency of this concoction may take your breath away.

As I can't resist the urge to mix my hobbies, I took the liberty of turning a screen capture from World of Warcraft into a keg label. I realize that you can't really see the label in this picture, but it's Grimbor taking a deep drink from a mug of Dwarven Stout. It seems like a moderately appropriate picture for any sort of keg. Of course, we didn't stop at ginger ale for this event.

No, we brewed up some of the real thing. At left, you see five gallons of Amber Ale draining into another cornelius keg. This brew is a donation to the Meridien Social on Wednesday night.

For those interested, it contains six pounds of spray-dried amber malt extract and four ounces of Cascade hops (two ounces for boiling and two ounces for finishing).

The nice thing about a keg system is that you don't have to add priming sugar and wait another two weeks for the beer to carbonate. You just hook the keg up to a compressed CO2 tank and keep the pressure on it for day or so to carbonate the contents. Naturally this keg also got a label; after all, I don't want my keg to get lost at the event.

Now all we need to do is finish loading the van and trailer. We started that process before the kegging, while we still had some light. The hecticness will continue until our departure Friday, after work. We'll visit my sister-in-law in south Alabama for a couple of days before heading on over to Gulf Wars on Monday.

Evolution and the Second Law

Creationists have long tried to claim that the Second Law of Thermodynamics contradicts the Theory of Evolution. That’s to be expected, since Creationists generally don’t bother to learn anything about thermodynamics before making the claim. The Intelligent Design crowd has generally tried to look more scientifically savvy, but one of their lead proponents, William Dembski, has recently linked to a thermodynamics-based anti-evolution argument by Granville Sewell.

The anti-evolution argument goes something like this: The Second Law of Thermodynamics says that no process exists which can cause the entropy of a system to decrease. Since entropy is chaos, this law means that the chaos of a system can’t decrease. If the chaos can’t decrease, the order can’t increase. If no natural process can increase the order of a system, the process of evolution can’t account for the increase in the order and complexity of living organisms over time. Evolution is destroyed! God created life! Hallelujah!

Rubbish, because that’s not what the Second Law of Thermodynamics says. Technically, it says that no process can exist that only moves heat from a cool place to a warm place. The expanded definition is that the entropy of a closed system can never decrease.

There’s that word – “entropy” – again, but what does it mean? Entropy is energy that the system can no longer use in its process. The simplest example of entropy is waste heat. If you spin a wheel, it slows down because friction at the axle turns the kinetic energy of the wheel into heat. The wheel eventually slows down and stops as all of its kinetic energy becomes entropy.

Note that entropy is waste energy – not “chaos”. Once you understand this simple concept, you can see why the thermodynamics argument against evolution is baseless. A living being is not a closed system, so it can easily get rid of entropy just by radiating waste heat. At the same time, it takes in new energy – in the form of food – to run its processes. That’s why scientists say it matters that living beings are open systems, as is the entire ecosystem. There is absolutely nothing in thermodynamics that prevents evolution from happening; if it did, real scientists would have killed the Theory of Evolution decades ago.

Granville Sewell – and, by extension, William Dembski – is just another charlatan trying to trick an uninformed public with lies about thermodynamics.

Credits go out to Jason Rosenhouse for drawing my attention to the joint foolishness of Dembski and Sewell and to Mike Wong for succinctly explaining why the Second Law argument against the Theory of Evolution is either ignorance or deliberate deception.

Bad Devices? Or Bad Instructions?

Reuters has a story about how half of all product returns aren’t caused by a defect in the product. Unless you call making the product incomprehensible a defect.

A wave of versatile electronics gadgets has flooded the market in recent years, ranging from MP3 players and home cinema sets to media centers and wireless audio systems, but consumers still find it hard to install and use them.

According to the article, product developers and company managers are often unaware of the problem.

I find this study amusing because I work as a technical writer. It’s my job to try to write instructions for using various products, mostly programs acquired by the company I work for and customized in-house. I have to create the document that translates the designer’s idea into the customer’s action. Sometimes that’s easier said than done. I think designers operate from an “easy to build and maintain” mindset, while customers would prefer that they think more in “easy to setup and use” terms. Of course, using the product seems easy to the developers, but why shouldn’t it? They designed it! They know everything about it!

I get frustrated because I usually don’t get a call until the development phase of the project is over. I’m supposed to write instructions for the finished product. The problem is that I never got a chance to see the product early in the development process, when I could have suggested ways to make the product easier to use (which would, of course, make the instructions easier to write).

If more company’s would bring their technical writers into the project earlier, I suspect that customer frustration with the product would be less of a problem.

