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…

  • When Cthulhu Spoils Your Weekend

    I just received an email from a friend living in the UK, and in the email was this brief review of a night out in London:

    I went to something the other day which made me think of you – a steampunk night.  It was full of people with elaborate Victoriana/goth/cyber-type outfits.  Among other things there was a grindcore band who did a song about an otherwise delightful family trip to the seaside (Margate, to be precise) being ruined by the appearance of mythical being Cthulhu rising up from the sea and sexually abusing grandma.  The phrase “tentacle rape” featured a number of times.

    Steampunk-burlesque-grindcore-lovecraft. Has civilization finally reached its nadir?

  • Japanese Cellphone Social Life

    Today during lunch with nothing better to do I broke out my keitai (cellphone) to check the news, and stumbled on a news article about a foolish chap who has been charged with taking secret film of more than 2000 women in public toilet facilities throughout Osaka. Apparently he was caught after getting involved in an incident during one of his intrepid attempts to install a digital camera in a women’s toilet, and an English translation of the key points of the article is available here. Apparently he made 4.5 million yen (about 45,000 US$) over 2 years selling this stuff on the internet. Who knew this kind of stuff was so popular?

    On my keitai the news article was uploaded (to yahoo’s cellphone internet site) at 8:52 am. I read it at midday, i.e. 3 hours later. At that time there were already 952 comments, and more comments were being added as I read it at a rate of about 1 per minute. Not only were there 952 comments, but each comment had a (widely used) “I agree” or “I disagree” button, and being ranked in order on my phone I could see that by that time the most popular had about 250 “agrees.” This comment simply said “Treat it as a serious crime.” As I write this there are now 1585 comments, and the top trending one (the same comment) has 5,603 “agree” and 358 “disagree” votes. The next couple of comments, in order, are:

    • Let’s publish photos of his face and home: 1519 agree, 89 disagree
    • 2000 people? Because he’ll undoubtedly do it again, give him death… and catch the people who bought the films too!: 1314 agree, 211 disagree
    • … something I don’t understand, even though I can read every word of it … : 1099 agrees, 93 disagrees
    • Because it’s been released on the internet, the victims suffering will be unlimited … so punishing the criminal with death is also right: 795 agree, 114 disagree
    • Publish the name of his company. If it’s a school or he’s a teacher, we should know: 710 agree, 31 disagree

    I have never seen anything like this level of commentary on a western newspaper article. For example, Barry Ritholtz’s article on the Big Lie, in the Washington Post, which was still most popular article a week after it was written, currently has 1793 comments. The top recommended comment has 97 recommendations – after two weeks.

    I never had an internet-capable phone when I lived in the west so I don’t know but I think this represents a level of social engagement through cellphones that is completely different to the way westerners approach social media – it’s a much higher level of engagement. Am I right, or does this phenomenon happen in western phonesites too?

  • Current Reading: Psychic Detective Yakumo Part 3

    Postmodernism and Panties

    After a work- and laziness-induced hiatus, I’ve returned to reading this series, about the detective/university student, Yakumo, and his friend Haruka. Yakumo can see ghosts, and works as a private detective in the ghost world; Haruka (pictured, in a rage) is his friend, and a university student as well, who becomes embroiled in his cases after initially inviting his help with a friend. At the end of Part 2, the pair – along with a rough and bullying private investigator called Gotoh – thought they had cracked the case of a child murderer, who had died in a car crash but managed to take possession of a by-stander in the moments before his death.

    In this episode, we meet Yakumo’s uncle, a Buddhist priest, who helps them to deceive the ghost of the child murderer and trick it into possessing the body of a rat, thus freeing the girl it had possessed and dooming it to a life of cheese and over-sized testicles. Unfortunately, they were wrong about the culprit for the murders – a fourth victim is discovered just hours after they consign the supposed murderer to a life of medical experiments. There must have been two murderers, and they have only caught one. So, they are back on the hunt for the murderer and, as might be expected, through the development of sympathy with a related character and the decision to act kindly towards someone else, Haruka becomes the potential fifth victim. Yakumo, Goto and Goto’s long-suffering side-kick Ishii arrive just in time to save her from a horrible death, and the identity of the real criminal, as well as his twisted motives, are revealed. As seems to be typical of many putatively evil people in manga, we come to understand and sympathize with his motives, and someone is able to forgive him (though he still goes to prison, which is going to mean the death penalty).

    This episode is reasonably light on investigative stuff and is primarily focussed on revealing more about our heroes. Haruka is forced to confront the ghosts of her past (having literally done so in the previous episode), and has a long and difficult conversation with her mother about her feelings of guilt over the death of her sister. This is quite a sweetly done conversation, and in fact much of this episode seems to be about deepening our understanding and appreciation of Haruka. Haruka is a very kind, very considerate and genuinely nice person but she’s also very feisty, open-minded, and quite tough when it comes to expressing her feelings or acting on something she thinks is right. This combination of traits seems to be very dangerous when you’re part of Yakumo’s world. In fact, I would go so far as to say that although this series is titled Psychic Detective Yakumo, the central character is really Haruka and it should be renamed Haruka’s Adventures with Ghosts and a Cold-hearted Bastard (would that be 冷たいあいつと幽霊を出会う春香の冒険？), because although we are learning to understand his history and motives, Yakumo really isn’t very nice to Haruka. He teases her and is always cold and rough.

    By contrast with Haruka’s story, in this episode we mainly find out functional details about Yakumo, and particularly we discover that he has some kind of nemesis who has the same powers as him and was involved in setting the murderer onto Haruka. They have some historical connection, and he’s obviously going to be the chief enemy of future episodes because in the final scene, when Haruka is enjoying the cherry blossoms with Yakumo, they are given a note by a child that simply says “See you again soon.” This is an ominous sign for their future: cherry blossoms are a sign of the passing of things, and if they get this note while they’re walking through falling cherry blossoms then it probably means the end of their happy life so far (if being coolly treated by someone you clearly have a crush on and nearly murdered twice counts as a “happy life,” but Haruka doesn’t seem to be complaining). The fourth episode looms …

    A brief aside concerning panties, and styles of representation

    In the above frame, Haruka has just finished her conversation with her mother, and her mother asks her “Haruka, your readers could see your panties, you know …” And in fact we could. For the first time in 3 episodes, and only at this moment when Haruka is opening up to her mother about her feelings of guilt, we get several quite direct views of Haruka’s panties. This is interesting because there are lots of other times – going up railway station stairs, sitting on chairs, exploring mysterious houses – where we could have been accidentally exposed to this most hideous of sights; and of course the writer has complete control of the field of view, and Haruka isn’t exactly excessive in her use of leg-covering material, so we could regularly witness this sight, but we never have up until now. It could be fan service, but I don’t think so. I think that it is intended to emphasize her emotional vulnerability in this conversation – unlike when she is being beaten, drowned, tied up and about to die, at which points we never see her undies. So I’m wondering if actually the “panty-shot” so maligned by western critics of anime is actually a representational ploy to show someone’s naivete, childlike position, or vulnerability. I’ll be exploring this and other aspects of representational styles in manga in a future post.

    Conclusion

    This episode of Psychic Detective Yakumo gave us a complex and challenging crime, some more details of the workings of the ghostworld and its interactions with the human, and a deeper insight into Haruka, who is developing as a stand-out character. It has also set us up for a plot involving some dark nemesis, which promises to be a lot of fun but threatens to turn silly. The story is a page-turner and the characters, though still a little stereotypical – especially Gotoh san – and with sometimes somewhat too archetypical relationships (Haruka and Yakumo’s friendship/unrecognized love affair is as old as Japanese drama, I think), are sympathetic and generally enjoyable to read about. I’ve got another book to attend to now, but I’ll be getting back to number four soon. The series is certainly popular here, and is definitely good enough to hold one’s interest. Stay tuned for more adventures in ghost-detection, manga-style.

  • In Praise of British Cooking

    Yesterday I discovered this excellent essay by George Orwell talking about the joys of English food. Many people will tell you that British food is terrible but actually that’s not true at all, and George Orwell mounts a spirited defense of the English culinary tradition in this article. What is true is the slightly different statement, “food you buy in England is terrible.” And it is certainly the case that since Britain opened its borders to the EU food culture there has improved immeasurably (this also owes no small debt to the antipodes). But this is more to do with Britain’s moribund business culture and society of low expectations than it has to do with original British cooking, which is actually quite diverse and interesting, and in many ways unique. I think Orwell sums up the difference between a tourist’s experience of British food and the reality with this pithy moment:

    If you want, say, a good, rich slice of Yorkshire pudding you are more likely to get it in the poorest English home than in a restaurant, which is where the visitor necessarily eats most of his meals

    This isn’t to say that British home-cooking is good: I have met many a Japanese person whose home-stay family cooked their food by “pressing a button.” But the fact that good British cuisine is a dying art doesn’t mean it isn’t great when it is done well. Here are some of my favourite British foods:

    • Portobello Mushroom steaks and burgers
    • Smoked fish in all its diversity, and especially the way English people treat eels
    • Rhubarb
    • Horseradish
    • A good cornish pasty, three days’ worth of food for about a pound if you buy it down Southwest way, my dahling my love
    • A good ploughman’s lunch, with the bread that Orwell approves of and a fine selection of pickles and cheeses
    • Ciders and ales, which are truly diverse and astounding in their range

    I have to disagree with Orwell about the faggots[1], and in the next few days I think I should post on my experience of this most uniquely disgusting British food[2], but he’s right especially about the bread. When I returned to London in September I was all over the bread! Sadly in the two weeks I was there I only managed to eat one really decent British meal in a pub, for exactly the reason Orwell gives – British restauranteurs undersell their own cuisine and instead do a shit job of trying to cover continental stuff. But if you are looking for British food I think I can give a few recommendations:

    • Put on your stab vest and visit the Old Dairy in Finsbury Park (near where I used to live). They always have good food and usually it is representative of British stuff (though their non-British food is usually excellent)
    • Visit the store in the Borough Markets that sells ales. The borough markets are overpriced and over-rated but they are still good and the ale store is excellent
    • If you are in Devon, go to any pier during late spring and summer, and buy pickled cockles and mussels (alive! alive-o!)
    • If you are in Devon, there is a little village in the middle of Dartmoor (I forget the name) where the pub does a truly awesome pie. Order one for your whole family, and you will still feel the weight packing on when you leave. Follow it up with a visit to the local post office so that you can experience the joys of British service at its worst
    • Visit the Hartland Quay hotel in Hartland, Bideford Bay, Devon. The hotel itself is built on an old port where wreckers and smugglers used to be active, and is exactly the place you imagine when you’re reading the opening chapters of Treasure Island. Don’t park your car on the seaward side of the car park though, or it will get salt-damaged
    • Fifteen, Jamie Oliver’s restaurant in London, is excellent and although the staff are all antipodean, the food always has a British inspiration. Jamie Oliver may be a complete wanker but he is a really, really good cook and he gets the basics right every time. The breakfast is also excellent
    • The smallest pub in Bath, the Coeur-de-Lion, does an excellent Ploughman’s Lunch. Bath itself is an absolute shithole and under no circumstances should you go into a tearoom, but if you do happen to find yourself stranded in this hellhole of British tourism, the coeur de Lion is your ticket to nirvana. Make the most of it, because at some point you are going to have to get on a Great South Western Train[3]

    So, if you’re in Britain, do your best to find out what British people used to eat, and do your best to eat it. And make the most of the ales while you’re there – some of them are truly excellent. I recommend Otter, anything by Prince Charles’s company, the Wychwood brand (which I think is related to Prince Charles, and has the added benefit of being all dark and RPG-ish), and anything by the Hall and Woodhouse company (Badger Ales, the Fursty Ferret, etc.) Usually also ales with honey in are fun. And do try the cider when you’re in England (though obviously not strongbow). There are a wide range of locally-brewed ciders, some of which are truly monstrous and some of which are great.

    If you do a culinary tour of Britain properly, when you leave you will never again have patience for the ancient adage, “all British food is shit.” Though, if you spend any time in Britain, you will know without a doubt that for 99% of Britons and 99.9% of visitors, it is undoubtedly true.

    I would like to finish this post by observing that reading Orwell truly is a joy – he is one of the great exponents of the English language in its purest and most powerful form. And I would like to add – imagine if Orwell were blogging now, what a wonderful contribution that would be to the internet.

    —

    fn1: haha. I wonder what his view on homosexuality was?

    fn2: Actually the most uniquely disgusting British food is my paternal grandmother’s pasta sauce, made entirely from one tin of tomatoes and one tin of steak and kidney

    fn3: I once watched a Korean couple miss their stop because no one could figure out how to open the train door, so I will tell you this for nothing: the door handle of Great South Western Trains is on the outside, and even though there are big signs on the door telling you not to open the window and not to lean out of the window, this is in fact the only way to open the door. Also, when your ticket gives a seat number and a letter, ignore the letter. It is always A and it always means “airline.” This is the type of chair you will be sitting in while you travel in the train, except it doesn’t recline, doesn’t have a call button, doesn’t have a life jacket and doesn’t have an entertainment system so in fact is nothing at all like an airline seat. Only the number is relevant to where your chair is. It’s shit like this that makes foreigners understand why Britain lost its empire.

  • Problems and Opportunities in Japan’s Ageing Population “Timebomb”

    Now the world’s population has reached 7 billion, there is some talk of the consequences for the planet, and as always happens at this time attention has turned to Japan’s ageing population. This is usually seen as a bad thing for Japan, with various predictions of population crash and economic catastrophe for the world’s second largest (or is it third now?) economy. There is also much talk of its “unsustainable” debt problems, because as the working population shrinks the government won’t be able to pay for its debts, and suggestions also that Japan won’t be able to maintain its industrial economy and maintain an ageing population. Japan is a particularly interesting example of how much myth and nonsense can swirl around a demographic issue, because a) people commenting on it usually know nothing about Japan and just imagine it’s the same as America and b) arguments based on demographic projections are inevitably wrong. People are talking now about Japan’s population crashing in 2050; I bet in the 1970s they were talking about the yellow peril taking over the world with their high birth rate. A lot can happen in 40 years.

    I think most of the myth and nonsense about Japan is driven by a combination of ignorance and rambo-style muscular deficit terrorism, which I define as that kind of macho classical economics thinking which claims a population has to stay young and vigorous in order to service public debt; public debt is always wrong and “unsustainable,” and populations that don’t thrive (i.e. produce lots of babies) will be extinguished by their vigorous rivals. This is the kind of thinking which you see in right-wing blogs all the time, about how Europe-stan is being overwhelmed demographically by “arabs” and overwhelmed economically by the more vigorous [insert current region of concern here]. It’s a heady cocktail of TANSTAAFL, anti-government-spending (unless it’s defense), society-is-in-decline-because-of-the-women theologizing. In the case of debates about Japan, it’s also infused with a fair amount of condescension, ignorance, some nice stuff about how we treat our women better than they do, and classic liberal feminist failure to consider labour rights in analyzing social problems. It should be noted it’s a common theme across all the different political traditions (right, left, libertarian, commie, feminist, palaeocon, neocon) and it misses a few important points about Japan and demographics that I want to talk about here. I don’t, incidentally, claim that the linked article is an example of any of the flaws I described; I just linked it because it’s recent, and not in a conservative rag either.

    I’ll briefly explain the real reason why Japan has a birthrate problem, then describe why I think there are many ways to save it, many of which are opportunities to improve Japan and the region. I think Japan is better placed to solve the problem than other countries, and I’ll explain why. I’ll also finish with some suggestions about why an ageing population is a good thing that we should all embrace, without descending into crude environmentalist tropes about having to reduce population.

    Why Japan has a Birthrate Problem

    Many reasons are suggested inside and outside Japan for its falling birthrates (currently 1.2 per woman according to the linked article). Some people think it’s to do with Japan’s oft-cited feminist failings; others think it’s because Japanese aren’t having sex as much as other countries (on the basis of a survey by durex[1], who make really shit condoms), often leavened with a bit of nudge-nudge-wink-wink those Asians aren’t as fecund as us type insinuations. Some think it’s a crisis in Japanese society to do with its alleged cruelty or lack of social connections (a common view of Japanese is that they are “like robots”). Some think it’s because the government has buried its head in the sand, that women can’t have kids and a career, etc.

    In fact Japan has a good maternity leave scheme (I think it’s 3 months’ leave at 60% of your salary) paid for by social insurance; although it lacks capacity in private or public childcare companies, traditionally childcare for working women has been provided by their husband’s parents (with whom they live) and this is still standard practice. In fact, I know and have known women taking advantage of both arrangements. It’s my belief that work culture is founded on the assumption that older workers are living in an extended family setting where their personal arrangements are handled by elderly family members. The problem, rather, is that workplace culture here is extremely strict and unrelenting on both genders, and particularly the situation for young workers in their 20s is such that they delay marriage and childbirth until much later. This isn’t just because women can’t have a career and children (they can). It’s because for the first 10 years of your working life in Japan you can’t have a life and a career. Japanese seishain (the “cradle-to-grave” employees that are idealized in western leftist imaginings of Japan’s 70s corporate culture) are transferred by their company on a whim, often for no reason as a matter of policy. They are expected to work hideous amounts of overtime and then to drink with their colleagues after work; they are not allowed time off beyond a few days for any reason; and they may have to apologize and give presents if they miss days at work due to illness. But particularly, the transfer culture and the overtime culture have a pernicious effect on young people’s ability to form stable relationships, and so a huge proportion of Japanese youth are putting off family life until their thirties. If you don’t start family life till your thirties, you have less children and are more likely to miss the chance altogether. The result is a falling birthrate, and the solution is to change workplace culture. This is not a problem for women workers specifically: if a company won’t allow its male workers more than a few days off for their honeymoon, what chance are female employees going to have of 3 months? The problem is a generalized problem of workplace culture and it can’t be fixed by a feminist reorientation of maternity leave rights. It needs to be fixed by a complete change in the way Japan’s businesses operate.

    Why Japan is well-placed to handle the problem

    Compare Japan and the UK, which also has a declining birthrate problem. Japan has low taxes, relatively low female workforce participation, a low retirement age (60 in many companies), immigration rates well below the maximum level the people will tolerate, low inflation, and a massive industrial base. The UK has extremely high taxes (e.g. its VAT rate is 20%; Japan’s is 5%), quite high female workforce participation, is already increasing its retirement age, has immigration rates that are controversial to the majority of the population, high inflation, and an economy already heavily focused on services. The only thing going in its favour is a high unemployment rate (lots of unused labour). Both countries have high government debt (120% of GDP for Japan, about 70% for the UK, I think).

    So Japan can easily adapt to a slowly declining working-age population by increasing taxes, getting more women into work, increasing the retirement age, increasing immigration and shifting from industry to services in the economy. Furthermore, if the government were to set strict rules on business activity to ensure more family-friendly workplaces, and these were to result in rising prices, the inflation rate would still be manageable (it’s currently very low). What, in comparison, can Britain do? Get it’s unemployed people working again. Good luck with that, Mr. Cameron …

    Another way in which I think this problem is often misunderstood by commentators is that retired Japanese people do not drop out of the workforce, but instead become important parts of the unpaid or informal economy. They often work as farmers in small-holdings long into their 70s, while also providing important childcare and family support services to their children. I know someone working in Oita whose two children are essentially cared for by her parents-in-law; she doesn’t cook any meals during the week, and her parents also run a small mandarin orchard on land they own behind the house. None of this activity is taken into account in national statistics about the “working-age population,” which under-estimate the true size of Japan’s workforce despite the near ubiquitous nature of this family support. Japanese families are not like Western families, and you can’t treat something like “declining birthrate” or “ageing population” that is intricately connected with the nature of the family and social support networks without considering this.

