Science words

I was just contacted a couple of thoughts ago by someone who wanted to know my opinion on Smallville's decision to stop adding Fluoride to the towns water.  About a year and a half ago I posted something on the subject, it was meant to engage a girl I liked in a discussion.  She said that she was open to her position being changed, but it turns out she was lying.  That did not matter, because I learned valuable things about the issue and about other issues as well.

My large take aways from the exercise was that people are scientifically illiterate.  Scientific terms have no meaning and they are willing to rely on other people's opinions to inform there own.  The real issues here are that, I assume, they view science like magic, something that works and you don't need to understand like cellphones, and that they can't possibly figure it out on their own; they believe that it would take too long to understand it, so why bother.  Several years ago, I was contacted by a friend in a panic because the Large Haydron Collider was powering up and she had been informed that it could create miniature black holes; she was afraid that the scientists were going to destroy the world.  That is a very common thought, because we have been told for our entire lives that Blackholes are very bad to be near.  That recent reboot of StarTrek did not help at all.  

Our science fears are being spoon fed to the public by other scientifically illiterate frauds, who are bent on becoming famous through scaring people.  The Food Babe is a big one, but there are others.  The words of science have entered in to the common speech of us all and we use them in was that pervert their meanings.  We say that we have a theory about something, but we mean an idea, but then science uses the word theory and we give it the same weight as just an unproven idea— they are not the same, they never were.

Here are a few words that people don't use correctly:

Theory.  A theory is a body of scientific study.  It is an idea, but not a simple one, as it is backed up with example after example of solid research and observation.  It is not something that can be disproved with one piece of new information, but new contradictory information can modify it.  Science is a process and any theory of science has to fit the current understanding of the evidence.  Theories have stood the tests of time, at their core they are unchanged, but as new evidence comes to light it can alter the knowledge that we have, but it would rarely prove that it is false.  The Theory of Gravity is over three hundred years old and at its core it has remained unchanged in all that time, but new information allows science to modify what we know about gravity.  The same with all the other Theories.  There are not ideas that can be dismissed with a good counter argument, they are hard facts.

Hypothesis is something like a Theory.  It is an idea though that a scientist is testing with his experiment.  Science is not the way that people try to prove something works or exists but the reverse; it is the methodology of trying to prove that it incorrect and failing to do so.  This is something that people misunderstand all the time.  Science is trying its hardest to prove ideas wrong and when it fails to do this it finds the ways the universe works.  Here is an example.  People think that Bill Gates is a nice person.  We could look at all his charity work and say he is a nice person  That is not how science works, because by looking for something, we tend to stop when we find it, so Science would instead do the reverse.  Science would make the hypothesis that Bill Gates in not is nice person and would then exhaustively search and try to prove that the statement is true.  If they found anything that proves the statement correct, then science would say Bill Gates is not nice, but if they can't find anything to prove the statement, then we would know he is a nice person.  This is called the Null-Hypothesis and it is the cornerstone of science.  In science we try very hard to prove that something is false, because it is the best way to find the truth.

Significance.  We common people thing this means something that is important, but in science it is a measurement of improbability.  Roll two dice there is a one and six chance that you will roll a seven and a one in thirty-six chance that a twelve would come up.  We know this because we know the odds that the numbers would be rolled.  And if we rolled two dice a million times we would expect that we would get close to the expected probabilities.  If we rolled the dice three times though we might get two twelves and one seven, through random chance.  It could happen too.  The sample size is too small to tell.  If we rolled the dice more times though we would expect a more probable spread of numbers.  In the world of Statistics, we know how often things should happen in an average world, but when things deviate from the normal expected results these are Significant.  In science when we are looking for something we want it not to be something that could happen by chance alone.  We want the findings to be improbable and the more improbable the findings are the more believable they are.  Generally this means a very high sample number.  In the above example if we rolled the dice a million times and we found that we rolled a twelve greater or less than the expected one in thirty-six probability the more significant the results would be.  If we rolled too many or too few twelves given the number of times we rolled the dice it might mean that dice have properties than normal dice, that something is not right to result in unexpected results.  

If three in four fruit flies wander around a dish in a counter clockwise direction the significance of the findings increases if there are more than four flies, and is very significant if you looked at a million flies.  Significance tells researchers if the result could be explained by chance alone.  When scientist are trying to discover something new they try their hardest to make the results as firm as possible.  As such they tend to look for a five or six sigma significance, sigma meaning standard deviations.  A six sigma significance is similar to a one in a million chance that the results had occurred by chance alone.  One sigma by comparison is 68:100, sigma two is 5:100, sigma three is  3:1000. 

Some people ascribe words to mean one thing when they mean something else. Sometimes people label words with properties that they don't have and then make value judgements on things with these things.  Some of these words are Natural, Chemicals or Organic.  Natural and Organic are considered good and chemicals are considered bad, but this is not the case.  In Nature some things are good for people and some things are not good for them and labeling them Natural, Organic or Chemicals is false.  Uranium and Lead are both natural elements that you can find in Nature and both are deadly to humans.  Aspartame is a man made chemical not found in nature and was made be humans and used appropriately will not hurt you.

