tadhg.com

Giants Versus Patriots II: Better Lucky Than Good?

Tadhg — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 04:44:45 +0000

Since moving back to the US, I’ve only missed one Super Bowl: XLII in 2008. I was quite down at the time, didn’t have much faith in the Giants, and couldn’t stand the thought of witnessing a Patriots win and their subsequent enshrinement as the best team in history[1].

Oops. I missed one of the biggest upsets in Super Bowl history, and one of the most dramatic game-winning drives.

In both that win and today’s, the Giants seemed inordinately lucky, albeit in different ways. In 2008, much of the luck was concentrated in a single play on that last Giants drive, the famous Tyree catch. On that play, Eli Manning miraculously escapes a sack (even now when I watch the replays part of me thinks he’s going to go down) and unloads a pass to David Tyree, who makes an outrageous catch, partly by using one hand and his helmet.

It’s hard to call that luck, given the amazing athleticism displayed by the Giants players in it. It’s hard not to call it luck, given how small the margins were and how a number of improbable events had to turn the Giants’ way not just to make it a successful play, but to avoid total disaster.

In today’s rematch, I thought the Giants had a much better chance at victory, but that the Patriots were slight favorites. That’s more or less how it worked out; the Giants won, but rode a significant amount of luck to do so, and just barely, 21–17. Two huge pieces of luck: twice the Giants fumbled the ball, and twice they recovered the fumbles. Fumble recoveries are coin flips, and had the Giants lost either of those fumbles I’m pretty sure they would have lost the game. Furthermore, while I may be doing Manning a disservice, I kept thinking that he was flirting with interceptions[2]. His receivers kept coming down with the ball, however, and eventually, late in the fourth quarter, he led the Giants down the field with time running out to set up the most interesting situation in the game.

Trailing 15–17, the Giants have the ball inside the Patriots’ 10-yard line. The Patriots have one timeout remaining. A field goal gives the Giants a 1-point lead, a touchdown gives them at best a 6-point lead. On the Patriots’ sideline, waiting for the ball, is one of the best quarterbacks of the modern era.

What to do? Going completely all-out for the touchdown is unwise, because throwing the ball is inherently riskier than running, and any incompletion stops the clock. Running the ball is the obvious play. But if you can run it freely, do you score at the first opportunity?

Bill Belichick, the Patriots’ “evil genius” coach, apparently decided to force the Giants to take the points or the time, but not both, and Giants running back Ahmad Bradshaw tried to avoid scoring but couldn’t. That was one of the strangest football plays I’ve ever seen, a player heading full steam towards the end zone and then trying to come to an abrupt halt but failing, with the only nearby defender apparently pursuing in order to, if necessary, knock the running back into the end zone.

In the Saints–49ers game three weeks ago, both teams had similar opportunities, but the circumstances were less clear, and in those cases the plays came on sudden deep strikes. This was different; the Giants had time to talk it over, and it’s highly possible that the coaching staff told Bradshaw not to score quickly. I doubt any of them talked over the possibility of what would happen if the Patriots let them score on purpose. It’s not clear that this is what Belichick did, but it makes quite a lot of sense for him to have done so. Otherwise, the Giants can take too much time off the clock, go for a short-yardage touchdown attempt on third down, and then kick the field goal for the win with almost no time left.

Belichick’s call, if it was deliberate, was the right one, and Bradshaw would have served the Giants better by kneeling at the one-yard line. Instead, the Patriots got the ball with 57 seconds remaining, and the Giants had to endure the stress of defending a couple of Hail Mary attempts before their defense prevailed and won them the game.

It was an extremely dramatic game, and had that interesting piece of game theory in it, but I’m not sure I’d call it a great game. Much of it felt bogged down and somewhat fractured, which may be a hallmark of Super Bowl games featuring the Belichick-era Patriots.

While it’s a difficult thing to pin down, I suspect that the Patriots were the better team this year. Maybe not by a significant margin, but play that game a hundred times and they’d win more than half. That’s not how it works, of course, and perhaps the best adjective for the Giants isn’t “lucky” but “opportunistic”. They took their chances to turn their season around and make it into the playoffs, partly by getting healthy at the right time. They pounced on the league’s best team, the Packers, when the Packers were a little rusty. They hung tough with the 49ers before turning utterly improbable special teams mistakes (not to mention non-interception good fortune and a ludicrous non-fumble call) into a trip to the Super Bowl. Finally, they pressured the Patriots into coughing up two points on offense before the Patriots settled down—two points that would prove crucial at the end of the game—and then weathered the Patriots’ long drives bracketing the half, and hung around, just barely, to get and then seize their chance at victory in the closing moments.

The Giants now have four titles (1986/1990/2007/2011), while the Patriots remain at three (2001/2003/2004). Given that the Patriots won those three by rather small margins, it seems just for them to lose some close ones—although the Giants have won all three of the close Super Bowls they’ve played in, including the closest Super Bowl ever.

The MVP award went to Eli Manning, which seems fair as he did, yet again, drive for the winning score in the fourth quarter.

[1]	It was mainly dread of a Patriots win—while I was born in New York and am a hardcore Yankees fan, I didn’t form any football allegiance until much later in life, and I became a staunch 49ers fan in Ireland.

[2]	Although not as much as he did against the 49ers, where he was unbelievably lucky twice to see interceptions instead turn into instances of 49er defenders injuring each other.

Tags: football, sports

Djokovic Wins Longest-Ever Grand Slam Final

Tadhg — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 02:28:13 +0000

Novak Djokovic beat Rafael Nadal in the Australian Open final, 5–7, 6–4, 6–2, 6–7 (5), 7–5, in 5 hours and 53 minutes. It was an incredible final, one in which both players exhibited astonishing speed, endurance, and resilience. Djokovic was not quite at his best, but still had enough—eventually—to overcome Nadal. I rank it among the best matches I’ve seen, probably just behind the 2008 Wimbledon final.

Djokovic started out slightly off, likely as a result of having played for almost four hours against Murray the night before. Nadal had played his semifinal a full day before that, beating Federer in a comparatively brief four sets. Nadal did look mentally a little shaky at the start, and let Djokovic back into the first set before making a successful push for it. At that point the tennis was already extremely physical, with long and arduous rallies showcasing ludicrous court coverage.

In the first set, it seemed that Djokovic just wasn’t getting the usual amount penetration, on his groundstrokes. It was apparently very humid, and this might have been making the balls move slightly slower—enough to take a slight edge from Novak. That, combined with Nadal’s amazing defensive ability, meant that Djokovic had to do quite a lot of work to actually win points. On the other hand, Nadal was making quite a few unforced[1] errors, and Djokovic would punish any short ball that came his way, so it remained close throughout.

The sense was that even though Nadal was winning, Djokovic was beginning to find his form, and Nadal was able to just snatch the set before Djokovic hit his stride. The next two sets were a clinic from Novak in both power tennis and how not to get frustrated. No matter how many amazing defensive plays Nadal made, no matter how many points Nadal won after it was clear that Djokovic was in control of the rally, Djokovic refused to be fazed, and simply got back to work.

As he’s proven repeatedly over the last year, Djokovic’s offense is better than Nadal’s defense. Consistently better; unlike Federer, who has to play his very best tennis to overcome Nadal’s defense, Djokovic’s game doesn’t allow Nadal any easy outs, and Djokovic is able to play at a sustainable level and still overcome Nadal.

Nadal’s best periods were when he played more aggressively and pushed to take control of points immediately. He won a lot of points where he did that, but it’s a very difficult shift for him to maintain. As the ESPN commentators noted, his defensive game is good enough to beat everyone—except Djokovic. Against everyone else, Nadal can play defensive tennis until he reaches a stage in the rally where he’s presented with a clear opportunity, and that’s a winning formula. Djokovic puts him under too much pressure, most of the time, when Nadal is on the defensive. That he should go on that attack sooner is clear—but it’s also extremely difficult to do, especially against the best player in the world.

Nadal’s struggles in this match reminded me quite a lot of what it’s like to watch Federer play Nadal: one gets the impression, somehow, that Federer “should” be winning. The points seem to be under his control, and it seems as if he has the ability to win but loses his concentration or lets his play slide, and that if he just worked past that he’d win. Against Djokovic, it looked as if the same were true for Nadal. He won many of the more spectacular points. When he stepped up to attack, he’d win. But then he’d make errors, and appear to be handing control back to Djokovic.

In addition, this match is the first time I can remember seeing a player appear to be consistent, “unbeatable”—and losing. With Federer, his brilliance comes most often in quick strikes, so in a way one can see how it can be there one moment and gone the next. With Nadal, his brilliance is in sustained defense and rallying, and it’s much harder to see how he can consistently play in a way where he simply gets back everything and waits for a small moment of vulnerability and then takes the point, yet lose the next. It was extremely rare for Djokovic to lose control of a point and still win it, whereas Nadal appeared to have lost points over and over again only to suddenly turn things around. That’s what I mean by his looking unbeatable, and yet he was, clearly, losing.

