"Tea, Earl Grey, Hot."

One of the things that has always fascinated me is the idea of acquired tastes. As a child, whenever someone told me a food was an acquired taste, I wondered just how people ever got started eating it in the first place. For example, I found tea and coffee to be absolutely vile drinks (coffee more so than tea... in fact, I still dislike coffee greatly. Although some predicted that I would never make it through my undergraduate education without learning to drink coffee, it would seem I have proven them wrong). They are also fairly non-trivial to prepare, so one would wonder how and why someone would go through all the effort of preparing coffee grounds or crushed tea leaves, boiling water, and steeping a drink that, on first taste, prompted a scrunched face of disgust. Of course, not everyone seems to have my initial dislike for the drinks, so perhaps the few people who enjoy such bitter draughts convinced everyone else to give it a try.

Alcoholic drinks are another confusing item, as they too are quite non-trivial to prepare. While one might suppose that there was an ancient group of people with a particularly good crop of grapes one year. They juiced some of the excess fruits and stored them in casks, but were not able to consume the juice fast enough to prevent it from starting to go off. A few might have braved the possible stomach ache and consumed the spoiled juice, only to discover a pleasant buzzing which prompted further experimentation in reproduction. Of course, this sort of story might sound plausible, but it is the sort of "just-so" story which plagues fields like evolutionary psychology. With only the vaguest of evidence to support it (namely, wine exists now, so it was discovered at some point), the story could just as easily have been some ancient teenager stole his neighbour's jar of juice, buried it in a field for a few weeks, and then forced his little brother to drink it just to see what would happen.

The reason I have been ruminating on the subject of acquired tastes, though, is I always find it fascinating when traveling to discover the regional acquired tastes, both of the place one has traveled to and of one's home region. For example, vegemite is a vile spread for toast and bread in Australia. Australians, however, do not seem to share my abhorrence for its flavour (judging by the fact that it is still manufactured, sold, and consumed there). While I have yet to discover any popular German cuisines that turn my stomach, I have been informed by several of my European peers who have spent a fair bit of time studying in North America that root beer is a horrible drink, and they don't understand how North Americans can drink the stuff. Oddly, peanut butter is also one of those things which is often raised as a peculiar North American food, although the reactions to it tend to be more divided with some deciding it is unpleasant and others wishing it was more common here.

So, there was not a lot of point to this post. I do not have any answers for why certain flavours are popular in certain regions of the world, nor how people ever got to manufacturing and consuming some of our stranger and more acquired tastes. Idle conjecture can be fun, though.

Intellectual Schmoozing

Lately I have been fairly bad about maintaining this blog, and I apologize for my lack of recent posting. A lot of that is due to a moderate degree of mental exhaustion; I spend long hours at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization (MPIDS) combined with the generally overwhelming feelings that accompany a move (even a temporary one) to a new country. However, I cannot complain too greatly about being tired, because the work is interesting and I am learning a lot. I am also coming to view neurons from a different perspective, and that is a fun and fascinating thing.

It is not just work and dealing with a different culture that has been keeping me from blogging, though. Academia is as much a social institution as any other human endeavour, and, while at a large university like the University of Toronto it is easy to keep your head down and coast along without ever really being aware of the academic community (aside, of course, from the people teaching your classes), at a small institution like MPIDS the sense of community is much more universal (in general atmosphere, MPIDS has much in common with UTIAS. For those who have forgotten, you can reread my fan-boyish fawning over UTIAS here). So, there have been a couple nights where I have been out late either enjoying food, wine, and beer with a few people from the Institute or at the Institute itself sharing the aforementioned victuals with a larger portion of the general Institute population.