In science Organic means that has a carbon atom in its makeup.  Organic foods are supposed to mean that they were raised without unnatural crops and pesticides.  They can be raised with natural pesticides though.  Most people don't realize that all the crops that we eat have been modified by humans.  For millennia humans have been selecting the biggest and tastiest plants and planting only their seeds until after thousands of years we have the foods that we have today.  Before scientists unlocked the genetic code, we subjected fields to radiation to increase the rate of mutation to find new beneficial crops faster than the old way.  All the foods we eat have had both of these processes done to them.  The process has always been about chance, but with the new technology we can get a new plant to be better than it was before in one try, in one generation, when before it took many.  

Organic farmers are allowed to use BTU on their crops, because it is an organic approved pesticide, but scientist have added BTU to the plant itself to ward of insects.  Organic farmers spread the pesticide everywhere and it affects all pests, while the GMO crops only affect the insects that eat the crop.  There are other examples.

Dose is another word that people do not understand.  Everyone knows that Formaldehyde is used in preserving dead tissue because it is toxic, but they don't know that our bodies produce it when we digest our food.  People get upset when they see formaldehyde in our bread and people say that it is poisonous.  The answer is that it depends on the dose.  A large dose will kill people and a small dose will not.  Another example?  Vitamins, everyone knows that we need vitamins to survive, vitamins are essential molecules that we need to live.  Many people believe that if a little is good for you, then a lot must be great for you and this is not true.  We need a little iron for blood cells and other organs, but if we get too much it can kill us.  Many vitamins have a minimum and a maximum dosage and too much of one or another will kill us faster than if we had none.  Take water, you need it to live, but if you drink too much of it too fast it will kill you.  

Half Life is self explanatory, it is the time it takes for half of the substance to disappear.  Change in the case of radioactive minerals and leave the body in the case of other substances.  The half life of radioactive materials is simple and people get it, but in relation to the human body they don't.  When you take a chemical into your body sometimes it will spend time inside the body, other times it will just pass through.  When you eat something that is contaminated it will stay in the body and slowly pass out.  How quickly it passes out is called the half life time.  Some very toxic materials are toxic because they can build up inside the body and affect the individual.  Methyl Mercury has a half life in the body of about 50-70 days, which means that it takes that long for half of the material to leave the body. If you are eating contaminated material regularly it will quickly build up to a toxic level.  Ethyl Mercury has a smaller half life of about 14 days which means that it clears up much faster.  Fluoride has a half life in e body of about 8 hours, so it quickly leaves the body so the only way you could get a toxic dose of Fluoride is to ingest a very large dose several times a day.  From drinking fluoridated drinking water, the water would kill you before you get even a mildly toxic dose of fluoride.

Chemicals are those man made toxins that you see in rusted barrels, and they are also every other place you look.  Chemicals are all different arrangements of atoms in existence.  Water is a chemical and alcohol is a chemical.  Pesticides are chemicals and sugar is a chemical.  Your food is made of chemicals and you are made of chemicals.  Most chemicals are naturally occurring and some chemicals are completely man made.  Some chemicals are useful and some chemicals are dangerous, depending on the dose.  Gasoline is a chemical and so is insulin.  The air we breathe is a chemical, the air that the dinosaurs breathed was filled with chemicals.  It is all about the dose.  Oxygen makes up about 20% of the air, if we breathed in 100% oxygen we would fall asleep and a lit candle would explode and metal would burn.  Get it, it is all about the dose.

Gravity is the interaction of two masses.  The mass attracts mass and the more massive object has a greater effect on a lesser mass.  Everything is effectively stuck on this planet because the planet has a lot more mass than we do.  If I had as much mass as the planet, then the center of gravity would shift from somewhere towards the middle of the planet to half way to the surface, to me.  The idea that most people don't understand is that two objects with the same mass, but different sizes would have the same gravitational pull as the other.  A black hole is a huge star at the end of its life and all its mass is concentrated into a single point.  A black hole has such strong gravity that light cannot escape from it, the light gets sucked into it—that is the reason why it is black, but it is this way because of its density and gravity.

If our sun could be compressed into a black hole in an instant, it would not change the Earth's or any other planet's orbit, because the gravitational influence of the sun would be the same as it was before.  It would be compressed into a tiny spot and light would not be able to escape it a few kilometers from its surface, but at the distance to all the planets the effect of the gravity would be identical.  Gravity is a relationship between the mass of an object and the distance between it and the object and by compressing one into a black hole the mass and the distance do not change.  

Another example, if you were to compress large rock into a black hole and dropped it on the earth it would drop between the atoms of the earth.  A very large rock the size of a mountain would be smaller than an atom and it would have an event horizon (the distance from the core where light could not escape from it) smaller than an atom.  So the Earth would have a greater gravity than the new black hole and it would drop into the center of the Earth and because it would be so small, it would not interact with the earth at all.  Perhaps a few unlucky atoms might get sucked in to the core, but that is it and it would be in the center of the earth until the end of time, or until it evaporated, which ever comes first.