WoW: Low on Quests

I found a pretty large chunk of time with which to play World of Warcraft over the weekend, and managed to wrap up quite a few quests. So many, in fact, that Gullveig and Dagran are rather short on quests to complete.

All of Dagran's remaining quests are Deadmines quests, so I'll soon be refining my knowledge of that dungeon. Escorting the Defias Traitor (a preliminary quest for the Deadmines) is usually pretty easy if you do it at a busy hour of the day. At such a peak time, there are usually so many players lurking near the entrance to the Deadmines trying to form groups that the Defias Looters and other threats to the Traitor are usually all dead when you escort him through.

Gullveig took a second trip through Blackfathom Deeps and wrapped up both of her quests there. That party was a very efficient monster-killing machine. Gullveig switched rolls pretty frequently, playing healer, tank, blaster, or backstabber according to the situation.

She also completed the last of the Astranaar quests and the last Charred Vale quest, including the long trek south to the far end of the Barrens and through Thousand Needles just to talk to one Druid at the edge of Feralas. She's got a quest in Darkshore still -- The Tower of Althalaxx -- but the warlocks in there are still a bit over her head. I guess she'll be cruising around looking for more quest givers next time I'm on.

That should bore everyone who has no idea what I'm talking about. Next post I'll try to discuss something with more universal appeal, like the kegging of beer for Gulf Wars.

Skeptics' Circle 29

The 29th Skeptics' Circle is up over at The Huge Entity.

WoW: What's Happening?

Having nothing more pressing to write about at the moment, I thought I'd pop up a gratuitous World of Warcraft picture and give an update on my activities. Grimbor (seen in the picture) has reached level 32. He's wandering the world looking for interesting animals to tame so he can learn their abilities. He just made his first trip overseas.

Dagran has reached level 18 and is about to start on the Deadmines quests.

Gullveig is level 26 and still meandering about Ashenvale.

My Horde characters have been languishing quite a bit, lately. I can get more interaction done with my Alliance characters, and they're all members of the same guild, so it's easier to find help if I need it.

More Psychic Uselessness

Following the Westminster Kennel Club show, a champion whippet by the name of Vivi (short for Champion Bohem C'est La Vie) escaped from her travel crate and ran off into the marshes around Kennedy International Airport. As of Tuesday, February 21, she hasn’t been found, although some droppings consistent with a dog her size were found near an airport cargo building on Monday.

Enter the self-proclaimed psychics.

"They are telling us that she is alive and they are telling us she is warm," said a friend of the dog's owners. "They are saying she's in a building — but there are hundreds of buildings."

Yeah… it takes a psychic to figure out that a thin-coated dog like a whippet is going to head for a warm building during winter in New England, especially when droppings have already been found in the area. This is typical psychic uselessness; make an educated guess and call it psychic intuition. You’d think that a real psychic would just go straight to wherever the dog is hiding, pick her up, turn her in, and walk away with the $5000 reward. Instead we get the usual optimistic health reports and useless vagaries regarding location.

I hope that Vivi turns up alive and well, but the psychics certainly aren’t doing a thing to help find her.

Steed Exchange

The exchange that my Lady Fjorleif arranged has taken place this weekend. In return for two
Arabian mares, we are receiving one Arabian colt. My Lady shall mold his little equine mind to her will.

In addition, we have started a new batch of beer. This one is fairly simple, a medium-bodied amber ale which I hope won't be too bitter. This is the first beer that I've made using only a spray-dried malt extract; we'll see how well that works. If it finishes soon enough, it will be going to Gulf Wars with us. I'll not go into the fine details of beer making in this post, as Lord Tadhg macAedain uiChonchobhair has already done so quite well.

Spreading Lies

It's both amusing and depressing when conservative talk radio personalities demonstrate their gullibility on national radio. I was listening to The Savage Nation (yes, I like to torture myself that way) on my way home from dance practice tonight, and Michael Savage actually shared the contents of a chain letter that he received as if it were the truth.

The gist of the letter is that during the Senate hearings over the Iran-Contra scandal in 1987, Al Gore asked Oliver North why he bought a $60,000 security system. Oliver supposedly answered that he needed it because he needed to protect his family from Osama bin Laden, who he said was "the most evil person alive that I know of".

This story is BS on many levels.

For one thing, Al Gore was not on the United States Senate Select Committee on Secret Military Assistance to Iran and the Nicaraguan Opposition, so he never questioned Oliver North on the subject. The questioner was actually the committee counsel, John Nields.

Second (and relatively insignificant), Oliver North did purchase a security system with money acquired from his Iran-Contra activities, but it cost only $16,000.

