Work and Workings of a Nerd

A personal blog about what's on Kevin's mind.

May 20, 2013

Volunteering for a Beach Cleanup

Filed under: personal — Tags: , — kevin @ 5:55 pm

On Saturday morning, I woke up too early for the weekend (and far too early after going to a formal event the night before) to hop in a car with one of my co-workers and a few friends to drive out to Half Moon Bay. The Stanford Alumni Association had their Day of Service, and our operations manager Sam had arranged for us to cleanup the beach. I had actually never been to Half Moon Bay, despite having heard nice things about it. As we drove up 280 and across on 92, we drifted away from the corridor of towns on the inner peninsula and wound through the scenic hills out towards the ocean.

We arrived late, though the event was organized for us to show up whenever we wanted. Around 9:30, we walked up to the booth in the parking lot where a chipper guy with a few bad jokes had us sign waivers and gave us bags. Without much direction, we walked out along the beach with our eyes glued to the ground for anything trash-like.

Early on, it was difficult. Dried grass and seaweed can look like loose rope or threads–probably because rope is made of similar material. Every once in awhile, we would end up in a circle around an unknown object and argue about whether it was trash or not. On the sandy beach, the most common trash we found were plastic bags, which were often difficult to dig up because the tides had often buried the bag under several layers of sand.

The path led us out to the jetty, and we walked over the rocks to continue our cleanup. Between the rocks, we found the remains of various fishing trips and parties. We mostly found empty beer bottles and wrappers of various snacks from Safeway, but we also found wrappers for various types of bait. Many of the items were wedged deep into the jetty, and I appreciated having work gloves to reach into the gaps. We exchanged a few words with other volunteers and passed by others who were either fishing or trying to catch crabs.

When I had filled my bag, I turned back around and skipped back along the jetty. Despite little time spent hiking or doing other similar outdoorsy activities, I like to think I’m fairly agile and can move quickly over rough terrain. There waiting for me was the rest of my party, who appeared to have filled their bags far more quickly than I had. We walked back along the path parallel to the beach making crab jokes and handed in our bags of trash at the booth. After a quick picture so that the organizers could demonstrate alumni participation, we headed home and arrived before I would have woken up on my own.

As I walked along the beach that morning with a bunch of friends, I joked that we weren’t suffering enough for our effort to constitute volunteer work. I had always assumed that some part of volunteering was inherently unpleasant, or else we would be doing it “for fun”, not “for volunteering”. Instead, people are driven to volunteer by some sense of guilt. Although we could spend the time watching TV or sleeping in, we feel like we should be contributing to the community by taking up that task that no one else wants to do but needs to get done. Well, at least I personally volunteered out of guilt.

But there wasn’t too much suffering as we enjoyed our long walk on the beach, occasionally stuffing things into our bags. Moreover, I’m not certain that we really did anything significant in the cleanup. I made eye contact several times with the fishermen while grabbing trash, and I wonder whether they were precisely the people I was picking up after. And when they recognized that others were willing to clean up after them, maybe it made it that much easier for them not to pick up after themselves.

I’m certain that these facts aren’t lost on the Surfrider Foundation, who organized the event. To, the event seemed to be less about the cleanup itself and more about awareness. It took my volunteering guilt to finally go out to Half Moon Bay, which I found to be worth a return visit. Picking up trash probably didn’t significantly change the quality of the beach area, but it has made me think much more about the preservation of the area where I frankly did have a lot of fun. It only took a few washed up plastic bags for me to think about those poor marine animals being caught in our trash and consider how I might alter my behavior to avoid contributing to the problem.

Maybe most individual people can’t make a tremendous impact through volunteer work, but volunteering might have a tremendous impact on an individual person. And for one Saturday morning otherwise spent sleeping in, I think that’s plenty.

May 18, 2013

“Star Trek Into Darkness” Review

Filed under: personal — Tags: , , — kevin @ 11:05 pm

Just over 4 years ago, JJ Abrams rebooted the Star Trek series with Star Trek, a movie made for the modern moviegoer with a young, hip cast. Star Trek Into Darkness is the sequel and is again directed by JJ Abrams, who again takes the audience on another thrilling adventure with the crew of the Enterprise.

The film is centered around Captain James Kirk (Chris Pine) and his pursuit of John Harrison, a rogue Starfleet agent played by Benedict Cumberbatch (best known as Sherlock Holmes in the BBC series Sherlock). After committing a terrorist act on Earth, Harrison flees, and the Enterprise is responsible for dealing with the threat. Pitching in are first officer Spock (Zachary Quinto), communications officer Uhura (Zoe Saldana), medical officer Leonard McCoy (Karl Urban), and more.

Cumberbatch delivers another amazing performance as the dark and intense villain of the movie. His mostly cool attitude contrasts strongly with Pine as Kirk, who continues to be a wild, yet growing, character. Quinto does well in playing both his human and Vulcan sides, and the writing backs up the deep conflict that he portrays.

Despite these performances, however, the ensemble cast feels somewhat underused as the heavy character focus on these primary players leaves others without a significant role in the fast-paced movie. Chekov (Anton Yelchin) and Sulu (John Cho) have token roles but are unexplored. Although McCoy is often available for medical tasks, he is relegated to a series of witty, one-liners and folksy figurative language. His absence in the deeper aspects of the plot is quite disappointing. In the original show, Spock and McCoy often served as the angel and demon on Kirk’s shoulder: Spock was logic and McCoy was emotion, and Kirk needed to balance these perspectives as a leader. Star Trek Into Darkness, however, leaves the emotions to Kirk alone, and these are mostly angst and confusion.