Geological timescales.  Unless you are a Young Earth Creationist, you know e Earth is about 4.5 billion years old.  The oldest rocks on the Earth are about that many years old.  The history of the Earth has been written over the face of the planet in the rocks of the continents.  The timescale of these changes has been measured in the tens of millions of years.  The human scale of time is a little smaller: all of our recorded history fits into less than five thousand years.  The real human scale is more like twenty years.  Humans look at the world and they see it as unchanging, because in the space of twenty years there are no changes.  Before Climate Change, no human would ever see changes in the world, but now we can see them in climate but also in glaciers and ice packs.  Humans will never see continents move, except in a few locations on the world.  It takes around 2000 years for a continent to drift a single kilometer at 5 cms a year, so in all of human history, a continent may have only moved two and a half kilometers.  That would mean only a few minutes longer trip, in a boat, on a trip that would take hundreds of hours or a couple minutes on a jet.  Changes on the Earth take a long time to see.  Geological timescales are therefore necessarily long.  

Genes vs alleles.  A gene is a undetermined length of a string of genetic material that does one thing.  It can govern an aspect of a living thing.  Like hair or insulin production.  An allele is an expression of a specific gene in the larger population, representing the variety of the way e gene can be expressed.  Genes are for hair, alleles are the colour if the hair, (red, blond, brown, black, grey, white) the thickness, the style, or any other variant aspect of hair.  Alleles are mutations of the original gene that make all things diverse.  We look at humans and we see differences in everyone's alleles but we recognize that we are all human genetically.  

Genetically modified organisms and not genetically modified necessarily, they could be allelecally modified.  For example Glyphosate inhibits plant enzyme production of three essential amino acids, the typical allele of that gene was replaced with a different allele that was not affected by Glyphosate.  These crops allow farmers to use a simple and relatively nontoxic herbicides to kill competing plants with their crops.  This is what Round Up Ready crops are.

Survival of the fittest is a misnomer, because fitness and fittest are often used interchangeably—they are different.  Survival of the fittest in the environment which they live, is the complete sentence which that phrase belongs.  The fittest individual may not be the strongest or the smartest or the most fecund or the one that can hold their breath the longest.  Evolutionary fitness has to do with surviving and reproducing.  I for example, do not meet those requirements.  I am strong, smart, have charisma, but I don't meet the requirements for reproduction in my environment.  In a different time or place I would be very evolutionarily fit but I live in these times and this place I don't.  I am not going to contribute my genetic material to another generation, I am a dead end.  I am fit though.  I an strong and physically healthy.  I also have morals that hold me back from going out and making women pregnant at random.  A evolutionarily fit individual is one that spreads their genetic material through into another generation, but it may not be a very responsible thing to do.  The other aspect of evolution is not seen in DNA spread to another generation.  I could strengthen others.  I can write and help people understand things, I can teach people to be strong moral individuals in society and thus strengthen our species as a whole, contribute to the fitness of my species.  So now Survival of the Fittest does not mean what those words imply personally, nor even on a level of a total species.  

Hey, do you have a worry or a concern about anything scientific, whether what it means or what it does?  Just leave me a comment below.  I will ,if you request delete it and answer it anonymously, if that is what you want.  Just ask, and don't live in ignorance.  I will research it if I don't know.

The Emperor's Soul

I have 17 of my projected 25 read now.  Books for the reading challenge.  I feel like it is cheating to read a short story and have it count, but I really loved them and is 170 pages really a short story?  The last one was The Emperor's Soul by Brandon Sanderson; can he do wrong?  Now easily my favourite author, mostly because he writes so well and secondly because although I have read almost everything he has written, he has a new book waiting for me when I show up at the book store almost every time.  The Emperor's Soul was awesome!  Really.  I read the first page and I was hooked and could not put it down.  It was the magic (it was so great), but it was the setting (it was so well thought out), but no, it was the characters they built so well on so little.

There was only one primary character, two secondary characters and two tertiary characters; the rest were incidentals, but everything worked.  In a way, the magic was a second primary character, because as you got to see how it worked you began to understand the character, the world and the other characters.  That is what Sanderson excels at.  Every book that I have read of his, the magic is the primary character that moves through the characters, the world and everything.

Well done!

10,000

Hey, I hit ten thousand pageviews sometime last night, when that person with a Chrome Linux read a few of my entries.  Sorry no prizes.  Maybe I will give someone a prize if I hit on million pageviews.  That would take another five hundred years . . . Though.  Actually I think the more entries I write the more people read my blog, or at least read part of it.  Right now I am just shy of five hundred posts. 