Third, while he did claim that he needed the security system to protect his family from a terrorist, the terrorist that he named was Libyan terrorist Abu Nidal, not Osama bin Laden, who was an American ally at the time fighting with the Muja-Hadeen against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

Savage was also peddling the equally false story that the US insisted that the Israelis free Mohammed Atta from prison, allowing him to mastermind the September 11th attack. There was some confusion, but Mahmoud Atta, the person extradited to Israel in 1990 is a different person who is still serving a life sentence in Israel.

It took mere seconds for me to do a basic fact-check on these stories through Snopes.com, but Michael Savage apparently wasn't inclined to do a pathetically easy fact check on information he received from a chain letter if it seemed to back his anti-Islamic rhetoric.

Another Time Waster

I'm genuinely surprised by the results, but I have absolutely no complaints.

You scored as Serenity (Firefly). You like to live your own way and don't enjoy when anyone but a friend tries to tell you should do different. Now if only the Reavers would quit trying to skin you. Serenity (Firefly) 75% Moya (Farscape) 63% SG-1 (Stargate) 56% Babylon 5 (Babylon 5) 56% Galactica (Battlestar: Galactica) 56% Deep Space Nine (Star Trek) 50% Millennium Falcon (Star Wars) 50% Nebuchadnezzar (The Matrix) 50% Andromeda Ascendant (Andromeda) 38% Bebop (Cowboy Bebop) 31% Enterprise D (Star Trek) 31% FBI's X-Files Division (The X-Files) 25% Your Ultimate Sci-Fi Profile II: which sci-fi crew would you best fit in? (pics) created with QuizFarm.com

Skeptics' Circle 28

The 28th Skeptics' Circle is now up at Unused and Probably Unusable. Go seek enlightenment.

A New Lie Detector?

A company called Nemesysco is now marketing the GK-1 Security Access Control System, a device that supposedly uses “Layered Voice Analysis (LVA) technology” to determine whether an individual is lying based on analysis of the person’s voice.

Well, they don’t claim it detects lies, as such, but they do claim that it will identify someone’s “overall emotional state” so that you can “single out potential harmful intentions”.

This is supposed to be a rapid screening system that you can use in places like airports. A subject answers three to five questions that take no more than a minute, and the system responds with a red or green result. I can only guess that a red result means you should take the person aside for more intensive questioning and searching.

While I don’t think such a system is necessarily a bad idea if it works, I have a couple of problems with it. For one thing, where did they find a broad sample of people who really had “potential harmful intentions” to use as the baseline for calibrating their machine? Do they have recordings of dangerous criminals that were made shortly before they committed their crimes? That’s about the only potential source of comparison data that I can conceive, but Nemesysco doesn’t say anything about how they determine what data in a person’s voice will “reveal their real intentions”.

They also say that one of three algorithms their device uses to detect threats is a “polygraph-like analysis”, which sets off my alarm bells. A polygraph test is a trick, not a legitimate test. The polygraph machine is, at best, a stress indicator, and the test can only work if the tester can ask a legitimate control question on which he knows the subject will lie. Furthermore, it’s pathetically easy to create false stress readings on a polygraph, so an informed subject can easily beat the test. If the GK-1 is using similar principles, I wouldn’t expect it to be any more reliable.

Maybe there is legitimate test data for this machine somewhere in the archives of Nemesysco, but I wouldn’t be inclined to trust the thing without seeing the results of some well-designed performance tests. Nemesysco’s website provides nothing of the sort, so I consider their product to be a dubious investment, at best. It may catch the spontaneous offenders, but I expect that determined intruders will find ways to beat the test, meaning that Nemesysco clients will be -- to some extent -- buying a false sense of security.

Midwinter A&S

We are recently returned from the Midwinter Arts and Sciences event hosted by the Barony of South Downs. Both my Lady and I found this to be a fine event, and we congratulate the Populace of South Downs (including Their Excellencies, of course) for their great success.

This was my first event as an Arts and Sciences Judge. As I progress in apprenticeship, I expect that I shall be acting as a judge quite often. I shall have to develop something in the way of largess to share with A&S contestants (back to the pewter casting projects with me, I think). As I only judged one entry at this event, I think I managed to get by.

Being the generous sort of individual that I am (cough... cough), I valiantly offered to sacrifice myself by volunteering to judge any brewing and vinting entries offered at the event. As it happened, there was one entry in the brewing and vinting category at Midwinter A&S. This was a fairly simple but extremely nice Blackberry Wine. I'm afraid that I was unable to give it a very high score, as the documentation was not very complete and it wasn't a difficult wine-making project, but I gave it a top score on execution without a second thought. I spoke with the vintner after turning in my judging form, and I was pleased to find that she wasn't actually expecting to receive a particularly high score on that entry. Her wine entry was something of an afterthought, and she actually won the category with her other entry.