The film has great pacing, with moments that should appeal to fans of all movies. While Kirk spent most of the last movie being beaten, his hand-to-hand combat appears to have improved in several combat scenes. As you should expect with a science fiction movie, there are many special effects, and these also look amazing. No spoilers of course, but there are also several moving moments between the crew. Fitting with our sarcastic sense of humor today, the movie also mixes in plenty of jokes, some intended for classic Trekkies but mostly targeted for the broader audience. Even expect some throwaway humor involving Spock and Uhura’s romantic relationship alongside their professional relationship.

The excellent pacing is critical to the movie as it patches over some major weaknesses in its construction. I can’t see any Abrams work without thinking about Lost, and despite having never watched it, the plot twists upon plot twists (some more predictable, some less) do little to add direction to the film while the action drives onward. Without a plot, it’s hard to drive meaning, and the movie lacks any large philosophical implications. Trekkies love to mention how deep Star Trek was, from breaking racial barriers on television to addressing the Vietnam War, and although the movie starts from the topical point of terrorism, it quickly moves away towards the chase. Instead, the writers chose to go for character studies instead, and as interesting as internal conflict is, it’s less than I personally hope for.

Overall, Star Trek Into Darkness is a fun movie to watch. Despite my criticism of its core elements (e.g. its plot and depth), the moviegoing experience shouldn’t be overshadowed by these issues until further examination later. Trekkies will find plenty of references to enjoy, but you won’t miss them if you’re not. In an interview on The Daily Show, Abrams said that he intended to make a movie for both moviegoers and Star Trek fans, and in that light, I think it succeeds.

May 1, 2013

How I got through High School as an “Honors Student”

Filed under: personal — kevin @ 11:05 pm

In the United States today, we do a lot of finger-pointing when it comes to education. We argue about what the best solutions are to the problems we see, and we’re also arguing about what the problems are. I try to pay attention to these issues, but frankly, I have very poor perspective on it. Neither my school nor I dealt with significant social issues. I think the quality of my teachers was generally good, and I didn’t really face any major obstacles in finding opportunities in education. And though the life of an GT student seemed pretty easy, there still seems to be a lot of controversy around GT and honors students today.

One particularly interesting blog post I stumbled across recently (though it is somewhat old) discusses a problem with “honors students”. The author (a teacher) taught an intensive summer class where she focused on creative and higher-order thinking. Quickly, the number of students in the class decreased as students found the class too much work, and parents seemed to be focused primarily on the letter grade. The conclusion she comes to is that letter grades and point systems shouldn’t be used.

I myself am not particularly offended by letter grades and standard methods of evaluation. Note that I may be extremely biased based on how they worked out for me, but I wonder if the attention should be focused elsewhere for high-achieving students. My high school experience in-class is pretty unremarkable. Despite being in GT and honors classes, I didn’t think we did that much critical thinking, and that’s mostly fine. I had a particularly good experience with AP English, and that has led me to care enough about critical reading that I’m in a book club now. AP US History and AP US Government went well enough that I can follow politics.

Otherwise, I learned a lot of facts in science and math and such that I formed a strong foundation for the rest of my education. And that didn’t really require a lot of critical thinking. In fact, I generally think of my academic classes in high school similar to General Education Requirements (GERs) from college: they were the general stuff you needed to take and have breadth in to get by. Since they’re just breadth classes, it’s fine to not think too deeply about them. Students get by, pick up some trivia, and let that become a loose basis for everything else.

That was my experiences with classes in high school, but high school offered tremendous opportunities to me in other ways. Specifically, most of what I learned about creativity, having a growth mindset, developing higher-order thinking, and being a “learner” (all concerns brought up in the blog post referenced) was from my extra-curricular activities. It’s a common joke among honors students that everyone is trying to pile on all sorts of crazy extra-curricular activities to pad their college applications, but the depth and actual development I had in high school came from these opportunities.

First, there was band. Band was all about having a growth mindset because only one kid in the state got to be 1st chair all-state in a given year, and since I was never that kid, there was something to work on. There is no ceiling on achievement because skills could always be refined and improved, and new challenges were always present. The other major aspect to band was basically learning to be a person. A lot of band was spend with peers, and there were leadership and social opportunities everywhere to grow.

Second, there was computer science club. We divided up into teams of three and toured around the area, going to competitions on Saturdays with desktops, monitors, and peripherals in mind. The importance of computer science club is obviously tremendous to me now because coding is now my day job, so maybe I won’t rant on too much longer here.

Third, there was Academic Decathlon. 10 subjects is a lot of breadth and covers many academic subjects as well as speech, interview, and essays. Like band, teamwork was surprisingly important for entirely individual evaluation because group learning works well, and everyone was always pulling each other along. AD was how I developed my study habit because it epitomized mindless rote memorization. The knowledge itself was pretty useless, but the focus was invaluable.

Before I go on, another disclaimer: yes, I was extremely fortunate to have the time and support from my family to pursue all of these activities. Let’s accept this as a given for the class of “honors students” like me who have very involved parents.

