Robert Reich on Real Time

I feel like I have tapped into the political zeitgeist in some way with my two Robert Reich posts (you can find his blog here).  Bill Maher had Robert on his show last Friday (9-17-10) and he is excellent on it.  Here are a couple quotes from the HBO site:

Last year, just to give you one example, the top 25 hedge fund managers in this country earned, on average, a billion dollars.  A billion dollars each... That would pay for 20,000 teachers.  You see how out of whack everything has become?

I think the Democrats are very afraid of being classified as class warriors...because they thing that everybody in America wants to and expects to be rich, and therefore everybody in America believes that one day they're going to be at the top, and therefore, they don't want to be taxed.

I couldn't get to any clips from his show except the Overtime clip, which you can watch here, and Robert does a great job.  Bill Maher is up there with Jon Stewart as far as one of the best in the media for running their show with a largely fair group of guests and questions.  I love the dialog that happens on Real Time.  One of my favorite quotations to describe the government's place happened on Bill's show, said by long time PBS newsman Bill Moyers, paraphrased:

Laws are there to make bad people do good things.

Here is the video:

Civ V Follow Up

I woke up early to fire up Civ V this morning at 8am MDT, and played nearly non-stop until 7PM.  The new unit control, including one-unit per tile, hexagonal tiles and ranged combat all added a lot to the complexity of the combat.  All forms of artillery, including ships and archers are now able to completely kill a unit, which seemed like a no-brainer.  I started a game on the largest map and slowest time so I haven't gotten to air combat yet, however if the changes to other ranged units and boats are consistent, it may be the best air combat style too.  Cities having their own inherent defenses, including HP and bombardment, is a great addition too.  From what I have seen so far, Civ V is the best of the franchise, building on the giants that came before it.

Civilization V

The Civilization series of video games gets its fifth installment on Tuesday.  This is a highly anticipated release, so I am paying homage to it with a brief summary of the first four, to atone for all of the time I wasted on them.
Civilization (or Civ I) came out in 1991, and as such I don't remember actually playing too much of this one.  The game introduced the basic model, which carries through to Civilization V.  Build cities, research technology, build units and wage war.  The unit combat is the simplest with each unit just having an attack value and defense value.  The attack value of one unit is compared to the defense value of another, which produces a proportion.  This is the chance the attacking unit will beat the defending.  A random roll is done and one unit is destroyed, and the other survives, fully intact.

This results in the notorious "phalanx defeats tank" phenomenon in which ancient units can seem absurdly over-effective. The effect is worsened by stacking multiplicative modifiers, so that when a modern tank(attack 8) attacks a phalanx of spearmen (defense 2) that's a veteran (+50%) fortified (+50%) on a mountain (+200%), the two are evenly matched.

In 1996 Civilization II was released.  There were a few big things that it changed.  Firstly, the map shifted to an isometric perspective, which became the standard for Civilization games.  Secondly, units started with hit points (HP) and combat happened in rounds.  Each round, the game randomly rolls, based on the proportion of attack to defense.  This is repeatedly done until one of the units HP reaches zero.  They made this change to eliminate the "phalanx defeats tank" problem of the first game, which it only partially addresses.  I like this change because you have to "heal" up a victorious unit after a tough battle.  Civ II added one last thing to the game-play of Civ I, a victory condition outside of just destroying all other civilizations and a scoring system.  When one reached the later stages of the game, one would have the opportunity to construct a space-ship to Alpha Centauri.  If one finishes building and launching the ship, it travels and reaches its destination, the game ends.  The game also ends at 2020 regardless and scores are compared to determine the winner.  The game scores each civilization base on the number of World Wonders they have built, happy population and years of peace (with bonus points if the game ended by reaching Alpha Centauri).

In 1999, Sid Meier released a non-"Civilization" game named Alpha Centauri (Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri or SMAC).  SMAC was the spiritual successor to Civ II, as it was developed by the same team that produced Civ II.  The game-play was nearly identical, however it introduced a unique feature: fully customizable units.  SMAC also introduced unique Civilization bonuses, similar to those used later in Civilization 3, and government system bonuses similar to those in Civilization 4.  Civ V also uses a special World Wonder as a win condition, like SMAC's Ascent to Transcendence.

