Board Games

From time to time I get intrigued by the promise of the game Diplomacy. The problem is that there is no randomness and hardly any tactical complexity. The game simply consists of the politics of getting people to temporarily help you.

I've never played Diplomacy-- it's supposed to be played with 7 players and can take several hours, from what I've heard. But beyond that, the idea of a game that is solely based on interpersonal manipulation seems odd to me.

The reason for that is that I don't usually regard any one contest as separate from any other. I usually play strategies designed to increase my winning percentage overall over several games, rather than a short-sighted maximization of chances of winning for that game.

And of course it's difficult for me to separate in-game relationships from those external to the game. When playing poker in a game with both husband and wife, I usually assume that the winnings will be split evenly between those two, for example. When playing in a multiple-player game with Sara, I usually suppose that the understood strategy is to maximize the probability of either of us winning, since a happy Sara is a happy Adam.

That's why I usually prefer games that involve more luck, more athleticism, less strategy, more tactics, more like arcade games and less like strategy games. I also prefer two-player games, since in that case it's obvious that the game is zero-sum (although sometimes you can still see players collude to end a game earlier rather than later, if such a move hardly affects the chances of winning).

Of course, cycling is perhaps one of the most interpersonally strategic sports there are, since most winning moves come from the simultaneous collusion and betrayal of opponents. Usually there are enough understood rules of decorum, though, that make the strategy of cycling more like poker and less like Diplomacy. It becomes more about figuring out how strong your rivals are from moment to moment, knowing when to hold 'em or fold 'em.

The one big instance of these unspoken rules of the peloton that I can think of is when Armstrong chased down Simeoni in the 2004 Tour. That's just the kind of crap that makes a game like Diplomacy a little bit weird to me.

That said, this game looks tight: Imperial

XKCD translated for the rest of us

http://www.explainxkcd.com/

Sure, our coolest friends already know about that crazy fast inverse square root algorithm, but we can't all be that cool. Thankfully there are folks out there willing to help us fake it.

Mobile computing

Smartphones are really starting to mess with my mind.

What really blows me away is the possibility of combining GPS with a digital compass to overlay digital images of the real world with artificial images.

You can play Tron or PacMan in real life. You can set legitimately rectangular flag football or ultimate fields in a snap.

Forget games, even-- you could register as a first-aid expert or ex-cop and get real-time updates on emergencies or crimes in your immediate vicinity. How crazy would it be if you could report a mugging and within seconds have 20 off-duty cops showing up on the exact spot, chasing down the suspected mugger? If you can patch flat tubes or fix cars, you could get real time updates from people who are stranded in your immediate vicinity, and they could compensate you for your trouble via a pre-paid online account.

You could get a real-time update on the exact minute when your bike club's peloton will be rolling through your part of town. It's already working incredibly well for CTA buses in Chicago.
You could have a 24/7 Critical Mass, with an ever-changing, ever-rotating cast of characters. Courier wages are obviously going to get pushed down even further (do they still get paid in anything besides street cred these days, anyway?)

I think GPS is already in heavy use among pizza deliverers to figure out the shortest route between stops, and to allocate certain sets of stops to certain drivers-- could this be applied to taxis in order to privatize public transit? If you have 12 strangers in nbhd A who all want to get to nbhd B, why not walk two blocks, meet up with everyone else, split a van, and charge it to your prepaid account? Hot damn! The same sort of thing could also work with car sharing services-- why limit them to be picked up and dropped off at the same spots? Why limit them to be used by only one person at a time?

You could have impromptu ultimate games, alleycats, orgies, kickball, whatever! Flashmobs take too much forethought-- why not just keep an online profile of when you're available for what, and when some quorum is reached, everyone who is down gets a message saying where to go? Totally spontaneous raves in public squares.

Traffic reports could not only be updated in real-time, but also give different drivers different re-routes so that not everyone jumps to the same secondary street. We could toll crowded streets, give cash to those who stay off streets which an ambulance will need in the next minute, and change stoplights faster for emergency vehicles.

There are perhaps other ways to play an enormous game of tag, but massively multiplayer GPS seems like the one with the least amount of prior planning.