Last night was one of those nights at the Institute, with the party sparked by the coincidence of a guest speaker (an American professor who I believe currently holds a post at an Italian university) and a birthday (one of the Ph.D. students, who, oddly enough, is also Italian). The guest speaker was particularly popular because his presentation was not so much a serious one but was rather a light-hearted application of visual computation algorithms in real-time. The motivation was ostensibly related to the motion tracking capabilities of the retina, but I found that connection tenuous as best (after all, the problem of motion tracking at a low processing level like the retina is highly dependent upon hardware, and the hardware of the eye and a computer differ greatly). Though posessing only a weak connection to visual perception, the talk was essentially an artistic presentation with a strong mathematical basis, and that can be fun too.

After the talk came the pizza, cake, wine, and beer. It also meant intellectual schmoozing in a whole smattering of languages (primarily German and English, of course, but there was also a little bit of Italian, Russian, and Farsi flying around). I got to meet a large number of people from the Institute that I had not yet had a chance to talk to, and we had some very interesting discussions ranging from politics, history, and languages to neuroscience, mathematics, and evolutionary theory. I will end this post with one of the more interesting classical psychological question series (which is fun to bandy about at parties), and the most tongue-in-cheek response I have yet heard to the query (of course coming, as you will see, from an evolutionary biologist).

The question series goes like this:

You are standing next to a branch in a rail line. A train is hurtling down the track without breaks, and the track it is currently set to go down has five workers on it oblivious to the danger. On the other track is a single worker. Do you throw the switch and kill the single worker or let the train continue on its original course where it will kill five workers?

You are now standing on a bridge overlooking a set of train tracks. Once again, there are five workers on the tracks below oblivious to a breakless train hurtling toward them. On the bridge with his back to you is a large man unaware of your presence. If you sneak up behind him and push him off the bridge onto the tracks below, he has sufficient mass to cause the train to dislodge from the tracks and come to a halt before it strikes the workers. Do you push the man off the bridge, or do you let the train continue on its path to kill the five workers?

The psychologically interesting thing is that the majority of people would throw the switch in the first formulation of the question but balk at the physical act of pushing the man in the second question off the bridge to his certain death. The snarky response I got from the evolutionary biologist was, "Am I related to any of them?" When I responded that he was not, he shrugged and said, "Oh, well, then it doesn't matter."

"Let's talk about sex"

I followed a link from a post over at PZ Myer's blog to an article on differences in male and female sexual arousal. While PZ Myers covered some of the main points (the article still doesn't really explain what it is that women want and it wanders down the shadowy and often unfortunate path of evolutionary psychology's just-so stories), I was rather amused to discover that the research the article was discussing had been conducted at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), which is associated with the University of Toronto. This got me wondering just how they found research subjects for the test. You see a lot of rather strange flyers for psychology experiments around campus, but I have yet to see one for a sex study. I really hope they didn't just pull people off the street, though, because the College and Spadina intersection (where CAMH is located) is a really dirty and skeazy intersection. I'm not really sure why, but the brief intersection of the campus with China Town seems to have spawned a disturbing and highly unpleasant atmosphere. I think drawing in subjects from the vicinity of CAMH therefore might skew the results...

Anyway, I don't really have much to say on this subject. I know I usually try to keep this blog sex-free, but it was an amusing article made even more so by the fact that it took place on the sketchiest corner of the University of Toronto campus, and I therefore decided it was worth noting.

"All non-believers stand aside in fear"

Alternative title: Truthiness and Political Power

Reading this post over at Deus Ex Malcontent a while ago reminded me of some thoughts I had bouncing around my head since I started listening to the How to Think About Science broadcasts that I mentioned even longer ago. In his post, Chez states that society requires a common basis for facts and methods for ascertaining them. I agree with that statement in principle, but it does not preclude religion. The thing is, a state-wide accepted pool of knowledge can come in many forms, and until relatively recently it was usually in the form of a state religion. In many ways, a non-science based approach is more attractive for a ruling party as there is more control. When the belief system in question is a religious or philosophical system (I include the philosophical system to cover things like Confucianism) the ruling party is completely unconstrained in what the knowledge they impart upon their subjects entails. If they are careful enough (and, to be entirely honest, "careful enough" doesn't really have to be all that careful) they can even entirely change their stance on an issue and convert the people under their care from pacifists to bloodthirsty crusaders like magic (or some other such dramatic change). To a certain extent, this might even be a desireable situation if the ruling party itself is able to see through their own nonsense and rule in an enlightened manner (like Plato's dream of benevolent philosopher kings). However, since true enlightenment and benevolence are awfully hard to come by, I think this can be safely ruled out and non-reality based systems of knowledge can be assumed to inevitably be used to serve the interests of those making the knowledge up.