We can’t really see on the screen all that’s important in the match. We can’t truly see the weight of shot the players are hitting, or the ways in which ball spin and ball speed put them under pressure. Just as it’s very difficult to truly appreciate the phenomenal coordination it takes for Federer to deal with Nadal’s forehand to Federer’s backhand, it’s very difficult to see what an achievement it is for Nadal to cope with the power of Djokovic’s shots coming right to his feet. Particularly when Djokovic does this relentlessly, and has court coverage equal to Nadal’s own. What look like poor shots, “unforced errors”, are actually more-or-less inevitable failures under repeated strain.

Nadal’s resilience in the fact of this was formidable. This was perhaps the most physically gruelling tennis match I’ve ever seen, and at times I thought that Nadal would win it because of that, because he was just going to keep Djokovic on court forever until he broke down. Late in the fourth set Nadal found the right mix of aggression and tenacity, saved three break points at 3–4, 0–40, and forced a tiebreak in a set where Djokovic had seen almost no pressure on his own serve and had made Nadal fight tooth and nail to avoid being broken. In the tiebreak, he kept forcing Djokovic to hit the extra shot (or several extra shots), and Djokovic eventually missed one or two—and then Nadal took the tiebreak, 7–5, on his first set point.

It looked as if Nadal had willed himself to victory; Djokovic was clearly suffering physically, and it seemed Nadal had simply ground him down. Nadal broke, and with Djokovic serving at 2–4, 0–30, Nadal again ran down everything in a long rally and had a fairly open shot at a passing shot, with Djokovic out of position at the net (and, I think, having given up on the point)—but he pushed the passing shot just wide of the line. Suddenly, Djokovic had energy again. His body language changed, and he started hitting more winners and covering more court, and he broke back to level the fifth set. At 5–5, he constantly pressured Nadal’s serve, which had been sub-par (in terms of power) for much of the day, and eventually secured a break (although the point he won at deuce was slightly tarnished by the fact that Nadal thought Djokovic’s ball had been called out, misled by crowd noise). When he did secure that break, it seemed clear that he would now not relinquish his hold on the match, and he didn’t.

This title is Djokovic’s fifth major, and Nadal is the first man in the Open Era to lose three consecutive Grand Slam finals. If Novak wins in Paris—which must be considered a possibility—he would become the first man since Laver to hold all four major titles at once. Much will depend on the draw; Djokovic’s chances are better if he doesn’t have to face Federer, and I assume that on clay Nadal will be favored against anyone other than Djokovic. Last night’s match makes me think that while it’s possible that Djokovic could beat Nadal at Roland Garros, it would take a near-superhuman effort to do so, similar to what it took from Nadal to beat Federer at Wimbledon. Meanwhile, I think that Murray has closed the gap with the Big Three a little, while Federer has slipped slightly. Barring some major unexpected event, the Big Four will be the only relevant men in the draw when the French Open begins.

[1]	At least, in the sense that any error while being pressured by probably the best exponent of pure baseline power tennis in the world can be considered “unforced”.

Tags: sports, tennis

SOPA and Why I’m Against it

Tadhg — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 07:52:50 +0000

Earlier this week I “blacked out” tadhg.com as part of the widespread protests against SOPA. This post includes a number of my reasons for opposing it.

The legislation allows for ex parte hearings to be held to determine whether or not sites accused of a dizzying array of vague things could be taken down. It’s a rather stupid idea to give any schmuck with a lawyer the ability to yank sites from the web.
Building a censorship mechanism into the Internet—which the bill would have required—isn’t something I would ever support.
I’m much more willing to risk copyright infringement in order to facilitate free speech than I am to risk restricting free speech in aid of reducing copyright infringement.
Unlike Lamar Smith, I believe that if 25% of the Internet’s traffic really is “infringing content”, then the laws should be changed to decriminalize what a substantial number of people believe is acceptable behavior, and not to pursue enforcement strategies in order to impose behavioral controls[1].
Copyright holders have sufficient—or too many—rights and remedies available to them already, and further social engineering to add to those rights and remedies are unnecessary and harmful.

At root, I see this as an issue of control, and I’m naturally inclined towards agitating for less control rather than more. The benefits brought by a less-regulated Internet are obvious.

Furthermore, I have little trust or liking for those who pushed for this legislation, partly because they habitually lie (particularly about things like how much money they supposedly lose to copyright infringement, but also about things like how much money their movies make), have been consistently wrong in the past about the harms new technologies would do to their industries (e.g. Disney and the VCR), and generally act like control freaks and constantly try to push the bounds of how far they can push that control (such as the NFL claiming in broadcasts that “any … descriptions, or accounts of this game without the NFL’s consent is prohibited”). They exert too much control on our culture as it is, and I have no desire to give them any more.

The boycott attracted some attention, and achieved the short-term goal of delaying SOPA. It’s inevitable that they’ll be back, and effectively fighting measures like this one will require more than symbolic gestures. Constant defensive maneuvers are bound to fail, and without some kind of offensive action (such as threatening to pass legislation to cut the copyright term, cut the penalties for infringement, or enshrine fair use and other copyright exceptions in law so that they are easily usable rather that being fraught with risk) the bill’s constituency will have all the time needed to eventually prevail.

Getting into that, however, requires dealing with the legislative process and its various flaws, which is clearly too large a topic for this post.

[1]	This is not a fundamental rule; there are clearly situations where large swathes of societies engage in behavior that’s indefensible. This is not one of those situations.

Tags: copyright, free speech, law, politics

49ers Defeat Saints in Classic

Tadhg — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 23:47:57 +0000

Football is a very complicated game. I can’t think of another sport as demanding for participants on an intellectual level. Soccer, basketball, and many other team sports often involve specific philosophies or systems that players need to learn, but none involve the level of complexity of football.

The main reason for this is the stop-start nature of the game. It’s not a game of flow, but instead at the start of each play the players line up in formation, and because of this their actions can be scripted to a very significant degree. This naturally emphasizes the importance of preparation and deception, and hence leads to an escalating competition between play designers on the offensive and defensive sides of the ball.

Depending on how you define it, the “modern” game has been around for about 40–80 years. It’s played in the United States at the professional level, at several college levels, and in high schools—and for all of those, the game is far from simple. Innovation and experimentation occur at all those levels, and the sheer amount of football knowledge out there is staggering. The range of options available for any given play is so vast that some of the important innovations are purely about how to communicate the chosen selection to the players, who have to learn a code for that purpose (as satirized in this ESPN commercial).

This complexity means that coaches have a tremendous impact on team performance, possibly more than in any other sport. Personnel and player talent are both still hugely important, as is the degree to which specific players are suited to coaching philosophies[1], but the difference between good and bad coaching is colossal.

This season’s San Francisco 49ers are dramatic evidence of this. There are few personnel differences between last season’s team, with a 6–10 record, and this season’s team, with a 13–3 regular reason record and yesterday’s victory against one of the league’s best teams and a resulting berth in next week’s Conference championship (the semifinal, the winner of which gets one of the two spots in the Super Bowl). The big difference between the two seasons? The coach, Jim Harbaugh, who replaced last year’s coach, Mike Singletary. Harbaugh had been extremely successful as Stanford’s football coach, and in his first year at San Francisco has effected a stunning turnaround, taking a team that was widely expected to be one of the NFL’s worst and remaking it into a legitimate Super Bowl contender, one with the league’s best defense (and one that was historically great against the run).

While the media tend to emphasize the psychological aspects of coaching, in this case making much of a preseason conversation between Harbaugh and quarterback Alex Smith, the truth is that while increased player confidence and effort is beneficial, coaching success comes from mastering, and tweaking to suit personnel, systems that are simply too complicated for non-professionals to comprehend. Dramatic inspirational speeches—awesome as they may be [2]—provide a rather minor edge in comparison.

The 49ers’ 13–3 record was proof enough of Harbaugh’s coaching ability, but beating the Saints yesterday (the Saints were slightly favored) makes abundantly clear that Harbaugh’s 49ers can beat elite teams.

That being said, the 49ers should have put away the game earlier, and having to rely on Alex Smith’s heroics (twice!) despite a plus-four turnover differential in the game isn’t a good sign. They jumped out to a 17–0 lead, but the Saints calmly went back to work and relied on Drew Brees’ phenomenal passing to cut the lead to 17–14 and then, late in the fourth quarter, took their first lead at 24–23. With four minutes to go, I had my doubts that the 49ers could score a touchdown, but felt that a long drive culminating in a field goal would be entirely feasible and might well win the game.

Instead, Alex Smith led them rapidly downfield, largely with a 37-yard pass to Vernon Davis, and then scored a 28-yard rushing touchdown with 2:11 left in the game[3]. A failed two-point conversion made the score 29–24. Could the 49ers’ excellent defense keep the Saints out of the end zone? Not this time, as two 49er defenders failed to tackle Jimmy Graham (possibly the best tight end in the game) on a 66-yard catch-and-run with 1:37 remaining. The Saints succeeded on their two-point conversion to lead by three, 32–29. I thought the 49ers had a good shot at making it to field goal range and sending the game to overtime.

