Greg Sanders

Just had my first experience with Capital Bikeshare

2012-05-30T22:22:50-04:00

Capital Bikeshare is a subscription system in D.C. which allows you to check out bikes at one location and return them to another. If you check the bike in again fast, in 30 minutes I think, there's no charge. I got a subscription when I saw a discount for them earlier, it took a few days to get my pass so you can't just grab and go when first you feel interested. Anyways, this is the first time I've used them in large part because during my earlier attempts I underestimated the force it took to remove a checked out bike.

There is an app called spotcycle that helps you find stations, although it doesn't seem to be integrated into Google Maps in such a way that helps you pull up directions. I ended up just running spotcycle while walking and then pulling it up again when pulled over at a corner near my destination. To the degree that your cycling between familiar locales this won't be a problem but it can be a bit trickier when first starting out.

On the whole I found biking in D.C. and easier prospect than I expected. There's a reasonable number of bikers about and a fair number of bike lanes if you're willing to adjust your route a bit. Tonight, I'd been making a trip to Adams Morgan, a neighborhood notably without a Metro stop, and bikeshare really does seem like a great way to do it.

I'll keep experimenting with the system. I'm curious whether I can use it to get to my occasional appointments at Georgetown University Hospital or as a means of reasonably reliable conveyance to Union Station when the hour is late and Metro trains are less frequent. Time will tell, but I had a good time riding so I'm happy to experiment. Now I just need to bring my helmet into work.

The destinations themselves, Bourbon and Bier Baron, were quite pleasant. I'm not a huge bar person but they both offered a pretty good experience on a Wednesday night.

Last Train Home 2012/05/15

2012-05-17T01:21:29-04:00

I recently rediscovered where to go to get write ups for criticism of video games. the aptly named Critical Distance blog. Game articles are the theme of this round up and if you want a wider selection I certainly recommend checking out critical distance:

I already mentioned this on my Google+ feed, but I thought Extra Credits did a constructive job of looking at the problem of harassment in online gaming communities and the question of what can be done about it.
Soctt Juster at PopMatters put his finger on a game trait that I think older games often managed better than newer titles: "One of my favorite aspects of video games is their ability to simulate worlds that reconcile the conflict between huge spaces and quick trips. Virtual spaces can be big enough to feel large and mysterious but small enough to mentally map as a contiguous whole, even after you get the ability to fast travel via the equivalent of a virtual jet. "
Krystian Majewski at Game Design Scrapbook wrote a piece noting that the first Suikoden game pull off the team building premise of Mass Effect and in some ways manages it even better. Sadly, many of the later Suikoden games are fairly widely seen as disappointments, although I quite liked Suikoden 2 as well. I'm not sure where the series hit the wall.
Wondering where the music games have gone and whether they'll return? Adil Sherwani at Medium Difficulty has an insightful discussion on what Guitar Hero and Rock Band did and did not achieve while citing Smule's Ocarina iPhone app as pointing to a possible way forward. I'll have to see if the app is available for Android as well.

Legend of Korra continues Avatar's tradition of excellent antagonists

2012-05-04T23:55:03-04:00

Sympathetic antagonists are one of my favorite things in fiction, if for no other reasons then that they add variety to the stories. If the enemy is nihilist or totalitarian evil then their degree of success is just a matter of how dark the pieces is. However, if the threat actually has a sympathetic cause, in this case standing up for ordinary people in a city largely run by those with special bending abilities, then it is far from clear how things will shake out.

I don't want to get into too much speculation at this point. Let me just say instead that if you were a fan of the first series be sure to check out Legend of Korra. This is particularly easy because the episodes are available, with commercials, for free online. Coming in without having seen the first series won't tell you as much about the world and will indirectly spoil some things about the ending. However, if you don't have an easy means to get a hold of it then I'd say that the core plotline should be perfectly enjoyable and the 70 year time skip means that the world in question is a very different one.

This ones for Shar and other lovers of swimming predators

2012-05-04T15:33:27-04:00

Shark by Gaba Kulka

I'm a big Gaba Kulka fan and will have to post some album reviews at some point. Short version: she's got an interesting vocal range and playfully incongruous lyrics.

Last Train Home

2012-04-24T22:37:56-04:00

I've been stockpiling these for a while. Some probably merit their own blog posts, but my new years resolution for this year was 'no more backlogs.'