Which leads me to science. Science is designed as well as we currently know how to default knowledge to what is real. While evidence can be spun and twisted and even sometimes outright manufactured, eventually the truth should come out. It is for this reason that it is so often at odds with the powerful and the elite, who would much rather have people believe whatever they are told regardless of the actual truth. To give perhaps a simplistic example, if a powerful ruler wants a rainforest destroyed so he can put in a golf course and a resort, it is much more convenient to have people believe that the Earth is created by a benevolent deity who will provide for mankind's prosperity than have to deal with facts of the disastrous ecological fallout that is likely to result. However, I fell into the same trap that skeptics and rationalist so often fall into and defaulted to a religious example. It isn't just religion that does this. Stalin did the same thing by trying to exercise complete control over the beliefs of his subjects. Jackasses like Dinesh D'Souza perpetuate the talking point that atheism is clearly morally bankrupt due to the abhorrent "atheist regimes" of the 20th century (he then goes on to list Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot. Sometimes Mao is in there too). Leaving out the fact that I have seen pointed out to Dinesh D'Souza in multiple debates (but which seems to fail to penetrate his mind) that Hitler and the Nazis were decidedly not an "atheist regime", this historical tit for tat of "look at the crusades", "Stalin killed more people" and so on is a complete mischaracterization of the rational secularism (as I understand it) being argued for by those I find intellectually inspiring on this account (namely, Richard Dawkins).

The debate, which so often is framed as religion vs. atheism, isn't and shouldn't be about that. Rather, it should be about a rational, confirmable world view as the paradigm one accepts for truth vs. a socially constructed dogma. While it is unreasonable to expect to completely get rid of dogma (as there will always be the temptation to at least try to warp or spin evidence to fit a previously expected result or to come up with a policy in favour of those performing the spin), requiring a knowledge base to be as evidentially based as is humanly possible provides the most protection for those not in decision making power. This, in essense, is what secularists are striving for. The cultural relativism of freedom of religion is a wonderful thing as long as it is restricted to the philosophical domain of non-practical matters. If people find comfort in the deistic notion that the Big Bang was caused by a powerful entity one would like to call God, that is perfectly fine. Likewise, if people find comfort in the spiritual community of weekly church attendance, that is also fine. What is not fine is when the freedoms of other people become infringed upon under the protection of one's right to the freedom of religion or when a religion is used as a position of authority to propagate a non-evidential base for knowledge and moral judgement used to inhibit the actions of those who do not adhere to the same belief structure (such as the limits on same-sex marriages or birth control). As I believe I have mentioned before, whenever the freedom of religion and other freedoms and rights conflict, I have yet to hear a rational argument for why the freedom of religion should not be overruled by the right with which it has come into conflict.

Somehow, I am back on religion again, and I apologize. I hope what I have written here makes sense, although I am not entirely sure I have said what I wanted to say either coherently or completely. Anyone else want to chime in?

Note: Not to distract from the possibility of a good debate this post might inspire, but one should note that I have used a quotation for the title, so it is part of my new figure-out-where-the-title-came-from contest. This one is somewhat obscure, so I'll give the hint that it is the opening line to a song.