Anyways, many of the things I brought up as lessons from extra-curriculars could be incorporated into the classroom. Freshmen history class could have been tougher and required more into rote memorization. English class could be redesigned so that without grades, writing essays could become a task without a fixed goal. I think the charm of extra-curriculars, though, was that these activities were my choice. I didn’t necessarily want depth across all of my classes. In fact, high school got better when I could blow off a class for a few days to focus on another upcoming competition, and the value of my time on that other activity was far greater than more exploration in a subject I frankly didn’t care about.

I should probably conclude here, though I’m not quite sure where I have gone so far with this post. Our in-class high school education can be improved for high-achieving students to give them more opportunities for higher order thinking. For myself, that change wouldn’t have been very valuable. My interest in classes may have been mostly driven by a desire to get an A, but I think that’s okay. Today, those classes largely only have first-order value to me: I have a basic collection of facts across a broad set of topics. The actual skills and knowledge I learned and passion I developed came from my extra-curricular opportunities.

So I turned out to be the disparaged “honors student” from the blog post. I think it worked out okay.

April 21, 2013

Shifting Towards “The Resistance”

Filed under: games,personal — kevin @ 4:36 pm

After AP tests at the end of senior year in high school, there wasn’t much to do in class. Our teachers didn’t have anything to teach, and we weren’t particularly motivated to learn, so we were stuck in a room full of peers for 51 minutes until the bell rang and couldn’t get too loud. Some may see this as a waste of time: we saw it as an opportunity and played a lot of Mafia.

Mafia is a simple game of social deduction. The basic game has 3 roles: the narrator (who runs the game), the Mafia, and the townspeople. To setup the game, the Narrator gives out secret roles to all of the players: either one of a few Mafia or mostly townspeople. Then, everyone closes their eyes, and the Mafia open their eyes and to see who each other are. The game then switches between 2 phases of day and night until the Mafia or Townspeople win. During the night, the townspeople close their eyes, and the Mafia silently choose to kill someone. When everyone wakes up for daytime, the Narrator tells everyone who was killed and eliminated from the game (usually with a grisly story). Then, everyone has to argue and agree to lynch someone. Various suspects are accused over discussion, and a vote is taken by the Narrator. That player is then eliminated from the game, and it goes back to night. The townspeople want to lynch all of the Mafia, and the Mafia want to kill all of the townspeople.

There are many variants and extra roles you can assign in this game, but the core gameplay is talking and thinking. The townspeople need to observe how everyone else is arguing, accusing, defending, and voting to determine which side they’re on, and the Mafia need to blend in with everyone else and hope that the townspeople just lynch each other. And through the game, everyone needs to determine who they trust and how they can make others trust them.

I really enjoy Mafia, but it’s typically a fad, and people get over it quickly. In addition to during senior year, my college friends played a lot of Mafia during the summer after our junior year. I think there are 2 major reasons why Mafia fades. First, players can be eliminated as quick as within a minute of the game starting, and Mafia isn’t as fun to watch as it is to play, especially if it goes long. Second, Mafia pits people against each other through deception, and that can be hard to deal with on a social level. Unless a game is cooperative, players will compete with each other, but in a game like Chess or baseball, the rules constrain the competition to a narrow set of well-defined behaviors. This makes it easy to walk away from a game and shake hands afterwards.

Mafia isn’t so easy to section off. Despite the fact that players know that the Mafia must deceive other players, it’s still tough after the game for townspeople to reconcile that their friend was lying to them for the a half hour and trying to turn townspeople against each other. And when you have a theory and others don’t trust you enough to believe your theory, you again may feel betrayed beyond the confines of the game.

As I mentioned, I still really like Mafia, but I can see why that second point can be stressful and induce paranoia in others. To address that, I recently picked up “The Resistance“, which is basically Mafia without elimination. There are hidden roles, but instead of lynching players, there are 5 missions, and each round, the players vote to pick a subset of players to go on the mission. These players then each secretly decide whether they want the mission to succeed or fail. If the spies (similar to the Mafia) manage to sabotage 3 mission, they win. If the resistance (the townspeople) succeed on 3 mission, they win.

The Resistance addresses both of the problems of Mafia well. There is no elimination, so although a spy may be discovered early and ignored, they still vote and can try to influence others. Second, there are just enough rules and structure around the game that instead of players focusing on accusations and wild speculation at all times, players can instead center their play (and concern) more around voting patterns.

Compared to other board games, The Resistance works better with large groups because it actually is a party game. Recently, I have been getting more into serious board games and trying out different ones with my friends. Although I enjoy games like Steam or 7 Wonders, these games typically are optimization tasks with some element of randomness and deducing the strategies of other players. In short, these games can be figured out, and unless you play the same group with the same players, some people are going to have fun.

The Resistance dodges this problem in that the game isn’t about the rules: it’s about working with other people with the rules, which leads to constant interactions in the game. And after the game, the conversation isn’t about what one player did right and what another player can improve on: the conversation is about how players succeeded or failed in figuring each other out. After we finished playing The Resistance last night, I enjoyed finding out exactly what people were thinking at various points in the game and how it could have gone differently.

So my foray into serious board games may have quickly ended. It’s true that there are serious board games (most famously, Settlers of Catan) that do focus on social interactions, but I guess I’m just not that interested in forcing people to figure out games to be competitive. And that’s mostly an artifact of my situation right now: were I with exactly 3 other serious gamers, I would probably play a lot of Settlers with lots of expansions. As it is, though, I play games with a large group with various levels of game seriousness, and although we aren’t stuck in a classroom for 51 minutes, we still want to play games.