    Why Debt is Not a Problem

    So, in terms of pure resources, the ageing population is not necessarily a problem for Japan, and offers Japanese people an opportunity to reform their workplace culture for the better. Increasing women’s participation by requiring workplaces to offer maternity leave consistent with that which the government offers (i.e. forcing employers to grant unpaid maternity leave to their staff) would both increase women’s workforce participation (thus increasing the pool of workers) and increase the birthrate. Having a quiet word with the major employers and their organizations, and forcing them to abolish the stupid transfer system (or strengthen labour laws to give employees a full right of appeal) would enable people to remain in one city and build their non-work lives. This would lead to short term redundancies and perhaps cost increases, but inflation is low and unemployment is very low, so it would doubtless not be a significant long-term problem. So the problem is easily solved but might require increases in government spending to cover maternity leave, increased childcare places, etc. This is anathema to the deficit terrorists, because Japan has a high debt-to-GDP ratio, and it is seen as “unsustainable.” The alternative, of doing nothing and just allowing the workforce to shrink, is also considered unsustainable because the debt will be serviced by an increasingly small number of taxpayers.

    Putting aside Japan’s ability to raise taxes to cover this problem, the whole debate is completely wrong-headed anyway. Let’s do what the deficit terrorists love to do, and compare Japan to a household. Let’s suppose it has a working-age population of about 25% of the household, which is about what it is projected to become (I think). For a normal Japanese household, we can imagine this as two ageing, retired parents, two 50-something adults, a child in University and a child in high school. The mother and the university-age child work part time and the father works full time. That’s about 25% of the population working. They have debts equal to 120% of their income. Furthermore, if we place them in the same economic position as Japan is internationally, we have to assume they’re near the top of the income scale; Dad is a university professor or company director, as was his dad. If this family approach the bank for a loan to make their house more disability-friendly, so that mother is better able to care for the disabled parents, and thus able to work an extra day a week, would any bank manager turn  them down? I don’t think so – their debt would be seen as completely sustainable. In fact if it were America this family would be encouraged to take a loan to invest in a second property or the share market (as I have been). In fact, the American or Australian dream involves a family with both adults working as hard as they can, with loans equal to about 300% of their combined income that have been taken out on a house they can only afford if its value continues to increase, and who were encouraged during the boom time to refinance and use their house as an ATM to fund their lifestyle. This was considered “sustainable” in the 2000s by most deficit-terrorists when it was done by individual households. Why is it unsustainable for Japan as a country?[2] In fact, when considered in this way, Japan is well able to finance its future problems through debt.

    Some Opportunities for Japan in the “timebomb.”

    Lifting the burden of social care

    One of the most crushing remaining social burdens for women in Japanese society is their role as carers for ageing parents. The general assumption of Japanese life is that the eldest child will care for their parents; if a man, his wife will do it; if a woman, she’ll marry someone else’s younger son, he’ll move in with her family, and she’ll do it. But this assumption can only be maintained if most families have at least 2 children, since as soon as a lot of families start having one child, the 2-to-1 ratio of caring can’t continue. Someone has to let their child move away and do without being cared for. At at this point the system breaks, and the replacement will undoubtedly involve institutional care. The declining birthrate is driving Japanese old people into assisted living and care homes, liberating their daughters and daughters-in-law from an onerous and unpleasant family responsibility. This is a huge plus.

    Achieving feminist goals

    Being slaved to childbirth is a huge restriction on women’s freedom, and as the birthrate plummets women are increasingly free to live their own lives. In an ageing society with long lifespans and only 1 or 2 children per woman, women have more freedom to explore their own interests before having a child, and have more time after child-rearing to return to a fully rewarding non-family life. Reducing the number of children women have to bear has been a long-term goal of feminism, and it has been achieved in the East Asian countries. This is a good thing, and we should not be rushing to reverse it; this is also part of the reason, I think, that many people refer to the modern Japanese era as “the women’s era (onna jidai).”

    Increased Immigration

    Japan will benefit culturally and economically from increased immigration, but will never get this immigration without conscious effort due to the language barrier. The ageing population means that Japan has to look overseas for some types of worker, especially carers, and has started, for example, to train Philipino nurses in Japanese so that they can come and work in Japan. This gives Japan the chance to diversify its population and improve its connections with its Asian neighbours. In general Japanese relations with Asia are good but increased immigration can only make them better. The ageing population is an incentive for the government to start planning this and investing in Japanese language education throughout the Pacific. This is a huge long-term benefit for Japan’s regional relations.

    Reform of Workplace Laws

    The main way that Japan will increase its working-age population in the long and short term is to improve women’s participation in the workforce, and especially to improve their ability to balance work and family life. This is something that has been a long time coming in Japan and will benefit everyone, not just women who want to balance career and family. It will enable men to settle down earlier in their careers, will prevent the horrible cruelties of transfers[3], and will lead to a general reduction in overtime and overwork. This is a huge benefit for everyone.

    Why Ageing Populations are Good

    The opportunities identified for Japan also apply to many other countries, but I think there are some additional benefits that derive from the ageing population that are good for everyone, and which we should embrace:

    • Increased Opportunities for Developing Nations: One commons solution to labour shortages in ageing countries is to import immigrant labour from poorer countries. This is good for the people of those countries; for places like the Phillipines, foreign remittances are a sizable proportion of total private foreign investment in the country, and are good for its economy. So as we age, immigrant labour provides a form of economic aid that those countries need and that also benefits us. It’s a win!
    • Less Crime: Ageing societies will experience lower rates of crime and less serious types of crime, which is good for everyone
    • Reduced Conflict: Ageing societies have less ability to wage war, and have to reduce defense spending due to both a loss of combat-age adults, and a need to redirect spending to services. Countries that are less likely to wage aggressive war make better citizens; furthermore, when they realize they can’t maintain an aggressive army they are likely to switch their funding for forward defense from the military to aid, which again helps their poorer neighbours. This is exactly what Japan does, of course.
    • Changeing Lifespans: partially freed from the hard restraint of giving birth by 27 or 28, adults in ageing populations essentially extend their youth from 21 to 32 or 35. They also regain a second kind of youth at 50 when their child goes to university but they are still, by the standards of the ageing society, young. If you visit a Japanese love hotel on a Sunday afternoon in a major city, you’ll see that people at 50 are indeed very spry (and quite vocal!), though they may not be being spry with their life partners. The demographic shift to small families and longer functional lifespans means we get more of our lives to devote to leisure; as many as 15 years of work before childbirth, and another 10 to 20 years of full physical function after completion of the child-rearing process. This is a good thing, and we should embrace it, though it does mean redefining our understanding of youth and middle age; but that is also a good thing

    As is the case with all aspects of civilization, Asia is leading the way into the future. The way the future of Japan’s ageing society develops will be very different to the expectations of the deficit terrorists and the demography alarmists of the right, and it will also, I think, be very different to the expectations of leftist and feminist critics of Japan’s response to the “problem.” Instead we will see Japanese society improved and diversified by the experience of ageing, with few serious economic consequences other than a slight increase in taxation and inflation.

     

    —

    fn1: Given the number of love hotels in this country, the idea that Japanese are shagging less than non-Japanese is ludicrous. The last representative national survey conducted (in 2000) found 13% of all respondents in a long term relationship had sex with an average of 2.4 casual partners in the last year. Given how private Japanese people can be about sex, the possibility that they are lying through their teeth in these surveys is all too real.

    fn2: I find it amazing that this stupid idea of comparing a country to a household has managed to become so useful in the deficit-terrorist toolkit, given that the last 20 years have seen a wave of unsustainable debt-financed bingeing by households that goes well beyond anything any country in the OECD has done. The fact that this idea is acceptable in polite discourse in the media is a sign of just how stupid journalists are, and how poor the contribution of classical economics – from which discipline most deficit terrorists are recruited – has been to debate about the future

    fn3: In case you think I’m exaggerating the horrors of this, my university in Beppu would transfer people to its Kyoto office with one months’ notice; I once taught an intensive English course to a guy who was being sent to the Phillipines with one month’s notice, leaving his wife and two children in Japan. He spoke no English and was moving to an office with no interpreter. This is beyond mean.

  • Cyberpunk’s Failed Legacy

    Wikileaks member Julian Assange has put up an opinion piece in the Sydney Morning Herald, decrying the findings of a recent court victory over right-wing columnist Andrew Bolt, by a group of Aboriginal Australians. The court victory is being widely spun as an attack on free speech, because the Aboriginal Australians in question (henceforth, the appellants), won a victory over Bolt under the terms of the Racial Discrimination Act (RDA). Rightists everywhere love to hate these kinds of laws, and they love to hate them under the cloak of “free speech,” even though anyone who cared about free speech would not have written the blatant lies that Bolt wrote about these appellants.

    Anyway, this post isn’t about what Bolt wrote or the court decision – I don’t want to have debates about Australian race relations here – so much as how Assange’s poorly written piece of fluff represents the failed legacy of Cyberpunk, and is a good indication of how intellectually weak it was as a social movement. Obviously first I need to discuss the outlines of the court case, but my main concern here is not the issue of the court case itself.

    The Court Case Against Bolt

    For my reader(s) who are unfamiliar with Andrew Bolt, race relations in Australia, the court case itself, or free speech in Australia generally, here it is in a nutshell: he’s a wanker, it’s not pretty, he was forced to correct his outright lies, and we don’t have a tradition of free speech. Happy? Here it is in more detail.

    Bolt’s a Wanker: Andrew Bolt wrote a piece a while back in which he claimed that some “fair-skinned” Aboriginal Australians were “choosing” their racial “identity” in order to get special privileges denied to white people. He didn’t bother checking the facts of the heritage of the appellants, and wrote the whole piece in a vicious and mean-spirited tone, and used it as a springboard for an attack on Aboriginal identity in general.

    It’s not pretty: Australia has a history of attempted genocide against Aborigines, culminating in a 70-year long program of stealing Aboriginal children from their parents in order to “breed out the colour.” Aborigines were granted the right to vote in 1962 and in a powerful referendum in 1967 the Commonwealth was granted the right to pass laws on their behalf. In order to roll back some of the egregious racist ideas floating around in the community, and reverse generations of deliberate social exclusion, many such laws were passed in the following years. The situation of Aborigines in Australia is still bad and much still needs to be done; only in 2007 did the government apologize to the Stolen Generations.

    He was forced to correct his lies: Having failed to check the actual heritage of the Aboriginal complainants, Bolt was found against by the Federal Court. The Court found that Bolt’s two articles

    contained erroneous facts, distortions of the truth and inflammatory and provocative language and that as a result, the conduct of Mr Bolt and HWT is not justified

    The court’s recommended relief was not that the articles be banned, and the court explicitly states (in section 461)

    It is important that nothing in the orders I make should suggest that it is unlawful for a publication to deal with racial identification including challenging the genuineness of the identification of a group of people

    The court simply requires that you get your facts right and not write in a racist tone if you want to talk about people’s racial heritage. The relief the court recommended was very simple: that both of Bolt’s columns could remain online on the newspaper site, but would have to have a correction of his lies published next to them, and that the newspaper would also have to publish a correction near his printed article. The court did not recommend banning the articles themselves or even an apology. No punitive damages were levied and in fact Bolt is lucky – the appellants could probably have nabbed him on a defamation charge and screwed quite a lot of money out of him, as well as getting the articles taken down.

    We Don’t Have a Tradition of Free Speech: which is just as well, when you consider what our accents are like. Like most Westminster systems, the Australian political tradition is based on balancing rights, not absolute rights. The judgment on this case is a good example of this tradition in action, and bleating about being denied the right to say anything you like is a very American import to Australian political debate. You might be able to get away with it, but it’s not generally assumed that you should be able to get away with telling lies and saying racist things in public in Australia.

    Assange’s Intervention

    Since he’s a celebrity now, Assange gets to have an opinion on stuff that is well above his pay grade, and this is a classic example of a man with some fairly poorly-formed libertarian views holding forth on stuff he really isn’t very capable of analyzing. Andrew Elder at Politically Homeless gives a fairly solid analysis of Assange’s op-ed and shows it for the flimsy undergraduate thinking it is, so there’s no need to go through it in detail here. Basically, it’s a combination of straw man, slippery slope, and exaltation of the market. But the particular part that bothers me is his complete failure to take into account the way power relations shape the media landscape, and his foolish understanding of the structural barriers to free speech in Australia (or anywhere):

    Democracy depends on the free flow of information and ideas. Opinions must be shared in ”a free and open encounter” because it is the competition between ideas that produces the truth. As Fredrick Siebert explained: ”The true and sound will survive. The false and unsound will be vanquished. Government should keep out of the battle and not weigh the odds in favor of one side or the other.”

    This is just, well, ridiculously naive, and as Elder points out, if only the true and sound survived in an environment of true free speech, why is the notion that Aborigines are inferior to whites so commonly held in Australia? And why has it only begun to decline in popularity since the passing of the racial discrimination act? The key is in the first part of this shallow statement: the free flow of information and ideas.

    There is no free flow of information and ideas in Australian public discourse, because the channels through which ideas “flow” are controlled by powerful interests, and some groups have more control over speech than others. This is why Ms. Eaton had to take Bolt to court: because he is a columnist in a national newspaper, with a very popular blog, and she is not. Without this court case, what option does Eaton have to engage in a debate with Bolt? Maybe she could write a newspaper column? No …  a letter to the editor? If the newspaper was willing to publish his lies, why would they willingly publish her correction? Perhaps she could turn up on his blog in comments to defend herself? Putting aside the kind of screaming monkeys who inhabit the comments section of Bolt’s blog, and the fact that he deletes comments he doesn’t like, this last option should make clear the nature of power in “free” speech in the modern world: Bolt as lying bastard, running a blog read by thousands; the woman he lied about, supplicant in his comments section being set upon by his readers. Who is going to win this encounter? How will the truth prevail?

    The “true and sound” do not triumph in a marketplace of ideas; they drown in the sewage that is pumped out by people like Bolt. The only way the “true and sound” triumph is if someone or something – some instrument – exists to offer redress in the most egregious of cases, and to prevent the powerful from saying anything they want and silencing those they tell lies about. In Australia, this something is called the law and one of its more sensitive instruments is the Racial Discrimination Act. It’s thanks to this system that Bolt can’t get away with telling vile lies about a woman who never did anything to wrong him, and if his newspaper wants to benefit from his controversial positions they will occasionally be forced to publish retractions or corrections, and privately thank their lucky stars that their victim had the decency not to do them for defamation as well. Not that you’ll find Bolt showing so much introspection…

    But Assange, undergraduate thinker that he is, thinks that Bolt and Eaton can compete on equal terms, and that any instrument which might serve to actually equalize their power is a dangerous attack on Bolt’s rights. Bolt, the man who still has his highly paid job at the centre of a major media machine, feted by rightists around the world and with his own tv show to boot. A man who gets to this position by snarling lies about ordinary people who cannot say anything in response, is forced to correct some of those lies long after the original damage was done. This, apparently, is the slippery slope to being woken up in your bed by armed thugs (really, this is what Assange says!)

    Cyberpunk’s Failings

    In the 90s there was a lot of talk about cyberpunk’s political and social critique, and even a documentary about the political program underlying it and its connections with the (then new) world of the internet and hacking. It was hailed as a new political idea, with a sense of the zeitgeist, a critical framework for viewing the new world of corporatization and hyper-consumerism, and – perhaps most importantly – a new way of viewing the role of information and media in a diversifying world. I think more than most other elements of science fiction – and definitely fantasy – cyberpunk was seen by its admirers and detractors as having a coherent political basis. Where sci-fi generally could claim pretensions to being “speculative” cyberpunk could be seen as – and indeed sometimes claimed itself to be – a transformative, political and cultural critique. Science fiction was concerned with lessons about humanity that could be gleaned from imagining the far future; cyberpunk was more interested in lessons about the near future that could be gleaned from analyzing the changing power structures of humanity’s present.

    If any genre movement can be said to have a real-life political legacy, then cyberpunk’s can be seen in the world of the hackers, the politics of the internet, and new notions of the power of information. Long before health systems were discussing privacy measures, William Gibson was tackling the issue of privatized data with work like Johnny Mnemonic; the hackers and computer collectives of the 90s left a legacy of efforts to decentralize and democratize information, and the early activists of the newsgroup and blog world were hoping to democratize access to information and media. The ultimate expression of this political legacy is wikileaks. Obviously no one can claim that cyberpunk drove this, and we won’t find one day Assange saying “I got rendered to an American prison hulk because I read a William Gibson novel.” But this was the politics of the cyberpunk era, and the concept has currency as a basis for understanding these political movements.

    So where have these movements come to? Wikileaks has fallen apart because of disputes about the way it used information[1], and perhaps now with Assange’s incursion into the mainstream media we can see why: its poster boy has a boy’s understanding of power and information. Cyberpunk’s central view of the future of society was a community where government abrogated its responsibilities and the economy was run by oligarchs; corporations compete ruthlessly in unregulated market places, and people are reduced to consumers, competing in a vicious labour market with no safety net or protections. In general, I think we were meant to interpret this as a bad thing; but it seems like the modern incarnation of cyberpunk’s information gurus are trying to present the same model for the exchange of information as if it were a good thing. Is this what the ideas of those original heady years of cyberpunk have brought us to? A reckless data dumper lecturing us from the bully pulpit about how we should let corporatism’s attack dogs say anything derogatory they like about anyone, because “information needs to be free” – even if the information is less than worthless and its victims have no recourse through a stacked corporate system? Is this what rebellion means, cyberpunk style – demanding that the government reveal everything it knows about everything, while insisting that anyone who is victimized by the world’s largest media corporation should be restricted to defending themselves anonymously in the comments section of their most odious commentator’s blog? Or perhaps Assange thinks that Ms. Eaton should just set up her own zaibatsu and have at it? And that’s not to mention, of course, that Assange tried to get his own unofficial biography pulped.

    Cyberpunk was always presented by its defenders as a criticism of unbridled corporatism, but I was never 100% sure about that. Sometimes reading Gibson, you get the impression that he’s just a bit too impressed by what the corporations could do, that he’s carrying a boys-and-their-toys appreciation of hi-tech violence into his writing about their nefarious deeds. Maybe Assange’s problem with the elite controllers of information is that he admires them and wants to be part of their super-groovy world, but wasn’t let in. Maybe that’s what cyberpunk has always been – a bunch of boys crying at the gates to be let in so they can play with the cool toys, instead of having to retrofit the older versions down here in the slums with the rest of us.

    A Brief Aside on Cyberpunk and Anarchism

    I think that cyberpunk, libertarianism and Assange both have their philosophical roots in anarchist theory, which also posits the role of the state as a kind of magical short circuit on all forms of creativity and expression. Assange – like a lot of cyberpunk’s remnants – appears to be a libertarian, and libertarianism and anarchism share common roots, like elves and orcs. So it’s no surprise to find some support for Assange’s position amongst the semi-anarchist Australian left, though from a slightly different direction. Assange supports data freedom as a kind of creative destruction, in which we all get to find out everything we want to know about everything (I bet he craps in front of his girlfriend, too?); the Australian far left’s position on things like the Racial Discrimination Act appears to be that we should leave it unused, and fight the purveyors of lies on their own ground, through a kind of conflict of information exchange. This would be done through the formation (of course) of a mass movement (anarchists cooperate where libertarians compete). Dr Tad at Left Flank sees this as a chance for the Australian left to

    start thinking about how we create facts on the ground that will delegitimize and sideline the likes of Bolt

    He sees a chance for conflict, but doesn’t want that conflict settled by the state intervening. Dr Tad shares a similar view about the state intervening in industrial disputes, because without the state to restrain the corporations, the industrial left will get the kind of creative destruction it needs to remake society. I see both Assange and this form of anarchist hard leftism operating from the same ideological roots, though they see the means of winning the resulting battles differently (Assange wants individuals to compete with each other, while the anarchist left wants us to cooperate against the corporate controllers of power) and have different goals (Assange wants an op-ed in the Herald; the anarchist left wants to overthrow the government); but ultimately I think they both believe that their political goals of absolute freedom, though very differently constituted, will triumph only through a form of unbridled competition, even in the world of information. But history tells us that only the rich and powerful win in these situations, and that the most stable and rewarding societies to live in are those where the balance of interests is managed by a small but powerful state, controlled by a well-constituted democratic polity.