A Century of Posts

This is my one hundredth published post, so I thought I would commemorate the occasion by talking about why one hundred is such a special number. The specialness of 100 is primarily rooted in our 10-based numerical system. Basically, 100 is nice because it is a large, uncomplicated number but not unmanageably large. It is also 10 x 10, making it a perfect square. However, we are so used to thinking in base-10 that we forget how much it colours our thinking of numbers. I suppose, to be entirely responsible, I should start with a description of what a base-n system of numbers is.

Any number which we can write as a decimal can be written as an additive sequence. I briefly covered this in my post on the Cantor Set, but I will repeat myself here to refresh your memories (also, please note that I will now use * for multiplication rather than x, simply because it is what I more used to writing on the computer). For example, the number 15.34 = 1*10¹ + 5*10⁰ + 3*10^-1 + 4*10^-2. The base of your system is whatever number is being raised to the exponent in the expanded representation of the number. There are some other base systems that receive widespread use, the most famous and popular being the binary system (base-2). When looking at the Cantor Set, we used the ternary system (base-3), and in many computer science problems it is useful to use base-8 or base-16 (base-16 gets somewhat awkward to use since we need additional symbols beyond 0-9 to represent values up to 15. The letters A-F substitute in an unpleasant mixture of letters and numbers, which is why, despite my fondness for the number 16, I resent base-16 (also called hexadecimal)). Those, of course, are not the only possible systems, since one could potentially choose any base.

If we did not use base-10, then, 100 would cease to be such an exciting number. While it would still have the property of being a perfect square, it would no longer be any more special than 36 or 49 (though I think I would still like it more than 49 since it is even, and I have an irrational dislike of odd numbers). There would be other ramifications, however. 5 would no longer be as special as it is, since it would no longer be half of the base. If we used a base-6 system, 3 would take on many of the nice properties of 5, becoming even more popular than it already is, and 5 would be relegated to the awkward position of 7 or 11 as an ungainly prime number. The reason the properties of numbers change based on the system one is working with is because of the tricks you learn to do mental math. If you are not working in a base-10 system, then multiplying by 10 no longer simply shifts things one position over and adds a zero. Instead, whatever the base of your system now does that. The entire numerical field in one's head must twist and contort to fit the new system.

The funny thing is, I have a really hard time picturing any of these ramifications, because my mind automatically works hard at translating things back into decimal. It is one of the reasons I find the binary system nicer to work with than the ternary system, since it is easier to mentally translate binary to decimal and thereby visualize what I am working with. Numbers have their properties in my head based on the decimal system, much like words have their meanings rooted very strongly in English. I might know some German words, but they are more like code words in which I have memorized their English translation rather than additional words with subtle connotations in their own right. Likewise, German grammar is an artificial system of rules that I must impose upon the sentences which I compose in my head in English. My Russian is much better, in that there are things I can successfully 'think in Russian' about, and I suppose that might happen if I were to exclusively operate in another numerical base for a while. I can even see that starting to happen with the ternary system and the Cantor Set, because I am perfectly happy to do the majority of my Cantor Set thinking in ternary. It just makes relating that to other areas of mathematics somewhat burdensome, because then I am stuck trying to mentally translate the entirely unwieldy ternary system to decimal.

Anyway, this isn't exactly the post I had envisioned to commemorate my 100th blog post, but I hope my meandering ramblings about numbers were at least vaguely interesting. The main point I was trying to make was that the appreciation for 100 that exists is mainly based on our convention of using a base-10 system rather than anything else, yet the fact that the decimal properties of numbers are a convention goes largely unacknowledged.

Irksome

For everyone, there are some things that drive them nuts. It often seems, though, that people in mathematics and science have an inordinate amount of neuroses bordering on obsessive-compulsive. As an aside, that is one of the reasons I like the webcomic xkcd so much. In addition to the general dorky humour, he seems to get the comical OCD things that I cannot help but think about. Of course, these neuroses often manifest in fairly different ways. For example, I remember making a joke about being OCD when some friends from engineering science were over at my place, only to be shocked by one of my friends arguing that I couldn't possible be OCD because my counter was so full of randomly discarded objects, something which drove him nuts and he had to restrain himself from trying to tidy (clearly, he had never played cards with me... I neurotically straighten the deck, without even thinking about it. If someone points it out and asks me to stop, I actually find it incredibly difficult to restrain myself).