Instead, Alex Smith led them rapidly downfield, largely with a 47-yard pass to Vernon Davis, and then scored with a 14-yard touchdown pass to Vernon Davis with 9 seconds remaining in the game. 49ers win their first playoff game in nine years and set up a matchup with either the Green Bay Packers (at Lambeau Field) or the New York Giants (at Candlestick Park)—both historic 49er rivals. The 49ers would likely be underdogs against the Packers and favorites against the Giants[4], but would have a good shot at winning either.

Getting ahead of reality a little bit, if the 49ers were to win the NFC Championship game, they would be in their sixth Super Bowl. They’ve won all five of their previous Super Bowls, putting them one behind the Pittsburgh Steelers for the record for Super Bowl wins. A win would cap a historic turnaround and put the franchise, after a decade of futility, back on top of the NFL in terms of all-time greatness.

[1]	See Kurt Warner, or, going in the other direction, Nnamdi Asomugha.

[2]	Note that even in Any Given Sunday, while the Sharks won the game featuring that speech but lost in a blowout later on; inspiration can only take you so far.

[3]

Returning to the topic of the game’s complexity, there’s some debate over whether it would have been better for Smith, instead of scoring on that play, to have slid at the 1-yard line, the 49ers to have knelt on the next two plays and then taken one rushing shot at the endzone before kicking a field goal to leave New Orleans trailing 24–26 with no timeouts and about 40 seconds remaining.

[4]	At time of writing, the Giants lead 20–10 at halftime at Lambeau Field

Tags: football, san-francisco, sports

Favorite Books of 2011

Tadhg — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 23:44:19 +0000

2011 involved less reading for me than any year other than 2004, with a rather low total of 37. I’m not sure why it was so low, but I went through a very slow reading period after starting Gravity’s Rainbow in mid-August, and after starting (and never finishing) it I didn’t finish reading another book until the end of October.

2011 was my year of the ebook; I read more ebooks than paper books for the first time, 32:5. I’d be surprised if that trend were reversed (failing some kind of major economic/technological breakdown), and anticipate reading mainly ebooks in future.

This was also the first year I assigned a rating to each book as I finished it. My ratings are purely based on how much I enjoyed the book at the time, and not on how good I think the books are.

My favorite fiction book of the year was Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones, which as I wrote in my review was one of the best works of fiction I’ve read in years.

My favorite non-fiction book of the year was Debt: The First 5,000 years. Everyone should read it. It’s a fascinating exploration of money and debt, with plenty of revelations about the nature and origins of money.

Stumbling on Happiness was excellent, and that’s another non-fiction work I’d recommend to everyone. Meditations on Violence was another strong piece of non-fiction, and one that made a lot of sense to me.

East of Eden was a great read, although the start and end were not quite as good as the middle parts.

The best science fiction I read in 2011 was China Miéville’s Embassytown, followed by Gilman’s The Half-Made World. The worst (and the book I rated lower than any other) was Doris Lessing’s Shikasta, a book that contained an awful central message of fatalism and a large amount of finely-rendered but unbearable bureaucratic language.

The best fantasy novel I read (not counting re-reads) was either Joe Abercrombie’s Heroes or George R. R. Martin’s A Dance with Dragons; I enjoyed the latter more at the time, but suspect that Heroes might have been the better book. I finally finished the 10-book epic of Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen, but was fairly disappointed with both of the final two books, Dust of Dreams and The Crippled God. In the end I felt that the series just didn’t have what it took to make it feel like there was a worthwhile conclusion—admittedly a difficult task given the colossal nature of the series.

I also finished Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander series, and thought that he ended it very strongly with The Troubled Man.

Last but not least, I was extremely happy with Neal Stephenson’s Reamde, as I enjoyed it thoroughly throughout and thought it an excellent return to form after Anathem, which I couldn’t stand.

The books I read in 2011:

Stumbling on Happiness; Daniel Gilbert 08/01/2011 Rating: 80%; {Format: ebook}
Quarter Share; Nathan Lowell 08/01/2011 Rating: 70%; {Format: ebook}
Half Share; Nathan Lowell 11/01/2011 Rating: 60%; {Format: ebook}
East of Eden; John Steinbeck 14/02/2011 Rating: 85%; {Format: ebook}
Replay; Ken Grimwood 18/02/2011 Rating: 75%; {Format: ebook}
Heroes; Joe Abercrombie 21/02/2011 Rating: 80%; {Format: ebook}
The Half-Made World; Felix Gilman 27/02/2011 Rating: 80%; {Format: ebook}
Shikasta: Re, Colonised Planet 5; Doris Lessing 09/03/2011 Rating: 55%; {Format: ebook}
Scorecasting: The Hidden Influences Behind How Sports Are Played and Games Are Won; Tobias Moskowitz; 14/03/2011 Rating: 75%; {Format: ebook}
The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead; Max Brooks 19/03/2011 Rating: 75%;
Tales of Nevèrÿon; Samuel R. Delany 27/04/2011 Rating: 70%;
The Kindly Ones; Jonathan Littell 03/05/2011 Rating: 90%;
Warriors; George R. R. Martin, Gardner Dozois, eds. 09/05/2011 Rating: 65%; {Format: ebook};
Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption; Laura Hillenbrand 20/06/2011 Rating: 65%; {Format: ebook}
Daughters of the North; Sarah Hall 22/06/2011 Rating: 70%; {Format: ebook; AKA: The Carhullan Army}
A Drop of the Hard Stuff; Lawrence Block 24/06/2011 Rating: 70%; {Format: ebook}
A Game of Thrones; George R.R. Martin 27/06/2011 Rating: 90%; {Again: True}
A Clash of Kings; George R.R. Martin 02/07/2011 Rating: 90%; {Format: ebook, Again: True}
A Storm of Swords; George R.R. Martin 03/07/2011 Rating: 90%; {Format: ebook, Again: True}
A Feast for Crows; George R.R. Martin 05/07/2011 Rating: 75%; {Format: ebook, Again: True}
Dust of Dreams; Steven Erikson 11/07/2011 Rating: 65%; {Format: ebook}
A Dance with Dragons; George R.R. Martin 14/07/2011 Rating: 85%; {Format: ebook}
Meditations on Violence: A Comparison of Martial Arts Training & Real World Violence; Rory Miller 15/07/2011 Rating: 80%; {Format: ebook}
The Crippled God; Steven Erikson 22/07/2011 Rating: 65%; {Format: ebook}
Angry White Pyjamas; Robert Twigger 23/07/2011 Rating: 75%;
Embassytown; China Mieville 26/07/2011 Rating: 90%; {Format: ebook}
Leviathan Wakes; James S.A. Corey 31/07/2011 Rating: 70%; {Format: ebook}
Slip of the Knife: A Novel; Denise Mina 05/08/2011 Rating: 75%; {Format: ebook}
The Folding Knife; K. J. Parker 07/08/2011 Rating: 80%; {Format: ebook}
Life; Gwyneth Jones 27/10/2011 Rating: 65%; {Format: ebook}
Reamde; Neal Stephenson 04/11/2011 Rating: 85%; {Format: ebook}
The Night and The Music; Lawrence Block 05/11/2011 Rating: 70%; {Format: ebook}
Professor Moriarty: The Hound of the D’Urbervilles; Kim Newman 28/11/2011 Rating: 60%; {Format: ebook}
Debt: The First 5,000 Years; David Graeber 28/12/2011 Rating: 90%; {Format: ebook}
Firewall; Henning Mankell 29/12/2012 Rating: 75%; {Format: ebook; Translator: Ebba Segerberg}
The Troubled Man; Henning Mankell 31/12/2011 Rating: 80%; {Format: ebook; Translator: Laurie Thompson}
Roseanna; Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahloo 31/12/2011 Rating: 70%; {Format: ebook}

Tags: books, reading, reviews

2012 Goals

Tadhg — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 19:47:42 +0000

I’m deliberately giving myself fewer of these this year, partly because I particularly don’t want to start the year feeling as if I’m already behind, so I’m trying to make the first quarter, at least, one in which I don’t have a pile of self-imposed tasks. So, this year, a shorter list of goals.

Notably absent is a goal related to the CrossFit Open. I intend to compete, and I know that once I’m in it I’ll try hard, but it’s scheduled at an awkward time for me and, as mentioned above, I don’t want to pile a lot on for the start of the year.

Finish a major creative work. This is essentially unchanged from the last couple of years, although now I’m focused on a specific project, the one I started with S0E1 Part 1.
Back squat twice my body weight. This is certainly ambitious given that my best ever is 315 pounds, but I feel it’s a good target to have. Strength is alleged to begin with back squatting twice your body weight, and it would nice to start to be strong.
Finish the second season of my roleplaying game. I’m happy with the progress I made with this in 2011, and this goal might expand to include starting the third season.
Polish, package, and release my Vim/writing/blogging scripts. This includes PyWordCount, but also includes the custom reStructuredText directives I’ve written, and the reST-in-Vim-to-WordPress pipeline I have.
Get paid for a piece of writing. Not necessarily a new piece, just any writing. In some ways this shouldn’t be that hard, given that I have a lots of existing work to put out there, but it’s not something I have any experience doing. It would be very good to rectify that.