I don't think all my posts have been viewed at least once and I know at no one has read all my posts.  I know that there are a few people who claimed to read what I write occasionally, but they have dropped off in the past few years.  Mostly because some of my posts are insanely personal and that makes some people uncomfortable.  Those personal posts are cathartic for me.  When I write them I am telling my best friend who does not respond negatively ever.  Sometimes I hold back because I don't want to hurt people, but 

mostly I let it fly.  Right MPTR?  Hopefully I have improved as a person since starting this.  Hopefully I have helped other people too.  And I have gotten things wrong too, but no one has posted to tell me that I was wrong, so I could not have been that horribly wrong.  

My first post attempt was June 17, 2011 and my first actual post was June 26, 2011, which means that I have not yet been blogging for five years.  Also the number of people who have viewed, maybe read, my blog has been steadily increasing.  July 2015 I peaked at 662 views, but lately it has been about 200-300 views a month.  

Hey leave a comment anytime.

Have a nice day.

Love

Cats again.  It is strange that I have been living without cats for so long and yet I love them so much.  I don't love them more than children, I don't love them more than some people, but I love them more than other people too.  I heard a comparison between cats and dogs about how much they love people and I thought that the experiment was stupid, a study made by a dog lover.  

The study concluded that dogs love people more than cats love people.  They tested it by introducing new people to new dogs and cats and measured the saliva produced by the animals.  The dogs produced more saliva than the cats did, adjusted for weight of the animals, when introduced to new people.  A comparison in human terms would be introducing new people to people and seeing how well they like the new people.  Cats are like introverted people and dogs are like extraverted people.  Extraverts like new people and get excited with just about anyone.  Cats don't like new things at all and will only show affection with well known people.  From the introvert perspective, new people will probably go away, so why would you get attached to them.  

Why would you value love that is spent so freely on you versus love that builds over time.  The love that is created quickly, goes away quickly.  I have been in the house with the cats, three of them for almost three months now.  I was a curiosity for the first month and they introduced me into their private rituals slowly at the end of two months occasionally they would sleep on my bed.  Now at the end of three months, one cat jumps on my lap and then tells me that I need to lie down so she can sit on my chest and sleep with her head near my neck.  Where she purrs and drools on me.  If I pick her up and pet her  she will stay for almost three minutes, without me holding her.  

A dog loves you because you are their Master, the Alpha in the pack or just more senior to them.  When a cat seeks you out and kneads your body and snuggles up to you it means that given all the other choices it has, it wants to be there with you.  

Conversations with Libertarians

I was having a heated discussion a couple weeks ago on Facebook.  I keep this person on my profile because it is a bad idea to become isolated with people who only believe the same things that you do.  You begin to think everyone believes the same things you do and are shocked when someone else thinks differently.  If I were to take a stab at it, I would say it is what is wrong with America these days; everyone seeks out the company of people with the same view point and they became isolated.  So to help prevent this from happening to me, I read what people who do not believe what I believe say.  This leads to some interesting arguments.

One such argument had to do with the evils of Socialism.  There is a belief in the United States that Socialism is Evil and that it is equal to Communism and by that they mean a Communist Government, like Cuba and the Soviet Union.  The thing is, the point I was arguing is that the only thing Communist governments have to do with Communism is the word.  My fellow verbal duelists could not get past that it was only a name.  See words have meanings, but names do not have to follow the meanings.  The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is a name, so is Russia.  Union means something, Soviet means something, Socialist means something and Republic also means something, but used together they did not really mean what the words together are supposed to mean.  Yes it was a union, a collection of states under common rule, but it was originally an Empire that had grown for centuries of conquest into one nation, so the word Union, which implies a willing coming together for common cause is incorrect.  Republics and nations are democratically ruled and the Soviet Union was not that.  Soviet is the Russian word for council and theoretically the voice of the common worker was represented in government in these councils, but in practice the councils were filled with one party state members with only one person on the election.  Socialism is a political ideal where the fundamental aspects of the economy are controlled by the whole community.  So with a name like USSR, you would expect a nation of democratically elected Councilors drawn from the masses that rule the economy and distribute the results of labour equally, if you just looked at the name you would say that that is what the country was all about.  And just like the book and movie Animal Farm, it started out that way, but did not last for very long.  

So back to the discussion, they were saying that Socialism is bad because the Soviet Union was bad and did not work, but I countered and stated that that country was not a socialist country.  But they responded that it was, because it said so in the name of the country.  Then I pointed out that if they believed everything that was written down they were idiots and believed that the China, North Korea, Belarus and almost every other totalitarian government were Democracies because the word 'Republic' is featured prominently in their name eg the People's Republic of China et al.  I told them that they can't just believe something is what it says it is, you have to use your eyes and investigate a little.  

My point was that they could not say that Socialism was bad and cite the Soviet Union, because the Soviet Union was not a socialist regime, but a totalitarian dictatorship.  True Communistic governments have never existed for very long, mostly because they scare the shit out of the people in control and they quickly get dismantled.  In the aftermath of the German invasion of France in the 1870s Paris established a very short lived communist government.  There have been countless communist villages stretching from the the dawn of time to modern small units in the present day.  Anytime that a group of people get together for the mutual protection and mutual benefit of the community it is communism.  Look at the two words: community and communism.  Don't they strike you as oddly similar?

