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Picard: Is Truth More Lawful or Good?

May 22, 2016Character Classes, Idle Speculation, Internet Culture, Politics, Thoughts on Thoughtsadmin

So, I was reading some internet forums associated with one of my favourite webcomics, and an argument came up about Captain Picard’s ‘alignment’.

“That’s a really good one. (Although I don’t watch enough star trek to recognize the LN guy)It’s Captain Picard. You could make a case for him being Lawful Good, just not that friendly, but LN suits him just as well.”

(A brief aside. ‘Alignment’ in this context is from Dungeons & Dragons, where each character is considered to be aligned along two axes, ‘lawful-neutral-chaotic’ (respect for the rule of law) and ‘good-neutral-evil’ (good of the many vs. good of the few). This gives 9 ‘alignments’, from ‘lawful-good’ to ‘chaotic-evil.)

Some had him as ‘lawful-good’, or trying to do the best for the many while respecting laws. some had him as ‘lawful-neutral’, where adherence to laws is more important than the good of the many. I can see the ‘lawful-neutral’ interpretation, just from listening to one of his quotes:

“The Prime Directive is not just a set of rules; it is a philosophy… and a very correct one. History has proven again and again that whenever mankind interferes with a less developed civilization, no matter how well intentioned that interference may be, the results are invariably disastrous.”

It seems at first blush that here the law (the Prime Directive) is more important than any group of pre-warp civilizations[1].

Another famous quote:

“The first duty of every Starfleet officer is to the truth, whether it’s scientific truth, or historical truth, or personal truth! It is the guiding principle on which Starfleet is based, and if you can’t find it within yourself to stand up and tell the truth about what happened, you don’t deserve to wear that uniform.”[2]

So we have two questions here:

1) Is adherence to the Prime Directive more ‘lawful’ or ‘good’?

2) Is Truth more ‘lawful’ or ‘good’?

1) The Prime Directive ostensibly has the interests of the many (the inhabitants of a pre-warp planet) outweighing the interests of the few (those few people who would exploit them).

And indeed, when the Prime Directive does not have their best interests in mind, Picard tends to look for exceptions.

Although there are times when he seems perfectly willing to let a planet’s culture perish to avoid interference.

So, I would count this as the Prime Directive is a ‘law’ that is mostly ‘good’, and Picard usually tries to move it towards ‘good’ when there is wiggle room. At the same time, when the ‘law’ conflicts with the ‘good’, sometimes (but seldom) he chooses ‘law’, so ‘lawful-good’ seems appropriate.

2) Now, let’s look at truth. Another quote seems to be in order here:

“Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.”[3]

This would suggest that barring violating the Prime Directive above, truth should be ‘good’, specifically the speaking of truth to power. (I think that’s what actually necessitates the Prime Directive, else if truth was pre-eminent, interference to tell people the error of their ways would be a very convenient excuse.)

So, truth is probably ‘good’. Is it ‘lawful’? You could make the argument that adherence to truth is equivalent to a code of honour[4], and it’s just as important (or more important) to do things the right way as to reach your objective. So, truth can be either or both of ‘lawful’ and ‘good’. The quote above from ‘The First Duty‘ is speaking about the good of the many (Starfleet, the reputation of his dead friend, and the trust between Starfleet officers) outweighs the good of the few (Wesley’s year of school, his reputation), so I’d call this a meeting of ‘lawful’ and ‘good’.

I’d say Picard is pretty firmly ‘lawful-good’, with some ‘neutral-good’ leanings (bending the rules to help people) and some ‘lawful-neutral’ leanings (sometime rules are absolute).

Thoughts? Comment below!

[1]Leaving out the non-interference in the Klingon civil war as out of scope.

[2]That quote also appears here:

[3]Note that George Orwell is most frequently associated with this quote, as is William Randolph Hearst. The actual source seems unclear. I enjoyed a number of the humorous takes on the quote in that article.

[4]No, not the episode. And I’m not linking to it.

