Saturday, February 18, 2023

Defining Oldness

Every once in a while people argue about what it means to be "old". Some of my kids think that 50 is the cutoff. The term is relative and subjective, but it could be useful to think about it in more absolute terms.

Sometimes a teenager will look at a 35-year-old and say "ew, you're old". But what they really mean is "you're in a place in your life that I can't relate to." It says more about the younger person than the older one. So that's not a good place to look for a definition.

There are a few conditions I've observed that I think lend themselves to defining "oldness" in a few different ways.

The first sense is "physically old". We could define that as the point at which you can't physically do the stuff you used to, because your body's capabilities are shutting down. In that sense, most 35-year-olds aren't old, and neither are most 50-year-olds.

A similar standard can apply to "mentally old". That should mean that your brain doesn't work as well, to the point that your memory or cognitive abilities are an order of magnitude lower than they used to be.

Here's a more interesting one: I've observed that some people get to a point in their lives where they've made mistakes, and they continue that pattern of behavior even when it's clear that they'd be better off changing - but they can't let themselves change, because doing so would be to admit that all of the damage that has already been done was preventable. So they refuse to change, as a coping mechanism against the pain of admitting past mistakes. (This is different from simply refusing to admit you're wrong, which of course is present in everybody from time to time, regardless of age.) In my view, when you reach a point where your past mistakes add up to regret that you can't face, you're emotionally old.

There's another kind of oldness that I don't have a good name for. It's when there is no one in your life that you'd take advice from. It's not that you can't face your mistakes, it's just that you don't see anyone as an authority figure, or as having wisdom that you don't already have. I kind of think of this as being "spiritually old", since essentially spirituality is all about being willing to make changes even when you'd rather not.

You could also label the above state as being "intellectually old", although I think that might be better applied to another very common situation: feeling like you already know enough. That's closely connected to not seeing authority, but even someone who won't take advice can be interested in learning. And someone who always takes advice from someone might use that as an excuse from having to learn on their own. I'm not 100% sure that "oldness" is the right way to describe this state, since many people never really value learning, but everyone has phases of their lives where they have to learn something, even if it's just how to do a job. Once they stop feeling that need, I think they've lost something that's essentially youthful - the ability to look at the world as something you can explore.

I guess the point of all of this is that, while everybody will outlive their physical health, most of the other aspects can be avoided. (The mental thing is on the fence since it has a physiological causes, but some of that can be prevented too.) In theory, if you stay humble enough to learn and change, you never have to really feel old. 

Not that I'd know - I'm still young.

Friday, June 24, 2022

The wrong way to argue about abortion

Abortion is one of the most polarized issues in American politics. It's also one of the worst-debated ones. Both sides tend to rely on straw-man arguments that vilify the people on the other side.

  • Pro-Life people portray Pro-Choice people as wanting to kill babies. (That is, they hate Life.)
  • Pro-Choice people portray Pro-Life people as wanting to control women. (That is, they hate Choice.)
Both of those portrayals are wrong, because in reality the difference between the two groups comes down to the question of when a human life begins. If we could scientifically prove that, the discussion would end.

Here's a version of the issue that's simplified, but not by very much:
Let's say a woman wants to have an operation. Should she be able to?
  • If the operation will kill another person, the answer is no.
  • If the operation will not affect another person, the answer is yes.
Which of those bullets represents the situation with abortion? Well that's up for debate. In fact, that's the only thing that really needs to be debated to resolve this issue! [Edit: This is not quite true. See comment at the bottom.] But is that what people debate? No, hardly ever. Instead, people talk about how evil the other side is. It feels empowering to be so right! But it's not really empowering at all. It just makes the power swing back and forth based on who's in office (or on the bench) at the moment.

As an example, on the radio this morning I heard a woman explain that abortion rights are a racial issue. He's the gist of what she said:
Black communities (due to a lower average income) have much higher abortion rates. Therefore they have higher needs, and denying access hurts Black people more. 

But when she says that, here's what a Pro-Life person hears: 

Black babies are killed much more often than white babies. Therefore allowing abortion hurts Black people more.

Same data, same concern for racial justice. Opposite conclusion. It's going to be like that every time.