April 13, 2013

GIFs of Baseball Pitches (or Why I Love Baseball)

Filed under: personal — Tags: — kevin @ 7:00 pm

I love baseball. You would have to ask my mom why I love baseball so much, but it started when I was 6-ish and hasn’t really let up. Some baseball fans love it for the statistics, and you might think that the geeky numbers part is what attracted me. Well, I honestly don’t watch as much baseball as I would like and have mostly followed baseball through box scores and statistics, but I really think I enjoy baseball mostly for watching it.

Let me make things even more confusing. If you go to a baseball game with me, you will likely end up listening to me joke about how boring it is to watch, and how ridiculous the rules are. I also won’t get too excited about big comebacks or my team winning. These things are all nice, but they aren’t the most exciting parts about baseball.

The best part of baseball is the amazing skills the players have honed. It turns out some baseball players are quite out of shape but still effective because they have particularly quick reflexes or can swing a bat well. The topic of this post, however, is going to be pitching, which I will explain in words and GIFs as best as I can having never pitched in my life.

Quick rules recap: the pitcher throws the ball to the catcher crouched behind home plate (a white pentagon). There’s a batter, who is trying to hit the ball with the bat. If the ball is thrown over the plate roughly between the batter’s knees and the middle of the batter’s torso, it’s a “strike”. If it’s too high, too low, or too far left or right, it’s a “ball”. If the pitcher throws 4 balls, then the batter gets to go to first base automatically. If the pitcher throws 3 strikes, then the batter is out, and the next batter comes up. Additionally, if a batter swings and misses at a pitch (whether it’s in the “strike zone” or not), then it counts as a strike. If the batter hits the ball, then it’s in play, where the rest of the defense must try to get the batter out.

The pitcher’s goal is to get the batter out. Hopefully, they can make the batter swing and miss until they strike out, but they at least want the batter to swing poorly and induce a weakly hit ball that the defense can easily handle. There are 3 primary ways that pitchers try to trick batters:

  1. Throw it so hard that the batter can’t react quickly enough. These pitches are called fastballs and can go as fast as 100 miles per hour (mph). To see how fast these pitches are, try out this reaction time test from the Exploratorium. This is the primary pitch type used.
  2. Throw it slowly to confuse the batter and make them swing too early. This is most effective when players try to get into the groove of the speed of fastballs. These are called changeups and can go 10+ mph slower than a fastball without any noticeable change in a pitcher’s windup.
  3. Throw it with a lot of spin so that the ball isn’t where the batter is swinging. These are called breaking balls and can make batters look silly as they swing wildly in the wrong place.

So let me break down the most common pitches in baseball. I’ll explain briefly how the pitch is gripped and thrown, what the pitch does, and what it looks like (in a GIF). For reference, here’s what a baseball looks like:

from wikipedia

Fastballs

4-seam fastball. This is the standard way to throw a baseball around (pitching or not). You curl your ring and pinky fingers under and hold the ball with your thumb, index finger, and middle finger. For a 4-seam fastball, the index and ring fingers will each cross the red seams of the ball twice (2 x 2 = 4 seams). The pitch doesn’t move much, but you can throw it really hard. Because of the Magnus effect, the ball may even appear to rise slightly. A great example of a 4-seam fastball comes from Craig Kimbrel, the young closer for the Atlanta Braves.

 

Cutter or cut-fastball (2-5 mph slower than 4-seam fastball). The cutter is somewhere between a fastball and a slider. This is admittedly nebulous, but the effect is a hard-thrown pitcher that moves slightly right-to-left very late. For a right-handed pitcher throwing to a left-handed batter, this is devastating as the batter will slightly over-swing and hit the ball on the thinner part of the bat close to their hands. This often results in broken bats and induces a lot of weakly hit balls. My favorite pitcher, Roy Halladay, has an effective cutter, but the king of the cutter is Mariano Rivera of the New York Yankees. He has several minor variations on this pitch, and they’re all impossible to hit. Sorry for the crappy gif, but you can watch Sports Science for a more in-depth explanation.

 

2-seam fastball (1-2 mph slower than a 4-seam fastball). The 2-seam fastball is just freaky. The ball is gripped with the index and middle finger along the seams at the narrowest point, and by applying pressure to the ball with different fingers, you can make the ball spin off-center. The freaky part is that the ball basically goes the wrong way. A right-handed pitcher brings his arm from his right across his body to the left, so you would expect pitches to move right to left. Well, the 2-seam fastball moves down and to the right. This pitch is just hard to follow. Check out this pitch from Matt Moore of the Tampa Bay Rays (note that he’s left-handed, so everything I said is flipped around.

 

Sinker (about as fast as a 4-seam). The sinker is similar to the 2-seam fastball and is gripped roughly the same way. The difference is that the main emphasis is on making the ball sink. Even if the batter still hits the ball, they will likely hit it weakly so it dribbles along on the ground for an easy defensive play. Check out the sinker from Johnny Venters. Not impressed with the movement? Note that he threw it at 95 mph, which is harder than most major league pitchers can throw any of their pitches. For more Venters, check out this post.