Civilization III hit the market in 2001.  In some ways Civ III was a step backward from SMAC.  It did not have SMAC's elevation changes in the map, "group movement" for units (though it was added by a patch later) and robust government options.  Despite this, Civ III introduced one of best new mechanics to the series: culture.  This allowed your civilization to have a border and reveal the territory within it.  Also, it carried over the concept of specialized units for improving terrain, from SMAC, in the form of workers.  In Civ II, settlers filled that role.  Civ III also expanded the victory conditions to Conquest, Domination, Cultural, Space Race and Diplomatic.  From Wikipedia:

A Conquest victory is achieved when no civilizations besides the player's exist, a civilization being eliminated when its last city is captured or destroyed.

A player wins a Domination victory by controlling two thirds of the world's land and population. 66% of the world's land area must be within the civilization's cultural borders, and 66% of the world's population must reside within the civilization's cities.

The Cultural victory is achieved when either one city the player controls has 20,000 or more culture points, or if the entire civilization meets a certain threshold (100,000 on a Standard map) and has at least double that of any other culture.

The Space Race is nearly identical to the Alpha Centauri victory condition from Civ II.  The last win condition, Diplomatic, is achieved by building the U.N. World Wonder, getting elected "Secretary General" and winning the victory option election by a simple majority.  The time limit game option also remains, the winner of which is determined by score in a similar fashion to Civ II.

The latest game in the series, Civilization IV, refines many parts of the Civilization formula.  The victory conditions are nearly identical to Civ III, as well as the map being fairly similar.  The game had a controversial addition to the game, religion, as well as "Great People".  These special units came in the form of either artists, merchants, prophets, engineers or scientists, and each had a slightly different one-time ability.  Civ IV also refined the government options to easily the best system so far of flexible civics.  The unit and combat system was also the best so far.  From Wikipedia:

Military units no longer have separate ratings for attack, defense and health, but instead a single strength rating. The combatants' strengths are modified by multiplicative promotion and circumstance bonuses, and the highest number generally wins. As of the game's most recent patch, a damaged unit loses half that amount of combat strength. The player may now check the probability of success before commissioning an attack. The revised combat system was largely in response to the "spearman-defeats-tank" problem that has plagued Civilization since its first iteration, wherein weak and obsolete units (generally controlled by the AI) would defeat stronger and more modernized forces (generally controlled by the player) on a far more regular basis than common sense would suggest possible.

One of my complaints with the combat system (which has persisted across the entire series), is the relative ineffectiveness of air units.  They always seem to be tacked on as an afterthought and made to be glorified artillery.  Also, the elevation system used in SMAC made a lot of sense.  I feel it added to the immersiveness of the map layout, as well as allowing worker units (called terraformers in SMAC) to change the elevation of tiles to manipulate water (for example).

Lastly, I leave you with a quotation from Jerry Holkins at Penny Arcade:

Via some methodology I am not entirely certain of, I received a working code for a review copy of Civilization V. I have played it enough to know that it is a game of clean lines and flawless ratios unbounded by the smooth corners of the world it simulates. It's perfect and deathless and it isn't going anywhere, ready the very moment I summon it to enclose me in its pure structures. It's the maximized centerfold archetype when what I'm after is filthy, anonymous, alleyway rutting. That's King's Bounty.

Polyphasic Sleep

Polyphasic sleep is a term for going to sleep many times a day, rather than monophasic or biphasic, the two most common sleep schedules.  The idea behind polyphasic sleep is that one takes many small naps throughout the day, in effort to get more total waking hours in a 24-hour period.  The most extreme of these schedules is known as the "Uberman" sleep schedule, in which one takes a 20 minute nap, every 4 hours, which makes 2 hours of sleep per 24-hours (22 waking hours).  This schedule has problems, the largest being it is incredibly difficult to adjust to.  The first few weeks, one is in a state of sleep deprivation.  It takes incredible determination and discipline.  The naps need to be taken at exactly the same time (to the minute) each day for the schedule to work.  From the Uberman schedule, the "Everyman" schedule was developed, which is a "core nap" of 3 hours and 3 20 minute naps spaced throughout the day.  This schedule is a lot easier to adjust to and requires less discipline with the "micro naps".
Here is a chart from the Wikipedia page, visually comparing the different schedules:

Interestingly, Dymaxion sleep is the schedule used by Buckminster Fuller before the phenomenon of polyphasic sleep was ever described.  In fact, many figures through-out history utilized a similar sleep schedule, including: Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla and Winston Churchill.

Here are a couple more sites for information regarding polyphasic sleep:
Polyphasic Sleep: Facts and Myths

Polyphasicsleep.info

Body Mass Index

Body Mass Index (or BMI) is a quick way of converting one's height and weight into one metric.  The problem is that the BMI metric is largely without value.  It is not any better of a metric of health than someone's height or weight alone.  According to the Mayo Clinic:

FINDINGS: We found 40 studies with 250,152 patients that had a mean follow-up of 3.8 years. Patients with a low body-mass index (BMI) (ie, <20) had an increased relative risk (RR) for total mortality (RR=1.37 [95% CI 1.32-1.43), and cardiovascular mortality (1.45 [1.16-1.81]), overweight (BMI 25-29.9) had the lowest risk for total mortality (0.87 [0.81-0.94]) and cardiovascular mortality (0.88 [0.75-1.02]) compared with those for people with a normal BMI. Obese patients (BMI 30-35) had no increased risk for total mortality (0.93 [0.85-1.03]) or cardiovascular mortality (0.97 [0.82-1.15]). Patients with severe obesity (> or =35) did not have increased total mortality (1.10 [0.87-1.41]) but they had the highest risk for cardiovascular mortality (1.88 [1.05-3.34]).

Their data shows that BMI is not a reliable metric for predicting health outcomes.  From a medical or scientific standpoint the metric BMI is just not valuable.  Another study published in the American Journal of Public Health found:

Traditional BMI categories do not conform well to the complexities of the BMI–mortality relationship. In concurrence with conclusions from previous literature, I found that the current definitions of obesity and overweight are imprecise predictors of mortality risk.

If a gut level reaction to assessing health by height and weight alone is not enough, take a look at the Wikipedia section on it.

Some argue that the error in the BMI is significant and so pervasive that it is not generally useful in evaluation of health.  University of Chicagopolitical science professor Eric Oliver says BMI is a convenient but inaccurate measure of weight, forced onto the populace, and should be revised.

The medical establishment has generally acknowledged some shortcomings of BMI. Because the BMI is dependent only upon weight and height, it makes simplistic assumptions about distribution of muscle and bone mass, and thus may overestimate adiposity on those with more lean body mass (e.g. athletes) while underestimating adiposity on those with less lean body mass (e.g. the elderly).

The problem with making the connection between BMI and overall healthfulness is that the metric is then used inappropriately, for example by health insurance companies.

In the United States, where medical underwriting of private health insurance plans is widespread, most private health insurance providers will use a particular high BMI as a cut-off point in order to raise insurance rates for or deny insurance to higher-risk patients, thereby ostensibly reducing the cost of insurance coverage to all other subscribers in a 'normal' BMI range. The cutoff point is determined differently for every health insurance provider and different providers will have vastly different ranges of acceptability.

Another article published in The Dartmouth, Dartmouth College's student newspaper, proposes that insurance and pharmaceutical companies actually have a financial incentive for embracing and perpetuating the use of the flawed BMI metric.

According to Oliver, the "obesity mafia" consists of government health agencies such as the National Institute of Health, the Center for Disease Control and the Food and Drug Administration. These agencies are linked in symbiotic relationships with drug companies and academic researchers, with the trio feeding off one another to perpetuate the myth of widespread obesity in America -- all for financial gain.

Because Moderates Shouldn't Be Drown Out

One of the funny things about political activism, whether on the left or right, is that those with moderate (centrist) viewpoints are often missed.  Talking heads that yell the loudest and espouse the craziest ideas are those that get the most TV time.  For this reason, the only news TV show I watch regularly is The Daily Show.  Last night Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert announced an event at Washington D.C.

We're looking for the people who think shouting is annoying, counterproductive, and terrible for your throat; who feel that the loudest voices shouldn't be the only ones that get heard; and who believe that the only time it's appropriate to draw a Hitler mustache on someone is when that person is actually Hitler. Or Charlie Chaplin in certain roles.

Also Stewart had President Clinton on, who had an excellent interview.
Part 1 and Part 2
Why can't we have democrats that are actually in office do this much?

Best "Always Sunny" Episodes

In celebration of the new season of It's Alway Sunny in Philadelphia, premiering tonight, I have compiled the top episodes.  I am assuming that the reader has watched each of these episodes and just doing a short-hand of the best parts for each of the best episodes.  At the end I will name the top 5 episodes.