Here's a great idea that will probably never happen: Compromise, so that each side gets the most important things they care about while acknowledging the validity of the other side's concerns.
Like, for example, what if you you amended the Constitution to say something like this?
Abortion is allowed in the first trimester of pregnancy and forbidden in the third. States may decide what to do in-between.

You could tweak the specific week numbers, but you get the point. Pro-Life people would avoid the most heinous abortion scenarios; Pro-Choice people would avoid unwanted pregnancy for the vast majority of women, since presumably most women who get abortions know they want one pretty early. Nobody would be completely happy. But nobody would lose what they have just because political power swung a different direction this year, or this decade.

Could we just... admit that pretty much everybody involved is a good person and just talk?


Thursday, June 16, 2022

U.N. Squadron

U.N. Squadron was the first Super Nintendo game I rented back in the day. It caught my eye from the Nintendo Power magazine stuff based largely on the fact that it has an energy meter, unlike most games in the genre, so it seemed more accessible. The various customizations and the Capcom brand were draws too. I wasn't surprised to find that the game has delightful music. The backgrounds are gorgeous, especially if you're used to NES graphics. And it has a bunch of memorable boss battles and stuff. I eventually beat it on Easy mode, although it did require a bunch of tedious side missions to get enough in-game money to buy the best plane after I had already upgraded once or twice.

The game isn't perfect. Since weapons and planes cost money, you sort of have to lose and retry, over and over, in order to build up enough to buy what you need. In fact, the "right" way to play the game is to stick with the default plane (and its minimal special weapons) until you can buy the best plane, the Efreet. Doing this is sad because you have to bypass my favorite aircraft, the A10A Thunderbolt, which has an extra downward-firing cannon (at the cost of a weaker forward-firing one). It's kind of sad that the game simultaneously encourages you to get a variety of aircraft, and demands stinginess.

The "U.N." branding is kind of odd. In Japan the game is branded after some Anime series, but they changed the name for sale in other countries. There is no reference to the United Nations though, or anything else with those initials. It's about a mercenary group. But whatever - the genre is not known for its meaningful plots. 

There's a side-effect to the original branding though: games based on outside brands rarely get re-released on virtual consoles. So U.N. Squadron has never been available digitally on modern systems. So recently I bought the game on eBay and replayed it. It's really nice - it has aged quite well, assuming you can overlook the above-mentioned need to be stingy. After beating it again on Easy, I went for some additional runs: Beat on Normal, Beat on Easy without the Efreet (so I could use the Thunderbolt on almost all the levels, including the last one), Beat on Easy without using any continues (which required me to use my least-favorite character so I could power up my main weapon faster).

Saturday, December 4, 2021

Wings of Fire


I'm not sure why I didn't get into the Wings of Fire books sooner. I think I was a little worried that they wouldn't handle dragons correctly, since so few authors do. (Also in theory they're aimed at a young audience, and I'm not a huge fan of similar books, like the "Warriors" cat books).

But in the last year my younger kids have sometimes asked me to read a chapter or two to them - so I got exposed, but I was getting things mostly out of context. When they started getting the graphic novels from the library, I figured I might as well read them that way, so I'd know what was going on, and it turns out they're pretty interesting. I mean, they're about dragons. And now I'm reading the real books.

It still doesn't exactly handle dragons the way I would. I mean, there are a bunch of different types, and while the SkyWings are the most traditional dragons, they're all red/yellow/orange, and I feel like you need blue and green fire-breathing dragons to be fully compliant. (You know, like Mrandor and Valkron.) But the different types create interesting variety, and the characters are good and stuff.

Plus, the series deserves a lot of credit for one huge thing - it's about the dragons. Not about people fighting dragons, or riding on dragons, or seeking out dragons. The dragons are the characters. And that actually does a lot to make for a compelling story. I mean, they fly, and they have these tribe-specific powers, and they very greatly in size. So it's not like you could tell this stories with humans swapped in for the dragons. (There is one spin-off book, Dragonslayer, that is about the humans. It's very well done and could be read before the others I guess. But it's probably better after the first five books, which is what I did.)

In a way it's surprising that humans are included in their world in the first place, but I think it does work because it gives you a sense of scale. (Although be fair, the scale issue can make things a bit hard to picture at times, which is one way that the graphic novels help.)