Anyway, one thing that has always bothered me is poor bathroom layout. It seems like something that should be incredibly easy to do when the bathroom is being installed. After all, bathrooms are rooms that everyone has used before, so it's not like a high tech lab where the technicians installing the equipment might not fully understand what they are used for. Today, for example, I went into a bathroom where there were five sinks but only one soap dispenser and one electric hand-dryer. Who thought that made sense?

Xenophobia and Alien Fascination

I am going to indulge myself in some fanciful psychology now. While I often rail against the credulity and imprecision of psychology as a general field, that doesn't mean it isn't a fun way to pass the time. My main problem is its lack of rigour and self-correction, not the fun that can be had in utilizing the field to explore human nature. It is like literature and art - while some may make the argument that those should be taken into the fold of science (I haven't actually read the book and I enjoy Jonah Lehrer's blog, but I disagree with the premise that the book is touted to have. Perhaps reading it will change my mind, and I wouldn't mind giving it a shot at some point), I would rather say that much of psychology should be relegated to the social science and humanities status that encompasses art and literature. It is fascinating and fun to explore our humanity with words and conjectures, but it is rarely done rigorously and powerfully like the work done in most of the other sciences.

Anyway, with that preamble out of the way, I am going to launch into my exploration of one of the aspects of the human psyche. There were two events that got me thinking about the subject today of non-human animals. The first was an experiment on mice that we were performing in my lab course this morning and the enjoyment I got out of watching the adorableness that was the mouse's whisker twitches as he explored the box he was in (I certainly would not want to be a behavioural neuroscientist or psychologist. Giving injections or any of the other things done to animals in a laboratory I would find too difficult. While I recognize the benefit, I am squeamish and soft-hearted and enjoy my cognitive dissonance, thank you very much). The second event was a slide containing information about the variety of different somatosensory representations in different species, notably raccoons (and how they had a very similar proportion of cortical space devoted to finger control as that found in primates). That prompted me to think about how neat I find raccoons and their cleverness and aptitude for mischief, and then a brief internet search into raccoons as pets (apparently they do not make good pets, as they tend to have an intense ornery streak as adults including indignant defecation on owner's belongings and a tendency to bite). From my brief sadness at finding out that, like many of the other creatures I have often wistfully thought of as having as a pet, I was never going to have a raccoon as a pet, I got to thinking about the odd propensity of people for domestication of other species. While much of domestication can be explained by the utility of it (and we are not the only ones who engage in such practices, with fascinating ecological tales of ants and aphids or butterflies (the guy's voice in the video I actually found kind of annoying, but you get the idea) and other such relationships found in nature textbooks), there are clearly indirect psychological benefits as well (not for everyone. Some people genuinely have no enjoyment in interaction with nonhumans. While I find that baffling, it clearly exists).

The thing is, domestication simply facilitates the process. It makes the other organism more prone to like us and accept interaction with humans, but there are many examples of non-domestic animal friendships. Some of my favourites include Jessica the Hippo and Owen and Mzee (odd that they both include hippos). Clearly, there is at least a small propensity for interspecies bonding even without domestication. What makes this such an appealing concept? Before I address that concept, though, I want to bring up another one: xenophobia. Basically, fear of those foreign and different is a powerful psychological motivator at the heart of ingroup-outgroup conflicts. It doesn't have to include humans and humans, but is also at the heart of the general trend to treat non-human animals as less deserving than humans (after all, if the colour of one's skin is enough to inspire contempt and hatred, not even sharing the same form is an even more blatant marker of difference. The main reason it is rarely labelled as xenophobia, though, is people take it as defacto that other animals are so different from us that it doesn't need to be acknowledged). So how can interspecies relationships work and be such a powerfully uplifting thing (for at least some people) when there is an inborn tendency for mistrust of those who are different that sometimes fails to even reach past boundaries within a species, nevermind to another species?