The Name’s the Thing

May 21, 2016Idle Speculation, Puns, Words!, Writingadmin

Last week, I was talking with D, and he mentioned that the name of this blog ‘Sometimes Egregious, Always Gregarious’, because the words are more complex than necessary, because many people don’t know what ‘egregious’ means[1], might turn people away[2], and thus be unduly limiting. In a way, it might act as a filter on those who might read it.

I responded that I don’t see it that way at all. I chose those words because they seemed to fit, and when I looked back, I could find many reasons why that was so[3].

Some might say that my entire blog is itself a filter, and I’m the only one that would enjoy it in its entirety. I am at peace with this notion. At the moment, I’m writing the things that I want to write that I think people might be interested in. Sometimes I’m wrong, sometimes it’s a completely different audience than the previous post.

At the same time, I use the words that flow naturally when I’m talking about a particular topic. As when I’m teaching, I try to notice when I’m talking about something when not everyone would have the appropriate background, and I’m sure jargon will creep in, as it’s useful for being precise and concise. (Also, I love big words, I love the sound and taste of them, and I could never fully give them up.)

[1]Interesting that ‘gregarious’ is considered much more common. They seem pretty similar to me, but what do I know?

[2]Also, ‘

‘ feels easy to me, but I realize many people read on mobile.

[3]I’m also really enjoying having some of these thoughts I’ve had kicking around in my head now in blog posts, so that I can refer to them as a link rather than having to write them out each time.

Numerical Jokes

May 20, 2016Nostalgia, Punsadmin

So, a person walks in to a bar. As they enter, someone up on stage says ‘one hundred and fourty seven’, and the whole bar erupts with laughter.

The person walks over to the bartender and asks ‘What are they doing? Why did everyone laugh just then?’

The bartender says ‘Well, a few years ago, they realized that they were just telling the same jokes over and over again, so they wrote them all down and assigned numbers to them. Saves a lot of time.’

‘Oh! Let me try!’

The person runs up on stage, and yells ‘Fifty-two!’. Dead silence. ‘Fifty two?’ Dead silence. They disconsolately walk off the stage and back to the bar. The bartender says ‘It’s alright.’

‘What did I do wrong?’

‘Just watch.’

A person from the crowd, a regular it would seem, walks up onto the stage. ‘Fifty two.’

The crowd erupts with laughter again.

‘What? Why did that work?’

‘Well, it’s all in how you tell a joke.’

Then a different person comes out of the crowd, and walks slowly up to the stage. They pause for a while, and then say ‘One thousand, two hundred and seventeen.’

There is a pause. Another pause. Then one person starts laughing, then another, soon the whole bar is laughing.

‘What did they just do? Why did the crowd react like that?’

‘That was one they hadn’t heard before.’

Notes: I think I heard this one from my dad for the first time when I was very young. I’ve always enjoyed it. It felt difficult to ambiguate the gender of the participants, but it felt necessary. I think there are two endings above, everything after ‘it’s all in how you tell a joke’ is an alternate ending, but I enjoy the whole thing together, if only because you get to surprise people twice.

Slide Rule Accuracy and F=ma

May 19, 2016Engineering, Nostalgia, Teachingadmin

Earlier this week, we were talking about drawing a Large diagram as one of the lasting and important things I learned in Prof. Collins’ Structure & Materials course.

Here are some of the others:

‘Slide Rule Accuracy’

This is the idea that in the real world[1], you’re never going to use more than three digits of accuracy (or four if your number starts with a ‘1’)[2]. Beyond that, things will get lost in the noise, or other inaccuracies, whether it’s budget contingencies, manufacturing defects, or whatever. (It would be interesting to see whether this has changed for manufactured parts with increased automation.)

The ‘3 laws of engineering'[3]:

1) F=ma

Simple, yet profound. When you’re dealing with non-relativistic systems (pretty much all of them), you push on something, it will move or react proportionally. This is not limited to physical systems.

2) You can’t push on a rope.

Also simple, has a number of applications for mechanical systems, but is probably the most ‘Engineer-y’ useful statement for dealing with other people.