Sara Robinson argues that we need to return to the 40 hour-week. Yes, techies too. She cites research that notes that we first adopted the forty hour limits for a mix of worker rights and productivity reasons. As a side note, I think it might make sense to extend the school day. However, teacher workloads and student homework assignments should be adjusted accordingly.
Mike Mitchell cites great artistic advice from Ira Glass. The short version is that when you start on any artistic project your ambitions won't match your taste. However, by completing many projects you can start to close the gap.
Fredrik DeBoer clips a bloggingheads.tv between Aaron Brady and Mike Konzcal arguing for keeping public universities public. This was in the context of the police crackdown against the occupy movement at UC Davis. This applied to a question at a Purple Line event this past year at the University of Maryland Campus. One of the student reporters had asked whether having the light rail on campus would allow non-students to access the campus at night (there's restrictions on those driving, but not walking, in). Fears about campus crime are not illegitimate, although there are real differences between having a car and coming in via transit such that at very least there's a transit driver that would likely see the riders. With that caveat out of the way, the question failed to recognize that public university campuses aren't a gated community, they are to serve the public.

Event: SIPRI military expenditure data 1988-2011

2012-04-17T23:18:01-04:00

The briefing: The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) is well known for their military expenditure data which emphasizes consistent global coverage. Sam Perlo-Freeman went over the data. World spending is $1.7 trillion and for the first time since 1998 did not increase in real terms. That comes to $249 per person or 2.5% of world GDP. This leveling off was driven by the United States, although otherwise patterns from 2010 to 2011 I hard to discern. Russia and some developing world countries have been moving up on rankings and European countries have been down, although the U.S. is still dominant at 41% of global military spending. One regional point: Asia and Oceania has overtaken western and central Europe in the past few years.

SIPRUI puts the U.S. at $711 billion in outlays, which includes State department military age. That puts it at 4.7% of U.S. GDP, one of the higher rates in the world. They anticipate overall spending to fall given the end of the wars, assuming no new ones start, and if sequestration starts in January 2013 it will mean much steeper declines. By comparison, the total for Europe was fairly constant, but only thanks to increases from Russia and Azerbaijan (89%!). In central Europe the cuts started in 2009, spending in western Europe ha been declining more recently although France, Germany, and the U.K. have been making smaller cuts so far. As you might expect, Greece, Spain, and Italy have all had fairly dramatic cuts.

Panel discussion: Chantal de Jonge Oudraat (SIPRI) moderated a panel discussion with Nora Bensahel (Center for a New American Security) and Gordon Adams (Stimson Center).

Nore Bensahel thought that sequestration was the big issue for the U.S. and thought that no progress was likely until the election. That's a 11 week lame duck session as the payroll cuts and the Bush tax cuts will also be expiring. She expects some sort of temporary reprieve as the most likely outcome. The current planned cuts only result in a 1.7 percentage point cut and if sequestration is included, that drops by 3.6 percentage point cut. That's still about at the 2002 spending percent and still leaves the U.S. higher as a percentage of the world than any point in the 1990s.

In Asia and Oceania, Bensahel expected next year will see a jump in spending by China's neighbors. On Russia, she argued that Russian capabilities don't seem to be matching Russian spending due to weaknesses in the Russian industrial base and a poor state of personnel, readiness, and training. She expects some of the neighbors will increase their capacity, although austerity measures will be a check on that. Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia have all been dramatically dropping their spending (all 30% or greater drops) despite likely being particularly worried.

Gordon Adams thought the Russia data was the most interesting but similarly doubts their capabilities and ability to maintain their spending. He argues that oil prices are a key driver and the we should expect that changes in the global oil price to drive drops or rises in the future. He's skeptical about increases in eastern Europe spending, although he thinks that she's right that the economy will be key. He expects a fair amount of useless discussion about NATO burden sharing until we have a real discussion about how to deal with common challenges and acknowledge Europe's comparative lack of interest in intervention in Asian affairs. In Latin America he expects the drug wars to drive variance.

On the U.S., historically debt and end of wars traditionally trumps defense spending with cuts of about 30% in ten years. Interestingly, they tend to happen under Republican presidents. He thinks that the present discussion is a shadow play and that sequester may well not happen. He mentioned a variety of other big issues that will be discussed in the lame deck session which could be the making of a big disaster or a deal. Big question with sequester will be at what level OMB decides to implement the sequester. He expects that even with a likely kicking of the sequester can down the road, there still will be notable drop offs but he agrees with Bensahel that this won't notably effect our current dominant global capability.

Q&A:

On data quality and transparency, Perlo-Freeman found that central European and Latin America data was getting better while in the Middle East and Africa the data is getting worse. A few countries, such as Vietnam and South Korea, are getting better at transparency but most are staying the same.

On the topic of differences between countries, Bensahel noted that there's no consistent way to account for losses to corruption, that gets to a regionalist issue. Adams added that a primarily internal versus primarily external role (e.g. China vs. U.S.), the aforementioned corruption, and the active participation of the military in some economies. Benashel added that the Middle East is also an area where military spending has a particularly low rate of conversion from spending to capability.