The true fact of the matter is that there is no pure government form works on the larger scale and remains pure.  You can not think of one, because they all fail in the end, because people are all individuals and there is nothing that can get past that.  For example, the people I was arguing with are Libertarians, they believe ere should be no taxes and no government and this government works great, as long as you are wealthy and young.  If you are poor and old and get sick often and can't work libertarian societies would not work.  You cannot name a libertarian government.  Democracies also don't work in their purest form.  Everyone votes on everything, everyone has to stay informed about everything.  There are no politicians, because everyone would be a politician.  We would get nothing done because we would constantly arguing points of view and not farming or making things.  The only government that works is a government of column A, B, C D— straight through Z.  Little bits of everything working together.  Flexible to the situation.  The Canadian version of democracy allows for the suspension of democratic rights for emergency situations, something that the American Government does not have; they have to vote on everything!  In Canada, the government can suspend democratic procedures with the War Measures Act.  It allows the government to make quick decisions without having to debate them. 

Weather

Spring has come, even to Smallville, early.  I hear in Big Smoke the tempature is going to reach the high teens this week.  Smallville might get double digits.  It is just Women's Day, the very start of March.  When you talk climate change you have to talk about long memory and one cannot just compare year to year.

Last year in Big Smoke the ice did not come out of the ground until mid April, but this year I don't think the ground froze at all, there.  In Smallville the ground froze, but there is precious little of that, so it is not a big obstacle.  Smallville is in a region called the Canadian Shield.  It covers roughly three million square kilometers of Canada and its main feature is a lack of soil.  Where the solid should be is rock.  

The company that I worked for last year will probably start earlier this year.  I remember starting the last week in March and planting stuff in frozen ground and moving snow.  

March 11.

The snow is quickly vanishing.  The last big dump in Big Smoke is gone, except in the piles on the edge of parking lots.  The weather in Big Smoke is warm, two days in the high teens in one week and Smallville the night temperatures are above freezing most of the time and the day temperatures are much warmer.  The seasonal coat is being shed from the landscape except where the piles have been laid.  Even the piles are shrinking.  The road edges are covered in heaps of sand that was piled with salt on the roads every snowfall.  

Often in the years past, the snow would stay on the ground through April and snow in May was rare but not unheard of.  The snow this year will be gone before the end of March.  The ice on the Bay used to stay until May, twenty years ago and late May fifty years ago.  The Ice on the Bay will be gone from the sheltered inlets by April.  In the past there was variation in the melt periods, but it was tighter.  These days the variation in the weather is more spread out, cold as twenty years ago to warmest Winter ever.  

Do you see it?  The People in the cities, don't see it.  The People in the Country see it everywhere.  No one looks at the stars anymore.  Or the moon.

Moods

I went house hunting.  I am very malleable to other people's ideas and I can be manipulated easily.  I know what I can live with but people tell me what I should do and look for and they are not right for me.  But I do what I am told to do.  Mostly because of repetition and sarcasm.  You need your own place.  You need to have laundry in your apartment or in the building.  Then there is the sarcasm telling me that otherwise is inappropriate.  And telling me that I can't just pick the first place I look at.  And that I need parking, because I don't have a car.  But if I have parking then I can accept work with my old company and I can spend two hours a day commuting.  

And I began looking for an apartment late and the apartments are 50% more expensive.  And it is a landlord's market in Big Smoke, meaning every listing has more than five people looking at it.  The emotions that are passing through me are overwhelming me.  And there are other things.  Part of this is demisexualism.  It is affecting me more generally.  I have lost my drive.  Heading to the big city to find love is now gone.  It feels like that part of my life is over.  And now I am empty of direction and everything else.  I still want to Game, but that is going away too.  I want to write too, for now.  Still horny but that is not aimed at anyone and so it just is.  Clearly I am depressed, but I don't know if it is general or deep.  If one person calls me back with a place for me I might be happy or I might not be.  

Part of me knows that getting back out and expressing myself will make me happier.  Dating might help too—but I don't see the point of dating anymore.  Dating feels like a fight to be popular enough to interest someone who may judge me on the basis of the month I am born in or the colour of my hair.  Meeting people takes a lot of work for me and superficial shutdowns kill my urge to even try.  And yet I try.  Someone once said Libido is a disease.  It is a disease that I have been cursed with my entire life and it ruins my life.  

Apathy

The Way Our Minds Fail

My sister got married several years ago and my mother purchased a few Muskoka chairs for the occasion.  She had a lot to do so she asked me to stain them for her. She bought the stain and the brush and she gave them all to my care.  It took a long time to paint the chairs as they were made of knotty pine and they were unpainted.  The stain was thin and the chair had widely spaced slat, so there was a lot of surface area that had to be painted.  And the wood was knotty and the stain did nothing to cover the knots; it actually accentuated the knots and the chairs were uglier because of the stain.  My mother insisted that this is what she wanted and how she wanted the chairs painted.  After I finished she pronounced that I had done a horrible job and I had ruined the chairs.  

