Category: journal

“Reality depends on what questions we ask” – Vlatko Vedral

It occurred to me the other day to figure out what’s the deal with dungeons & dragons.
Sounds like a kind of nerdy thing that I would have been into, if I had been a little younger. I was completely nuts for the Lord of the Rings trilogy. That would seem to be relevant. I remember I read it through for the first time when I was about thirteen. that was 1969. I’d been through all of Jules Verne and plenty else by then. My whole life, I’ve been out there. But I was never plugged into a network, or maybe I was plugged in but to the wrong network, like a 60hz appliance plugged into a 50hz world.
I read Lord of the Rings for the second time in 1974, putting my time in suspension to good use, I think. I’d gone through the entire science fiction aisle at my town’s rinky dink library, and I’d taken to riding my bike over to the nicer libraries in the neighboring towns, Wantaugh had a really nice facility I thought, and Massapequa’s facility was old and funky, worse than ours in a way, but with a more eclectic collection. I couldn’t find anything I liked, but I did find Ezra Pound’s Cantos. What a brilliant wacko. Imagine a 14 year old nerd trying to make sense of that stuff.
My favorite authors of the time were Asimov, Heinlein, Vonnegut, Herbert and the occasional brilliant piece of others like Poul Anderson, Ursula K. LeGuin, Harlan Ellison, Clifford D. Simak, which I found mostly by following the lists of Hugo and Nebula award winners.
So one day I asked the web, “What d&d character am I?” Turns out there’s a page for that.
But before I go on, I also found out lots of other people were asking that same question, and many of them were interesting.
So, the first thing is that one point of a role playing game, is that you assume a character and interact with other people, likewise assuming their own characters. So there’s another barrier to entry, not only am I from another generation than most people who know anything about this kind of crap, I fall short in another way. Even the biggest geek out there at least seems to be able to participate in some kind of community. Each to their own, I guess. What few friends I do have are old and antisocial, just like me.
The next thing to bear in mind is that your character doesn’t have to reflect your actual personality or values. In fact, it probably shouldn’t. Where’s the fun in that?
But after thinking it over, the interwebs told me I was a chaotic good human strong fighter. Sounds good. Anti-establishment. Value oriented. Strong. Hm. I can be that.
It even gave me enough to jog my creativity, and I allowed myself to imagine and research a backstory:
The Asturs were the Celtic Gallaecian inhabitants of the northwest area of Hispania encompassing a portion of the Mountains of Cantabria to the west, and facing the Bay of Biscay and the Celtic Sea to the north. It is an ancient kingdom dotted with Roman ruins and traces of human activity from the Neolithic, Megalithic, Bronze, and Iron Ages. Cantabria has iron, and Asturias is home to a few gold mines, making it very interesting real estate.
In Roman times, Cantabrian and Asturian fighters were renowned, having fought as mercenearies against Rome for Hannibal and later for themselves. They were expert with short sword, lance and cavalry. Their tactics were so innovative and influential, they entered the Roman martial lexicon in terms such as the ‘circulus cantabricus’ and the ‘cantabricus impetus’. Cantabrians were among the very few ever to have acquired a Roman standard in battle.
The medieval Kingdom of Asturias was overrun by nobles and ne’er-do-wells retreating to the mountains from the advancing Moors of the great Caliphate.
I imagined myself the rightful prince of Asturias, deprived of my birthright through intrigues by my scheming cousin, Alfonso, King of Leon, who had designs on my lands, and my beloved .
My name would be Juan-Gaspar Santiago Asturias de Cantabria. I roam Gallaecia, Brittany, Normandy, England and Wales, a chivalric knight, romantic and brooding of character, landless but leige to no lord, righting wrongs and doing good when I can.

From time to time, I like to take a bike ride at lunch.


Two years ago this month, in the midst of a death march through the holidays, my buddy Charles Ramsay pointed out to me that there were some decent bike trails out behind a neighborhood nearby our new offices. They weren’t obvious, but he used to live there, so he knew the ins and outs. You are here:

We went out for a few crazy rides taking a a break together between long shifts in the lab, where the team was giving birth to a new machine. I knew that’s what we were doing, because I had been midwife to many other machines before. I was glad to do it, and my many years experience in the business tells me, that just like when a baby is being born, there’s a time to push, and God damn it, when that time comes, someone has to shout “Push!” That was my role at that moment in time. But it never fails to be intense and like I said at the time, I learned a long time ago that getting out and blowing off some steam was the only way I knew how to keep my head screwed on straight.

I have since explored most of these trails many times and feel myself very fortunate to be able to take an occasional long lunch break when time and the weather permit, and get out and test myself against the hills and rock outcroppings of central Texas. When I do, I always return a new man. The world and I are both the better for it, believe me.

So the other day, while Anita was in the hospital, and I struggled through another work day, I decided to take myself out for a ride. She always told me to take my phone, in case of emergency or whatever, but this time, I actually did. She was in the hospital, after all. But that’s another story.
But then I thought, since I have my phone, I might as well try to take a few pictures of some of the interesting features of this ride. Here’s a few shots of the Regent Hills trail:

For the most part, its just a fun ride and an excuse for a good workout, but some of these features can be pretty challenging.
Later on Charles showed me this map he had drawn (his kid named some of the trails):


Trail biking is a great physical activity. Its exciting and good for you and fun to get out there and enjoy the great outdoors. But like one time I told Anita, trail biking around here is a lot like skiing. Just instead of riding up in the lift, you get a damn good cardio workout on ascent. And you get a thrill similar to skiing on descent, except instead of fluffy white snow, you have jagged rocks to help you keep your concentration.
Overall though, its a really sweet ride. Try it sometime.

This post is probably not going to be about what you expected.
For reasons that don’t matter, I got myself thinking about Curtis Mayfield, who died on this day, December 26, 1999.
Sometimes I’m just overcome when I think about it. He was just an artist, a performer, writer and music producer. He wasn’t important like a civil rights leader, like Martin Luther King or Malcolm X. Or was he?
He is credited with first infusing the power of the civil rights message into black popular music coming out in the 60’s. And he wasn’t a musical phenomenon like Stevie Wonder or a bona fide preacher like the Rev. Al Green, or whatever comparisons you want to make. He was unique.
But the latter part of his too short life was filled with tragedy. He was paralyzed from the neck down in an accident in 1990, and lived for ten more years, having various parts of his body amputated from diabetes and declining health before finally passing in 1999.
His last album, “New World Order” was released in 1996. Somehow he managed to produce it, despite his paralysis.
The thing that messes me up is when I ponder the total waste and tragedy of the 60’s and the way the whole thing has been chewed up and digested and barfed back into our mouths like the applesauce baby food so called recollections of conventional wisdom like “Forrest Gump” and “The Greatest Generation” make it out to be. You forget how much hate there was out there, how they played dirty, and used every tool in their toolbox to discredit and destroy any leader who came up to challenge the way things were. And if they couldn’t scare you into quitting, and if they couldn’t destroy your credibility, they just killed you. You can pick and peck about this one and that one, but just step back and look at how many poor bastards somehow wound up dead. Civil rights workers found dead. Churches burned down. Car accidents. Plane crashes. Its hard to figure, but it sure seems like a lot of the assassinations and mysterious deaths involved people of a particular persuasion.
The twist is that some of the ideas that were revolutionary back then are commonplace or even coopted today. Civil rights for all races. Equal rights for women. Environmental consciousness.
And while we still have work to do on all these fronts, no one any longer even tries to deny the objective. You don’t have no more Maddox or Wallace barring the doors to schools to keep the blacks out and down. Some might say the struggle has moved to a more abstract and cynical level, where as King said “they wrap themselves in the garments of love, and say that they’re loving, when they’re really hating.” And I’ll come out and say it: Haley Barbour and Pat Robertson are no different from Maddox or Wallace, just craftier liars with even less integrity, if that’s possible.
But in the end Mayfield remained or at least seemed hopeful. “It’s a new day,” he said, and his voice calling for “a change of mind of the human race” just breaks my heart, thinking that he was singing, laying there in his hospital bed.
“Right on brother, Right on for the darkness.”