On use of exchange rates versus purchasing power parity which can result in very different trends. U.S. versus China is 5:1 with market exchange rates and 3:1 with purchasing power parity (PPP). He argues that PPP does give a better measure of opportunity costs, guns versus butter, but thinks its complex for capabilities. Personnel are cheaper in China but training and equipping them to U.S. standards may not be. Top of the line military technology, when available in the PRC, is almost certainly not cheaper and may even be more expensive.

There was a discussion of what intelligence spending was included in SIPRI's total. Gordon Adam's pitched his recent book for more detail on the issue of what falls in the national security budget.

When asked whether the U.S. should go lower than planned spending, Adams thinks we probably can and will. He thinks that non-defense political and policy factors will drive the decrease, national security factors becomes less salient. Bensahel agreed arguing that percentage of world spending isn't really the relevant calculation.

On whether the U.S. should step in for European decreases, Adams notes that there's no functional or geographic definitions of responsibility, thus there's no agreement between the Europeans and the United States about what the shared burden is. Bensahel agreed and said that she expects that coming out of Libya and Afghanistan we'll be seeing NATO as less valuable for military if not political reasons. The trouble with intra-European cooperation, provision guided munitions, aerial refueling was a surprise and suggests that NATO has minimal independent operations capability. Jonge Oudraat added that the 'smart defense' concept could compound the lack of independence issue. Perlo-Freeman notes that even with a recall of U.S. forces, there's no real threat from Russia. It's about the ability to do operations of choice, which is going to reduced over time.

Susan Jackson, also of SIPRI, commented on the status of the military arms productions. She noted lot of growth in the military services industry. In the Middle East, where's there's less bang for the buck in terms of capability per dollar of military spending, industry is moving in to fill gaps. There's also an increase in corporate strategy to export outside of the Middle East and Europe. India, the Middle East, and Brazil have been the main targets. The third major trend is moving into cyber security.

Arms race between Azerbaijan and Armenia, Perlo-Freeman notes that Azerbaijan winning the race thanks to oil revenue. They both have have some of the highest shares in Europe and there's a real risk of war.

Brazil cut military spending despite growth which was Perlo-Freeman attributed to an attempt to avoid economic overheating without hitting social programs. He notes that they do have regional ambitions, but that the center-left coalition doesn't consider that the highest priority. Adams argued that guns versus butter distinctions seem to be coming more apparent. At the same time, global conflict is down, imminent security threats have faded in Latin America and Europe.

Review: The Whiskey Rebels by David Liss

2012-04-17T00:42:05-04:00

Post-Revolutionary War America isn't a setting I've read much about before, let alone as the basis for a novel that is in part a financial thriller. The Whiskey Rebels trades off between a disgraced Revolutionary War spy and an upcoming would-be novelist. The former primarily stays in the great-ish east coast cities of the day while the latter travels with her husband into the wilds past Pittsburgh. The actual Whiskey Rebellion itself doesn't play that big a role, as the period is wrong, but that's no demerit to the story.

Both the leads are good characters, with a plausible mix of flaws that I felt the novel sometimes forgave but rarely whitewashed. The prominent supporting characters include a slave whose promised freedom was wrongly delayed, a lady whose high stature provides her little protection against her husband, and a vicious Jewish special agent working for Alexander Hamilton. As that list should show, the characters come from a variety of backgrounds which enriches the historical setting of the novel.

The story is a mix of conspiracy thriller and frontier adventure with the rise of the Bank of the United States, hated by the eventual Whiskey Rebels, being a core plot element. I rather liked this as it was a part of history I knew a bit about but was on the balance more ignorant than informed. At the same time, it was quite relevant to our modern era.

Almost to my surprise, the ending was particularly solid. I don't want to give anything away, but I'd say it managed to stay true to the values and cleverness common to the rest of the book. That can be particularly hard to pull when the main characters can be tricksters in their own right, which makes the successful implementation all the more satisfying.

Source: Moti, thanks Moti!

Review: Paolo's in Georgetown, D.C.

2012-04-11T19:21:44-04:00

My mother and I got lunch at Paolo's on my birthday before heading over to Georgetown Hospital. It was a good choice for a nice day as there were a fair number of patio seats available. We shared one higher-end entrée, seared scallops, and one $13 grilled chicken pizza. Both were quite good as were the warm breadsticks and dipping sauce served at the outset.

I don't hit Georgetown often, but I'll definitely keep this place in mind for the future. It was a short hop from the closest Circulator stop and the range of menu items means it could esaily fit different occasions. As is, we took a fair amount of pizza with us as leftovers; we could probably have split just that and a salad and been satisfied.

Source: Mom's treat, thanks Mom! Priscilla's recommendation, thanks for that from both of us; well done!