    The Final Irony

    The reality is – and let’s not gild the lily  here – that Assange is only able to write that op ed, rather than carving his name in the wall of a US prison hulk somewhere, because of the rule of law. The US doesn’t observe the rule of law that well, but the countries that Assange moves through expect at least a modicum of respect for their own, and so demand some kind of due process before their citizens can be treated like animals[2]. One would think, at this delicate time in Assange’s life, that he would put a little thought and reflection into that fact, and ask himself whether there is some analogy to be drawn between how he would be treated if this protection were withdrawn, and the way people like Ms. Eaton would be treated if their protections were withdrawn. He clearly hasn’t bothered to see in himself any parallels with Ms. Eaton – after all, he has an opinion piece in the Herald, while she has never had any fame and thus had to appeal to the state to secure her rights, like some kind of weakling – but perhaps if he showed a little more introspection it would occur to him that power can be misused in any area of society, and his case is not really so special in the end. Perhaps he could even dwell on that while rich friends fund his multiple legal defenses against what he considers to be egregious misuses of power. But my guess is he won’t get to think properly and clearly about that until he’s inside the aforementioned prison hulk …

    —

    fn1: and a focused US campaign of cutting off its funding

    fn2: well, mostly

  • Viking Technology

    The Guardian reports that recent scientific experiments confirm the use of Icelandic spar (a type of calcite) may have enabled the vikings to navigate without a compass even in cloudy weather. Apparently this stone is described in an Icelandic legend about a sailor called Sigurd, who used such a stone on a cloudy day to orient his ship. This may explain how the vikings were able to sail to America even in polar gloom. An interesting side point of the research is that, apparently, even a single cannon on an Elizabethan ship held enough iron to interfere with a compass, and sunstones may have been used by navigators to avoid this effect 4 centuries after the end of the viking era.

    Of course the vikings knew nothing about the polarization of light or even the scientific processes by which instruments are calibrated and used. How did they discover this “magic” property, how did they believe it worked, and what did it tell them about the world around them? This kind of solution to complex navigation problems fascinates me as an example of science in an era when many phenomena of the natural world must surely have been seen as magic. Probably, the vikings had worked out sophisticated navigation techniques without any understanding of the nature of the heavens or the earth. It’s interesting to think about how far such science takes people before it breaks down or its contradictions force its adherents to find modern science. How do these processes work…?

  • Using Material Components to Enhance Wizard Powers

    When I played AD&D I think one of the first aspects of its magic system I dropped was the material components. It’s a shame, but they just represented too much of a constraint on what was already a hideously underpowered class (especially at first level). Some of the material components even for first level spells are quite challenging to provide, and they’re consumed in the casting of the spell. Consider, for example, the following spells:

    • Alarm: A tiny bell and a very fine piece of silver wire
    • Armor: A piece of finely cured leather that has been blessed by a priest
    • Color Spray: A pinch each of powder or sand colored red, blue and yellow
    • Dancing Lights: A bit of phosphorus or wychwood, or a glowworm
    • Friends: Chalk, lampblack and vermillion
    • Identify: A pearl worth 100gp and an owl feather soaked in wine
    • Light: A firefly or a piece of phsophorescent moss
    • Protection from Evil: Powdered silver

    and so on.  The spells Burning Hands, Detect Magic, Charm Person and Magic Missile require no material components of any kind. These material components are very cool and really add to the romance and style of wizards, but they’re an enormous burden, especially on low level wizards. A first level wizard starts with 20-50 gps, so will not be able to cast Identify and probably can’t afford the ingredients for Protection from Evil, Dancing Lights or Color Spray in most medieval settings. That’s without considering the difficulty of carrying phosphorus, glow-worms and phosphorescent moss. Some of these spells also can’t be cast in the casting time given in their description, because the ingredients need to be steeped, smeared or scattered in a circle. Find Familiar, much more powerful than its 3rd Edition version, requires 1000Gps of herbs and incense. Even Sleep is probably beyond the reach of a lot of wizards, requiring as it does a pinch of sand – sand would have been a rare sight in 12th Century Glastonbury, I’m willing to bet. So here you have a first level wizard with 40 GPs, and before he goes adventuring he needs to gather together a piece of silver wire, several portions of powdered silver, a collection of tiny bells, some phosphorescent moss, some sand and a drop of bitumen (!! for Spider Climb).

    One can imagine what happens if the party kills a gnome, who has a small admantite file in his toolkit. The file is worth 50gps and everyone else just wants to sell it, but the Wizard recognizes here an opportunity to make himself self-sufficient in powdered minerals, and snaffles it up. A libertarian party would probably charge him 200gps premium for it[1]. And at higher levels it gets ridiculous, of course:

    • Invisibility: An eyelash encased in gum arabic[2]
    • Melf’s Minute Meteors: nitrite[3], sulphur, pine tar and a (reusable) fine tube of gold worth 1000gps
    • Evard’s Black Tentacles: a piece of tentacle from a giant octopus or squid
    • Feeblemind: a handful of clay, crystal, glass or mineral spheres
    • Chain Lightning: A piece of fur, an amber, glass, or crystal rod, and a small silver pin for each experience level of the wizard

    Some of these material components are very very difficult to get hold of. I doubt I could get most of them easily, even living in Tokyo. If one were to rigorously adhere to the spell components rules, every wizard would need the regular services of an alchemist, silversmith, blacksmith, and a couple of other extremely talented craftspeople; the wizard would also need to be very assiduous about cutting up and preserving any roadkill or adventure-kill he or she came across. There’s no doubt that this sort of thing makes these PCs much more interesting, but it also makes them virtually unplayable, because it essentially restricts the number of spells the PC knows in any one day, as well as the number they can cast – effectively it puts a bunch of spells beyond the PC’s reach at any time, while maintaining daily limits on those that the player does have the ability to use. A good example is Identify: a wizard at first level can’t use it, but by second level may be able to afford a pearl of suitable value. They can then cast the spell; but they can only cast it once, on one object, and they can’t cast it in the dungeon because they only know two spells a day and they need Shield and Magic Missile in the dungeon. So the party stumbles upon a ring that may be of great use right there and then, but the wizard can’t cast the spell even though it was a week’s work to find the owl feather and the pearl. So then they have to wait till they leave the dungeon, at which point they have a second item to identify but they can’t do so because they don’t have enough ingredients. Alternatively suppose that the wizard has spent all their treasure on pearls and owl feathers; they can still only cast the spell once today, because they couldn’t memorize more than two spells; but the party is pressed, and has found a magic sword and armour that they really need to use now, in the dungeon. Even though the wizard has spent his last money on two pearls and two owl feathers, he can only identify one item today.

    Suppose then, that instead of using the standard approach to magic of AD&D, one introduced a simpler system in which a wizard can cast any spell they know as often as they like, provided they have the material components. This would mean that the wizard would usually have some spells (such as Burning Hands) on rotation, but I don’t see this as a bad thing. A first level wizard with Burning Hands once per round at will can do 1d3+2 hps damage per round on anyone within combat range (save for 1/2). It’s not a game changer; free use of Magic Missile makes a high level wizard pretty scary, doing 5-25 damage per round with no saving throw, but a few tweaks on minor spells (e.g. fixing magic missile at a maximum of two missiles) would easily solve that problem. Alternatively, you could give these spells simple material components: magic missile could require an arrow per missile, for example. Burning hands could require the wizard be carrying a lit flame source, that is extinguished by the spell. This would reduce the spell to the potency of WFRP 3rd Edition, where wizards have basically unlimited spell use but mostly have to use one every other round.