Tags: coding, CrossFit, exercise, games, goals, personal, roleplaying, writing

2011 Goals Review

Tadhg — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 21:41:16 +0000

I feel as if I did worse than usual on my goals for 2011, but that could be due to getting a bunch of them done early, with not many coming in the second half of the year.

The ones I accomplished:

Celebrate my birthday. Done.
Top 50% at the CrossFit Open. Top 41%.
Run the second “season” of my roleplaying campaign.. Technically I only ran the first half of the second season, six sessions, but there was plenty of plot progression so I think it’s fair to call this accomplished.

The partial successes:

Finish and publish PyWordCount. It’s really close to finished, it’s in a plugin form of its own with its own github repository, but it’s lacking the final documentation and polish that would really make calling it done possible.
Miscellaneous fitness goals. Not many of these, but I did get one:
- 400-pound deadlift. Done
I failed, however, to get any of the rest:
- 20 strict pullups. Not even close. I can probably only do 11 consecutively right now.
- 30 kipping pullups. I haven’t really tried; I might be able to do this, but only butterfly-style, and that would mean taking a significant risk with my shoulder, which I’m unwilling to do.
- 5K in 23:00. Nowhere close. I think the best 5K I ran in 2011 was over 26 minutes.
- “Murph” in under 50:00. Nope. In fairness, this did depend on my being able to do kipping pullups. I did improve my best time with strict pullups to 66:39.
- 48" box jump. I’d forgotten this was a goal, and didn’t work on it. I didn’t get close; I think my best is about 43", which is a long way short.
- “Helen” in 12:00 (strict pullups). I got closer, beating 13:00 for the first time with 12:48, and I think that it’s possible that I could get it next year.
The first half of the year was fantastic for my fitness, but the second half far less so. I need to get committed again next year, and will probably be adopting most of these goals again for 2012.

The goals I failed to accomplish:

One major creative project. No. This is the biggest failure of the year in my eyes, and it bothers me because I really thought I’d get significant headway on my current project after I got started on it in November. I couldn’t keep that momentum going, however, and will just have to try again next year.
Finish AFBH. No. I didn’t even do one of the remaining episodes. Getting started on this one is pretty tough, for whatever reason.
Make progress in building a sense of community for myself. It’s not that there’s none of this in my life, but I don’t think I really did much about it this year, and that’s why I’m listing it as not accomplished.

A quasi-goal that warrants mention:

From August 2006 to August 2011, I posted to my blog at least five times per week (once per day, in the first year). I decided to call a halt to that schedule and move to once per week, but the five years of posting so regularly was an accomplishment, and I’m proud of my output over that time. So while that wasn’t a goal for the year per se, it was still a goal, and I’m counting it as a success. As is, for that matter, posting weekly since, and I’ll probably make posting weekly a goal for 2012.

I feel so-so about my goals for 2011. Not having completed a major creative project bothers me, and I would have liked to have continued my strong fitness progress from the first half of the year. Hopefully I’ll get back on track in 2012.

Tags: Blog, coding, community, CrossFit, exercise, games, goals, personal, roleplaying, writing

Favorite Posts of 2011

Tadhg — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 03:01:27 +0000

What I liked most from my posts this year.

Top Five

The “Dickwolves Thing”

Controversial, and while it makes me uncomfortable in some ways, this still strikes me as an important piece. 06 Feb 2011.
Happiness Progress

In many ways my most personal post of the year, and important for entirely different reasons. 14 Feb 2011.
Expression, Pseudonymity, Google+

Saying some things that needed—and still need—to be said about Google+ and the debates over online identity. 08 Aug 2011.
S0E1 Part One

The first part of what will hopefully be a long work of fiction, I thought this turned out quite well. 06 Nov 2011.
Self-Expression & Voice

We need to be free to not be true to our selves. 16 Jan 2011.

Honorable Mention

Q’Rith: The Underpinnings of Magic

A basis for how magic could work in a fantasy world. 25 Jan 2011.
My Reaction to “40 Things People Need to Stop Saying”

The most-commented-on post I’ve written, because I stirred a lot of negative responses when I decided to deliver my thoughts on another community’s list of things they wanted to discourage as utterances. 28 Apr 2011.
4 Philosophical Questions Examined in Light of The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Life, the Universe, and Everything. (Not really, but some examination of “the big questions”.) 23 May 2011.
The Rorschach Riots

My take on the public unrest in the UK this summer, and considerations about how we filter what we see. 14 Aug 2011.
Q’Rith: Navigation, Sea Turtles, and Magic

An exploration of how magic affected the development of certain kinds of technology in my game realm. 28 Aug 2011.
Nerd-Shaming

If shaming is wrong, should there be exceptions for groups you like to be snarky about? 04 Sep 2011.
“Still in the City”

A microfiction piece. 11 Dec 2011.

Tags: personal, writing

“Still in the City”

Tadhg — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 07:44:38 +0000

At Clay and Gough, after I crossed the street, there was something. No cars in sight, no car sounds, not even from Franklin. No people in sight. No people sounds, until a man in Lafayette Park broke the spell by speaking to his workout partner.

Until then, however, I had felt as if I were alone.

The sky was pale blue blending into chalky white. The sun suffused everything with a strong yellow, and the dominant colors were blue, white, yellow, the grey of the buildings, the green of the park.

That awareness of my surroundings came suddenly. It didn’t jar me from my thoughts, but rather I emerged from them into it, unprepared. My consciousness hung there, its relation to the world altered.

Not oneness, not a communing with nature. A glimpse of a natural state, what it might be like to have a place in the world—what it might be like to not face that question, for it to not be a factor in one’s existence. That is what surrounded me, even while the thought itself, once it came, underscored its impossibility.

But it wasn’t a thought, not at first. A sense, requiring unravelling, reading. Everything was still and beautiful—that beauty merely a fact of the situation—and for a split second I fit into my surroundings, leaving conscious thought aside, until that thought caught up with me and it was gone.

Gone, but leaving a trail. What are such moments, if not hints at how unlikely belonging, in any sense, truly is? The experience required that the city be busy around me in the broad sense but yet for me to find in it calm solitude. This was not wilderness stillness. This was a fleeting gift, chance, unlikely, and all the more precious for it.

Tags: fiction, microfiction, personal, san-francisco, writing

49ers Clinch NFC West

Tadhg — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 06:18:49 +0000

I’ve been a 49ers fan since about 1986, just before their late 80s period of dominance. They were already an excellent team, and although I didn’t become a Jerry Rice fan until later, it’s probably not a coincidence that I liked their offensive style so much shortly after Rice’s arrival in 1985. I was in Ireland at the time, and watched them have success after success from afar. From 1983 to 1998, they had 16 consecutive winning seasons.

In 1999, I moved to California, and coincidentally the 49ers went 4–12; Steve Young (another favorite player of mine) also retired that year.

They went 6–10 in the 2000 season, then rebounded with two winning seasons in 2001 and 2002, winning the division in 2002. But after losing to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in the Divisional playoff, the organization fired coach Steve Mariucci (a move I didn’t like at the time and which certainly looks like a mistake in retrospect). Since then, they’ve been a terrible team.

I fully expected them to be a terrible team this year, too. I thought Jim Harbaugh might be a good coach, but given that they didn’t make any other significant personnel moves and also considering the fact that the off-season was shortened due to the labor dispute, I thought it’d be next year before he could make a difference.

I was wrong. They secured a winning record a couple of weeks ago, and today clinched their first NFC West title in nine years when they blanked the St. Louis Rams 26–0. It’s not just that the rest of the NFC West is awful—although it is—they’re actually good, with wins over the Giants, the Lions, and the Bengals, and a very close loss to the Ravens.

Unlike the great 49er teams of the 80s and 90s, they’re not dominant on offense. But their defense has been absolutely excellent, particularly against the run. Through 12 games this season, they have allowed no rushing touchdowns, making them the team since the AFL/NFL merger in 1970 to go 12 games in a single season without giving up a running touchdown[1]. They also haven’t allowed any opposing running back to gain 100 yards in 34 games[2], and unsurprisingly lead the league in rush defense, giving up an average of 71.8 yards per game.

They have a legitimate chance to tie or beat the record for fewest rushing touchdowns conceded in a 16-game season (four), and perhaps even in any NFL season (two). Their remaining opponents are all in the bottom half of the league in terms of rushing yards—although Seattle’s Marshawn Lynch has been extremely good the last few games and may represent the biggest threat to the 49er streak.

They’ve given up the fewest points in the league so far, averaging 13.4 per game, and of the 15 touchdowns they’ve allowed so far, all 15 were through the air—not only have they allowed no rushing touchdowns, but they’ve also allowed no special teams touchdowns and haven’t given up any turnovers resulting in immediate points of their opponents (although one could argue that last stat is as much a factor of luck as anything else).

By any measure, that’s a dominant defense, and the rushing offense has also been effective. In today’s game Frank Gore became San Francisco’s all-time leading rusher, and overall the 49ers are 7th in rushing yardage this year. The running game has allowed Alex Smith to play with less pressure, and to put up career-best numbers so far in terms of completion percentage, TD–INT ratio, and NFL passer rating.