At this point, I began to ramble on in a long-winded analysis of the intricacies of interspecies relationships. However, this post has already gotten longer than I intended, so perhaps I will leave such an analysis to a later time and jump ahead to the conclusion I was intending to reach. It seems to me like there is a competing psychological need for empathic understanding instilled by our social nature and the instinctive mistrust of strangers needed for simple survival. While the mistrust of strangers is necessary without being able to guarantee the trustworthiness of others, it isn't pleasant. Conflict is messy and uncomfortable, and though xenophobia can often be gratifying and exhilerhating, that is only when one is surrounded by likeminded individuals railing belligerently against the out-group that is not present. When one is forced to come face to face with the brutality and hate that was so previously euphoric (especially if one is forced to deal with the outgroup on relatively equal terms, like in a war, rather than in unequal terms like a lynch mob), the rush of happiness inspired by belonging with the ingroup is tempered somewhat by the unpleasantness of conflict. I think most people who are not insanely bigoted understand this and frown upon that aspect of their psyche. Forming a bond with a member of an outgroup, therefore, is a way of throwing off the shackles of xenophobia and searching for a linking trust rather than dwelling on the separating differences. Instead of saying "You walk on four legs and I walk on two, so I look down upon you", it is saying "I like to scratch you behind the ear and you like it when I do, so let's be friends." We can think that if we can set aside our mistrust and fear of the other party in this situation, maybe we can do so again in the future and have a more peaceful life. Or maybe I'm just a dork wrapped up in his own fanciful psychology. Whatever the case may be, I know some day I'd like to rub a tiger's belly, scratch a hippo behind the ear, or play a game with a raccoon. I also know none of those are going to happen, and even if given the opportunity I'm not sure I'd have the courage to go through with it. In a way, that thought makes me very sad.

Game Review: Diplomacy, Part III: End Game Analysis

After many months, I figure it is time I finished my rudimentary analysis of the game Diplomacy. For reference, here are links to Part I (game description) and Part II (opening and mid-game analysis).

To briefly recap, the second stage of the game occurs when all (or at least most) of the neutral supply centres have been occupied by one of the seven major powers. Most players are on nearly equal footing in terms of military size, and the number of players means cooperation with at least one or two others is necessary to overcome an opponent (even though the game is zero-sum in terms of any progress made by one player is at the expense of another). The third and final stage of the game is difficult to concretely separate from the second, but it basically happens when some players begin to lose badly and others expand their military to impressive sizes of ten or more units. At this point one or two players may even be eliminated from the game. While in my experience this seems to happen most often to either Germany or Austria-Hungary (being in the centre is an unfortunate place to be), it doesn't always. Russia makes a large and tempting target, and a Russian leader lacking vigilance might find himself victim of a disastrous invasion from the north through Scandinavia, Finland, and the Barents Sea, or from the south (especially if the Turks manage to get a fleet in the Black Sea). Even Great Britain, which is notoriously difficult to invade (but, at the same time, notoriously difficult to expand from) can be defeated, especially if France and Germany team up and devote some resources to developing their fleets. If enemy ships manage to enter the English Channel and the North Sea, the British are in a lot of trouble.

Regardless of who has found their fortunes dwindling and their dreams of European dominance shattered, as the dust settles the remaining juggernauts begin to face the same predicament that spurred the first round of wars: to expand their empires, they need a target to conquer. The difference at this point, however, is that interactions between players are now often more complicated. Many turns have gone by in an alliance against a foe, but with that foe gone, players begin to wonder how long the alliance will continue. Additionally, those doing exceptionally well at this point begin to grow cocky; victory is looking more assured, as their militaries are now three to four times as powerful as they originally began. It is hard to give much analysis for this part of the game, since the situation is virtually impossible to predict. This is also the part of the game that I have the hardest time with, simply because I don't like the concept of backstabbing an ally. While it very often is advantageous to strike without warning (especially if you and your ally are doing equivalently well or he is even doing better), I have a hard time emotionally with that. It might sound like I am making myself out to be a nice guy here, but I'm not entirely sure that is the case, either. It could be a remnant of chivalry that makes me feel this way, but it could also be a testosterone driven alpha-male style arrogance in which I want my foe to know that I'm coming for him and still have no way of stopping me. I like to think it's the chivalry side of things, but who knows.