As some of my readers might expect, I entered the competition myself in the performing arts category with Contrapasso, a 16th-century Italian dance written by Fabritio Caroso. Marks from the judges on this dance were 19, 21, and 23 (out of 25). I was actually rather surprised at these scores: I wasn't expecting to do so well with a partner I'd just found the night before (shame on you Francesca for not making it to Midwinter!) and a dance that I don't consider very difficult. The judges' ratings for difficulty/complexity were 4, 4, and 5; I was personally expecting a 3, since I received ratings of 4 for Laccio d'Amore, which was much more difficult to master (I swear that Caroso deliberately tries to mess you up with that dance). I'm obviously going to have to come up with a 16th-century Italian Renaissance outfit for these dances that I'm researching, as every single judge commented that our garb was not appropriate to the time and nationality of the dance.

I also found time to consult Her Majesty regarding the Meridien Ball at Gulf Wars. We now have a finished dance list, and I hope to make it an exceptional evening for dancers.

I would like to say a special thanks to Viscount Rhame (my apologies if I've mis-spelled that) and Viscountess Gwynna, who made this event all the more special with their hospitality.

Our next planned event is the Convivium Collegialis on February 25th.

Time Waster du Jour

Woe is me. I followed Reiblue’s link to a Star Trek character quiz, with the results you see below. I suppose there could be more embarrassing results, but I’m hard-pressed to think of them right now (I'd almost rather be the Red Shirt Expendable).

Your results:
You are Will Riker

Will Riker 70% An Expendable Character (Redshirt) 60% James T. Kirk (Captain) 55% Jean-Luc Picard 50% Geordi LaForge 50% Uhura 45% Mr. Sulu 45% Spock 44% Data 44% Beverly Crusher 40% Worf 40% Leonard McCoy (Bones) 35% Chekov 30% Deanna Troi 30% Mr. Scott 25%

At times you are self-centered but you have many friends. You love many women, but the right woman could get you to settle down.

Click here to take the Star Trek Personality Quiz

Skeptics' Circle 27

The twenty-seventh meeting of the Skeptics' Circle is now up at Photon in the Darkness.

Evil Science Entertainment

By the title, I mean the depiction of science in the movies and on television. Not the news, mind you (although they’re clearly affected), but in popular entertainment.

Science gets a bad rap.

For starters, movies and TV usually portray the scientific establishment as villains. Yes, there’s often a scientist hero, but he (or she) is usually a loner who’s resisting mainstream science. The big villain is probably a scientist with a lot more financial and political clout than the hero.

Scientists are great villains. They’re involved in some of the most dangerous activities known to man, like the development of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. They seek knowledge man wasn’t meant to know; they meddle with forces they don’t understand; they try to play God. Examples:

• The Fly: A scientist tries to transport objects through wires, messes up the experiment, and merges himself with a fly.


• Jurassic Park: A group of scientists – hired by a businessman – clone dinosaurs that get out of control and start killing people.


• Frankenstein: A scientists tries to create life and ends up creating a monster.


• Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: A scientists accidentally unleashes an evil version of himself.


• The Island: A scientist clones people for use as organ donors.

Hallmarks of Hollywood scientists are reckless disregard for prudent safety precautions and indifference to the moral questions of their research. Is there a chance the scientists new power supply could get out of control and destroy a city? Who cares? The mad scientist will forge ahead regardless of the risks. Is it ethical to replace a parent’s dead child with a clone? As long as the mad scientist makes a buck, who cares? This is the mainstream Hollywood scientist; only mavericks operating around the edges and fighting the establishment get to be good guys.

Which is where the quacks of the real world jump in to sell their dubious services. They paint themselves as the maverick scientists operating at the edge, trying to save people from the predatory mad scientist establishment. They’ll sell you anything you want to buy, making outrageous claims for how it works. They’ll tell you that the scientific establishment doesn’t want you to know about their discoveries, so the establishment covers up the evidence.

I’d like to think that if more people got a real education in science, they wouldn’t fall for the claims of the “edgy science” charlatans. Real scientists are usually careful people who demand a lot of evidence to support extraordinary claims. That’s why they come down hard on the “fringe scientists” and charlatans who boast of great discoveries without any evidence to back them up. When some “fringe scientists” claimed to have discovered cold fusion, the media ate up the claim while other scientists expressed skepticism, especially when they couldn’t duplicate the experiment themselves.

The scientific professions certainly have their bad apples, and the media is quick to report on their misdeeds. Unfortunately, the media doesn’t emphasize that it’s the scientific establishment, with its demands for repeatable tests and peer-reviewed publication of results, that inevitably catches the bad apples. Quite frankly, the comfortable lives that most Americans lead are utterly dependent upon the work of scientists over the years, so it would be nice to see the media show them more respect.