They’ve clinched the division, and are one game ahead of the New Orleans Saints for a first-round bye. The 49ers’ remaining opponents are:

Arizona (5–7).
Pittsburgh (9–3).
Seattle (5–7).
St. Louis (2–10).

Obviously, the Steelers game is likely to be the toughest. The Steelers will likely still be playing for their own divisional crown at that point, and are a seasoned, dangerous team. Still, the 49ers have a shot to win it, and should probably go 3–1 to finish 13–3 and secure the second seed in the NFC.

Harbaugh has done a phenomenal job, and I can’t think of anyone else in the NFL who should be considered for coach of the year honors.

The team is still suspect in terms of passing offense, but the defense and the running game give them the ability to hang around in games versus just about anyone. It’s been a while since a team has won a Super Bowl that way—the Ravens did it in 2001 with a defense that was among the best of all time—but the 49ers have a shot. They’re in the top five teams in the NFL right now, with Green Bay, Baltimore, New Orleans, and New England. They’ll drop a little if they lose to Pittsburgh, but are probably still in the top 10. The odds are good that Candlestick Park will host a playoff game for the first time in years, and it’s entirely possible that San Francisco will end up in Green Bay in January trying for a trip to the Super Bowl.

For now, however, they can congratulate themselves on their first division title in nine years, and on an excellent turnaround from last year’s 6–10 season.

[1]	The Chicago Bears hold the record of 15 consecutive games over two seasons without giving up a rushing touchdown.

[2]	The Baltimore Ravens and Philadelphia Eagles have streaks of 50 or more.

Tags: football, sports

Federer wins 2011 Year-End Championships

Tadhg — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 00:25:50 +0000

Roger Federer added yet another record to his list by beating Jo-Wilfried Tsonga 6–3, 6–7 (6), 6–3 to win the ATP World Tour Finals. Federer has now won it six times, more than any other player in history (Sampras and Lendl both won it 5 times), with three sets of back-to-back victories, 2003–2004, 2006–2007, and 2010–2011. It was also his 100th final appearance, his 70th tournament victory, and his 807th match win.

Tsonga didn’t make it easy for him. Early in the first set, Tsonga looked the better player: he was serving better, doing better in rallies, and hadn’t lost more than a point in any of his service games. Federer looked like he wasn’t getting much penetration on his shots, allowing Tsonga plenty of time to tee up for winners. Then, serving at 3–4, Tsonga’s serve was slightly worse, and Federer suddenly stepped up his play, breaking Tsonga to love and then serving out the set. It was classic opportunistic tennis backed up by excellent serving, and in the second set, Federer kept his high level of play, breaking Tsonga early.

At that point, it looked over, but Federer wasn’t serving well. In the early part of the second set, Tsonga was making a lot of errors, but was still hitting the majority of winners. Unfortunately I wasn’t that surprised when Federer’s poor serving coincided with Tsonga improving his form just as Federer was serving for the match at 5–4, and Federer’s only points in that game were the two that came off first serves—he lost all four points on second serves to give up the break. He was up early in the tiebreak, having been given some early gifts by Tsonga, but couldn’t make it hold up, and Tsonga saved a match point at 5–6 with tremendous forehand hitting. Federer didn’t get another chance in the tiebreak, which Tsonga took 8–6.

Federer has lost a bunch of matches this year after having match points, most notably against Djokovic in the US Open semifinal, and also lost to Tsonga at Wimbledon despite winning the first two sets. At the start of the third set today, Tsonga had the momentum and simply looked the stronger player. However, Federer managed the set very well, improving his serve and waiting for his chance.

Against Tsonga at Wimbledon, that didn’t work—Tsonga’s play never dipped, and Federer was seemingly unable to dominate play. I thought this might happen again, as Tsonga was dominating the baseline rallies with power hitting—but also missing quite a few shots due to his high-risk approach. Federer couldn’t seem to out-hit him, but did manage the situation very well, not giving up easy points and using his tactical awareness to outmaneuver Tsonga enough to offset Tsonga’s power advantage.

With Tsonga serving at 3–4, he couldn’t shake Federer off and get out of the game. He saved a number of break points, but Federer found the right mix and clinched the critical break. Unlike in the second set, where I wasn’t surprised that Federer couldn’t hold, this time it seemed entirely inevitable that he would, and he delivered, winning the game at love to clinch the title.

Once again, Federer finished the season stronger than any of his rivals. He demolished Nadal, 6–3, 6–0, in the round-robin stage[1], and neither Novak Djokovic nor Andy Murray made it out of their group. Federer won the YEC without dropping a match for the fifth time, the only player to ever have done so more than once. Djokovic, Nadal, and Murray all complained about the length of the season and their tiredness, but Federer looked smooth and tireless as ever (although he did state that he was exhausted after the final). Last year, the late-season success didn’t translate to the Australian Open, as he lost to Djokovic at the semifinal stage.

Next year, it may be different; much depends on the extent to which the other players can recover from their 2011 campaigns. If the Australian Open started tomorrow, you’d really have to take Federer as the favorite.

The victory clearly meant a lot to Federer, and it is a historic one. Surpassing Lendl and Sampras is no small thing. Dominating younger opponents when they wilt at the end of the year is an important statement for a 30-year-old, and while a year without a Grand Slam is a disappointment by Federer’s standards, it’s important to recognize that a Slams/YEC record of SF/F/QF/SF/W is clear evidence that he’s still right in there as a threat.

The tournament brings Federer back to number three in the world after briefly dropping to number four. I still think it’s possible for him to get back to number one—which I would love to see, because two weeks at number one in the world would give him the record for most weeks there—but his main rivals would definitely have to stumble.

It’s certainly possible for him to win another Grand Slam, and perhaps without his rivals stumbling; I suspect that the Australian and US Opens are the most likely, though he would probably be most eager to win another Wimbledon title.

Going into 2012, the big questions are: can Djokovic recapture his 2011 form? Can Nadal figure out how to beat Djokovic after going 0–6 against him in 2011? Can Federer keep enough momentum to overcome the two of them and possibly win another Slam to extend his record? Some others include whether or not Murray can win a Slam, whether Del Potro can make it back to the top of the game, and whether any other player will emerge to break into the big three/four.

[1]	Nadal has never beaten Federer indoors, where Federer has a 4–0 edge in matches and an 8–1 edge in sets. Take away clay (Nadal 12–2) and indoor courts, and their head-to-head record is 5–3 Nadal.

Tags: sports, tennis

PTQ at Worlds 2011

Tadhg — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 07:52:13 +0000

The last time the Magic: The Gathering World Championships were in San Francisco was September 2004. 2004 might have been the high water mark of my MTG career, and at one of the side events for that Worlds I racked up probably my best win, a two–one victory over Tsuyoshi Fujita with my Black/Red Death Cloud deck[*]. A month later I picked up my first (and, it seems, only) PTQ top eight result[†].

Rather than being spurred by those results, however, my interest in the game began to wane a little. It was a slow dwindling, but eventually I stopped playing in PTQs, and then stopped playing Wednesday nights at sfmagic, and then stopped playing casual games. After Grand Prix Portland I didn’t play for almost a year. The game that had been such a mainstay for so long receded into the background, and I’m now fairly determined to sell my cards—and, furthermore, to attempt to not accumulate any more of them.

Worlds 2011 was in San Francisco, however, and it seemed wrong to not go at all to something just ten minutes away from me; given that I was going to go, it seemed wrong not to play; given that I was going to play, it seemed wrong not to play in a tournament. So at 08:15 on Saturday morning I was registered for one of the larger Pro Tour Qualifiers I’ve played in, with 320 players.

The format was Sealed Deck with the latest set, Innistrad. I had played with Innistrad cards once before, a draft on Wednesday night with the sfmagic crew. Apart from that my preparation had been more or less nonexistent.

The card pool I received seemed reasonable, with the most notable card being Garruk Relentless. However, I didn’t think the rest of the Green cards were strong enough, and thought my only shot was White/Blue aggro, which happened to include the stupid Invisible Stalker/Butcher’s Cleaver combo.