For years afterwards every time she looked at the chairs she said to herself that I did a horrible job painting the chairs and I had ruined the chairs.  For years she did this.  Every year the criticism got a little worse in her head.  One day it all came out and she called me incompetent.  Later that same year she decided that she would paint the chairs properly.  She took out the stain and painted the chairs properly.  Her paint job was as effective as mine since the problem was not in the stainer but the knots in the chair were not covered by the paint.  She went out and bought oil based paint and covered up the ugly wood with bright yellow and red paint.  

She admitted that she was wrong for thinking I could not paint, but the damage was done through years of saying to herself that I can't do simple tasks and I was therefore incompetent.  Realizing that she had made an initial mistake years ago could not change the negative feelings that she built up because of the error on her part.  

This is how people work.  If you don't know this then try to now.  Which is why when I see people make inadvertent slights to friends I try to let them know that the slight has occurred and allow them to figure out how to fix it before permanent damage occurs.  I have noticed that this cumulative damage happens mostly with women and it is worse the older they are.  

Back in January I was with two of my friends and we had a good time in my friend's house.  In the morning, my friend who did not live there accidentally damaged my other friend's house.  Very slight damage.  I thought that my friend was an idiot for doing the damage, but I also realized that nothing could be repaired right this moment so I thought it best that they got on their way before they woke up my other friend, because he is loud and my other friend prefers to sleep late.  

We have not gone out together, the three of us because of that damage.  Every time my friend saw the damage that was caused she got angry at him.  Repairs took longer than predicted and that meant my friend was angry all the time at my other friend.  The friend who did the damage has Autism, just like me, and I know that he felt bad about doing the damage but did not know how to let my other friend that they were sorry.  My friend knows that he has Autism and so she does not think to tell him that she is angry and how he can make it right, like she assumes that every normal person would do.  And I can't tell him because she would know.  This sort of thing is the thing that can destroy friendships.  

I know that my autistic friend would never help me out if I were in a similar position, not because he does not care, but because he can't express it.  If he does express anything like that it is only to ride someone else's comment, which does nothing except aggravate me because he acts like it was obvious to him when I did it, when it is not.  But, I am not him and I hate it when my other friend speaks angrily about the incident.

So I do something.  I go visit my friend and I ask him if he has noticed that we have not been around him recently.  I tell him that if he wants to keep his friend?  And then I tell him what he has to do.  Because no one told him at when he goes on a first date with a girl he should try to wear clothes that are better than what he wears everyday.  No one told him things that other people find self evident, because he has Autism.  I thought, until I was told otherwise, that a person had to like me for who I was and not how I looked.  I told my friend that if he wanted to keep his friend, he had to ask if the damage had been repaired and how much it cost and then to pay it, because to do otherwise would be rude.  Then I told him that if he wanted to be treated better, treated like he was normal and not Autistic, he should not mention that I told him to do it.  I told him that my friend would ask me later and I would lie to them, because it was not fair for them to treat my friend like he was damaged.  It would not hurt my friends image to be raised in their eyes as his image has been lowered for three months now.  

I told him that he should do it when he was in the area.  But I should have told him that he needs to snip this off early and the more time he waits the more damage  is being done.  He probably does not understand how people think, how the way people feel about other people is more like paint being built up on a canvas and not like a brick.

My friend says that she knows that my autistic friend can't think like a normal person, but does not want to say anything to him, so will not seek him out for a year, until she is calmed down.  I look at my friend and tell her if it takes you a year to calm down, you will never forgive him and she assented to that.  I did more interference than was recommended and if he can't get it through his skull that he needs to act sooner than late, I can't help him.

If you resemble my grudge holding friend, let me tell you this: as you age you will get worse.

More house rules

Mass combat simplified

Rule of Five

One can not attack a unit larger or smaller than any unit.  

All units must be the same size to engage in combat, but one can be engaged in combat with up to five same sized units at a time, if they can surround that unit.      Each additional same sized unit adds to the attack of the primary attacking unit. A talon must split into five scales to attack a single scale.  If they are able to surround the target, the primary unit gets a +4 bonus to attack.  All units must be identical.  

War is that Skill of Mass Combat

Unless the unit size is single, war is the skill used, because it is about organizing the troops.  All rolls are using the War skill.  Each point of attack skill the unit has below that commander's War skill adds an attack penalty.  If the commander has a lower attack skill or a higher attack skill than War, it does not matter or count.  Scene length charms are the only charms that affect Mass Combat.  Scene length charms need not be War charms to be affective, but the skill portion of the dice adder is the war skill.  So character A has 0 War and a Melee scene length dice adder, the added dice are based on a 0 War.  Parry defense and attack is both added.  

You Wear your Unit.

All scene length charms affect your unit.  Armour, health, DV is based on your character and not the unit.  The quality of the troop's discipline adds a bonus equal to the difference of the two unit's discipline.  Composition of the troops adds a Might bonus.  Your War + Dex +/- bonus is your attack.  Your health is the health of your troops.  