Anyway, I am wandering away from the topic at hand. Often people actually don't make it this far in Diplomacy (it is an awfully long game for a single sitting), and simply stop after a player or two is eliminated (or even before if time players need to leave) and simply count up the number of supply centres under each person's control, determining rank in that manner. I hope in my ruminations on the subject I have done Diplomacy justice, and perhaps I may also manage to convince some of my readers who actually know me and have always begged off playing to give it a shot.

Game Review: Diplomacy, Part II: Opening and Mid-Game Analysis

A little while ago I devoted some time to describing the game Diplomacy. Here is the first continuation of that post, devoted to analysing what I find interesting about the game.

Note: A map of the board can be found here. When I mention specific territories, most of them have obvious three letter abbreviations (usually the first three letters of the territory's name), but if there is any confusion, the list of standard abbreviations can be found here.

The game has roughly three stages. The beginning of the game is characterized by many neutral supply centres available around the map for enterprising European powers to take over. For example, France pretty much immediately annexes the Iberian peninsula, netting the valuable pair of supply centres in Spain and Portugal. Italy picks up Tunis, Austria-Hungary envelopes Serbia, Turkey buffers their border with Bulgaria, Britain moves onto the continent by occupying Norway, and Germany grabs Denmark. Of course, this might not happen, but all of those captures are possible to perform without any interference from another player (as long as it is accomplished within the first year (two turns)). The only country that is not guaranteed to take control of a supply centre in their first year is Russia, and that is only if Germany decides to be a jerk and, in the first turn, moves the fleet in Kiel to Denmark then follows up the next turn by attempting to move that fleet to Sweden, likely blocking the fleet sailing out of St. Petersburg either through the Gulf of Bothnia or along the coast of Finland.

Similar to Sweden, there are a large number of more contentious supply centres scattered about the map. Romania is easily contested the first turn between the Austrian-Hungarians and the Russians (as long as the Russians are willing to not attempt moving their fleet into the Black Sea and risk the Turks occupying that vitally strategic body of water). Similarly, Greece is not immediately available to any power, but within two turns could be occupied by either the Italians, Austrian-Hungarians, or Turks. The Austrian-Hungarians and Italians are likely to already be wary of each other due to the border between Trieste and Venice, the only pair of starting supply centres that border each other. Like the triple entente created over the question of occupying Greece, the British, French, and Germans face a similar conundrum over the occupation of Belgium.

Anyway, so the first few turns consist mostly of people being self-absorbed with their own easy expansion. Initial rounds of diplomacy tend to be fairly sparse and open (at least with beginners to the game. Some veterans or avid fans of Machiavelli might leap headfirst into shadow and intrigue). At this point the game is not excessively interesting, as it is essentially a non-zero sum game where everyone wins. However, the degree to which one 'wins' (i.e. expands the size of one's military) can have massive ramifications on the following stages of the game.