 

Splitter or split-finger fastball (7 mph slower). To throw a splitter, wedge the ball between your index and middle fingers. When done correctly, the pitch will look like a fastball, then suddenly drop at the end of the pitch, like a more extreme sinker. It’s kind of a changeup too, but whatever. Here’s Freddy Garcia of the Baltimore Orioles throwing a splitter:

 

Breaking Balls

Curveball (15 mph slower). The curveball is almost synonymous with breaking balls, and despite what it sounds like, most of the curve is just the ball dropping. The ball is held with the index and middle fingers together and opposite the thumb, so your fingers form a backwards “C” (if you’re right-handed). When you throw it, your arm is coming down and you let go with your thumb first, so the ball gets a lot of top-spin on it. Hopefully, it looks like it’s going into the strike zone, but then it drops down to the ground and the batter just misses. There are many great curveballs out there, but my favorite is from Adam Wainwright of the St. Louis Cardinals.

This isn’t even close to the best I have seen from Wainwright

Slider (7-9 mph slower). The slider is gripped like a curveball but is thrown harder, so it’s kind of in-between a curveball and a fastball. By changing exactly where it comes off your fingers, however, you can make the ball move differently (primarily making it move laterally from right to left). This can make batters “chase” a ball as it moves away from them. Like curveballs, there are many sliders out there, but here’s one from Sergio Romo of the San Francisco Giants.

Changeup

Changeup (10 mph slower). There are a ton of different grips you can use for changeups, so I’ll defer to wikipedia for the variants. The basic grip is just to grab the ball with your entire hand and throw. When done correctly, the arm action will be identical to the fastball, so a player won’t realize it’s a changeup until they swing way too early. It’s a little hard to see how tricky a changeup is, but here’s one from Cole Hamels of the Philadelphia Phillies. Also, here’s a post on Chase Anderson’s changeup.

Note how the batter swings straight through the pitch and just misses

Knuckleball

Knuckleball (60-70 mph, so maybe 20-30 mph slower?). I said there were 3 basic types of pitches, and I didn’t lie, despite adding this 4th type. The knuckleball is the joker of all pitches, and it is the riskiest. Essentially, the ball is gripped with your fingertips, and you kind of “push” the ball with your fingers towards the batter. The goal is to reduce the spin to almost nothing (less than a single turn on a good day). When that happens, the ball will move according to the turbulence over the seams and the weather. Literally.

The effect is that the ball will wobble and move in just about any direction, making it difficult to catch and even more difficult to hit. Sometimes. If there’s too much spin on the ball, or if you just don’t get the right turbulence, the ball will go flat, and since the pitch is usually thrown somewhat slowly, it will be an easy pitch for a batter to hit a home run.

Only a few pitchers in history have really mastered the knuckleball, but we happen to have probably one of the greatest pitching today: R.A. Dickey of my Toronto Blue Jays. Check. This. Out.

The best part is the catcher flinching to catch it.

Oh, here’s another one. And GoPro footage from the perspective of the catcher.

Conclusion

There are lots of other strange pitches out there, but this covers most of them. To wrap up, imagine yourself as a batter: you know exactly what pitches the pitcher can throw (scouts compile binders with these details), and you basically need to guess what pitch the pitcher is going to throw and where they’re going to throw it. You can watch their arm action and guess what’s coming, but you have milliseconds to decide to swing or not. Naturally this leads to all sorts of crazy mind games.

The greatest part of baseball to me is the battle between a pitcher and batter as they try to figure each other out. The pitcher may make the ball go fast (4-seam), slow (changeup), left (slider), right (2-seam), or anywhere in in-between, and the batter has to adjust instantly to make solid contact with a wooden club. That’s why I prefer watching baseball on TV over watching it live: you can see the details of pitching, which I think is the core of baseball and best demonstrates how amazingly talented these players are.

April 9, 2013

Better than Begging?

Filed under: personal — kevin @ 7:00 pm

A few weeks ago, I went down to Santa Barbara for the weekend with 3 friends. Santa Barbara is the stereotypical California city: the weather was summer-sunny in March, surfers milled around the beach, skateboarders weaved through the laughing tourists, storefronts and restaurants covered all of downtown, and the hills and ocean bracketed the town.

There were bums, too. Alongside the boardwalk leading out to the pier, several beggars had setup coin targets on the beach below. A sheet was covered with a few cups or sharpied circles, where some targets were just bullseye, while others would tell you have good of a lover you were.

target

 

There were some coins on the targets, though I couldn’t really estimate how much was there, or how much money there was compared to a guy with a sign and a hat. There are many reasons why you might guess that targets might be a better or worse strategy.

The targets lack the human connection. You can’t look into the eyes of the man who has nothing other than hope for your pity. Without that, you won’t feel the same guilt or sympathy that might drive you to give. I don’t have a reference on-hand, but there’s at least a Stalin quote about how people are more sympathetic to individuals than to statistics. For example, organizations gathering donations to end hunger in Africa use a picture of a cute kid and may even let you “adopt”a child instead of explaining to you how your donation will affect millions in poverty. So, advantage to the panhandler on this issue.

Looking at the beggar himself may not always encourage us to donate. Many societies have stigmatized begging and homeless people, and interacting with them may be discouraged. We avert our eyes from things that disgust us, and we may feel better pretending as though these things don’t exist or never happened. In this case, giving only encourages beggars to continue to leech on society. A target, however, is less likely to trigger this social reaction, though that may change in the future. For now, advantage target.