If you damage your opponent passed their health levels, adjacent units suffer the overflow.  All defeated units are incapacitated, not dead.  Death occurs if victorious uses an action to kill defeated unit or an hour passes.  Stabilization also is an action.  

Example Magnus' unit is surrounded by five normal units.  

Magnus has a scene length Melee charm and a War of four with Dex of  four.  His unit has +8 attack dice and +4 DV melee.  Otherwise the units are identical.  The five units get one attack at +4 dice 4 Dex, 4 War, 12 dice and they need to get more than 8 successes and Magnus has a DV of 4+4 or 8.  They fail.  Magnus rolls 16 dice and has to get more than three successes 4DV-1 attack.  Magnus has a really big weapon and he attacks twice; he hits and causes 13 health levels of damage.  His weapon has a higher speed factor so he repeats his manover and does 8 more damage.  When they get to attack they only have two units and a +1 bonus now, his unit's DV is 8-2 and they have an attack of 9 dice now.  They might need to make a morale check as they have just seen two units die in one round.  

Reasoning

Mass combat should be easy, easy is fun.  It should be accessible too so although it is governed by War, every Character should have a chance so scene length Melee, Martial Arts and War charms aid melee combat and Archery, Throw and War aid range combat.  They are at a disadvantage without War, but not useless and they don't have to be specialized in Mass Combat to be effective.  Also if your Character is specialized for Mass Combat, the effect is even greater.

Overrun units alive until they are killed.  It also means that even a losing army is not destroyed and the wounded can be recovered

Role playing encounters

The tricky part of designing monsters for game play is that they have to be cool, challenging, and beatable.  It is the last two that I have the most trouble with.  I am good at story generation and setting generation.  I am really good at setting evolution, that is when the players change something or interact with people and things and the changes that happen because of the interaction.  

With RPGs where the mortals have little impact on the world the changes are all small in the short term, but in the longterm could be monumental, however some of the changes are going to have huge side effects and others not much.  In Dungeons and Dragons, clearing out a clan of orcs in a abandoned keep has major local effects but little national or international effects.  But they do exist.  The orcs preyed on the area farms and caravan routes, removing them allows the farms to grow and prosper, trade to pass unhindered, locally.  Nationally, the kings does not divert troops to police the troubled region, leaving his forces stronger and better able to defend or attack.  Simple side effects.  In a few years the area is doing much better and the area grows and supports more people and taxes revenues.  But the heroes take e treasure and they spend it, stimulating the economy.  Then they go look for more treasure.  The heroes are stronger, have better armour now, better training and next time they strike another target and another and if they stay in that one nation, that nation is starting to have major effects because of the players.  The key is to realize that nothing happens in a vacuum and that every action has an effect that may not be visible and that they work both ways.  For example, the orcs were sent to this keep not by accident, their shaman knew that there was a burial ground that the keep was built on and the primary mission of the orcs was to quell the spirits.  The orcs were doing that but were killed by the heroes before it was completed.  Now every corpse within a mile of the keep gets inhabited and roams the area with intelligent direction.  The twenty orcs that were butchered are the first ones.  The corpse of a cow hanging by the tree to drain the blood out also animates.  The heroes in the city don't realize this and when they come back, the undead army has grown to fifty before they come back and the entire area is now devoid of farmers and trade routes.  Now when they clear out the area, people will not resettle because of the poor reputation of the area, but a clan of orcs has no such problem.  Cause and effect.

That is from a less powerful perspective.   The more powerful the character group the greater the effect and the wider the region affected.  In Exalted the starting characters are essentially demigods and they have to potential to be more powerful than the gods and the curve of advancement is steep; they quickly advance from local power to national power to world power.  And because of this, every action that they do has a greater affect.  Just by acting in public they gain instant notoriety everywhere.  Much like a King or Superhero or high level Dungeons and Dragons character.  What are these effects?  Certainly neutral and allied powers start with asking questions about what you are doing today and how it affects your nation.  Roughly analogous to the concern of the Prime Minister of India worrying about who gets elected in America; it's on the other side of the world, but it will affect everything that they do.  

So understanding how the player Characters will affect the landscape of the setting and alter the world to their whims, we see how important their advisories are.  If they are too weak the offer no challenge, if they are too strong they make the story bad, unless it is the point, but that is not a good way to run a game.  So how do you make a protagonist a threat? 

One way is to fight them with goals.  The two fight but are never in contact with each other, the protagonist just offers impediments but is otherwise faceless, like for example a faceless government or culture with ingrained bureaucracies and armies that oppose the characters.  The opponent can be actual armies or it can be public opinion and cultural attitudes.  "Slavery?  There is nothing wrong with that, it is the way the world works, indeed, without slavery our country would starve and the factories would go silent."  Change in this case that attack and the culture is the opponent to be overcome.  

