Americans are Plumbers

Well they are.

Americans have to make up their mind. I mean on the one hand they're plumbers, and on the other they have a lot of plumbing companies, what a conflicted confused people they must be.

What am I talking about? My favourite topic of all. Problems of Scale.
The above is a ridiculous comment. Obviously "Americans are Plumbers" can't mean all Americans.
~0.2% of them are. About 1 in 700 to be more exact. So saying "Americans are plumbers" is silly, saying "They are Plumbers" is silly. I don't just think it's silly, I think it's fundamentally wrong.

Lets take an example that illustrates my point more so. "Americans support Pedophilia" "Americans are Bastards".
In the first case, some are. I didn't [b]say[/b] all Americans.
In the second case, some are. I didn't [b]say[/b] all Americans.

Here are the qualms:
1) They give no information. To say that in any population there is a pedophile, or a plumber, or a bastard is virtually a given. I am not adding anything.
2) They give misleading information. Even if they're not deliberately vague, I could use one to try to force change in age of consent against the vast majority of what Americans want.
3) They're insulting. I know calling people bastards is derogatory and insulting. That's not the whole issue though, and this is where I'm in contention with a lot of freedom of speech advocates. The issue is that it's all I'm doing. I'm not providing information. I'm not making a statement.
It serves no possible purpose other than to be derogatory. [b]Society loses nothing[/b] by banning the statement entirely when not in context

In other words, if you make an accusation of someone, you should have to defend what you say, and there should be some form of recourse on behalf of the accused.

I might for example say my mother in law is a controlling, manipulative, self centered, whore. I think she should be able to take me to court for that, and deserve some compensation. I however in turn should be given the chance to prove she is a controlling, manipulative, self centered, whore.

Therein you have an excellent system where not only do you have freedom of speech (you can always say it), but you also get the opportunity to prove it!

Moving quickly on from that though. The main point of this article. Is a little something from I-A-B's forums.

"Muslims are Terrorists", "Muslims are all...", "Muslims can't...." "Muslims don't know...".

0.01% of Muslims are Terrorists. "Americans are Plumbers" is 20 times more accurate. Percentage wise, it should be equivalent to about how many Americans are African Americans with Down Syndrome. Yes they exist, but no they are not an accurate picture of the country.

More importantly "Muslims believe". Muslims apparently marry 4 women a piece, a statistical impossibility for more than about 25% of them to. Muslims Want. Muslims.... etc. Muslims think.

It's simply untrue in case after case after case. It could *always* be replaced with any other demographic and be equally valid.

There are at this point in time, in my opinion, something on the order of 200 million Muslims who are assholes. The regular kind you see day to day. There are at absolute most 20 million violent stereotypes, and absolute worst case scenario 2 million terrorists (Figure ranges from 120k to 1.2 mil really).

That's 18% asshole.
That's 1.8% violent.
That's 0.18% terrorist.
19.98% total.

Why not: Muslims are not the stereotypes that are portrayed to be.
That's ~8000 times more accurate than the than "Muslims are terrorists". You don't hear it 8000 times more often.

Rigour

Well I have more to talk about, but I thought this post should be about "Rigour".

I want people to criticize me here to some degree. I'm not interested in correcting spelling mistakes and whatnot, but I do want some level of review to go on here when it comes to any of the serious topics.

For example... I am now aware that a Colossal snake is impossible to achieve with the Beastmaster combination I wanted. I had assumed the HD increase also increased the size of the snake as per it's definition.

I therefore know I was wrong when I put up that character. I also don't care. What I do care about however is where I make an error in one of the more serious posts. For example are my numbers wrong for the 2 person earth, that would be important.

Obviously there are going to be times when there is going to be a borderline issue. Where I've tried to be funny in a serious post and applied some sarcasm. For example, when I mentioned Shroedinger's cat. I know the cat isn't *really* both alive and dead. I know that the Big Bang revolves around a singularity, not "nothing".