The target also does offer some value to society. We play darts, bowling, and other carnival games to test our dexterity, and the target constructors made a game for our entertainment. Beggars, on the other hand, appear to offer little value, other than to Sherlock Holmes. Advantage target.

If we’re looking at offering value to society, though, begging may not be the fair comparison. There are many people who earn money on the street for minor tasks. There are dancers, buskers, the bush man, and those guys who stand really still. Whether you like them or not, they try to offer some service to earn your money. So maybe that last point was a wash.

One last comparison for the target could be fountains, where people will throw coins in for a wish. That’s a lot of money being thrown away just for a silly superstition, and who knows where the money goes. Maybe some really clever beggar made up the practice years ago as an easy way to get people’s money without them knowing it. So I guess it’s no worse than that.

So back in Santa Barbara, we did end up playing, and my friend Jordan almost claimed the title of best lover in the west. I’m not sure whether just missing the cup means that he’s almost the best in the west, or that he almost could have been the best in the west, but either way, he missed. I should head back to Santa Barbara again: not only is it as delightful as stereotypical California can be, but there’s a target maker who deserves my quarter by now.

April 6, 2013

Watching TV Alone Together

Filed under: personal — kevin @ 2:23 pm

Julie and I watched 4 episodes on Sunday, 3 on Monday, 2 on Wednesday, and 1 on Thursday to finish the first season of “Game of Thrones“. The last show I watched this quickly was 7 seasons of “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” in 1 summer during high school, so we’re enjoying “Game of Thrones” a lot.

For awhile, I was quite stubborn about watching “Game of Thrones”. My friends watched last season together on Sunday nights, and I even attended a few viewing parties and just did other things instead. Out of pride or forgetfulness, I can’t recall why I refused to watch, but with the 3rd season starting last weekend and Julie reading the books, it made sense to catch up as quickly as possible to share the experience with my friends.

Binge-viewing is now a recognized behavior among TV viewers. Thanks to services like Netflix, people can easily watch an entire TV show over the course of a few days instead of needing to get the DVDs or wait for re-runs or new episodes. An interesting consequence noted in the NYT article is that cliffhangers aren’t as relevant for binge-viewers who are launched straight into the next episode. In fact, the so-called “hoarders” even prefer to wait for a TV show to finish its run before watching it all in one go.

Another hidden cost to increased availability of past TV shows is that TV doesn’t have the same global feel to it, where everyone was sharing the experience simultaneously, albeit individually at home. One factor is that we don’t have to watch TV live. A few years ago, it was unfortunate when you couldn’t be home for your favorite show and needed to tape it. And if it took more than a day to watch, you had to deal with spoilers at lunch the next day. Another factor is that current TV may not garner the same audience. Why should I spend my time watching a possibly bad show when I can watch a classic instead?

I have mentioned a few shows I have watched recently, and I’m sorry to say that I often wasn’t keeping up with those well, either. Every few weeks, I would catch up on the last few episodes of “30 Rock” or “Dollhouse” or “Avatar”, while my friends bugged me about the past episodes I hadn’t watched yet. Without Hulu, I might never have kept up, and without Netflix, I might never have watched Arrested Development and missed out on those experiences. But with these services, I don’t feel the need to be in front of my TV at a certain time, and I’m losing out on the shared experience around that.

That shared experience is what I’m hoping to reclaim with “Game of Thrones”. There are politics and battles everywhere, and I would like to be able to speculate wildly on what might happen next. For example, I went out to dinner with family friends last week, and we realized that we had been watching the BBC “Sherlock” show, which ended the 2nd season with a cliffhanger. We had different theories about the mysteries and how they would transition into the new season. Despite having not talked about it before, TV situated us both in the same experience without having shared anything before, and that’s pretty cool.

Anyways, I recommend that you all watch “Game of Thrones”. It’s bloody, and there’s more nudity than the plot requires, but it’s HBO. And maybe we’ll never be able to speculate wildly, since the TV series is following the fantasy books, but it’s enraptured a lot of my friends, and sharing this experience seems like an okay application of peer pressure.

March 7, 2013

Why I Think StarCraft is Awesome

Filed under: games,personal — kevin @ 7:00 pm

I play, watch, read, write, and think a lot of StarCraft. Specifically, since StarCraft 2 came out in July 2010, I have played at least 653 games of StarCraft (source: battle.net); watch on average a half hour to an hour of StarCraft a day via online streams like Twitch; read /r/starcraft first thing in the morning, last thing at night, and at least a dozen times in-between; write a StarCraft blog; and think about StarCraft a lot.

Looking at my blog history, I haven’t shared very much about StarCraft at all given how passionate I am about it, and with the upcoming release of Heart of the Swarm, the first expansion to StarCraft 2, I want to share why I think StarCraft is so awesome.

Like with books, video games can engage people in many different ways, depending on both the game and the person*. For me, StarCraft is all about the challenge of making quick, strategic decisions while managing many tasks simultaneously.

StarCraft is like Chess come to life in a sci-fi setting between humans (Terran), bugs (Zerg), and psionic warriors (Protoss). You and an opponent each start with a base and need to mine resources to build an army to destroy each other. The strategy and quick reflexes come in at several different levels, all of which must be maintained simultaneously.

