Original Cin

Eliezer Yudkowsky writes “If You Demand Magic, Magic Won’t Help” on Overcoming Bias:

Born into a world of science, they [fantasy fiction readers] did not become scientists. What makes them think that, in a world of magic, they would act any differently?

If they don’t have the scientific attitude, that nothing is “mere” – the capacity to be interested in merely real things – how will magic help them? If they actually had magic, it would be merely real, and lose the charm of unattainability. They might be excited at first, but (like the lottery winners who, six months later, aren’t nearly as happy as they expected to be), the excitement would soon wear off. Probably as soon as they had to actually study spells.

This is not exactly the same as my “the world is strange” principle, but it is very similar. Alas, I can’t remember where I read that a sense of wonder about the world makes someone more likely to be successful.

The famous David D. Friedman writes on his blog about the decision against homeschooling in California:

The term “fascist” has been overused, and in any case I know nothing about Croskey’s views on economics. But I find it extraordinary that he would be willing to explicitly argue that public schools exist largely to indoctrinate children in views the government approves of, with or without the consent of their parents.

Indeed…

I’ve been running a game of Exalted online for two of my friends, and the last session turned out very, very badly (e.g. boring). I already have lots of ideas on how to make the next one better, but I thought it’d be worthwhile to reflect on some things regarding my writing and storytelling.

Things are valuable when they’re scarce. I think this gives me a clue for why my own prose tends to sound overwrought and verbose when I read it. I have a confession to make: My name is Nic, and I am an adjective addict. I have difficulty disregarding irrelevant details, eschewing oddball colors, scents, and sounds, and eliminating background noise. Oops. Somewhere along the way, I forgot that “show, don’t tell” means to use verbs.

Moving on, what’s scarce in an RPG? Experience points are scarce, but they don’t have value outside of their fictional world. Character to beat up are a bit scarce, but the PCs could become marauding pirates and beat up lots of NPCs every session and I don’t feel that it would inherently make the campaign more or less interesting (it would give it a radically different flavor and plot).

I was told it needed some challenge, and I agree. But here’s where I really think I failed — the situation I created in the last session was very pedestrian – students talked to some people on campus, met a someone new at a nearby event. <sarscasm>Well, it’s not like people do that all the time!</sarcasm> Novel situations are scarce, perhaps not in RPGs, but definitely in real life. Throwing exotic characters in mundane situations sometimes creates an exotic situation, but you can’t depend on that to happen.

So, from now on, I’m going to try to create a new, unusual situation as the foundation for each session. I don’t know if I’ll succeed, but that’s my goal.

One thing I’ve been assuming for the clock is that I’d run it off of batteries. This may not be realistic.

I used to sell batteries, so I know a bit about them, albeit not nearly as much as I’d like. The capacity of a rechargeable battery is measured in amp-hours, or milliamps-hours as appropriate. According to the LED wizard I found online, a mere 12 of the LEDs I’ve bought for the model I’m building would make a circuit that “draws current of 960 mA”.

A rechargable NiMH cell I just happened to have around has a capacity of 2500mAh.

2500mAh/960mA = 2.6 hours

2.6 hours of operating time is not acceptable for a clock. Not even close. Having to “wind up” the clock by popping in new rechargeable cells every 3 or 4 days might be acceptably retro, but this is not.

Also, as a battery is used, its voltage decreases; the exact discharge curve depends on the battery, particularly the battery’s chemistry. Most batteries, IIRC, have a real voltage which is higher than their nominal voltage initially, but can fall dramatically at time goes on (the internet has plenty of charts of real batteries’ discharge curves).

Batteries will do fine for a model to show what the clock is supposed to look like, but probably not for the real deal.

Since I’m an impatient person, I’ve put a little PHP based version of the clock right in this blog’s sidebar. I’ve also changed the way the colors switch after realizing that Green changing into Red looked way too Christmaslike.

I’m now running StorySage on WordPress; there’s only one story there now instead of two, but it looks cool with its custom theme, NDASH.

Last time, I wrote that it’d be very difficult to work through the clock’s logic if I used only 5 output pins. Fortunately, there’s no requirement that says I need to do so — leaving two pins available for input should be sufficient. I can use 1 pin to denote AM/PM, and that leaves 10 pins available.
In general, the fewer pins make up a combination for a particular hour, the easier the logic will be to work through, so I’m starting by assigning every available combination that uses only 1 or 2 pins first (for AM and PM, respectively) then I move on to 2 and 3 pin combinations:
0000000001 1AM/PM
0000000010 2AM/PM
0000000100 3AM/PM
0000001000 4AM/PM
0000010000 5AM/PM
0000100000 6AM/PM
0001000000 7AM/PM
0010000000 8AM/PM
0100000000 9AM/PM
1000000000 10AM/PM
1000000001 11AM/PM
1000000010 12AM/PM

The clock, as I’ve previously described it, can be in one of 24 possible states, because there are 24 hours in a day. Each hour “segment” of the clock can be in one of three possible states — red, yellow, or green, but red and yellow are really the same state based on whether the time is AM or PM.

I’m thinking of making an Arduino the heart of the clock. It’s a bit of overkill, but I guess I can have a fancy light display for the change of the hour or something like that.

The Arduino has thirteen digital outputs (or inputs, as the case may be). One way to hook things up would be to have each output control a single section of the clock, and use the final one to determine AM/PM. Unfortunately, this doesn’t leave any way to change the time.

There are 24 possible states for the clock face. The minimum number of outputs needed to represent this is 5, since 2⁵=32. However a lot of fairly complex logic would be required to get the clock working in this case: 12PM would be “01100″ and 4PM would be “10000″ — here’s a table of each possible output when using five pins this way, the corresponding time, the color that the “9′o’clock” segment should be.

So, the rule just to determine if the yellow LEDs for the 9 segment should be on would be something along the lines of “Light up if ((Pin 2 AND Pin 4) AND NOT (Pin 3)) OR ((Pin 2 AND Pin 3) AND NOT (Pin 4 OR Pin 5))”

Yikes. Complex! Poking around Wikipedia gives some hints on how to make this slightly better, but nothing based on an output of 5 pins is going to be simple. Fortunately, there are some things that I can do to make things easier for myself…

I haven’t updated StorySage.com for nearly 3 years, and I think it’s time for a change. I spent yesterday working on a new, improved design for the site, please let me know what you think: