Reason Writers on TV: Matt Welch Talks Iowa & Ron Paul on The Real News Network

Reason Writers on TV: Matt Welch Talks Iowa & Ron Paul on The Real News Network:

On Wednesday, Jan. 4, Reason Editor in Chief Matt Welch
discussed the Iowa caucus and the significance of Ron Paul's
challenge to the political establishment with Raw Story Executive
Editor Megan Carpentier and host Paul Jay of The Real News Network.
Around 20 minutes:

Fish disguised as copycat octopus

Fish disguised as copycat octopus: First there was the octopus that mimicked fish; now a fish is copying the octopus, according to new photographs.

Violence: Are Percentages or Raw Numbers a Better Measure?

Violence: Are Percentages or Raw Numbers a Better Measure?:

Steven Pinker has been
getting much attention lately for arguing in his new book

The Better Angels of Our Nature, against a lot of people's
surface assumptions based on a pretty geopolitically violent past
century, that modernity and the modern state have in fact made the
world a far less violent place.

David Bentley Hart at First Things
wonders if Pinker's measures make the most sense, given that we
are still, after all, sitting on a pretty big pile of murdered
bodies here in the aftermath of the 20th century:

Pinker’s method for assessing the relative ferocity of different
centuries is to calculate the total of violent deaths not as an
absolute quantity, but as a percentage of global population. But
statistical comparisons like that are notoriously vacuous.
Population sample sizes can vary by billions, but a single life
remains a static sum, so the smaller the sample the larger the
percentage each life represents. Obviously, though, a remote Inuit
village of one hundred souls where someone gets killed in a
fistfight is not twice as violent as a nation of 200 million that
exterminates one million of its citizens. And even where the orders
of magnitude are not quite so divergent, comparison on a global
scale is useless, especially since over the past century modern
medicine has reduced infant mortality and radically extended life
spans nearly everywhere (meaning, for one thing, there are now far
more persons too young or too old to fight). So Pinker’s assertion
that a person would be thirty-five times more likely to be murdered
in the Middle Ages than now is empirically meaningless.

In the end, what Pinker calls a “decline of violence” in
modernity actually has been, in real body counts, a continual and
extravagant increase in violence that has been outstripped by an
even more exorbitant demographic explosion.

A Reason.tv inteview with Pinker:

Gary Oldman Screaming Call of Duty Orders on Conan [Video]

Gary Oldman Screaming Call of Duty Orders on Conan [Video]:

Actor Gary Oldman has a long and lengthy resume with varied roles. But the one that concerns us today, and Conan O'Brien, is his work as Viktor Reznov from Call of Duty: World at War and Call of Duty: Black Ops.

In this Conan clip, Oldman voices some Reznov and talks about doing "battle chatter", or shouting commands over music and explosions to players.

I don't know which is cooler: Oldman doing Reznov or Oldman doing Reznov in a purple bow tie.

Gary Oldman: Call of Duty Black Ops Screamovers [TeamCoco.com]

Mitt Romney as a D&D Character? NYC Show Celebrates Art and Gaming

Mitt Romney as a D&D Character? NYC Show Celebrates Art and Gaming:

Mitt Romney as the D&D character "Lord Speldyall," art by Casey Jex Smith. One of the works in the “Dungeons and Dragons On & Ever Onward” art show. (Courtesy of the Allegra LaViola gallery).

Today and tomorrow mark what looks to be an exciting series of events in New York City that celebrate the impact and continued relevance of Dungeons & Dragons on the culture.

The “Dungeons and Dragons On & Ever Onward” art show at the Soho Gallery of Digital Art is, according to Tavis Allison, one of the event’s organizers, “a snapshot of the contemporary NYC scene forming at the intersection of roleplaying games, the art world, and the conservation of Dungeons & Dragons’ legacy.” Mr. Allison says that curator Timothy Hutchings has assembled a retrospective of digital works by contemporary artists, and a selection of images from the Play-Generated Maps and Documents Archive (PlaGMaDA) that “demonstrate the roots of the connection between playing D&D and making art.” Artists include Ryan Browning, Casey Jex Smith, and a group called the Doomslangers, plus video by Hutchings, Erol Otus, and Autarch. The show runs thru January 11.

Allison’s Adventuring Parties LLC (which, get this, organizes private role-playing sessions to celebrate birthdays, bachelor or bachelorette parties, reunions, etc.) will be throwing gaming events at the gallery from 7-11 pm tonight and tomorrow night.

The opening night party tonight combines a wine and cheese reception for the artists with a beer and Doritos fundraiser for the Tower of Gygax, one of Gen Con’s most popular events. The Tower of Gygax is an D&D adventure that has, Allison says, “introduced thousands of gamers to the joys of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons while slaughtering the characters of those whose wits and luck fall short of the standards set by the great Dungeon Master.” Allison has been one of the Tower’s DMs since the beginning. He’s bringing the Tower of Gygax to NYC for the first time, raising money to support this fan-based effort to join Gary Gygax’s family in promoting role-playing and marking Gary’s role in creating the RPG industry.