At the lowest level, you control individual army units, each with their own strengths, weaknesses, and special abilities. With good dexterity, you can guide a flamethrower buggy (a “Hellion”) into your opponents base and kill lots of workers when they aren’t looking. Or maybe you need to split up your clump of Marines when explosive, suicide Banelings waddle up. These require careful attention to individual units to make each of them as effective as possible.

Going a level up, you need control your whole army that may be as many as 200 units. Typically, most of your units are in one main army, and how you position that depends on where your opponent’s main army is and what you think they’re going to do. Your strategy, however, might be to attack in multiple places at the same time, and professional players can control attacks on up to 4 different places simultaneously.

Going up another level, you need to be building your army. Depending on what units your opponent has and what your strategy is, you might want slightly different compositions of units. If your opponent has lots of flying units, you should probably have anti-air units, but if you also get some invisible units, you can force your opponent to build detectors or possibly take a lot of damage. To ensure that your army is at full strength, you must constantly be queuing up more units to be built at various buildings, while controlling your army and individual units in it.

Up one more level, you need to control your economy as a whole. Although you start with one base, you need to build various types of buildings to get access to different units and different technology. Additionally, you can also take more bases around the map to get more resources faster. It can be hard to know which bases are safe to take and when to take them. It’s even harder to figure that out while constantly building up your army, managing your existing army, and all of the units in your army.

At the highest level, you need a game plan. Will you build an army really quickly and try to destroy your opponent before they have defenses ready? Or will you try to take a bunch of bases to mine more resources to build a bigger, stronger army later? Of will you build up defenses and try to develop technology as quickly as possible to get advanced army units very quickly? As the game progresses, you constantly need to readjust your strategy between army, economy, and technology. This strategizing is happening while you’re figuring out how your economy works, training a bigger army, moving your army about the map, and controlling individual units.

So at the highest level, there’s a lot of strategy and little physical work, but as you move down, the focus shifts more and more to reflexes. Different players have different strengths among all of those tasks, but regardless, StarCraft is a constantly demanding, both mental and physical, game. In fact, I think it’s the hardest video game out there. Like chess openings and football plays, StarCraft games start with a plan (known as a “build order”), but soon, the game is alive. Professional players can perform upwards of 300 clicks and key presses per minute to do everything they need to, and they practice as their full-time job (40+ hours a week) to understand the game and learn strategies.

So beyond playing, I also follow professional StarCraft, which is now an eSport. Watching professional StarCraft players is amazing. Many players stream their practice sessions so you can follow your favorite players as they play everyday. They compete in a regular tournaments where commentators talk through all the games played in big brackets. Between the strategic depth of the game, the storylines of individual players, serious mindgames between familiar players, and crazy highlight plays, following and watching tournaments are always engaging. And there’s a vibrant online community to make the game accessible and fun for everyone.

So back to the original prompt for this post: Heart of the Swarm is coming out. Many people only play the story-driven single player, which plays through a sequence of different missions. I often forget about lore and only see the concrete gameplay (it’s kind of like just seeing the green code for the world in The Matrix), but the story alone is a great experience. Take 2 minutes to watch the cinematic trailer for the game. Hopefully you think that part is pretty cool as well.

Okay, the final part of this post is the pitch: please try out StarCraft**. I would love to have more friends to play with (we can play together on a team), and despite focusing on how hard the game is, I think anyone can have fun with it. For example, Julie played few video games beforehand, but I got her playing a bit of StarCraft 2 summers ago, and we’re both hooked. We play every week or 2, but we’re both frequently watching StarCraft, and it comes up almost every time we talk.

So that’s why I think StarCraft is so interesting to follow and play for several years. I hope you give it a shot if you haven’t already.

 

* We read to learn new skills (technical books), learn (history, science), engage with deep moral questions (philosophy), laugh over something ridiculous (humor), put ourselves in other people’s shoes (fiction, fantasy), figure out what all the hubbub is about (50 Shades of Grey), and more.

We play video games to test our twitch reflexes (shooters), engage in social situations (MMOs), challenge ourselves (puzzles), make us think tactically (strategy games), fill time (many mobile games), experience a story (roleplaying games), and more.

** If you want to skip the $20 for StarCraft 2 and $40 for Heart of the Swarm, you can try the free starter edition first

February 20, 2013

Reflecting on “30 Rock”

Filed under: personal — kevin @ 6:00 pm

In 3rd grade, my dad decided that my sisters and I should no longer be allowed to watch TV. In the coming years, we picked up a few shows (Enterprise and House, to be specific) that we watched for exactly that time slot, but turning on the TV just “to see what’s on” ended. During senior year of high school, however, there were maybe a handful of times when I just turned on the TV in the evening to see what was on. Once, I watched a PBS documentary about penguins. Another time, I stumbled across 30 Rock, an apparently new sitcom that instantly hooked me.

Back then, I was pretty negative about pop culture: I thought that all top 40 music lacked any real musical value, and TV shows universally appealed to our worst character traits and didn’t really engage viewers’ minds. It was terribly judgmental, dismissive, and smug of me, but 30 Rock was different: it was smart and funny and focused on a diverse ensemble cast. And Tina Fey was a realistically geeky and cute lead.