This is the view from my office window. In the distance, across the intervening Barton Creek Greenbelt and Colorado River, you can see the skyline of downtown Austin, including the Capital. We like to joke, you can only see the right wing from here, but you’re not missing anything, because the Texas State Capital has two right wings.
Something about the optical effect makes it look microscopic in this shot, but to the naked eye, its actually seems closer. Another unfortunate optical effect obscures the half rainbow arching over the skyline, which to my eye was beautiful and evocative.
There is something about this city that arouses an affection. I can’t put my finger on it. Its kind of an insouciance, or maybe the feeling you get when you recall a lost love of your youth. That’s not exactly it, but close. Sometimes they use the word nostalgia, which literally means “homesickness.” Its a longing, but not for a “where” so much as for a “when”. I said at the time that someday I’d write about it, and tell the story, and God willing, I will still do someday. But then as now, my life was not my own.

I’ve recently become more and more interested in economics. for a variety of reasons. its fascinating, like a mandala. everyone sees what they want to in it.
there’s psychology, and sociology, and it matters, like food and jobs, and mom can’t even make apple pie if she don’t have apples or money to buy gas for the oven.
and there’s politics and these days, its almost a theology.
if you ask a some people, its like religion, and ronald reagan ain’t jesus, but maybe he is saint paul. the pharisee, converted. pointing the way to the one: that would have to be milton friedman, I guess, in this analogy. he did win a nobel prize (friedman, that is), but it turns out economics is also kind of like magic, you can be totally, 100% provably wrong, and still win a nobel prize in your field. you’ve got to love it.
so the basic idea is that we have these contending theories. there have been other theories in the past, but they have all been proven wrong. usually through the force of arms, it turns out, which would seem to be out of the field of economics, but no, its quite ecumenical. so flexible. it can accommodate any eventuality. it has to. that’s one of the many attributes it shares with theology.
one of these theories is that the market is the most efficient way to organize pretty much anything.
and that’s good as far as it goes, since the market relies on some very reliable forces: greed and self-interest.
but a free market is like an AI thing called expert systems. it works well enough, perhaps even optimally, but only within certain constraints. outside those constraints, a free market, like an expert system, is subject to catastrophic failure.
do I really have to cite chapter and verse on you at this point? oh, yes. another thing about economists is that their memories can be so astonishingly short.
now, the other idea is that we have rights and responsibilities as individuals, and we have other responsibilities as groups, organizations and societies of human beings. and to the extent that markets help us achieve our objectives and satisfy our responsibilities, that’s fine. but there are other things that we simply must do, be, and have, and markets don’t guarantee that these things come into being, so we as a society will them into being.
these include things like the military, schools, libraries, parks, volunteer fire departments, and so on. we used to have a word for it, we called it the “common wealth” or the commons. where we all shared the pasture. we helped raise each other’s barns. not for money, but because we were social minded. and at the bottom, we hoped that if we helped out when we could, should the need arise, we could expect help from others in return. basic human decency.
but there’s another word for that these days: socialism. ooh. how we hate socialism. its right there next to communism in our pantheon of isms. and we know we hate communism, because we fought a long and bitter war against it. the war was so long that the other side even forgot what they were about and morphed into something entirely different from what I’m talking about when I use the word socialism.
but unfortunately, most of us in the west have been brainwashed so thoroughly, that even volunteer fire departments are suspect these days.
like the man said, don’t confuse the map for the territory.