3) In order to solve an engineering problem, you must first know the solution.

This one doesn’t really make sense on first blush, but I’ve experienced it. I mentioned earlier that the brain is often a structure that problems flow through, and in a sense this is a statement of that. You’re going to try to fit a new problem you’re looking at into the structure(s) of all the problems that you’ve seen before, and you have a huge advantage if you’ve seen similar problems before, or seen other problems you can apply by analogy.

We also had a ‘notebook’ that we put all of our class notes in, including cut and pasting from technical sheets, and this ‘notebook’ was our open book for the exam. It was a great exercise in focusing note-taking and coalescing your thoughts onto a medium-small piece of paper.

“When someone is paying you $100 for an hour of work, it’s worth paying a few extra cents for a good sheet of paper to give it to them on.”

The course had special ‘engineering notepaper’ that they wanted us to hand problem sets in on. There wasn’t any penalty for not doing so, but the lesson was that a little bit of professional presentation went a long way.

[1]This is when you’re dealing with things of reasonable size. I’m guessing when you’re looking at gravity waves or Higgs bosons, you might be using somewhat more accuracy. But at the same time, you’re probably not really looking at more than the last few digits…

[2]This is one of those subtle things which is actually quite important and powerful. On a slide rule, the portion which starts with a ‘1’ is fully 30% of the length (log10(2) ~=0.301), so unless you use the fourth digit here, you’re losing a substantial portion of your accuracy. There is a better explanation of this here:

[3]For a slightly different set of three Engineering laws, look here:

Deadlines are a Clarity Crutch

May 18, 2016Agile, Idle Speculation, Organizing Systems, Software Development, Thoughts on Thoughts, Words!, Writingadmin

I have a love/hate relationship with deadlines. At one point I said that the amount of work I do is proportional only to the number of deadlines I have, not proportional to anything else. (I think this is one of the reasons I favour daily 5-minute standups. They allow a daily reset of expectations, along with a deadline to work towards each day.)

So, deadlines proportional to accomplishment. Daily blogging something to show for your year something something etcetera[1]. But today I wanted to talk about the mental clarity that arrives as you’re approaching a deadline.

You have a task/deed to accomplish, you have a fixed time when it is due. As the time gets closer, the light cone[2] of possible ways to solve the problem shrinks. You push aside a large number of extraneous things[3], choose how solved you can get the problem in the time alloted, and get it done.

There’s the standard ‘good, fast, and cheap…pick two’. It feels like a lot of this clarity comes from having chosen the speed. As the time grows shorter, the number of ways you can now spend your mental focus budget on the task becomes manageable.

So, knowing this, how do we compensate? More frequent deadlines do actually seem to help, but that’s more of a forcing a solution, rather than relaxing into a solution.

What is it about the problem that is making you pause? Is your brain working on it in the background? (Does this mean the fallow time is necessary?) Are there parts you can hive off? Can you draw a large diagram? Can you put it in a spreadsheet or table?

Or perhaps the elephant in the room: If it is so difficult to find mental focus, what do you need to change about your environment?

[1]Until writing this I didn’t know that the ampersand ‘&’ was a ligature of ‘et’, and ‘etcetera’ was often written ‘&c.’

[2]Light Cones are also fascinating. I use them often in my mental model.

[3]In undergrad, we used to say that we enjoyed exam time, because we could push everything else away and focus, and not face opprobrium.

Draw a LARGE Diagram

May 17, 2016Engineering, Nostalgia, Organizing Systems, Teaching, Thoughts on Thoughts, Visualizationsadmin

Draw a LARGE diagram. When you start, you have no idea which part you’ll be focusing on, so draw it large to start.

In undergrad, we had a Structures and Materials course with Prof. Collins. I owe a lot to that class. It was first year, first term, and it was our first experience with ‘real Engineering’ (with a capital ‘E’).

Collins talked about (along with how to build bridges and other structures) a number of things which you would actually use every day, no matter what types of things you were designing or calculating or planning.

The biggest[1] one is indubitably ‘draw a Large diagram’. Every time I do this, whether it’s on a whiteboard at work, or in my journal[2] at home, it helps far more often than I expect, especially when you’re drawing a teaching diagram, and people are asking questions.

It helps when you’re drawing a semicircle intersected by many lines, with some angles known, some angles not known, and you need to do a bunch of fancy figuring to get the answer[3].

Next time, we’ll talk about some other useful tidbits I learned in that class. Stay tuned!

[1]Ha!

[2]I use notebooks with blank pages. It helps me draw diagrams without extraneous lines, feels freer for thinking.

[3]I think this was a GRE question.

Burning Man 2015 in Pictures V: Unpacking and the Calm of Early Arrival Burning Man at Night

May 16, 2016Photos, Things We've Built, Traveladmin

Having finshed unpacking, we returned to camp to build our yurt!:

Presenting our new home for the duration, complete with smiling occupant. Note that I am trying not to shine a headlamp[1] in her face.:

Our new home, complete with maniacal occupant.

Investigating the rest of camp, we met this guy, and felt reassured by his knowledge of first aid:

Still having some energy, we decided to go back to the installation to take a look around. I gave M & F a hand building some scaffolding. M convinced S to climb up to take a look. Apparently the view was breathtaking:

I contented myself with enjoying the calm of Early Arrival before the multitudes arrived for the festival proper[2]:

Next up: Building building building!

[1]Protip: Headlamps. Not just for Burning Man.

[2]’Early Arrival’ is half a week (or more!) where those who have large installations to setup arrive early. It’s quite something to be living in a city of ten thousand people, every single one of them there to build something. Even the festival proper can’t compare.

Burning Man 2015 in Pictures IV: We Finally Arrive, Unpack, and Setup Camp!

May 15, 2016Photos, Things We've Built, Traveladmin

In which our intrepid heroes visit the box office, unpack a fire mirror maze, and set up camp.

After a long journey, we had finally made it! (To the box office…):

Finally, we have reached our destination! The Box Office?!?

Our intrepid heroine ventures forth to stand in the (mercifully short) line:

At the box office, we found that the playa dust had formed itself into a message of some type. While we recognized it as being partially palindromic, we were not able to decode it in its entirety:

A cryptic message, spontaneously formed from playa dust.

Tickets in hand, we continued our (now dusty way):

And we were there! You can see the green glowing man in the dusty[1] distance:

Burning Man! With the green glowing Man in the distance!

Day turned into night, we unpacked some, and ventured out the Charnival grounds to help unload the truck, bravely driven for days from Toronto by an amazing group of volunteers.

Normally, your first day on playa is for acclimation, but we had a lot of building to do, and the truck needed to be unloaded (including our fragile tube![3]). This would turn out to be fortuitous, as we lost an entire day to high wind and sandstorms (but more on that later).

Here, you can see the lighting of the Charnival grounds in the distance (it looks like I took this picture from my bike). Lighting is incredibly important, especially on open playa, with art cars and bicycles zipping[2] about. The Charnival grounds peeps did an incredible job:

The Charnival grounds, from a distance. Note the man in glowing green.

We met up with the S3FA people, and much truck unloading ensued. You can see the result here, with our tacitly triumphant trusty heroine:

Tacitly, our triumphant trusty heroine tells her tale.

To give you an idea of why we needed a truck, here are the not yet assembled pieces of Mirror Blaze. Those are 4×4 8′ cedar (half the mass) posts with hinges (for easier[4] assembly), and 4’x8′ acrylic mirrors in a pile. It’s interesting how I automatically orient my view of this picture with respect to the fence and the Man, how I can feel where the rest of the festival is around me:

Mirror Blaze components ready for assembly!