I was probably right about this being the best direction for my card pool; I might have been wrong to not put Garruk Relentless in anyway, and I was wrong with some of the other card choices. The deck:

8 Plains
7 Island
1 Shimmering Grotto
(16 land)
1 Silent Departure
2 Feeling of Dread
2 Think Twice
1 Bonds of Faith
1 Rally the Peasants
1 Butcher’s Cleaver
1 Smite the Monstrous
1 Grasp of Phantoms
(10 non-creature cards)
2 Doomed Traveler
1 Selfless Cathar
1 Invisible Stalker
1 Unruly Mob
2 Silverchase Fox
1 Cloistered Youth
1 Fiend Hunter
1 Lantern Spirit
1 Civilized Scholar
1 Abbey Griffin
1 Slayer of the Wicked
1 Manor Gargoyle
(14 creatures)

Relevant sideboard cards were:

1 Silent Departure
2 Makeshift Mauler
1 Daybreak Ranger
1 Garruk Relentless
2 Traveler’s Amulet
1 Curiosity
1 Sharpened Pitchfork
1 Urgent Exorcism
1 Spare from Evil

The Shimmering Grotto was in there purely to flash back Rally the Peasants—and it shouldn’t have been. I never needed the flashback, and the Shimmering Grotto definitely slowed me down at times—when that’s absolutely the last thing this deck needed. After every game one, I sided in the additional Silent Departure and the two Makeshift Maulers, taking out both copies of Think Twice and usually the Abbey Griffin. If I played it again, I would take out the Shimmering Grotto and replace it with a Plains (White was more important early), make the swap I made after every game one, and strongly consider putting in Spare from Evil over Rally the Peasants. Actually, I’d probably try putting both of those in against decks without a lot of Humans, as together they could represent a major chunk of damage, which is really the point with that deck.

Still, a reasonable enough deck for my first ever pool in the format.

I started out well, winning my first two matches—mostly on the back of putting out the Invisible Stalker early and then putting the Butcher’s Cleaver on it for a 4/1 lifelink creature that couldn’t be blocked or targeted by my opponents. In round three I lost to a White/Green deck that just seemed to have better creatures, and which I couldn’t take a game from. Another three wins, including an unfortunate pairing against my friend Brett Allen that I squeaked through with excellent draws, and I was at five–one. It was a nine-round tournament, with a cut to top eight after that. Seven-one-one might not make it, but it would depend on tiebreakers. If I won three more, I was in; if I won two more, I could perhaps draw in the last round to get in; if I won one more, I would at least get some prize.

In round seven I played Rasmus Sibast, I think playing White/Green. In the first game I went to five cards; he went to six, and it was a lopsided affair judging by the notes I have on life totals, but I can’t remember any details whatsoever. In the second game I played creatures on my first three turns and then followed with Rally the Peasants to bring him down on life very quickly. Two lopsided games, and then on to the decider. I had to mulligan to six, and that didn’t help me. The life totals reflect another lopsided game, but my notes for the game don’t say anything other than: “one mana short”.

Five–two, out of contention. Next up was Stefano Ossino, playing Black/White. The first game was extremely close, and a critical moment came when I had two creatures out and attacking against no blockers: a Homicidal Brute (5/1) and the Invisible Stalker (1/1); he forced me to sacrifice a creature. Racing, and hoping to get a definitive lead, I gave up the Invisible Stalker. I’m pretty sure that was the right decision, as if I’d gone the other way the game would have been even more lopsided. However, he seemed to keep drawing removal and/or creatures to turn the tide, and I lost with him on four life. In the second game, we went back and forth for a long time, with my early beatdown supplemented by Butcher’s Cleaver, but slowed by the creatures he kept adding to his side. Eventually the life totals were 14–7 in my favor, but he had a ton of blockers and it wasn’t clear how I could get through. Among his creatures was a Markov Patrician, 3/1 lifelink. I knew that if he attacked with it, he’d be safe. I had a flyer and an Invisible Stalker on my side, and he had four on his; I was holding Feeling of Dread and Rally the Peasants and my evasion creatuers were a 1/1 and a 3/3. He cast Army of the Damned to give himself 13 tapped 2/2 Zombies, and then decided the safe thing to do was hang back. I played Feeling of Dread on two of his flyers, flashed it back on the other two, untapped, played the Rally the Peasants, and got in for eight to squeak through. He cursed himself for not having attacked with his lifelink creature, and I thought that maybe that was the luck I needed to get back to winning. Nope; our third game was close again, but not that close, and he beat me down in relatively short order.

Five–three, and now just trying to qualify for prizes. My last-round opponent was Jerome Lechevre, playing either White/Red or White/Green/Red. Our first game was extremely close, with him on four life at the end, and managing to take me from six to zero in the last turn. In game two I had a very strong start, and when I put Bonds of Faith on Invisible Stalker with him at 12 life, he conceded. In the deciding game, he started out better than I did, but not for long. I managed to stabilize the board, and get the life totals to 10–8 in my favor. The same turn I did that, I attacked, forcing him into a disadvantageous block that lost him a creature. It all looked under control; he had two cards in hand. But at the end of my turn, he tapped six mana and played both of those cards: two copies of Brimstone Volley—which, because his creature had died that turn, both did 5 points of damage to me. Game over, match over, tournament over.

Five–four, probably better than I had any reason to expect in a format I’d never played before, and given that I was pretty rusty. I did make some egregious errors, but not really in games that cost me. The more subtle errors, like incorrect sideboarding, not taking Shimmering Grotto out, and perhaps tempo-related decisions in the early stages of games, weren’t so apparent, but I felt as if their traces gradually became more solid as the day went on, and eventually they pulled me back to mediocrity.

Although the end result was similar enough to Grand Prix Portland 2011, my attitude was different. While my play level was probably about the same (average) on average across the day, I think I had more highs of focus and lows of distraction in Portland; I also think that the losses were slightly less bitter and the wins less sweet. Perhaps because I felt one of my main avenues to victory, the lifelinked unblockable untargetable-by-opponents 4/1, was a pretty dumb two-card combo that shouldn’t have been in the set.

I’ve played the game for 15 years, and despite much striving have never been better than slightly above average. Now, having ceased to play much, I’m probably barely above average. But one of the problems for me has always been that I couldn’t seem to find the right way to make effort count. There were some formats I practiced fairly hard at without getting much better.

To put it another way, I could never figure out just what constitutes “mindful practice” for MTG. It’s not just playing, or if it is, it means playing a lot more than I did even as a fairly obsessive gamer years ago—although I did always suspect that I wasn’t obsessive enough to compete with many of the good players.

In addition, there’s some kind of maddening intellectual laziness at work. I’m reasonably good at games in general, but this may hinder me in the long run when trying to become truly good at any game. Being “good” at picking up games might be due to being able to relatively quickly construct a mental model of a game that I can then refer to in order to be successful. But later, as my understanding of the game becomes more sophisticated, that model requires updating—and at some point I stop being interested in updating it. There’s some complexity threshold at which I prefer to travel the well-worn neural paths of the old model rather than finding difficult new ways to represent how the game works, and that’s what I mean by “laziness” here. More annoyingly, I don’t seem to be aware of this at the time, only when I examine the situation afterwards, and it’s never been clear quite how to get past it. But in retrospect I can often see where, instead of treating the individual game I was in as a puzzle yet to be solved, I instead took the easy route of following my comfortable model and waiting for the part where I win.

This should probably bother me less now, given that I no longer play the game much. Instead, it bothers me almost as much, for different reasons: I don’t seem to mind losing quite as much as I used to, but I hate the idea that I might never figure out how to at least make true attempts to play optimally, rather than happily resorting to following a model I know is flawed—although I don’t know exactly how—but which is comfortable and always seems “good enough”.

[*]

I played this list:

10 Swamp!
4 Mountain
4 Bloodstained Mire
2 Blinkmoth Nexus
4 Chrome Mox
2 Talisman of Dominance
26 lands/mana
4 Headhunter
2 Ravenous Rats
4 Chittering Rats
4 Solemn Simulacrum
40 (14 creatures)
4 Echoing Decay
4 Night’s Whisper
4 Death Cloud
4 Stone Rain
2 Barter in Blood
2 Sword of Light and Shadow
60 (20 spells)
4 Relic Barrier
2 Shatter
3 Withered Wretch
2 Persecute
2 Infest
2 Oblivion Stone
(15 sideboard)

It was a decidedly non-standard Death Cloud list of my own devising, with the Sword of Light and Shadow stolen from Japanese lists for Black/Blue Death Cloud decks. Fujita was playing his own rogue deck, one involving March of the Machines with Sunburst to give himself e.g. 10/10 artifact creatures for 5 mana. It went to three games, and remains one of the best MTG matches I’ve ever played.

[†]

It was a Kamigawa Sealed PTQ, and I made it to the top eight with a Black/Red deck with Nezumi Shortfang as its highlight. I then lost in the first round of the Rochester Sealed Draft top eight, partly due to drafting poorly and partly due to getting so mana-screwed in the second game that I think I cast no spells.

Tags: games, MTG, personal

The Art of Improv

Tadhg — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 07:55:50 +0000

No real blog post this week, my apologies. Instead you get this:

Tags: comedy, video

S0E1, Part One

Tadhg — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 07:59:01 +0000

She couldn’t hear the evacuation sirens, but her retina display told her they were sounding. The crew of Circus Catch should be rushing around, following their evac drill, and the command staff should be preparing to abandon and scuttle.

She, however, had to remain still, reining in her adrenaline, clinging to the outside of the hull.

She was impatient, and time passed slowly. Eventually, the deadline arrived. She gave it ten more seconds, then opened the airlock next to her. This would cause alerts on the bridge, but at this point there shouldn’t have been anyone left to see it, and the command staff should have have been too busy to notice a minor notification in the midst of evacuation. At least, that was the plan.