A Spiritual Trip to Italy

I’m not talking metaphysics here; I’m talking wine. Specifically, I’m talking about the Valpolicella wine region of northern Italy. Valpolicella is named for the region, not the grapes, which are of the corvina, molinara, and rondinella varieties.

Yes, we started a new batch of wine, and it better turn out good for the amount we spent on the kit. We got a kit because it supposedly contains juice from grapes grown and harvested properly for producing an Amarone-style wine. The growers hand pick only ripe grapes from clusters, then they allow them to dry in a nice cool barn loft to concentrate the juice. The result should be a particularly flavorful wine.

I wasn’t able to find a commercial Amarone to try myself, so I’ll have to wait the 6-8 weeks that the instructions say it will take for this wine to be ready. I did, however, find a ripasso wine from Valpolicella. A ripasso is made from grapes that aren’t so carefully selected as those going into Amarone, but it gets a bit of a lift from the Amarone process. After the wine gets pressed and goes through primary fermentation, it gets to “rest” on the pressed skins of grapes used to make Amarone.

I expect that someone got the ripasso idea from the technique of “second pressing”, which is adding water and possibly sugar to pressed grapes skins and pressing out a second batch of juice to make “second wine”. Someone must have figured that if you can make decent wine out of water by pressing it out of grape skins, you should be able to turn decent wine into exceptional wine. Whoever thought of it was a genius; the ripasso we had was really good, easily good enough to justify what I paid for it (more than twice what I usually pay for wine). The ripasso has raised my expectations for the Amarone.

On a related note, we racked the mead into a clean carboy over the weekend, getting it off of the lees (yeast sediment at the bottom) and adding some sassafrass tea (which my lovely lady considers a particularly good mead additive). The mead still has a bit of kerosene flavor, but it’s already drinkable and I expect that nasty character to age out pretty quickly.

On another related note, it seems that I will be teaching a class on wine-making at Winter Collegium in addition to the dance interpretation class that I announced previously.

Breaking the Silence

Has it really been a week? I’m such a slacker. I suppose at least a small post is in order.

For those who might be interested, I will be attending both Winter Collegium and Midwinter Arts & Sciences in February.

At Winter Collegium, I’ll be teaching a class on dance interpretation. I have different music arrangements for some dances commonly done in Meridies, and we’ll be discussing how the arrangement of the music affects your performance of the dance. The big example will be Petite Riens, which is commonly danced to a fast-paced musical arrangement that often turns the dance into a giant game of chicken. We’ll see how dancers respond when I hit them with a really slow musical arrangement.

At Midwinter A&S, Fjorleif and I will be entering Contrapasso in the performing arts category. And as I’m typing this, I’m reminded that I need to send in my documentation so the judges have time to review it in advance.

Gulf Wars approaches, and we will be attending. As far as I know, I’m not in charge of anything this year, and we’re not playing camp organizers, so we will get to relax and play all week.

In unrelated (WoW) news, Grimbor reached level 30 during another plunge into Gnomeregan, and he learned the Feign Death skill. I'm looking forward to trying it out. Gullveig also got some play time in the last week and reached level 24.

The Wine Jip Revisited

The makers of the Wine Clip have changed their description of how the device operates on their website. They used to say…

“When wine passes through a magnetic field, a physical change occurs. The magnetic field has an effect on tannins which are suspended in the wine. The tannins are broken down into smaller tannins. We believe that the taste of many small tannin molecules is smoother than the taste of fewer large tannin molecules.”

…and…

“There is absolutely no chemical change and nothing is introduced or taken away from the wine. It's the physical change which accounts for the enhanced flavor and bouquet.”

I pointed out when I wrote before on this subject that a chemical change in the tannins is actually required. The benefit of aging is the result of chemical reactions that occur in the wine over time. To have the same effect, the Wine Clip would have to accelerate those chemical changes, and accelerated chemical reactions in the wine would most certainly be detectable with modern technology.

Needless to say, the Wine Clip’s manufacturers have never produced any evidence that their magnets cause rapid chemical reactions in wine as it’s poured. Apparently they got so much negative email about their claims since James Randi first publicized them back in August 2004 that they decided a rewrite was necessary.

Now they say…

“Using magnets to treat fluids – water, fuel, wine, etc. - is not a new idea, and the technology has been applied successfully in many industries. What causes the effect has been the subject of some debate, but it is generally thought that passing a conductive fluid through a properly designed magnetic field has an effect on the polar molecules in the fluid.