Things other games should steal from 4th edition DnD

2012-04-10T23:58:45-04:00

I've actually been playing some version or other of the venerable system since college. However, I'm not really the target demographic of the next edition as I'm not that into fantasy and quite like non-combat mechanics, and D&D Next aims to be the arch-typical version of the system rather than moving in a new direction. There will doubtless be modules of interest to me, but this seems like a good time to say my goodbyes. The points below are meant to be my favorite parts of the edition, not the best in any objective sense.

Special powers that can be used freely (encounter powers and at-wills): 4th edition made fairly heavy use of powers that could be used at will or once per scene. If I'm playing in an environment where supernatural abilities are in play, I like to be able to use them freely. The once per scene (or encounter to use the technical term) powers did this particularly well, because they could be substantial without being game breaking. This combined well with 4th edition's encouragement to freely reflavor things: the mechanical effect may be defined but it is easy enough to ascribe the source to anything you desire.

Mechanically meaningful non-attack powers (utility powers and themes): As I mentioned above, I'm not quite a stereotypical story gamer. While I enjoy challenge and conflict, I'm just more interested in confrontations that aren't violent, let alone lethal. 4th edition D&D offered two notable new sources for such abilities: utility powers, which came along every few levels, and themes, which help define how a character starts out. Good flavor and mechanical matches particularly matter here and D&D delivers with powers like allowing rangers to keep someone from falling over a ledge by catching them with an arrow or allowing those skilled in the ways of magic to use technobabble to help get them out of a social problem once a scene. This is a mechanical space that could in theory be filled by feats, a game element that sometimes involves prerequisite but is typically chosen from a vast list. The selection of utility powers is more limited; you have to qualify for them via class, theme, or skill. This encourages them to be more defined, easier to balance, and makes their numbers less overwhelming. Also critically, neither utility powers nor themes are charged with doing the heavy lifting of making a character effective, which gives more room for flavorful selections.

Digital tools: I think the character builder and online rules compendium has been rather game changing. I've paid the subscription fee happily and haven't even minded that much when the character builder went from desktop client to web tool.

Design that draws from a wide range of games: This is sometime mentioned as a knock against 4th edition, particularly in reference to video games. However, I'd say that video games and board games have both advanced greatly over the past decades. Not all changes have been for the best, but I think we have a much better idea of what it means to get the underlying math right. This matters to me as a player, because knowing that I've checked the box when it comes to effectiveness gives me freedom to be playful. This matters far more as a GM, as getting a solid balanced system should be one of the big perks of going to larger companies for games. Playtesting, R&D shops, and system updates all take hard work and are well worth paying for.

Things other games should steal from Mass Effect 2

2012-04-05T23:55:10-04:00

I just finished the game with my femShep paragon sentinel. I enjoyed it, although I think its best thought of as a series of episodes rather the stronger mini-arcs and main arc of the first game. In keeping with my recent post on pop culture dominance, I'm not going to go with a full review or even a critique. Instead, I'll just emphasize those elements I'd like to see used in other games.

But first, here's my favorite character doing Gilbert and Sullivan:

Having a small number of well defined powers with clearly labeled interactions. Some people have complained that Mass Effect 2 was dumbed down; that may be true. However, having a smaller number of powers and clearly labeling when they would be effective allowed for a wider range of mechanically distinct characters. In addition, I think I actually used all of the powers available in the game fairly often. Similarly, the original game was vastly improved upon by dramatically reducing the number of guns while making them actually feel different.
Evocative hacking mini-games: There were two hacking games: one involved selecting matching source code, the other involved linking circuits on a board. They were both quite simple and actually could have used a steeper difficulty curve. However, they were enough to make the hacking feel genuinely technical in no small part thanks to good visual design. The probe mini-game does fairly well too in that regard, but I disapprove of that form of resource gathering because it's ultimately a mechanic that lets you trade your time for more in-game resources.
The conversation interrupt mechanic: The alignment system is nothing spectacular: you get paragon or renegade points based on your choices, although nicely enough you often can get some of each from the same conversation. That said, I was pleased by the way the plot mandated that being a paragon required some standing up to your patron. In any event, those points are spent by allowing you to interrupt a conversation; for example, a paragon might convince someone not to do something stupid while a renegade might shoot them before they had a chance to draw. In Star Wars terms, Han Solo was able to shoot Greedo first thanks to all of the mouthing off he does elsewhere in the series.
Reasonable chance of a few support characters dying: I hope I'm not being too bloody-minded here, but people die in war and its important to remember that. One of the real strengths of the first two games of the series is that your choices directly impact who dies. I particularly regret the character who died in my playthrough; he might have had an important future, but I think some regret is appropriate for this sort of tale.

(Mild outcome spoilers on my playthrough: lost Grunt, dating Garrus)

Origin: Gift from Ryan, thanks Ryan!

Update: Noted origin and moved spoilers to the end to get them out of the google plus preview.