She climbed into the airlock and closed the outer door, waited for pressurization, adjusted to the feeling of gravity again, and opened the inner door. Nobody shot at her. Light in the corridor alternated between white and red, and she could hear the sirens now, through her suit. She checked, again, to make sure she had covered all possible identification markers, and indeed her insignia and name were still taped over.

She looked up, and someone ran by, far off down the corridor, without glancing in her direction. The countdown was at 500.

She didn’t have that long; her personal countdown was about 380, and she jogged down the corridor. Fast, but with enough control that she wouldn’t run right into anyone who appeared in front of her.

She resisted the urge to take out her gun. She didn’t want it to come to that.

She reached the junction where she’d seen the runner. Left and right, there was no-one. She went left, becoming more nervous as she approached the bridge. What if some of the command staff had refused to leave, determined to heroically keep trying to bring the warp drive back online until the end? Too late to worry about that. But the worry made her take out her gun.

The bridge was sealed, but she had the overrides. The door opened to reveal an absence of command staff. The panels were mostly dark, and those that weren’t displayed the countdown.

415 seconds.

Her access codes worked. The first task, cutting outbound communications, was more complicated than it sounds. She wanted all distant communications to go dark, but didn’t want any of the crew notified of this, and wanted the ship’s internal network to appear unaffected. Still, that was merely a question of stopping the right daemons in the right order, and she did so.

380 seconds.

Some of the commands she was running required brief pauses for execution. During those pauses, she became aware of how she was compartmentalizing.

She had long ago discovered that the only way to really get things done was to separate and sequester various aspects of her self. Otherwise, the noise impeded action too much. Or the need to do distracted thinking too much. Eliminating or ignoring the extraneous aspects, for example via meditation, never really worked for her. The approach she took instead was to think of them as foreground and background, with only one allowed in the foreground at a time. At this point, naturally, what she thought of as her implementation self was in the foreground. The stress of what she was doing had pushed the background far away—stress achieving what meditation never did—but this was always just temporary, and now she could hear the other selves. The self that questioned the sanity of the plan and its creator; the self that wondered what people would think if they found out; the self that really very strongly felt that taking time to think things through was critically important right now; the self that was shouting about being on the bridge of a ship that was going to explosively cease to exist in 375 seconds. Later, she thought. They could have the foreground later. But she recognized the signs of high stress and reminded herself to provide as much margin as possible and to not rush beyond the point that was absolutely necessary.

370 seconds.

With outbound communications cut, she also started the process of wholesale log erasure. As Circus Catch was set to explode quite soon, that might have been overkill, but she’d come up with scenarios where it would make a difference. So it was part of the plan, implementation self pointed out, and went ahead with it, also informing second-guessing self that it didn’t have the floor right now.

One of the shuttles took off. She was a little surprised, having not expected them to start leaving for about another 30 seconds. She was impressed with the efficiency of whoever was on it, but slightly concerned about this bringing forward her own schedule. The plan did cover this, however, so she took the time to execute another program, one that would stall the final shuttle with a variety of minor technical glitches.

350 seconds, and the next part was tricky. She had her doubts about how accurate the simulations had been, but this was the only way to find out. She wanted a part of the ship that was only supposed to be decoupled from the rest under certain conditions, and “about to self-destruct” wasn’t one of them (somewhat illogically, she thought). So the programs she was running were supposed to persuade the ship that certain parts of it had been shut down, and that this meant it was fine to accede to her request. This was made easier by the fact that many of the ship’s functions actually had been shut down already. Still, there were some decisions to be made here, and some disturbing delays while the ship’s systems initially refused to cooperate.

The plan said it should be possible to manage without shutting down internal communications, and she very much wanted to follow the plan. This meant taking a little longer than the plan allowed, but she thought it was within acceptable margins, and with 280 seconds remaining, she was able to get what she wanted to emerge from the floor of the bridge, and to take it without anything going haywire.

Tags: fiction, science-fiction, writing

NYPD Notes

Tadhg — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 06:59:45 +0000

I don’t recall any interactions with the police when I lived in New York, but over the years my accumulated impression has been that it’s a very corrupt organization. That’s not necessarily unusual—I suspect that most of the police forces in major American cities would be just as bad (and nothing I’ve heard about, say, the Los Angeles or Chicago police has made me think otherwise). At the moment, though, the NYPD seem to be at the forefront.

This is partly due to recent media attention focused on Occupy Wall Street, including the awful Anthony Bologna pepper-spray incident, but I thought I’d run through and comment on the various NYPD-related stories that come to mind.

We can go back almost 20 years, to the first media reports I have a concrete memory of reading about NYPD corruption in, which concerned the 1992–1994 Mollen Commission, whose conclusion is worth quoting:

Today’s corruption is not the corruption of Knapp Commission days. Corruption then was largely a corruption of accommodation, of criminals and police officers giving and taking bribes, buying and selling protection. Corruption was, in its essence, consensual. Today’s corruption is characterized by brutality, theft, abuse of authority and active police criminality.

—The Mollen Commission. The Mollen Commission Report. New York: The City of New York, 07 July 1994.

The next case I recall reading about was that of Abner Louima, who was sexually assaulted/tortured by officers from Brooklyn’s 70th Precinct. While not strictly-speaking a corruption case, that this could have occurred at all, and that it wasn’t immediately denounced by all the officers nearby, clearly indicates a terrible culture among the police at that Precinct—and, other evidence suggests, the entire NYPD.

The attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001 gave the NYPD a massive public-relations boost, one which saw many Americans don “NYPD” baseball caps (along with “FDNY” counterparts) as signs of patriotic solidarity with the first-responders who tried to save people from the buildings. Then, as now, I admire the heroism of those who died trying to save others, but see no reason to believe that those actions were more representative of the NYPD than what was outlined in the Mollen Commission’s report.

The NYPD turned out in full authoritarian mode for the 2004 Republican National Convention, and in the years following has been forced to produce documents detailing that its “Intelligence Division” illegally infiltrated and spied upon activists well before they arrived in New York—and that NYPD officers did so even in Canada and Europe. Incidentally, they then had the gall to argue that those documents shouldn’t be produced because they would make it easier for the city to be sued over their activities. The RNC escapades are indicative of a different kind of corruption at the very top of the organization, that of using the powers of an organization ostensibly dedicated to public safety in order to suppress dissent for political purposes[*].

I wrote last year about how the outrageous ticketing of a cyclist for going around a police car that an officer had deliberately placed in the bike lane was indicative of larger problems with mixing law enforcement and revenue-gathering. Looking back to the Mollen Commission’s report, and forward to the next few items, it remains unclear to me whether or not something particularly bad about New York/American police culture makes such abuses (and far worse) seem inevitable, or if any such combination of unaccountability, power, and greed would have similar results anywhere in the world—my feeling is that the latter is closer to the truth.

Sometime last year I heard about the case of Adrian Schoolcraft, an ex-NYPD officer who exposed corruption in the 81st Precinct and who was falsely committed to a psychiatric ward as a result of actions taken by the NYPD against him. It’s notable that one of the aspects of the corruption he revealed was the way in which higher-ranked officers insisted on quotas for arrests and that this resulted in officers simply arresting people for no good reason to make their quotas. Schoolcraft was recently interviewed on This American Life, and his description of the culture of the NYPD is both highly disturbing and unsurprising.

Anthony Bologna’s assault on the two female protesters received tremendous media attention, but three things about it stand out: the sense of entitlement in his body language (and in his statements afterwards), where it seems apparent that he thinks he’s absolutely entitled to dish out the pepper spray on people who annoy him; the fact that (regardless of later actions) the NYPD claimed (after the video of the assault was available) that he had followed departmental procedures; and the fact that it seems unlikely that he’ll be charged with assault, which he absolutely should be given the circumstances.

Last week I read about officers protesting the arraignment of 16 of their colleagues on corruption charges arising from a ticket-fixing scandal—this article is worth reading, and the signs they’re holding in the accompanying photo are a must-see. That they’re out protesting in such force suggests that things have only become worse since the Mollen Commission’s report, to such an extent that the NYPD rank-and-file and their union now regard the more minor corruption and abuses of authority as essential perks of the job.

Most recently, there are reports that NYPD officers are attempting to undermine the Occupy Wall Street protest by directing the homeless and petty criminals to the camp. That’s a much more subtle form of corruption, but is evidently an abuse of their power.

So is the NYPD worse than other cities, or does this kind of thing happen all over? The answer might be “both”—New York’s size, and the concentration of wealth and power in the city, result in pressures on the police that exacerbate the situation; at the same time, if you took another large American city and subjected its police department to the same pressures, it would likely respond in a very similar fashion. Outside of the US, comparison are more difficult, but it seems to me that societies with histories of endemic racism (like the US and Britain, for example) are more likely to have these kinds of problems than others; I also think that colonial powers are more likely to have a militaristic mindset and to attempt to bring back home the population-control measures they used on colonized peoples. Also, of course, higher levels of inequality in a society mean that its police forces will be more likely to act as enforcers for the elites.

[*]	The actual mission of a police force, of course, is the control of the public in service of the state; if we want to make public safety their real mission, then we have to exert an awful lot more influence over them.

