The Secret Lair

Recently, we decided it was time to change things up in our home.  The furniture layout of the main floor had remained essentially unchanged since we moved in almost ten years ago. Since our kids are getting to be of starting gaming age, we decided to convert the family room into a game room.

We started by moving the large sofa and new television into the front room to become our prime television watching room and removed the old computer desk from the house entirely.  We then moved the love seat and the entertainment center to the far end of the room. The addition of an unused television created a small video gaming nook.

The small table seen here was adopted by my younger minion as a “news desk”. The ‘gaming center’ is in the corner on the other side of the mural.  The mural itself was painted by a family friend and is based on the same castle as Hogwarts in the Harry Potter movies.

We looked at a store with “container” in the name for storage, but were notably unimpressed. Instead we purchased some press board storage which we liked better – at a fraction of the price.

Note the retro-style classic board games used as wall décor. These are fully playable games.

So we now have a room, storage, but are still in need of a table. We’ve got a friend who is going to build us a table – once we figure out what we want – but until then we are noticeably shy of a surface on which to play games.

We decide in the interim to re-purpose a couple of tables that were being under-used, abused, or both. The only problem is that they are a light wood in a room full of dark wood.

(Observe my elder minion’s disinterest in physical labor.)

I picked up some dark faux leather on clearance at a local fabric store. However, before I could upholster the tables, I needed to do some maintenance. We cleaned them both and I glued and tightened the legs. Using the round table as support for the rectangular table, I set to work. (Using the tables as support for each other both provided me a good working height and a firm surface to work on.)

In each case, I pre-cut the leather roughly to size and laid it face down on the supporting table before centering the working table on top of it. The rectangular table was fairly easy with which to work. I folded the leather over the sides of the table and secured them with the liberal applications of a staple gun.  I only needed to do creative folding, trimming and stapling on the corners.

The second table, a round one, was more challenging. In the end, I folded and stapled the four compass directions. I then worked from each of the cardinal staples toward the mid-points between the staples.  It took some thoughtful folding, but in the end, I ended up with a very smooth and symmetric table top.

My younger minion is ready to play!

I overlapped the two tables to provide a more or less continuous surface. This configuration will comfortably allow eight players to sit around the table – more if we separate the tables. Our bigger problem will be finding enough chairs.

That’s more or less it! I’m ready for our face-to-face RPG game to return from hiatus.

After I get the basement cleaned up, I will introduce you to my other (not so) secret lair – super-hero themed office space.

“Now,” said the administrator while  opening the door to the lab, “we have a practical experiment in the development of clean energy sources for the future. This is Dr. Roland Jeffers, head of the project. Dr. Jeffers, would you show our visitors your results?”

With the administrator were two official-looking people. The man wore a dark blue suit; clean-cut, clean-shaven, greying a bit at the temples. The woman was also middle-aged but quite beautiful, brunette hair pulled back, blue eyes that took in everything in the room: the control console, the man in the plexiglass chamber with the wires that led from the console to his head and chest, and the small toy monkey on a stainless-steel table, also connected to the console by another long set of wires.

Jeffers began. “My experiments have to do with developing forms of renewable energy for the future, specifically coming from biological sources. In this case, we have the gentleman in the chamber hooked up to my device, which stimulates the memory centers of the brain. The energy generated by the subject is captured and transmitted, either for use or for storage.”

Jeffers flicked his eyes to the administrator with a question, the administrator nodded. Jeffers turned a central knob on the console about half-way. The results were immediate; the man in the chamber began to smile dreamily and the toy monkey chattered and clapped its cymbals together at a moderate pace. After about thirty seconds, Jeffers turned the device back off, and the monkey stopped.

‘What you just witnessed was the device’s ability to harvest clean emotional energy from a happy emotional response. It is also possible to trigger other emotions for more or less intensity, depending on the quantity of energy desired.”

The woman asked, “The subject volunteered for this?” She looked both intrigued and repulsed by the results.

Jeffers smiled. “The subjects have been told that they will be going under a new form of therapy. We hook them up to our device and induce memories that are emotionally relevant to the energy we want to capture. As you might expect, the more difficult and complex emotions…anger, betrayal, and despair produce the strongest and most efficient energy.”

The man who looked like he worked for a branch of the government asked, “What is the most powerful?”

“Regret. Without a doubt. Regret is the most powerful.”

The government man nodded. The woman in the sharp suit asked, “Don’t you have any ethical qualms about using people this way?”

Dr. Jeffers shook his head. “No. You have to understand…these people are already destroying themselves. We find them in bars, wandering through grocery stores, sitting at playground watching their kids, in cubicles unable to work but unable to do anything else. They are already in pain. We are simply using that pain for the betterment of society.”

The woman nodded. “And does this actually help them?”

Jeffers cleared his throat. “In a manner of speaking. The brain can only handle so much. After a while, it reduces the capability to feel in order to protect itself. In many ways, we are simply accelerating the process an individual would go through naturally.”

The administrator smiled, “Well, now,”  he said, clapping his own hands together, reminding Jeffers of the chattering monkey. ” This is good work, and you can see how it will pay off in the long run.” The government man nodded, the woman in the suit pursed her lips but nodded after a moment.

“Excellent,” the administrator said. “Let’s take a look at the other labs, shall we?” With that, he ushered the official visitors out.

After the door closed, Jeffers released a long breath he did realized he was holding. He sighed and looked at the man in chamber with the electrodes attached to his head and heart.

“You poor bastard,” he said, and twisted the knob all the way to the right. The monkey on the table began to chatter away faster than before.

In the chamber, the man began to cry.

CC BY-NC-ND image by svale via Flickr

As January creeps forward from the holidays, The Lair is waking up, shaking off a bit of dust and fatigue, and getting back to the business of serving Overlord Miller’s mad genius. That means many things, but most of all, it means SCIENCE.

Science is not a “thing”, or a body of knowledge, but rather the process we subjective humans use to overcome our individual biases and make some objective decisions about the world around us. Doing our best to eliminate that subjective bias is key to both engaging in the scientific process and understanding the results of that process, and can be a challenging thing to do. Recently, physician Harriet Hall summed up three lessons she has learned about dealing with scientific studies that speak to this perfectly:

Roosters don’t make the sun come up – Also known as “correlation doesn’t equal causation”. Just because two things always seem to happen in sequence, or together, does not mean that one causes the other. While this should seem obvious, this is perhaps the greatest stumbling block for humans in terms of understanding why things happen in our world, as we are psychologically wired to interpret things that happen together as having a cause and effect relationship. Our minds do this as part of an excellent survival instinct that, sadly, doesn’t serve us well when we are engaged in higher thought than FIRE BURNS DON’T TOUCH FIRE.

Never believe one study – One key to the scientific process is that if a study shows a certain result, other people in other settings need to be able to do that same study and come to the same result to prove it’s objective validity. In science as in the whole of life, mistakes can be made and sometimes people lie. Even if a single study seems to be excellently designed, controlling for any problems and outside issues, it’s results should be viewed with some skepticism until they are reproduced or confirmed. This is something we often lose sight of in an era when new studies are often poorly reported in the popular media, or promoted by a press release.

When encountering a new or questionable claim, always try to find out who disagrees and why – This will often give one more insight into a new study result than just considering the result itself. Whether or not we realize it, all of us as people have an agenda in life, be it basic things like caring for our family or doing well at our chosen profession to protecting a financial interest or promoting a belief system. Does someone disagree with a claim because they stand to lose money or prestige if it’s true, or do they really have good data that said claim is wrong? This can sometimes be a challenging question to answer, but a very important one.

In the weeks ahead, we shall be delving into SCIENCE! As we do so, keep these principles it mind. Next time, I will answer a challenge from Overlord Miller and wade into the eternally popular and debated subject… of weight loss.

Image by @Doug88888 via Flickr

Statistic: A quantity calculated from data in a sample, which characterizes an important aspect in the sample.  In other words, a summary.

Warning: This series of articles is not about equations and formulas.  You will not find Greek letters here, except when we are mocking them in a light-hearted manner.  If you are looking for any of these things, close your browser window now and slowly back away.  No one will know – trust us.

It has been said by some that the origin of statistics lies in gambling.  A bored nobleman, tired of losing at dice and card games, sat down and tabulated the frequency at which various results came up when he rolled his dice.  He basically discovered what we all assume to be true today – that each face of a fair die (the six-sided kind that you see in board games, and every other sort of fair die – we will discuss them later) is equally likely to land face up.  Somewhere along the line, that same bored nobleman, or more likely, a different bored nobleman discovered something we don’t really take for granted – that each roll is independent – that is, what you just rolled has no bearing on what you will roll next.  But at least he could predict the odds of that next roll.

Others tie the field of statistics to academic or governmental driven definitions.  If you talk to an academician, they will tell you about the papers that inspired their work and you can trace through the bibliographies that papers that inspired that work and so on and so on until you reach “Paper Zero” which some people blame on the correspondence of Pierre de Fermat and Blaise Pascal.  If on the other hand, you want to talk about practical application, some authors will point to the changing political climates of the 18th and 19th centuries, when it was no longer sufficient for a monarch to merely decree and it was so.  Instead, administration took the place of fiat and political bodies suddenly needed data on the people, on their economies, and on their worlds to make decisions.  Or perhaps, need is a strong word.  Fiat would have still worked, but data made the whole process more efficient and effective.  And more predictive.