    Even for high level spells with simple components, like the Bigby’s Hand spells, this method wouldn’t lead to infinite amounts of spell casting. Bigby’s Hand requires a glove; no one can realistically carry more than, say, 10 gloves in their equipment if they also have to carry: a small bag full of crystal spheres; a collection of test tubes carrying the components for Melf’s Minute Meteors and Invisibility; 8 or 10 small pouches of different powders, nitrites and the like; a sheath or case with several different rods; some vials of acids, pure water, tears, etc; additional pouches carrying fur, bits of leather, feathers and wings; a jar with a pickled piece of a giant octopus tentacle; a small cage of fireflies; a pestle and mortar to crush gems with; a couple of miniature platinum swords; and a collection of iron, silver, and bronze mirrors. Sure, this would make the task of spell-casting a little like a complex system of inventorying, but you could handle it, I’m sure, and if it’s hard for the player imagine how complex it is for the PC! You could also argue that if a Wizard is carrying components for more than, say, 5 spells on their person, they can’t cast a spell every round (they need a round to find the item[4]).

    Furthermore, one could introduce different effects for more imaginative components. E.g. Invisibility lasts a round longer if the eyelash is from a thief (handy if you have a thief in the party); the component is never destroyed if the eyelash is from an Invisible Stalker. Water from another plane makes a spell that uses it more powerful, and the effect of spells like Identify is enhanced with more expensive pearls or more esoteric feathers (e.g. from a Sphinx). Expending a magic arrow adds one to the damage of a Magic Missile spell, and so on. You could also rule that every time a wizard is struck in combat one of their more fragile components is damaged or destroyed (randomly determined). It would also make wizards very eager to kill or capture each other, since they can loot their rivals’ components as well as their spell book.

    Power limits could be obtained easily by dividing wizards into specialties, so that from first level they are limited only to conjuring or evocation, etc. Many RPGs do this, so that wizards have access to very few spells over their career. This would prevent a single wizard from being able to cast Burning Hands (alteration), Magic Missile (evocation), Charm Person (enchantment), and Chill Touch (Necromancy). I would make the conjuration, divination and abjuration specialties common to all wizards and then force them to choose one of the other four

    —

    fn1: libertarian parties probably last as long as the first Cure Light Wounds spell, and then decide socialism is the way to go.

    fn2: According to Wikipedia, gum arabic was an extremely valuable export commodity and is an essential ingredient in soft drinks, and the Sudanese president recently implied he could bring down the western world through suspending its export

    fn3: I find it hard to believe that nitrite was readily available in the medieval world but nitrates were as saltpeter, again not exactly your common or garden middle-ages corner store product

    fn4: This could be a good rule for PCs with more than 5 magic items in general, I think.

  • Get off My (Maths) Lawn!

    In the Australian state of New South Wales, final year mathematics exams were held a few days ago and the Sydney Morning Herald reports the advanced maths exam was “cruel and difficult.” Students on some message board are posting sad messages saying they might as well not have bothered because it was so hard, and some teacher says:

    I am appalled that an examination committee could set such a difficult paper which gives the competent student little chance to show what they know

    Poor kids! I was interested in this because when I did my year 12 (in South Australia) in 1990, the NSW assessment was famously challenging, and we were in awe of the effort the students put in. There’s a certain pride that comes from completing a year 12 advanced maths exam, and I can understand why even if the results are scaled (so you don’t fail if the exam was too hard), it’s discouraging and mean to put out an exam that is too hard for the subject content. I’m also interested because in my opinion Australians are much more numerate than British, but much less than Japanese, and I’m interested in our educational trajectory.
    Fortunately, the herald also gives an example from this exam, and here it is:

    A game is played by throwing darts at a target. A player can choose to throw two or three darts.

    Darcy plays two games. In Game 1, he chooses to throw two darts, and wins if he hits the target at least once. In Game 2, he chooses to throw three darts, and wins if he hits the target at least twice.

    The probability that Darcy hits the target on any throw is p, where 0 < p < 1.

    (i) Show that the probability that Darcy wins Game 1 is 2p – p[squared].

    (ii) Show that the probaility that Darcy wins Game 2 is 3p[squared] – 2p[cubed].

    (iii) Prove that Darcy is more likely to win Game 1 than Game 2.

    (iv) Find the value of p for which Darcy is twice as likely to wine Game 1 as he is to win Game 2.

    So I’m interested to know … do my readers think this is challenging? I did it on a single sheet of paper in 10 minutes yesterday, and it really didn’t seem tough. Admittedly I should be able to do this stuff quickly, but when I compare it to the work I did in 1990 it doesn’t seem very hard at all. Questions i and ii are basic applications of probability theory, without even any conditional or joint probability questions; part ii requires use of basic combinatorics but I remember this stuff was not too hard in year 12 when I did. Questions iii and iv are trivial exercises in problem solving with quadratics: you need to do a sign diagram for iv and complete the square of a quadratic but if you can’t identify and solve such a problem in year 12 surely you have stuffed up somewhere? Also, you don’t need to get i and ii right to do iii and iv, which in my opinion is very far from cruel. I would have been very happy to see that option in an exam when I was doing year 12! Basically, the first two questions are year 11 level probability (at most!) and the last two are year 10 functions.

    So I’m wondering, have standards slipped in Australia in the last 20 years, or am I turning into one of those teachers I hated when I was at university, who say “this is trivial high school maths” as they introduce a path integral that can only be solved numerically? I’m pretty sure it’s the former (or the question the Herald gave is not representative) and 38% of people who answered the poll on the Herald website agree with me. Dissenting opinions (and reminiscences about the horrors of your own school days) are welcome in comments…

    Update: I found on reddit some photos of two other questions: question 5 and question 7. I think these both look tough though I think I could do question 7 (I think you use differentiation and a change of variables in part i, then ii and iii are just straight nasty old manipulation; though maybe part i is induction). I’ve always been terrible at trigonometry, and I remember fluffing a question very similar to (possibly the same as!) number 5 in my exam in 1990. I don’t think I’d do better this time round. But I’m not sure that this material is excessive for a year 12 maths exam; maybe question 7 is more a first year university question …? But I don’t think so. Kids should be doing series and induction in year 12 for sure …

  • Undiscovered Tolkien Artwork

    The Guardian has 6 pictures from an early collection of Tolkien’s sketches for the Hobbit, that were apparently discovered recently. I particularly like number 3, which despite its roughness gives the sky and Smaug a certain vitality.