But games are not as fun if there is not someone to defeat and that usually means combat.  And then comes the difficulty of balancing the encounter.  How to make the encounter real and winnable but also challenging.  Which is my difficulty.  It can be conquered by looking at the numbers.  All characters have four basic values important in combat: attack, defense, damage, and armour.  They can be expressed as a number and it is a good idea to calculate these numbers for each character.  For Exalted these numbers are easier to find and finesse.  Attack is a combination of the dexterity, skill and weapon.  Damage is a combination of strength and weapon used.  Defense is already calculated as either a parry or dodge defensive value and armour is also similarly static.  Combat is best run when there is a conscious consideration of these numbers.  The attack value is the dice rolled, but in this case the number is that divided by two to get probable successes in a dice role (Dex 5 and Skill 5 mean at attack value of 5).  The attack value is compared to the defensive value which is static and not rolled.  The closer to the defensive value the two numbers are the harder it is the character will hit.  Similarly, damage and armour has the same effect, the closer the numbers are the less likely that they will be hurt and the longer the combat.  Basic example: Str 5, Dex 5, Skill 5, damage 5.  Attack value 5, defense value 5, damage value 5 Armour 5 vs. bad guy, attack value 4, defense value 4, damage value 4, armour value 4.  Statistically the combat is one sided, the challenge is not easy but inevitable, not guaranteed though.  Ten dice are random and statistically average 5 successes, have to overcome four defense, but the roll could be 10 successes or none.  The damage adds additional successes and armour value reduces the dice rolled.  The health of the opponent also tells you how long the fight will be.  Low health means quicker fights.

In Exalted there are Charms that add to the mix and many of them add dice to the character.  Modifying the DV and the ArV of an opponent and modifying the character's AV, DV and DamV.  This makes comeback potentially harder or easier.  In the above example with a character who can have double the attack would quickly wipe out the presented foe.  Instead of a projected on success, 6 would occur, damage would increase by 6 and wound potentials would go up too, shorter overall fights.  This is a good thing, because fights should not be drawn out and short one sided fights are entertaining.  When the big fight comes, it is possible to have an opponent that stretches the character but it is important that the character feels that they can hit them and do damage them.  Fighting impossible opponents is not fun, unless they can't hurt them either and it forces players to work together to win.  

There are a few roleplaying games out there and they all have different rules, but some of the rules are transferable.  When it makes sense to do so, do it.  For example, in a Star Wars RPG there is a rule that extras fight in groups and add to the overall.  So here is a neat extra rule for Exalted.  Extras can fight in groups up to five, which makes sense as five is a theme in Exalted and the smallest group in an army is a five man team.  They all have to have the same basic stats.  Every additional man adds 1 dice to the attack roll and health is added together too.  So a group of five extras role four extra dice an attack, but attack as one.  When they are hit, damage could wipe out more than one person.  So a particularly damaging attack could wipe everyone out or just one or more people.  Each loss of a person reduces the bonus by one.  Damage is increased because the chance to hit is increased.  Multiple targets can be removed with single arrows, because it is fun to think that you shot two or three people with one arrow, it is cool!  Mass effect spells affect everyone in the group equally, if the spell does not kill, it could reduce the life of the group enough to remove one group with one hit easily.  

The key to combat is to provide a fun interlude and make the characters feel like they are Heroes or even better Superheroes.  One reason why I find this difficult, combat that is and making it fun is that I don't always have a good record of the player's character's stats, so it is important to keep on top of that.  Exalted already has rules for mass combat, which can be applied to single fights, but the rules are completely different, use different stats and are complicated.  

The AV and DV strategy work for Social Combat as easily as it does for physical combat.  

Cats life

I have been living with cats for the past two months.  I have not lived with them in years, for an extended period of time.  I always liked cats over dogs.  They are a lot of work, but not more than dogs, just different kinds of work.  They are more self sufficient than dogs, but no less affectionate if you let them get to know you.  That last bit is the key.  Dogs are out going animals and cats are more introverted; they need time to get used to you and then they need more time to figure out how you fit into their life.  Then if they like you you are in the zone.  

The cats I was sitting with got to know me, and then I got to spend a lot of time with them by myself and then I got owned.  Cats own people, they decide where they are going to go and sit with who they want and cannot be forced.  If you force them they will just run when they can.  In that way they are like people.  A dog wants to be in your lap because you are in its pack, but a cat wants to be in your lap because it wants to be there.  Fae, one of the cats I am with has been sitting on my lap, but when I lean back she has been sitting on my chest head orientated towards my face, purring and drooling.  Fae is not a lap cat, she does not seek out laps, so when she sat in mine I was shocked.  When she crawled up on my chest I was truly weirded out.  

I am going to miss her.  I am going to move soon and be out of this house, away from the cats.  Cats are expensive.  My friend babies her cats.  They get the best food and a variety of food, the expensive food.  And then they have vet bills and they have medicine.  Each cat cost her between $1500 and $2000 a year, and she has three of them.  And they are stray cats.  They are also outdoor cats except in the winter and at night.  

I would want a cat, when I stop moving around so much, or rather I hope at some cat wants me.