It is a bit icky at times. The dragons occasionally eat people, and even though they think of humans as animals, as a reader I can't help but be disturbed. They also fight with each other, and in both cases the injuries are described in enough detail to be, well like I said, icky. I'm kind of surprised my elementary-school-aged kids weren't more freaked out by a few scenes. (The graphic novels actually skip over icky details, mostly.)

In general, though, it's delightful to see into a world of scary monsters going on quests and stuff. And the series is almost over I think, so I should be able to binge-read for a while. Yay dragons!

Thursday, October 28, 2021

Metroid Dread



We waited a very long time for a sequel to Metroid Fusion, and it's delightful to have it. The game looks and plays like a real Metroid game, more so I think than Samus Returns (the game it most resembles and the second-most-recent). The map in particular is delightful - not only does it show you the location and type of items you've seen (including whether you've acquired them or not), it shows everything you need about the rooms you've visited, including individual destructible blocks and what it takes to destroy them. The lighting effects are nice too.

The boss battles are pretty hard - I perished a ton of times on almost all of them. But there are always checkpoints nearby, so the penalty for losing is low. (Really it's just time on the clock, if you're interested in speed running.) One of the help text thingies they show you while loading says that "no attack is unavoidable", and that's true - once you know what you need to do, even the hardest battles become reasonable. And one of them is pure joy.

I do miss the music of Super Metroid. Dread's music is fine, but none of it is memorable, and it doesn't lend the same kind of character to the different areas that Super Metroid (or even Zero Mission) had. 

As for plot, that is also fine, and I can't say much without spoiling things, but I will say that they didn't include much detail, and I don't feel like this works as the "ending" of the side-view Metroid story, like the pre-release media paints it as. At the start we don't find out how the Federation reacted to Samus's rebellion in the previous game, or where the Dachoras and Etecoons went, or why Samus's armor looks totally different now. And while the ending is certainly more plot-heavy, it still raises a lot of questions.

But anyway, I'm very happy that they finally made a new Metroid game. Hopefully it will do well and they'll keep cranking them out.

Sunday, September 26, 2021

The definition of "black"

Sometimes people get so technical in creating definitions that they end up defining or categorizing things in a way that flatly contradicts the colloquial definitions of those things. I think that's lame.

One example is the question of whether black is a color. Some people say that it's not because it's the "absence of color", or it's a "shade", which can be used to modify a "color". 

But, come on. "Color" is a way to describe what frequencies of light come from an object to our eyes, and which of the light receptors in our retinas react to those frequencies. We experience colors as contrasts to other colors - just try and describe how a color looks in any other way. In that sense, black is definitely a color. It's one of the ways our eyes perceive light bouncing off of things. If someone is wearing a black shirt, and you ask them what color it is, they don't go "Oh my gosh there IS no color!" They also don't try to figure out which primary or secondary color is being reflected the most and then say something like "I think it's a profoundly dark green." They say it's black. And even you developed some ultra-Vantablack shirt and there were no light coming off of it at all, zero is a valid value that something can have. But then again, there's never really zero light.

And that brings me to another point. Some people say that nothing is really black, because black means no light and everything reflects a little light (except a black hole I guess). But dude, that is NOT the definition of black. If it were, it would be totally useless. That's like saying nothing is cold because nothing has a temperature of absolute zero. There are plenty of things that we all look at and say are black. That's the definition of black. It's all relative. All colors are relative. There's no use defining a common word in such a way that it can't actually be applied to anything.


Wednesday, September 22, 2021

Alcatraz vs the Evil Librarians

One of my kids checked out Alcatraz vs. the Evil Librarians from the library. Brandon Sanderson has written some good stuff, so I figured I'd check it out. The book is hilarious. The plot is fine - it's one of those kid-gets-powers-and-has-to-save-the-world types of things. But what makes it great is the commentary that the narrator gives. It's a very self-aware book, written as a biography after the fact, and it openly mocks various tropes in literature. I don't know if I can even say that much about it here without spoiling the jokes, but I haven't laughed out loud at a book in a long time (well except for What If? by Randall Munroe), and I did that several times here.