Datum by Datum

I like the idea of blogging, sharing your inner thoughts (although generally not innermost) with an audience consisting of something between 0 and 7,000,000,000 people. But holy hell does it prey on your anxieties and insecurities. Throughout the years my reading of articles and blogs and thinkpieces on the internet has gotten through several dozen different instances of an author confessing about his or her hypercritical inner voices. I've personally wondered if those sorts of tendencies are almost necessary for becoming a writer of any substance. While I am not sure I honestly believe that being hypercritical of yourself is necessary, I do think that having that trait is the rule rather than the exception. Just the number of blog posts I have thoroughly absorbed which discuss suicidal depressive tendencies led me to that conclusion. I try to ruminate on something like that, because I believe that depression is a complex state of mind which requires nuance to weave into a func...

I am a humanist. So much so that I can barely understand why one would not want to be a humanist. As someone focused on humans and their wellbeing/function I really love ecology and how its principles translate to economics and back again. The two theoretical frameworks reinforce one another beautifully. Okay, one person helping another is seen as a good thing. It follows that if everyone helps everyone else, everyone has a good thing done for them. That's (mostly) the extent of my general philosophy on life. My goals and hopes revolve around the idea that everyone should be trying to better what they can as much as they can. Everything should be getting better all the time, and if it is not we must try to make it so. Complacency is death. In the natural world, species always face the dilemma of a changing environment to some significant degree. I don't mean something like seasonally, but rather evolutionarily. The only species that don't face this dilemma are the ext...

There are quite a few ways of getting a bleak look at the world in 2016. One is to follow the media's schizophrenic coverage of police shootings. Another is to look at the many awesome instances of uncontrollable deforestation and pollution that humans create. One can also just look to modern politics in the western world and assume that it's a hopeless mess. But don't worry! The world has been facing all of these issues for decades. Wait, that doesn't comfort you? Yeah, it doesn't help anybody who goes to a university to get an education in anything related to environmental science, ecology, or urban planning either. Environmental science curricula inherently focuses on solving or preventing damages to the environment, you spend most of your time looking at past failures as a result. Ecology is mostly in the same boat except even more complex and is often concerned with species that are facing extinction (or that have already gone extinct in the wild). ...

The metaphor of a two-edged sword applies very well to modern science. Besides the obvious stories of Dr. Mengele or the Manhattan project, where both projects involved ended up doing great harm regardless of intention, social media is the new hot stuff that can warp our interpretations of new scientific discovery. News media by itself has had a tumultuous history with covering science. This blog post  by Jonathan Eisen highlights an interesting case of modern government programs engaging with science. Long before any real results come out of projects like these, reporters pick up on the story and try to sell it to their audience to varied results. John Oliver took on science reporting in popular media and Phil Plait's take on it  makes it very easy to apply the two-edged sword metaphor. We have way more capability than ever before to disseminate information and stimulate scientific discourse. We are also way more likely to pick up only bits and pieces of complex issues,...

I was recently reading this article by Rock Paper Shotgun 's contributor Sin Vega. I was suddenly reminded of the numerous struggles I've had when trying to convey any sense of history or meaningful presence as a Game Master in various tabletop role-playing games. Surely video games have an advantage in this arena as they offer a real physical place in relation to your character(s), which is simply impossible to maintain beyond small arenas in the tabletop realm. However, the elegance and effectiveness of purely using imagination to fill in the holes you didn't even know were present in a setting is pretty spectacular. A person... ...in a place. It's totally acceptable if a game has idiosyncrasies all over the place, but hits just enough marks to convince your brain that its setting is a real enough place. Fallout 4 is a game full of "jank" on multiple levels. In terms of believability, the skeletons that litter its world only make s...

How much more precise are we thanks to Einstein and the development of rocketry? I've been taught that before the proliferation of the Navigation Satellite Timing and Ranging Global Positioning System (NAVSTAR GPS) when you took a sample from a site, such as aquatic invertebrates from a watershed, the standard procedure was to name the site as best you could which mostly meant putting the name of the body of water down or describing local landmarks. As I'm sure you can imagine, this just isn't a very precise way of marking where you took a sample from. As GPS the technology has developed and as the satellites that enable its precision have been launched into orbit in greater and greater numbers, resulting in greater and greater precision, policies have also enabled non-military use of GPS to be more precise by turning off civilian uses' selective imprecision. (You can read more about the history of GPS here .) The technology behind GPS is becoming so popular and wid...

The very first blog. Here we go. I hope that I can do a bunch of a half-assed dissections of complex systems, but really I'm just gonna rip pieces of stuff and plug it into my endless log of ideas for RPG campaigns. Alternatively let's look at ants, plants, and ecology to tear apart their systems in a haphazard manner too. Either way it should be interesting. See you later.