Personally, I find it fairly egotistical to claim that statistics only started in the last few hundred years.  For a good chunk of human history, man has been trying to predict things.  The ‘ancient’ Mayans and Aztecs had a calendar that continue to predict events in our ‘modern’ world.  The various zodiacs and astrologies attempt to predict human behavior based on birth dates and times and other sundry details.  And it would seem those predictions are pretty good over all, because we as a species keep going back to them.  At the very least, they are providing a good summary of human behavior.

So, personally, I would argue that the concept of statistics, the desire to summarize and predict the world around us has been a part of human history since the beginning of human sentience.

Of course, then you have to ask about the Statistics they teach you in college and quote in the news and produce in business reports.  Certainly, those ‘statistics’ are newer in the sense that we are quantifying them in our own modern way.  We’ve assigned Greek letters to them and give people advanced degrees for specializing in them and have developed our own mythology around them (“lies, damn lies, and statistics”).  But in the end, they are trying to do the same thing – summarize the world and predict what happens next.

Of course, _those_ Statistics, the ones taught by dry professors to large lecture halls that require you to learn a new language, those Statistics are based on what we could do with only a pencil and paper.  And to a math guy, they’re pretty cool.  But in reality, the number of people who work out those problems, the ones that can be worked out on paper and with pencil, those people are a rarer and rarer breed in this modern era of computing.  So they have become more widely available through computer programs, more widely accepted as an arcane art and a mystic language, and, I would argue, less well understood in terms of what they really mean.

So that’s what this series of articles is about.  It’s about what those statistics really mean, or what they are meant to mean.  It’s about their impact on our world and the impact they could have on our world.  And it’s about summarizing the world around you and predicting what’s going to happen next.  Good luck!

Like any man who wants to know what is going on in the world, I prefer to start my day with a cup of coffee and my morning paper.  Like any modern person who is well-versed in the ways of the Internet, I know that I can get better news, more timely, more interesting, more custom tailored to my needs by subscribing to a number of RSS feeds and social stream instead of subscribing to my local newspaper.  The hitch in the plan has always been the laptop…I dislike having the laptop and keyboard in front of me when reading.  The reason is purely psychological: as someone who spends all day in front of a traditional computer, I prefer that my off-time be a lap- and desk-top free as possible.

Until recently, this was an impossible dilemma. When I received a Samsung tablet at Google I/O last year, that changed.  It became possible to sit and read on my little Star Trek-like device and still pull the most current news from the web. Additionally, when I got my new iPhone, this became even more interesting.

Pulse

The program I use most often is Pulse. Pulse allows you to subscribe to suggested feeds, feeds aggregated by the Pulse service into several Top lists (top tech, top politics, etc) , your Google Reader feeds, or any RSS feed you can enter into their system. The design of the program is especially nice, articles from a source are arranged into horizontal bands with photos and their headline. Selecting an article allows you to read it, then flips across the page with your finger will move you to the next article. The motions and gestures are intuitive and simple. On top of this, Pulse allows share interesting articles to your social feeds with a touch of a button¹.  Reading the paper is a simple and pleasing experience, and when I’m done, I feel like I’ve got a better handle on my day.

When I picked up my iPhone, one of the programs I downloaded and use most often is Flipboard. Same idea as Pulse, aggregating personal, social, and featured feeds into a single interface, but Flipboard uses the form faction of the phone to great advantage. TO move between pages, you swipe up with your thumb or finger. The graphic animation is as if the page is folding up to reveal the next article in the queue. The main selling point, beyond the simplicity, is the use of excellent typography and brilliant images — the graphic design of program is stellar. It is the perfect companion when waiting in line or relaxing at the coffee shop of your choice.

How do you keep up with your favorite news? What programs would you recommend?

1. if you follow me on Twitter or Facebook, you’ve seen me sharing links first thing in the morning. [↩]

I am transmitting from a secret underground  location.

I have been instructed by Overlord Miller to inform you that I am here of my own free will and am able to leave in peace at any time I wish. At least I think that’s what he meant.

Since it appears we will be spending an extended amount of time together, it seems only polite that I introduce myself.

My name is David Wendt, though you may address me as Blue or Doc Blue. By training, I am a Ph.D. Statistician (thus the ‘Doc’ portion of my sobriquet). I am employed as a Marketing Research Consultant by day and as a free-lance game-designer by night.  I have a passion for pulp action and super-hero comic books. My brilliant wife and two (equally brilliant) children and I are in the process of converting yet another room in our home into a dedicated gaming space.

During the month of January, it is tradition among some peoples to make resolutions for the new year. For such individuals, the most frequent sort of promise is associated with self-improvement – loose weight, get a new job, paint the house.