Not only that, but direct-brain input is already starting to get figured out. If output can also be solved, then we are basically going to be living in the Matrix. I/O certainly does seem like the big hurdle right now. Voice control and bluetooth headsets seem really lame in comparison with social GPS.

Holy crap dudes and ladydudes. The future is going to be so cool. I am going to save all my money, take care of my body, and retire ASAP.

Of course, this stuff could and will also probably be used for evil. Apparently photo messaging has gotten out of control among high schoolers, and cell phones seem to be used to coordinate brawls that have left some Chicago kids dead recently. Also the mystique of some overlooked lonely spots might be lost as the hive mind clues in, so those at the social centers are going to lose their comparative advantage, possibly decreasing the production of neat stuff which require that only a few people know about it in order for them to stay neat. So, yeah, someone's gotta anticipate those downsides and figure out solutions. But in general I'd say things are really looking up!

Rumours?

No, it's been confirmed.

Based on the recommendation of Murray Hewitt, I decided to listen to Rumours all the way through. Freed from its usual setting on crappy soft rock stations and stupid commercials, the album gave me chills.

I never would have guessed "Go Your Own Way" could be any good. Am I just getting old, or what?

10:28

Both the date and the time. Or at least it was a second ago.

This happens twice a day, and for some reason I'd never noticed it until now.

Great article

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/09/07/090907fa_fact_grann?currentPage=all

Great story my friend Jenni recommended-- if you check it out, you won't be sorry you did.

Personally, I would actually favor the death penalty if it had some kind of huge deterrence effect, even if innocent people were sometimes executed. So far, though, I haven't seen any evidence at all that the threat of the death penalty deters crime..

In fact, some people I trust (Donohue, Wolfers, Katz, Levitt) have found there is no deterring effect:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cassy-stubbs/the-death-penalty-deterre_b_52622.html

(Not that I trust the HuffPo, but the papers are clearly linked there.)

Does Science Improve Policy?

Maybe. Clinton and McCain both got hammered for their dumb gas tax holiday last summer.

But then you read news articles like this: http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/23343/?nlid=2323

Which is a complete lie. The study actually concludes the EXACT OPPOSITE of what the article says it does: http://www8.nationalacademies.org/onpinews/newsitem.aspx?RecordID=12747

One of the upsides of the old model of news (with just a few content providers) is that each news outlet could build up a reputation. Now that any old bozo can write articles, consumers of news are going to have to get a lot better about going to the source, and scientists are going to have to make it easier for the average joe to decide if any given news article is misrepresenting the research.

Maybe journals could have two versions: One for experts in the field, and then an alternate version (whether written by the researchers themselves or else someone working at the journal) containing all the same articles but with none of the technical details, methods, or jargon.

Too bad watches weren't common during the French Revolution

For some reason Napoleon fixed everything but the measurement of time and the desire to conquer the world.

You may have heard me talk about the swatch, the decimal unit of time invented by swatch.

Well, that may take a while to catch on. Before that, even, we need to get everyone in the world on the same time, Zulu time. That is going to slowly catch on in the new global, digital world as all servers operate on one timezone, in the same way that English is the official language of aviation.

If someone tells you that it won't work to have one timezone (with no "savings time", obv) because the sun comes up at different times on different parts of the world, you may safely assume that person regards you as a moron. He or she may also have been a mathematics major in undergrad.

People within time zones don't go to bed at the same time, nor do all businesses within time zones open at the same time. Time zones don't follow longitude lines. The sun rises at different times within yards of other places if you're in the mountains. The sun stopped being relevant at pretty much the same time artificial lighting became cheap, so it's time to get over it and move on.

As a prelude to that, however, the least we can do is move toward a uniform date-time system. This whole mm/dd/yy hh:mm am|pm thing is too QWERTY for me to take anymore. Therefore, I'm now switching to the 24-hour clock (which I'll avoid calling "military time", since I hope that will soon become antiquated as well).

The format I now use is yy.mm.dd hhmm, as in 09.10.04 2343. Sometimes if I'm in a hurry I'll omit the dots. One nice feature is that if you name files this way, they'll automatically sort the way you expect. One downside is the requirement for leading zeroes, and the ambiguity with regard to century, but I think both of those balance the needs for standardization and brevity.