In wine, it is believed that the large, polymerized tannins in wine that normally result in a high degree of astringency are broken up or otherwise affected, resulting in a less astringent, ‘softer’ flavor.”

When in doubt, just make your claim more vague and remove any testable statements. The new explanation is no less bogus than the old. Tannins are large, organic molecules held together by covalent bonds, meaning that adjacent atoms share some electrons. This differentiates them from ionicly bonded compounds like salt, in which one atom essentially steals an electron from the other and the atoms stick together by electromagnetic attraction.

Big organic molecules like tannins aren’t usually “polar”, meaning that shared electrons tend to spend more time in one part of the molecule, so it tends to be positively charged at one end and negative at the other. Even if they were, they’re immersed in a solution of other polar molecules: specifically water molecules. Immersion in other polar molecules would prevent any “clumping” of tannins even if they are polar. Consequently, a magnetic field wouldn’t have any “large, polymerized tannins” to break up.

The Wine Jip’s new description is just an effort to back-pedal from an obvious falsehood to a vague, unsupported claim. An example-free reference to industrial use of magnets to treat fluids and an “it is believed” statement that doesn’t identify who makes the claim round out the new, worthless explanation of the Wine Clip’s operating principles.

Buy a Wine Clip if you want one, but you’ll be getting a $40 refrigerator magnet; it won’t have any real effect on the taste of wine.

Saltare Has Passed

Another Saltare has come and gone. I can’t say that I was thrilled with the level of planning; everything was handled in about as last-minute a fashion as I think would be humanly possible. That being said, I think the Shire of Tal Mere handled their part of the proceedings quite well; it’s not easy to arrange a site classrooms and a ballroom on short notice, and they did a pretty good job of providing both.

I didn’t have the opportunity to learn much new this year. I taught Contrapasso, Ballo del Fiore, and Laccio d’Amore, and I was pretty pleased with the turnout for all three classes. I was able to attend Lady Rachael’s class on Villanella and part of Lady Tsire’s class on Buffens… Bouffons… oh, heck, it’s not like spelling was clearly defined in the sixteenth century, so who cares?

It was nice to see a scheduled court at Saltare. I felt pressured not to schedule it when I hosted, but either the pressure went away or the autocrat ignored it. Lady Francesca got to be in the Queen’s entourage this time, and I think she found that quite amusing.

The ball started in reasonable time after court and had a good selection of dances. Lady Rachael had them culturally grouped within sets, which is an approach I probably wouldn’t have taken; I think it limits how many people will be able to participate in any given set. We had a good mix of simple and complex dances in each set, though, so it worked out fine.

Two of my favorite people did get into something of a spat during the ball, unfortunately. The less said the better, and hopefully it can all be forgiven and let lie by the next event.

Another Fencing Drill

Since the opening of Youth Fencing in the Kingdom, I’ve had a couple of younger students join our fencing group. I find new students always help me work on my technique, since I can actually slow down a bit and concentrate on executing attacks and parries properly instead of having to defend with all the speed I can muster against an experienced opponent. New students just haven’t developed the reflexes yet, and I want them to be able to see my attack coming so they can try to do the right thing to counter it.

That in mind, I developed a new drill last weekend for doing hand parries. Not that I’m the first to come up with it, mind you; I just happened to catch the drift at our last practice. The basic idea is that you have to keep a rapier-equipped opponent from stabbing you using nothing but your gloved hands. Needless to say, you’re going to need to wear full protective gear.

I teach Jeet Kune Do parries that I learned a couple of years ago for empty-hand parries in fencing. I’m sure that instructors who come from a different martial arts background will have their own favorites, but I find that the JKD parries are particularly well suited to fencing (possibly because Bruce Lee was inspired by fencing early in the development of JKD). Someday I’ll have to take some pictures of the actual moves, since using their Chinese names wouldn’t mean a thing to most people, even if I remembered them right.

UPDATE: These are now available in video form.

For the basic drill, the attacker throws three attacks in succession. The first is a high attack to the head or throat thrown from the secund guard, in which the sword his held at arms length to the side… a sort of “outside” attack. The second attack is another high shot, this time thrown from the quarta guard, in which the sword arm crosses in front of the body to throw an “inside” shot. The final attack goes toward the belly, and it’s thrown from the terza or low guard. The attacker should make these thrusts at a measured pace, making the parries easy for the defender… at first. We’ll spice up the drill later.

The defender should parry all of the attacks with the same hand. Parry the first attack to the outside (that’s the left side if you’re parrying with your left hand) using the back of the hand closest to the approaching blade. Parry the second attack by bringing your palm across to push it to the opposite side. Parry the final attack by swinging your arm straight down to push the attack to the outside. Ideally, your elbow should stay pretty still while your forearm rotates around to parry attacks.