Fortunately, for both you and I, I am not the sort to make such a resolution. Instead, I pose a challenge to myself – one that I encourage you in which to participate. I wish to read 12 magazine issues this year. But not any 12 magazine issues – where would be the challenge in that?!? No. I want to be exposed to 12 magazines that I have never read before. And that is where you come in: I would deeply appreciate your suggestions. Make suggestions. Challenge me. I only ask two things: (1) it should be a magazine that I can leave laying about my home reasonably comfortable (i.e. no “adult magazines” as there are kids in the house) and (2) I would strongly prefer magazines I can get off the new stand. I have a Barnes and Nobles nearby.

Why would I want to do such a thing?

(1) I believe in encouraging an open mind. It is very easy to get caught in the same mental ruts and my hope is that by reading material from new writers on new topics I can avoid ruts of my own.

(2) I tend to draw connections from seemingly disconnected sources. So it is my belief that in both my day job and my chosen career I will be able to be more creative and effective by introducing myself to need ideas.

(3) It will give you and I something to talk about here in the Secret Lair each month. For the next twelve months, I will read a new magazine (hopefully recommended by one of you) and share my thoughts about what I discovered within. This will not be a review, as such, merely insights I gleaned and how I might apply them to other fields.

What else can you expect from me during my stay here in the Secret Lair? As I mentioned, I have a passion for games and comics and heroic figures. If I were you, I wouldn’t be surprised to see content about games I’m playing, things I’m writing, and perhaps the odd, exclusive to the Secret Lair, creative content.

No matter what anyone else tells you, I’m thrilled to be a part of the Secret Lair and am looking forward to the coming year!

[How was that Overlord Miller?]

CC BY-NC-SA image from tkelly7029 via Flickr

Firstly, let’s get the obvious out of the way: the world might, in fact, end in 2012. However, this will be far more likely due to a Crackpot Scheme and/or an Unfortunate Synergy devised by our own Minister Lynn that I was unable to stop in time, as opposed to any sort of Mayan prediction. In point of fact, the end of the Mayan calendar no more predicts the final days of the world than the end of our own calendar did three days ago, after which we flipped things ahead to the next year, much like the Mayan calendar will move on to a new age at it’s end.

It is worth noting that the origins of our own calendar have nothing to do with our present day beliefs, be they crazy (The Mayans predicted the end of the world this year! Yay! I mean, DOOM!) or otherwise, but rather the pragmatism of ancient Greece and Rome as well as the inspiration of older gods. The original Roman calendar had ten months, with March (or Marius, named for the Roman god of war Mars) being the first month of the new year – this was both due to it being the start of spring, as well as beginning of the military campaign season. This was followed by:

• April, or Aprilis, which may derive from the Latin aperire meaning “to open”, or from the Roman goddess Venus’s name in Greek, Aphrodite
• May, or Maius, attributed either to the Greek goddess of fertility Maia or the Latin maiores, meaning “elders”
• June, or Junius, possibly originating with the Roman goddess (and patroness of marriage) Juno, or the Latin iuniores, meaning “young people”
• Quintilis, named for the Latin for “fifth”
• Sextilis, from the Lation for “sixth”
• September, October, November, and December, all derived from the Latin for “seventh” through “tenth”

The approximately 60 days between December and March were not assigned to months until later Roman revisions added January (or Ianuarius, named for the Roman god Janus) and February (or Februarius, from the Latin februum meaning “purification”) as the first and second months. Subsequently, Quintilis was renamed July in honor of Julius Ceasar, and Sixtilis to August named after Augustus Ceasar.

The above summary of the origins of our current calendar nomenclature is a vast oversimplification, but even more complex is the historical cultural interplay the resulted in the names of our days of the week:

• Sunday, with multiple origins referencing the Sun
• Monday, derived from the Old English for “Moon day”
• Tuesday, originating from various European names for the Roman god of war Mars, such as the Old English name Tiw
• Wednesday, identified with the Germanic god Woden, who has been tied both to the Norse god Odin and the Roman god Mercury
• Thursday, named for one of many cultural identities of the Norse god of thunder, Thor
• Friday, tied to the nomenclature surrounding the Germanic love goddess Frijjō
• Saturday, for the Roman god Saturn

Pulling things back to the month we just entered, January includes other notable days, such as Christmas for Coptic and Eastern Orthodox Christians; Seijin No Hi, the Japanese day that celebrates Coming-of Age of the youth who are twenty years old; and Martin Luther King, Jr. day in the US. Additionally, January 23rd marks the Chinese New Year, which starts the year 4709, the year of the Dragon.

Go forth, enriched in knowledge, and know that a confusing host of gods and goddesses are watching over you as you work to make 2012 a splendid year! Leave the worrying about the end of the world to us here at The Lair, since we do have a good chance of (unintentionally, I swear) bringing it about.