I'm hoping Obama gets everything else fixed soon enough to 1. get us on that perfectly nice metric system that already exists, 2. get everyone in the world to drive on the same side of the road, and 3. standardize time. It shouldn't take guillotines to reset the global standards. Really it seems like the UN should be doing this stuff already, but apparently they are useless. It's about time to get a world government cranked up.

Make Gitmo the New Canadian Hong-Kong

The US wants out of Guantanamo Bay. Even Bush eventually came around to the idea of closing that sucker down.

But then what are we going to do with that prime real estate?

In a new TED talk Paul Romer has a brilliant suggestion. Let Cubans decide what kind of free market experiments they would like to try in Cuba at large, then get some credible third party like Canada to take possession of Gitmo (via a 199-year lease, I suppose) and implement them there.

Obviously Cuba would need Canada to do it, because businesses would trust a commitment by Canada more than by Cuba.

Then, Cuba would allow free migration into Gitmo but not necessarily out of Cuba altogether. Or, even better, they could take applications from those who would like to migrate in, and then randomly assign migration permits to X number of households. Then it builds in a nice experimental design, to better assess the value of the rules as a whole.

It would be best if they also ordered the laws and had them take effect in order over time. That is, Cuba would institute its one most favorite policy right away, then its second-favorite policy in two years, then in another two years it could add on its third-favorite policy. That way the effects of the policies could be separated out and Cuba could see what works for Cubans and what does not.

I love it! I have been converted to becoming a big fan of planned developments, condos, and weak zoning laws (except for cul de sacs, which have terrible traffic externalities) on exact the basis of devolving authority to the lowest level. Condo associations and homeowner associations are the next big form of micro-local government, in my view, and it could end up being great for the environment and for allowing ppl to do what they want without harming their neighbors. One great side effect of that is more stable housing prices on the micro level.

So far, planned development has only been a upper-class phenomenon. I would really like to see more homeowner associations in ghettos. The alternative is having a developer come in and buy everything, kick out the tenants, maybe tear down the current stock, and sell it back to someone slightly richer. There must be a way to do the same thing without tearing anything down or necessarily kicking anyone out...

Anyone want to start the next big thing in real estate development? I am going to call it WEvelopment (unless you have better suggestions). Sign up landlords, tenants, and homeowners in the ghetto and get them to agree to a set of rules that will raise property values.

Of course any change (down or up) in property values hurts tenants because moving is costly. There has got to be a way around that as well... maybe insurance companies could buy price risk from landlords and sell it to tenants? Surely not all landlords (myself included!) want to play the housing markets, and would probably prefer to lock in a certain value for their house.

In addition, giving tenants some stake in maintaining the value of the property and the neighborhood would lessen the principal-agent problem and encourage behavior on the part of tenants to maintain housing values... I have often wondered why tenants in gentrifying neighborhoods dont just spray-paint everything they see, but maybe they are evicted before they get the idea, or maybe spray-painting is actually less costly than moving?

I need to start making a list of incredibly genius business ideas. Remind me to tell you about my socially responsible casino sometime...

Tough Q

I love riddles that poke at the deficiencies in my brain, that really seem very counterintuitive.

One example is the famous Monty Hall Problem... once you know the answer it's easy to see why the correct answer is right, but the tougher problem is why you were wrong in the first place. That is, it's hard to see why the wrong answer seems right.

More worryingly, it's hard to tell how often an analogue to this puzzle pops up in daily life and how often I've been getting it wrong!

I think of these as optical illusions for my brain, but for some reason I'm a lot less worried about optical illusions for some reason. Of course when it really matters I just bust out a ruler, but it can be hard to even tell if it really matters if a certain answer just already looks obvious!

Anyway, here's the latest:

http://terrytao.wordpress.com/2008/12/09/an-airport-inspired-puzzle/

I've managed to convince myself that the correct answer is in fact correct, but it still blows my mind. I haven't yet fully wrapped my mind around it to the extent that the correct answer just seems natural and intuitive. What I think will seal the deal for me is figuring out the economic intuition behind this. Maybe I should just do the math for myself to see the details. Crazy stuff.