Get good at this defense with both hands. You’ll want to get particularly good with your off hand, since it will be the one that’s empty when you’re fighting with a single rapier, and it will be your only defense if your sword is busy attacking or otherwise locked up.

When that’s starting to get too easy, advance to stage two: vary the pace of the attacks. Shorten or lengthen the delay between attacks so the defender can’t predict exactly when to parry. The defender can also start trying to grip the blade briefly during the parries.

Finally, continue the drill on the move. Both the attacker and defender should feel free to move about (using good footwork, of course). The attacker will be trying to maintain an ideal attack distance, while the defender will be trying to stay either outside of the attacker’s range or slip in close enough during a parry to score a finger-touch on the attacker.

That's all for now. I'm leaving for Saltare tomorrow.

WoW: Into the Depths

I found some extended opportunities to play World of Warcraft over the weekend, and I used them to venture into a couple of instance dungeons: Gnomeregan and Blackfathom Deeps.

I found a group to venture into Gnomeregan with Grimbor on Saturday morning. Gnomeregan is the former capital of the Gnome civilization (hence the name), but it has been overrun by troggs and insane “Leper Gnomes”; the circumstances of the invasion are somewhat vague. Gnomes are the most prolific engineers of the WoW civilizations, and Gnomeregan is filled with whirring and spinning machinery. In fact, robotic adversaries are a significant portion of the enemies that you'll face in the dungeon. This dungeon is located in the Dun Morogh region, west of the entrance to the Dwarf capital of Ironforge.

Tips:

• After decending the elevator into Gnomeregan, turn left when you reach a balcony to head toward the entrance to the Instance.
• Some monsters in Gnomeregan – mostly troggs near the entrance – respawn. If you get wiped in the instance, you'll probably have to fight shortly after resurrecting yourself.
• If you see Dark Iron Dwarves, be wary of traps. They lay mines in the path, and the detonation of the mine will be followed by a brutal rush of monsters (yes, the photo below is my entire party turning all dead in just such an event).

• Also be wary of Alarm Bots. They announce you're presence to nearby monsters, potentially creating another unsurvivable rush.

The group that went with me into Gnomeregan was not an especially good one. Apart from Healemall, who's a member of my guild, they were fairly scatterbrained. We got wiped out with annoying frequency. I did manage to complete a few quests for the dungeon, though.

Saturday evening I played Gullveig and joined a group headed into Blackfathom Deeps. The Deeps are located on northern portion of the west coast of the region of Ashenvale. I only had one Blackfathom Deeps quest, and I didn't even complete it, but I still had a better time working the deeps because the group was much better organized. In fact, we only got wiped once, and that by an encounter that was deliberately set up to be pretty brutal.

Be prepared to do a bit of swimming. The Deeps are home to an array of aquatic monsters, including Murlocks, Nagas, crab-like Snapclaws, something resembling a giant snapping turtle, and Threshadons. It's also home to the Twilight Cult, which has members of a variety of races and classes. The Aquamancers may be the most annoying: they're like Warlocks that summon water elementals. An encounter with four Aquamancers turned into the big wipe for my party. All in all, though, it was a pretty good run, and Gullveig gained a level in the process. I played Primary Healer for the group, a role that I seem to be able to hold down pretty well.

On a final note, the latest patch (1.9) to World of Warcraft made at least one very cool update. Now all of the major capital cities have auction houses. You no longer have to journey to Orgrimmar or Ironforge to get to one. I think that's a long-overdue update.

Less than a week left to Saltare!

The Skeptic Thing

Even though it was winter in the north, where the Sun would not rise for many days and snow and ice held the land in a ferocious grip, the great Lords of skeptical thought would not rest. They had searched their realms for the claims of the foolish and credulous, and now they journeyed to the hall of Ulfsheim, where Runolfr, son of Ulf, called the Word Chooser, would host their discussion of matters unproven.

As they entered the hall, servants took their great fur coats and hung them on pegs along the walls. They seated themselves on benches around the great central fire, and more servants brought out drinking horns brimming with mead. They muttered among themselves and sipped from their horns until the last of had arrived, then Lord Runolfr rose from his seat at the head of the hall and raised his arms for silence.

“Great Lords and Ladies of the Realms of Clear Thought. Let our business begin!” he shouted. “The Skeptic Thing has begun! Rise and share your wisdom!”