Ryan Browning, "Slain Dragon" Illustration for the Adventurer Conqueror King System (Image courtesy of Tavis Allison)

The party tomorrow celebrates a new gaming system, Adventurer Conqueror King, and its entry into retail stores following a successful crowdfunding effort on Kickstarter. During Thursday’s celebration at the gallery, Adventuring Parties will be introducing guests to Erol Otus’s Island Town adventure, which will be one of the first gaming releases to use the Adventurer Conqueror King compatibility logo. And Thursday’s party will conclude with performances by d20 Burlesque, an acclaimed burlesque show catering to the gamer community in the New York City area. The ladies may do their famous d20 dance.

“Dungeons and Dragons: On & Ever Onward” marks the beginning of a busy year for the NYC art and gaming scene. On March 15-19, the 319 Scholes gallery will present “Big Reality,” which also explores the intersection of art and role-playing games. Curator and PlaGMaDA founder Timothy Hutchings is also expected to announce a new line of books documenting the intersection of art, RPGs, and gaming history.

Marginal revolutionaries

Marginal revolutionaries:

JUST in case you missed it between holiday celebrations, please allow me to draw your attention to a briefing in the most recent edition of The Economist which examines the impact of the economics blogosphere as seen in the growing prominence of several heterodox schools of thought. It's a remarkable story. From my perspective, the phenomenal success of the push for nominal GDP targeting, spearheaded by the once-obscure economist and blogger Scott Sumner, is the most impressive. The possibility of using a nominal output or income target as a monetary tool is not a new one, but it was almost entirely off the radar and out of the discussion before Mr Sumner began his crusade. It has now, Federal Reserve minutes confirm, made it into policy discussions at the highest levels. That's quite a success.

And while I'm certainly biased in my view, I can't help but second the message of an accompanying leader:

Previous publishing revolutions, such as the advent of printing, prompted similar concerns about trivialisation and extremism. But whatever you think about the impact of blogging on political, scientific or religious debate, it is hard to argue that the internet has cheapened the global conversation about economics. On the contrary, it has improved it...

The back-and-forth between bloggers resembles the informal chats, in university hallways and coffee rooms, that have always stimulated economic research, argues Paul Krugman, a Nobel-prizewinning economist who blogs at the New York Times. But moving the conversation online means that far more people can take part. Admittedly, for every lost prophet there is a crank who is simply lost. Yet despite the low barriers to entry, blogs do impose some intellectual standards. Errors of fact or logic are spotted, ridiculed and corrected. Areas of disagreement are highlighted and sometimes even narrowed. Some of the best contributors do not even have blogs of their own, serving instead as referees, leaving thoughtful comments on other people’s sites and often criss-crossing party lines.

This debate is not always polite. But was it ever? The arguments between John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich Hayek in the 1930s, some of them published in academic journals, were not notable for their tact. One observer likened their exchanges to the brawling of “Kilkenny cats”. Both men, one suspects, would have relished taking their battle online.

The economics blogosphere, timely as ever, has provided a nice illustrative example in recent weeks, in the form of an ongoing debate on the nature of sovereign debt burdens and the implications of Ricardian equivalence for fiscal policy. Nick Rowe helpfully collects many of the relevant links here. The discussion is not always polite. It is interesting and enlightening, however. And it disciplines participating thinkers in a way that few other mediums manage.

Top 10 D&D Modules I Found in Storage This Weekend #1 (GeekDad Wayback Machine)

Top 10 D&D Modules I Found in Storage This Weekend #1 (GeekDad Wayback Machine):

We were digging through the storage shed this weekend to find just the right box of Christmas decorations that were needed to make things perfect before the party, when I should chance across the dusty stack of old Dungeons & Dragons modules I’ve had with me for… well, for a very long time. For all the GeekDads who have gamed, as I scan and read through these, I’ll post them for for your enjoyment and comment, if you remember them.

Here’s the first, B1: In Search of the Unknown – the module that came with the boxed Basic Set, and was the first adventure that many new gamers played, setting out to find and explore Quasqueton, the abandoned dungeon complex of famed (but now, sadly, dead) adventurers. It’s a classic dungeon crawl for beginning characters. The key things to remember:

• If you’re quiet, and put out your lights, the bats won’t bug you.


• There’s no treasure in the “Treasure Cave.” There are, however, two magical berserkers.


• If you place a chip from the Magical Stone in you mouth, something really good (like granting a Limited Wish), or something really bad (permanent loss of 1 point of intelligence) will happen.


• Don’t confuse the Magical Stone with the bat guano.

[Editor's Note: this series originally ran in December, 2007.]