However, A) I wasn't being entirely serious. B) A lot of people do believe in the concepts as I presented them, not as they "really are". I feel this analogy holds with religion where many people hold beliefs as per Disney rather than the actual teachings of the Church. C) The more complex/complete versions hold other unintuitive answers synonymous with answers to the existence of God. "There's no such thing as an unmoved mover". D) Similarly the answers are similar to those given by Theists. "You don't need an uncaused cause with the absence of time".

Small World

There is an interesting thing I've seen a few times now on the internet, where the world is shrunk down to 100 people. It then goes on to say how "only one person would own a toilet" or whatever. Now even though it's usually wrong (Snopes Says So Here), it does make an interesting read, and eliminates the "problem of scale" I keep talking about in this blog.

Now I want to use it to do something else. I want to use it to demonstrate disparity.
If the world was shrunk to two people. What would it look like? I would argue that the more distant these two people are, the less our world can claim to uphold "equality".

For example, if our world was divided into just two people.
One would expect to live till 60. One would expect to live till 77.
(This is a very rough estimate on my part, but you get the idea).

I would like to see income for one.
In 2000 according to this article it would be the following:
1 would own a total of $403.
1 would own a total of $39'919.

Another idea could be to divide it into 3. That way we get rich man, middle man, poor man.

Another good thing that we could use it for is demonstrating the scales of problems.
Example.
If we reduced the Muslim world to 1000 people, only 1 would be a terrorist.
Yet 6 would have been killed in Iraq. 11 seriously injured.
~70 women would be wearing a Burqa. The other 430 women wouldn't.

Trial Run DMing

Well I did a trial run of a dungeon today that I think went really well.

I put together a "maze" for a hack and slash dungeon crawl. Minimal storytelling. Just to see if I could get the numbers to work, and how easy it would be to guide the party around.

I managed to fit in 10 of the encounters I planned (out of 15), and definitely got all the interesting ones in.
Favourite encounter of mine was the hydra. I think we'll be seeing another one of those in the campaign. :)

New DnD characters!

Well well well. I've been busy making characters for different campaign one offs we've decided to have until I host in January.

Here's a rundown of the campaigns we're doing, plus the character's I've made for each.
1) Colossal Red Dragon!
My character: A Level 20 Cold/Water Cleric. (Although possibility of adding in anything which keeps or adds to my caster level).
Tower Shield: +5 with 40 Fire Resist, possibly Mithral.
Weapon (Type undecided): Dragonbane, Icy Blast, Corrosive Burst, Keen, Holy, Wounding, +1.
Mainly he'll be a caster, with plenty of spell penetration to get through that nasty spell resistance, not that he'll be awful in melee.

2) Gargantuan Black Dragon!
My Character: Ranger 12, Beastmaster 1, Animal Lord (Serpents) 7.
Pet: Mountable Level 20 Colossal Constrictor in "Chain Shirt" with Holy, Wounding, Dragonbane, +? Armour Spikes. Some Acid resist would be nice.
I'm in a Mithral Chain Shirt, Plenty of Acid resistance.
I have 2 Scimitars. Keen, Wounding, Holy, Dragonbane, +?

The wounding weapons here are what I'm going for. Plummet his fortitude saves and hitpoints, then really lay into him with poisons to finish him off.

3) High level campaign (3 sessions).
I'm not sure what character I'll use here. I have 2 very interesting options.
Option 1: Karma Kender. I'm thinking Fortunes Friend(5) + Cleric of Destiny and Luck(15). Then all the luck feats I can muster. Ending on something silly like 15 rerolls per day, and some interesting spells.
Option 2: Octopus Prime! Warforge, 5 Levels Druid, 5 Levels Warshaper, 10 Levels Blighter.
With some choice feats, I can polymorph into a huge, Adamantine, undead, flying, Squid, still capable of casting blighter spells.

4) Babylon 5:
I'm playing a level 1 scientist. Computer whizz, technology whizz, and general repairman. More skillpoints than I could actually spend.

