Compromise and Conceit

Infernal adventuring…

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An Australian statistician and role-player living in Japan, interested in the theory and practice of role-playing…

Category: Science

  • Healers in the Crimea: a factual account

    I am presenting a Special Lecture on Global Crime and Public Health this semester, which is really the culmination of my work on international drug cartels, prohibition and harm reduction. In preparation for the lecture on harm reduction, at the end of the lecture on sex work and sexually transmitted infections (STIs) I thought I…

  • Fucking Linux

    I’m going out for a drink now. I spent much of this afternoon and evening trying to install Linux on a PowerPC iBook G4. The only reason I’m doing this is that I thought it might be nimbler than mac os 10.4. We use this iBook purely for watching movies (it’s plugged into the tv)…

  • Why Tory reforms of the NHS won’t work

    Over in the UK, the long period of flirting with market-based solutions to the NHS’s problems has finally come to a head, with the new coalition government deciding to abolish the cap on fee-paying patients at public hospitals. This means that the big hospitals can compete for a supposedly lucrative health tourism and private health…

  • Have casualty rates in Afghanistan actually increased?

    The release of the wikileaks data on the “secret story” of Afghanistan has led to a frenzy of the usual shallow reportage one comes to expect of the media, and nowhere more shallow than in the sensational finding that death rates of coalition soldiers have increased over the last 7 years. The Guardian even has…

  • A long time ago, in an ocean far far away

    Many years ago I ran a campaign I referred to as “The Apocalypse Campaign,” set in a post-apocalyptic Europe in which the sea level had risen. This was back when A4 drawing tablets for a computer were hideously expensive, and scanners were expensive too. So to make my higher sea-level Britain, I photocopied pages from…

  • Some thoughts on black swans, modelling and role-playing

    I have noticed recently a tiny debate going on between two blogs concerning whether or not it is sensible to assign the class of people called peasants a different distribution of ability scores to the class of people called lords. The distinction in question – 2d6 for peasants, 3d6 for lords – seems roughly fine…