Some more components for Mirror Blaze, and some of its friends:

Mirror Blaze components and friends: (l-r fencing, my first welding ever, some 4x8 ply, some accumulators, parts for the Mirror Blaze lifeguard stand, a shipping container, Quartz Tube, fence posts) — Mirror Blaze components and friends: (l-r fencing, my first welding ever, some 4×8 ply, some accumulators, parts for the Mirror Blaze lifeguard stand, a shipping container, Quartz Tube, fence posts)

Next time, off to finish setting up camp and unpacking!

[1]You may think I’m overemphasizing the presence of the dust, but I’m really not.

[2]Art cars at 5mi/hr, and bicycles only somewhat faster in the (usually) hard-packed dust.

[3]A 7′ long 1′ wide quartz tube, used for keeping the flame effect away from the acrylic mirrors.

[4]Note that I didn’t say easy…

Burning Man 2015 in Pictures III: The Most Important Kind of Freedom

May 14, 2016Photos, Thoughts on Thoughts, Traveladmin

Last time, we had just arrived at the salt flats, and were all set to enter the line to take us into the festival.

Here’s the turnoff to the festival, and the first of many generators you’ll see. These were invaluable for our night builds:

The turnoff from the highway onto playa.

0.5 miles may not seem very far, but when you’re limited to 5mi/hr (to keep down the dust and to reduce damage to the playa), it can feel like a long way:

Along the way, we saw the first of many warnings:

The first of many warnings. "Warning: Complex Sentences Ahead". — The first of many warnings. “Warning: Complex Sentences Ahead”.

And true to their word, there was indeed a complex (and poignant) sentence[1] which (I think) represents some of the best aspirations of Burner culture:

(The most important) kind of freedom... — (The most important) kind of freedom…

You trade in your reality... — You trade in your reality…

And perhaps a commentary on why some people find the release offered by alcohol so difficult to deal with:

...your ability to feel... — …your ability to feel…

...and in exchange... — …and in exchange…

...put on a mask. -Jim Morrison — …put on a mask. -Jim Morrison

Under the heat of the afternoon sun, it perhaps felt like a ritual cleansing, the sauna before you sit and think deep thoughts before fully experiencing.

Or maybe it was just a mask of playa dust:

[1]Yes, I know it’s multiple sentences.

Burning Man 2015 in Pictures II: Travel to Black Rock City!

May 13, 2016Photos, Traveladmin

Today we return to our intrepid adventurers as they brave the roads of Nevada and the entry lines of Black Rock City.

In the morning, we met up with D, would would be helping out with building Mirror Blaze:

Many interesting things were seen, mostly out of camerashot:

"What's that over there?" — “What’s that over there?”

Taking advantage of the hotel wifi, as navigatrix, I grabbed some maps:

We did some last minute shopping, then headed out to pick up our bikes:

Black Rock Bicycles! (There may be something of a theme to these names.)

Along the way, we saw a type of terrain which we would be seeing a lot of:

Nevada Badlands. We would be seeing a lot of this.

We also played a (not very difficult) game called ‘Spot the Burner’:

Spot the Burner! (For bonus points, spot the art car.)

And ran into the school police (no relation?):

Then, it was time to head into the desert! I pulled out my trusty map:

See that big blank patch? That's where we're going. — See that big blank patch? That’s where we’re going.

For all we talk about the Badlands being much of the same, they’re actually extremely varied:

Scrub Badlands, with Butte (Buttetholomew, to its friends).

Passing through the last vestiges of civilization near Gerlach, we saw the ‘last store before the Burn’, where we had experienced our first culture shock upon leaving in 2013. They had interesting ideas about potato chips[1]:

They have all the same colours as vegetables... — They have all the same colours as vegetables…

And then suddenly we were there, driving through the salt[2] flats:

It’s difficult to describe or even photograph the alienness and barrenness of this landscape:

It's difficult to capture the barrenness of this landscape. — It’s difficult to capture the barrenness of this landscape.

Next up: More playa and playa dust than you can shake a furry glowing boot at!

[1]Which is probably good, because potato chips feel like a terrible survival food

[2]Salt is somewhat of a misnomer, because playa is more like an alkali salt, around pH 10.