5) My own campaign... I'm not even gonna begin to give you my character list for that. :)

Science and Religion

There has been much discussion in the last 10 years of science and religion. Practically every large forum on the internet has to have a section dedicated to the topic to keep the rest of the forum clean.

The real shocking thing though is how little people know about the topics before they start debating them. From the very beginning people have no clue how to even approach such topics. All sides are elitist, all sides are running on emotion, not fact.

Secondly, there is no reason the two cannot co-exist. The problem is that people are using "science" to say what every other religion says. "MY beliefs are better than yours". It's an elitist attitude that makes people emotionally want to call themselves something that is different, to distance themselves so they don't have to apply their own criticisms to themselves. Muslims for example say they don't convert they "Revert" or "Reconvert" back to the natural state of Islam. Atheists often say "Deconvert" to mean the same thing.

For starters, Science is "A set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe". This is usually easy to get people to agree with. If you say "Science is a religion", you get people angry. Even though I lifted that definition directly from Religion on Dictionary.com.

It does require faith, not just the rudimentary kind. If you want to say "I believe in science", you shouldn't say it with such an elitist tone. If you believed fully in science, you believe contradictory statements. You believe "In the beginning, there was nothing... which exploded", you believe it is possible to have a rotational symmetry of 1/2, you believe the laws of physics change depending on whether or not you're paying attention to them, and more besides.

This is not the same kind of faith that says "I have faith the sun will rise tomorrow". These are big anti-intuitive leaps of faith. *Especially* if you've not done the experimentation yourself.

"But science doesn't cause half the problems Religion does!"
That sentence, in one way or another comes up.
For starters, it's irrelevant to whether or not Science is a religion. Something being "nicer" has no bearing on whether or not it's true.
Next, it's unfair, you're comparing *a* religion to all other religions combined.
Third, you're still lying.

Evolution was used to justify the Holocaust for example. Up to 6 million dead.
"Evolution was just used though, it wasn't the cause".
The same can be said in Israel-Palestine, which started with Orthodox Jews opposing the move. Religion in most cases is used as a tool for people who wanted free land. The UK effectively told the Arabs they could have a free Palestine and told the Israelis they could take over the land. If we're going to blame religion for being a useful tool, it's only fair to judge science in the same way.

Hiroshima. Nagasaki. Cherynobl. Global Warming. Ozone Depletion.

"But science has given us so much compared to religion!"
Again, irrelevant to whether or not it's a religion.
Again, an unfair comparison.
Again, you're still lying.

Islamic contribution to Mathematics, Philosophy, Architecture, (and Science) is what brought Europe out of the Dark ages and into the Renaissance.
It established Women's rights (Including but not limited to: Right to education, The right to refuse marriage, the right to divorce, the right to her own money and property) etc.

There could be a whole other section on misinterpretations in science/religion causing problems.
"Lol all Muslims are Terrorists"
vs
"Lol all evolutionists think monkey's turn into people!".

However, I think I'll stop there. this post is getting far too long for it's own good. This is far from a complete post. There should be plenty to talk about in this and handles a *ton* of different topics, the one thing that is undeniable however, is that science, like it or not, is a religion.

Fraud at Fraud Factor

Lets make this quick.
FraudFactor.com is claiming Israel has experienced the equivalent of 23 September 11s.

This is done by making every Israeli death count for 60 American deaths to "adjust for scale".

The problem here is an issue of scale. If 4/5 people die in a car crash, that is not the equivalent of 80'000 September 11s when "adjusting for scale", yet using the above methodology, it is.

What annoys me here is that he is using it to push forward one side of the argument with mathematical wizardry. Ignoring important points such as that there have been more deaths in Palestine than in Israel, and that Palestinians in Palestine are an even smaller group than Israelis. (Hey does that mean every Palestinian death is worth 1.4 Israeli death? I wonder if he still uses the wizardry in that direction).

There are times when this sort of math is appropriate. In terms of economics for example, it matters more how much money each person has in a country rather than as a whole (A population of 1 million will not have the same amount of money as a country 300 times bigger). When it comes however to comparing the value of human life, it's not the same thing.