Tags: anarchism, economics, law, New York, politics, power

Q’Rith: Sketch of a New Town

Tadhg — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 06:37:52 +0000

While filling out background details for an upcoming episode of my D&D campaign, I came up with this town and its history, which I thought worth sharing. It’s strongly rooted in Q’Rith, but could easily be transplanted to another setting, and it looks promising to me as a potential base for a series of adventures, although I’m not sure I’ll actually use it as such.

It’s a harbor town of about 3000, far north of any other urban areas, independent, surrounded by sparsely-populated cold country, and run by a group of six, its founders.

In 1219 a Torinthian noble with a commission in the army decided to solve the problem of his gambling debts by betraying his garrison to Nalend, during one of the innumerable Torinth–Nalend wars. The betrayal was successful, leading to one of the bloodiest defeats in Torinthian history, and Yemmit Tarika was paid his asking price. However, the betrayal was also discovered, and he had to flee. Torinth put a very substantial reward on his head.

A group of six mercenaries took up the chase, following him into the north and tracking him through tundra and mountain. He eventually tried to settle among the Snow Bear tribe near Northern Garlathia’s eastern coast, but was discovered there by his pursuers, who killed him in battle. On their way back with his head, they stopped at the hot springs at Sulfur Bay, which were used as a winter rest spot by the Snow Bears. There, they realized that the natural harbor, the springs, the relatively sparse population, and the abundance of furred wildlife represented a significant opportunity.

Eight years later, having accumulated large amounts of capital as well as important mercantile connections, they returned to the spot by ship, with a significant armed force. They negotiated purchase of the area from the Snow Bears, this purchase being partly predicated on their agreeing to supply the tribe with food, as recent winters had been particularly harsh. They began building a makeshift pier and then a town, naming it Tarika.

They also let it be known that they would pay for pelts. Up to that point, the northern fur trade had been under monopoly control in the Q’Resti Empire; however, the monopoly only covered furs imported across the northern border; the same monopoly interests also controlled the trade at what had been the only port north of the border. The founders of Tarika had invested in a ship, which they proceeded to fill with sable, fox, and otter pelts. They made a few journeys to Anaq’rest, the Imperial capital, and were able to sell them at a significant profit to their merchant contacts while still undercutting the monopoly’s prices.

Demand was high, and the merchants in Anaq’rest were able to protect their new source from legal changes attempted by the monopoly, and Tarika was a money-making center. The founders publicized it, as they needed more fur trappers, and this kicked off a mini-boom that secured the town’s wealth and future.

The founders still run the town. They own the largest inn, warehouses, the docks, and a number of ships that stop there regularly. They tax lightly, but extract money from everyone who passes through in a number of other ways. At the same time, they allow significant freedoms, and have been wise enough to realize that letting other people also get rich there is an excellent way to attract more custom. A variety of other individuals have done extremely well there, some of whom started with nothing.

The founders control the town guard, who are between 50 and 100 strong, a relatively high number relative to the population. They’ve seen off a number of coup attempts, and some attacks from outside, none with any lasting effects. The founders have decreed that Tarika is an open town, meaning that all races and nations are welcome and must be traded with, making it one of the few mostly-human towns to have open trading with orcs; in addition a small number of orcs reside there.

At the beginning of the war between Q’Rest and Shegu, Tarika experienced another boom, as Shegu funnelled trade through there to replace what had previously come from Imperial ports. A number of Imperial merchants traded with Shegans via Tarika, and the founders, despite pressure, refused to take sides in the conflict or prevent the Shegans from trading. While various factors in that war have meant that trade with the Shegans has dwindled (much of it moving to Zistown, which is far larger and better able to handle it), some still occurs, and the boom hasn’t entirely worn off.

The founders took the opportunity to recruit fishermen to Tarika, beginning to exploit local marine resources that had been largely untouched previously due to the lack of a local port. They’ve begun consultations with agriculturalists to see whether or not farming locally could be possible despite the cold. Over the years they’ve invested a tremendous amount in the town, which is well-fortified. They’ve also built around the hot springs, and with the aid of magic and excavation have managed to provide natural heat to much of the town. They’ve deepened the harbor, and now own several ships that call it home, with many more that call there to provide supplies and pick up furs.

In its current state of development, Tarika is a bustling, wild, and interesting place, with opportunities for trade, espionage, and intrigue. The founders run it well, and are ambitious, seeking not only to further increase their already-significant wealth but also to expand the town and its influence. They’ve started examining the possibility of satellite settlements, and are actively looking into opportunities for mining. The harsh cold makes these projects difficult, but the commerce already occurring at Tarika makes them more feasible. The founders are also considering a more military focus, and are contemplating moves against local orc and human tribes, weighing the gains against the potential disruption to trade.

One of the few institutions the founders do not own is the bank, a local branch of the Anaq’rest-based Coggs & Dann, one of the most powerful banks in the Empire and a longtime backer of the Tarika enterprise. Tarika does not have its own currency, and for the most part uses money from the Empire and Zistown/Unlund.

Tags: fantasy, games, Q’Rith, roleplaying, weekly

Considerations for a Space Opera Setting: Artificial Intelligence

Tadhg — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 06:48:55 +0000

The effect of AI on a setting is similar to the effect of sentient alien beings, in that it helps to define the limits of “humanity”. By AI here I mean strong AI, the ability to create sentient machines, and particularly sentient machines of vastly greater intelligence than humans.

While it’s certainly possible to include AI created by non-human civilizations, that’s really the realm of “sentient aliens” rather than what I have in mind here, which is strong AI created by the human race. The interplay/tension between those two groups is critical a lot of space opera, e.g. Iain M. Banks’ Culture series and Dan Simmons’ Hyperion Cantos—not to mention Battlestar Galactica and critical aspects of the background of the Dune setting.

Other classic space opera settings ignore it or treat it inconsistently: it’s present in the mainstream Star Wars works only in terms of individual sentient beings (e.g. C-3PO), for example, but there’s no exploration of the question of what that ability to create sentient beings on that scale would mean for creating them at a much larger scale.

The most compelling treatments are those that acknowledge the tremendous changes that would occur if we could create these intelligences, and the extent to which strong AI would come to dominate society. The previously-mentioned Culture and Hyperion works are among my favorites.

That being said, for this setting I’m inclined to not follow that path, because the relationship between AI and the race that created it isn’t something I want to explore. Their advanced capabilities make them seem like djinns or gods, incomprehensible forces operating at a much higher level of understanding than humans can manage. As fun as that is to play with, I don’t want this work to be about humans as lesser adjuncts to their creations, nor do I want the ultimate decision-makers to be less-fallible machines—I want it to be about humans, about flawed human decision-making, and the struggles they have while trying to outwit each other.

The question of whether strong AI is possible, and when it might arrive, is deeply controversial. For this setting, I have to be on the conservative side if I assert that there’s been no huge shift after several thousand more years of work. In this setting, that’s what’s happened—despite colossal advances in processing power, it still hasn’t been possible to create sentient beings out of hardware. The setting doesn’t take a position that it’s ultimately impossible, just that it’s still too complicated for the technology available. It could be that strong AI is only a couple of decades away—as on contemporary Earth where it’s been 20 years away from quite some time, and will remain so for the foreseeable future.

However, I find it difficult to believe that no advances have been made at all in related fields in that time, and in my setting artificially-created biological intelligence is possible. It’s not the godlike AI allowed by digital processing, but rather breakthroughs in the interfaces between specially-bred lifeforms and digital devices that lead to the possibility of different, specialized intelligences that can be manufactured. These “bioAIs”, much less impressive than their digital counterparts but more effective due to not being entirely theoretical, take over many tasks where human decision-making is provably weaker—such as starship combat, where the large distances involve cover up the importance of reaction time. Thus, combat ships (and many others) have bioAI to run specific combat tasks, guided at a much slower level by human commanders. These bioAIs have sentience and language, but cannot override their human commanders except in extreme cases, and are kept narrowly-focused to prevent them from trying to tackle problems outside of the domains they were created to handle.

This allows for some interesting situations and personality, while not opening the Pandora’s Box of pure hardware strong AI.

Tags: artificial-intelligence, genre, science, science-fiction, tech, weekly, writing

tadhg.com

Giants Versus Patriots II: Better Lucky Than Good?

Related Posts

Djokovic Wins Longest-Ever Grand Slam Final

Related Posts

SOPA and Why I’m Against it

Related Posts

49ers Defeat Saints in Classic

Related Posts

Favorite Books of 2011

Related Posts

2012 Goals

Related Posts

2011 Goals Review

Related Posts

Favorite Posts of 2011

Top Five

Honorable Mention

Related Posts

“Still in the City”

Related Posts

49ers Clinch NFC West

Related Posts

Federer wins 2011 Year-End Championships

Related Posts

PTQ at Worlds 2011

Related Posts

The Art of Improv

Related Posts

S0E1, Part One

Related Posts

NYPD Notes

Related Posts

Q’Rith: Sketch of a New Town

Related Posts

Considerations for a Space Opera Setting: Artificial Intelligence

Related Posts