I scoured the internet for details about the show, which were surprisingly hard to get back then. Fortunately, I had caught the 8th episode (“The Break-Up”) and wasn’t too far behind, except that there wasn’t anything like hulu back then to help me catch up. I watched week after week, and when the season ended, I waited anxiously for the DVDs, which became the soundtrack of my freshmen year at college.

Now, after 7 total seasons, it’s over, and while I’m not emotionally compromised by the situation, it’s still somewhat sobering to think that there isn’t anymore 30 Rock. I have watched a few TV shows more or less to completion now (Enterprise and Dollhouse), but neither lasted this long, and neither became so important in my life.

It wasn’t rosy all the way along: I thought a few seasons in the middle were somewhat weak, and I worried that the show wasn’t going anywhere. They dropped the focus on the ensemble cast to instead get more in-depth with Liz and Jack, which I didn’t like as much. There were times when the shows seemed to get a little formulaic, too. But over the course of 7 years, there are bound to be rough patches. I have often wondered whether some great TV shows cut short (“Firefly” being the prime example) would have achieved the same cult status had they gone through their whole run: it’s almost a blessing that they were canceled so fans never had to experience the inevitable decline. So maybe 30 Rock wasn’t always its best, but I always laughed, often very hard.

Looking back on the seasons, 7 years was a long time. When I started watching, I didn’t know what college I was going to. Now, I’m looking back on college and am working full-time. It’s hard to say that I really grew up with the characters of 30 Rock, but I have become used to it being around week after week. And because I watched it live almost from the beginning, I do have some sense of pride or ownership or something with it.

You know, I’m not really sure where I wanted to go with this post, so I’ll cap it off with at least one thing I wanted to say. Thanks to 30 Rock and everyone involved with it for creating such a great TV show. I have really enjoyed it for the past few years and will probably watch reruns for years to come.

February 17, 2013

Why I Ate Cake for Breakfast

Filed under: personal — kevin @ 12:27 pm

Julie’s birthday was last weekend, and I made her a chocolate avocado cake as part of the avocado potluck birthday party. Since Julie had also received a chocolate cake from her mom, I kept the leftovers of my cake at home and ate it over the next weekend, and I finished it for breakfast this morning*.

I haven’t done it for awhile, but I am very familiar with eating cake for breakfast. My earliest recollections of breakfast are Flintstones yellow cakes with with way too much frosting. Since then, breakfast for me has included all types of cereal, waffles, waffles with a pile of ice cream on it, ramen, steak, sausage, fried rice, hot pockets, buttered toast, toast with a layer of brown sugar on it, bagels, pasta, yogurt, and anything else you would have found from my fridge, pantry, or last night’s dinner. Thankfully, my breakfast has evened out to oatmeal on an average of just under 5 days a week. I’m surprised that a mother-endorsed diet of ice cream for breakfast led to a pretty healthy outcome.

I’m not really sure if this was her intent, but my mom’s genius in allowing me to eat this way is that I always eat breakfast. Long after many of my friends stopped eating breakfast during high school or college, I will always arrange for something to eat shortly after waking up. Popular nutrition says that eating breakfast is very important, and though their advice probably wouldn’t include ice cream, it seems I ended up in the right place.

I maybe didn’t eat ice cream for breakfast as often as I’m suggesting here. I actually mostly ate leftovers, which I still happily eat for all meals. I had always assumed that this was another food preference I may have inherited or been stuck with because of the rest of my family. For example, my grandpa doesn’t like garlic, so my mom didn’t make stirfrys with garlic, so I don’t either. My sister Lisa didn’t like eggs in fried rice, so I didn’t discover it until college. And my mom doesn’t like green bean casserole, so it never appeared on our Thanksgiving dinner table. Given that I did eat leftovers often, I assumed our family was a leftover loving family.

I was understandably shocked, then, when my mom revealed to me over dinner 2 weeks ago that she didn’t like leftovers. When I pointed out that I had eaten lots of leftovers growing up, she looked up from her bowl of chow mein straight at me and said with complete sincerity, “Yeah, you ate the leftovers.” In the ensuing conversation, it started to make sense. My mom really did cook 7 days a week when I was growing up, and the only leftovers I actually can remember her eating was ground pork and tofu with rice and turkey sandwiches. Everything else in the fridge was mine.

I was a little miffed to find out that my mom was using me as a garbage can. I had grown up assuming that I was the beneficiary of all food choices. The classic example is that when we had chicken, my mom would let us have the meat while she would gnaw at the bones, and when my grandparents were there, my mom would pass those bones onto them and enjoy more of the meat herself. That was just a good parent-child relationship.

Now, all of my mom’s parenting choices appear to have worked out, though some weren’t perhaps as thoughtful and selfless as I may have once believed. Apparently, a common misperception that first-time parents have is that they have brought into the world a beautiful, perfect child, and unless they do everything just right for their child, life is just going to chip away at that innocence and potential. Clearly, my parents lost that notion by the time they had me, the last of three children, but it seems like they might have gotten things right, at least on a few of these points.

And now that I have grown up and see my own friends having kids, I’m starting to see that parents aren’t all-knowing. They’re people just like me, with their own foibles and needs, so many parenting choices aren’t made strictly for the benefit of their children. But it’s okay: a few of those maybe thoughtless choices led to me eating my oatmeal for breakfast while amused about having once, long ago, eaten ice cream for breakfast for an entire week.

 

* Not really this morning. The perspective works better from when I came up with this post in my head on my bike ride last Thursday

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