Lord John McKay rose to stand upon his bench, tossed his empty drinking horn aside, and addressed the Thing. “Some people can look at a water stain and see the Virgin Mary playing canasta with Elvis. This dentist looks at a rock and sees a woolly mammoth battling a dinosaur,” he said. “The tooth-inspector in question, one Jack Cuozzo, would have us believe that scientists have been conspiring for decades to cover up the Biblical truth of our ancestry. Let his duplicity be made plain to all.”

Lord Gadfly jumped up onto a table, and all eyes turned to him. “Hear me, wise ones,” he said, “For my tongue is struck with inspiration!” Whereupon he launched into a poetic tale of his youth, and how the events of that day set him upon the path of critical thought. The assembly listened in rapt silence, then erupted with cheers at the conclusion, and the points of many drinking horns turned toward the rafters. “That is not all!” the Lord exclaimed, bringing quiet to the hall again. “In long thought, I have determined how evil undermines omnipotence.”

Now Lord Parker stood upon his bench to address the gathering. “I bring grave news of the state of medicine in the land,” he said. “The land is thronged with sickened folk who fear that tested medicines and procedures may do them more harm than the disease, and there are all to many physicians of dubious integrity willing to treat them with alternative methods” He went on to relate the latest news of just such a practitioner.

The Autism Valkyrie sprang lightly to a table top, and her voice rang across the hall. “We must all be more wary than ever, “ she said, “for I have seen that even documents that have supposedly been reviewed by qualified peers may in fact make contradictory claims.” She then elaborated in great detail about quicksilver measurements in the hair of children, and how the measurements were often higher in “normal” children than in those affected by autism.

Lord Orac now took his turn to stand and address the Thing. “As I often I do”, he began in an oddly mechanical tone, “I bring word of those who pontificate upon matters of which they know nothing. Indeed, I suspect they prefer their state of ignorance.” He continued at some length about celebrities who think they can speak with authority about the origins of life and others who simply enjoy being contrary by ranting against tried-and-true developments like vaccines before settling back onto his bench.

Lord Skeptico then stepped onto his seat. “Those who speak from ignorance or ideology are bad enough, but those who falsely claim to critically assess a subject are perhaps worse.” He then related the tale of a questioner who missed an opportunity to demand evidence from charlatans. He was not yet finished, though, and after a quick draught from his horn, he continued, “The tricks of the credulous are easy enough to spot”, he began, going on to relate the trick of using the incompleteness of science as an indictment of it.

Having heard Lord Skeptico's first story, Ryan the Skald could wait no longer and rose to sing, for he could not resist a bawdy tale about the same hypocritical effort to be skeptical of psychics. The assembly applauded and raised their horns as he returned to his seat.

Lord Max stood up as the applause subsided. “I bring a story of local woes,” he said. Evidently a cabal of tinkers had arisen in his domain who made irrational claims about how to provide energy. He ranted on for some time about this intrusion before returning to his seat to nurse his horn of mead.

Lord Max seated himself, and Lord Thursday stood. “If I were just a little bit more dishonest, I might be a very wealthy man by now,” he began. He then related not one but two thoughts on how easy it would be to become wealthy with pseudoscientific deceptions aimed at his subjects. Having spoken, he took a deep draught from his horn, as if in despair, before seating himself again.

Lord O'Donnel rose next, saying “First, the future looks grim for emerging medicinal knowledge”, he said, referring to the woes of the field of stem cell research. He then turned and raised his horn to toast Lord Orac, for as he told next, he dealt with more anti-vaccination foolishness in his own realm.

Lord EoR then stood upon his bench. “I invite the entire assembly to laugh at this deception,” he said. His tale was, indeed, mirthful, for he spun a marvelous yarn of a homeopath who claimed to have evidence too grand to be believed. “He even claims to have discovered life force,” he said in conclusion.

Lord Phil the Astronomer stood upon his bench. “Let me be the one to relate the good news!” he shouted. For the new education stewards of Dover had reversed the foolish decision of their forbears.

Lady Ditz then arose. “I have discovered yet another worthless healing claim”, she said. She expounded upon a baseless claim that hypnosis could be used to cure dyslexia.


Skald Xiphias then stood to relate a new theory that he had been working out with his family. “It all makes perfect sense, when you think about it”, he said in conclusion, although it was certainly a twisted sort of sense.

Lord Runolfr now stood a final time at he head of the hall. “It is good to hear that there are those in our lands who do not accept an extraordinary claim without sound evidence. You have all brought wise words and ways to share among us and with all the people of the land. I now charge you all to continue in your good works and teach others how to sift the claims they hear with the fine mesh of skepticism. The Skeptic Thing is ended, but we shall look forward to hearing from you again in two weeks at the Skeptic Rant.”

With that, servants came out to escort the guests to their bowers, and the hall fell silent, attended only by a few servants who brought more wood to keep the great fire burning.