The second stage of the game occurs within a few turns, and it happens when virtually all supply centres are occupied by one of the major powers. Here is where tensions begin to build. Essentially, all players are likely to be fairly evenly pitted with between four and six units under their control (seven or eight if they have done well, an opponent made some early blunders and failed to grab open supply centres, or they have already declared open war and are making remarkable progress). At this point the only way to increase one's position is at the expense of someone else. However, while in that sense it is a zero-sum game, the number of players makes cooperation (at least to a certain degree and with certain favoured allies) still the most effective strategy. This is when the game becomes psychologically interesting, as groups and pacts begin to form. Some alliances are forged out of fear (either of each other or a third party), and it is fear that makes doing excessively well in the opening rounds sometimes less desirable. For example, if France grabs the Iberian Peninsula (gaining two supply centres) as well as Belgium and Holland (giving a grand total of seven supply centres counting their starting territories of Paris, Brest, and Marseilles), the intimidating sea of light blue units might be enough to galvanize a disastrous alliance of Britain, Germany, and Italy. This is especially true since having a large number of units not only makes one powerful, and therefore fear inspiring, but it also makes one an attractive conquest since it leaves many supply centres to be neatly divided amongst the conquering parties. That said, in the situation just outlined an enterprising leader of France might manage to convince the Russians or Austrians to come to his aid with a promise of mutually beneficial spheres of influence divided between the two of them, thus forcing his German or Italian opponents to fight on two fronts. Other than fear as a motivating factor, one also needs to contend with greed and an odd sense of temporary goodwill (of course, an exhaustive list is unlikely to be generated, since one can always come up with a fairly unique motivational mindset, but I think the biggest two are fear and greed. Perhaps I only think that, though, because I've been reading Machiavelli lately).

Of course, I am once again getting caught up in details when I intended to give an overview. Beyond the psychological interest of the second stage of the game there is also an interesting mechanical aspect to it as the players learn how best to maneuver their troops and vie for strategic territories. While the Black Sea is of immediate strategic importance for the Turks and Russians from the very beginning and the border between Trieste and Venice sparks immediate tensions for the Austrian-Hugarians and Italians, several other territories that are not supply centres take on an increasingly important role in any but the most trusting of relationships (or relationships characterized by completely ignoring each other due to focusing on another front): the English Channel between England and France, Burgundy between France and Germany, Piedmont between France and Italy, Bohemia between Germany and Austria-Hungary, Galacia between Russia and Austria-Hungary, and the whole mess that is the Balkans between, mainly, Austria-Hungary and Turkey but also of significant importance to Italy and Russia. Of course, there are other territories that can also become quite significant. The North Sea is vital for anyone trying to attack Britain from the east, Scandinavia can become quite hotly contested between Britain, Germany, and Russia, and sometimes something completely unpredictable happens (such as one game I played in which Russia sailed a lone fleet all the way around the edge of the map and happened to snag Portugal from the French).

For the final stage of the game and some more fancifully meandering analysis, stay tuned for part III.

Making Something Geeky

This past weekend my internal filter failed to kick in. Rather than saying something inappropriately sexual, however, I said something inappropriately dorky. While sitting with a group of friends in the rear car of a streetcar, one of my friends made a comment about the driver detaching our car at the next stop because it was so empty, to which I responded before adequately thinking it over, "Well, at least we would have the warp engines."

So, I happen to have watched and enjoyed some Star Trek episodes over the years. The fact that certain things are considered incredibly geeky and others are not made me start to wonder about how such classifications were made. After all, the Lord of the Rings is the basis for many of the geekiest things around, including the Dungeons and Dragons games, but when the movies came out they became a huge hit and widely popular. Riding on their success and the success of science fiction hits like the Matrix, a huge number of sword and sorcery style and science fiction movies were spawned (some good, many quite bad). Among them, comic book heroes have gone through a similar rebirth of going from epic geekdom to mainstream, widely popular and accepted film.

It cannot simply be the transformation into movie format that makes things shed their geeky nature, however, because Star Trek and Star Wars are still considered rather geeky (although, to be fair, I think Star Wars has more of a widespread popular acknowledgement as not excessively geeky), and Dungeons and Dragons failed miserably at elevating itself beyond the stigma of geek with its film a few years ago (though that might simply have been a result of the movie being supremely poor). Anyway, I should have left for work many minutes ago, so I leave this question up to my readers:

What makes something geeky?