Aaron's Watching His Stories

For those of you not watching football today, here's a Sporcle quiz to keep you occupied. You are to name all the Presidential candidates who have received electoral votes. This is different than simply naming the winner and principal opponent; remember there are stray electoral votes that wander off every so often and there were a lot of recipients in the early days. You have 10 minutes.

Also, note that wrestling has been reinstated to the Olympics in one of the more obvious fixes to a pointlessly stupid dilemma in the history of the Games.

If you ARE watching football today... welcome, dear brothers and sisters.

Well, He Does Kind Of Steal Souls

If you're well-versed enough in medieval Japanese culture, you might be familiar with the art medium of woodblock printing; specifically, the ukiyo-e format. How ukiyo-e works is, first you make a master drawing in ink. You then trace that drawing, and put the tracing, face down, on a block of wood. You then carve the drawing into the wood, leaving the trace lines alone so that they're in relief. You ink that block, print copies from it, and then put those copies on additional blocks which put each of the additional colors you wish to use in relief. The final product is the result of a sequence of prints from each of the blocks, some of them impressed on the paper more than once to get the shading right.

An extremely labor-intensive format, as you can imagine, with a lot of potential failure points and no way to fix a mistake. If you go watch someone creating online art- a webcomic, for example, and after Strip Search came along I've watched quite a few of these things because artists will livestream it- you'll note liberal use of the Undo function. The artist will make a rather daring, sweeping attempt at a particular line, and if it doesn't look right, they'll hit Undo and make another sweeping attempt until they get a line they like. The art is also done in several layers which can be individually moved around at will- a layer for the trace, a layer for the background, for the foreground, for each of several key elements of the piece. In ukiyo-e, there is no undo and no freedom of realignment of elements. One wrong carve, one slight misalignment at printing time, and you've got a lot of work to do over again from the beginning.

As time passed and artists found different methods and different mediums, and as German printing presses made their way into Japan and made for a much cheaper and easier way of doing things, ukiyo-e faded away to the point where literally nobody was making new prints, merely copying existing prints. Those practicing ukiyo-e today have all spent their entire lives copying older prints for tourists.

Normally, if I were to tell you someone was making video game art, a lot of you would roll your eyes at it. But when someone wants to make video game art in ukiyo-e... well, the ukiyo-e creators of today still did, because they were convinced nobody wanted new prints anymore. Then the project Ukiyo-e Heroes set a Kickstarter record for the most-funded art project in site history, a record that was held for 51 weeks before being overtaken about two weeks ago. Ukiyo-e Heroes was the brainchild of one Jed Henry, spurred on when he noticed how much early video game design seemed influenced by ukiyo-e, chiefly black outlines and solid color fills. So he went off and tried to make video game art that was a more direct homage to it, making it look more evocative of the Edo period, getting tutelage from British woodblock printer David Bull. But Bull, having run into his own roadblocks from apathetic interest in ukiyo-e, didn't think new prints would sell. Henry won Bull over with a Kirby design in which Kirby, a little pink puffball who swallows enemies to gain their powers, was reimagined as a soul-stealing frog demon, depicted attacking longtime foe King Dedede. The time and expense of doing a series of such prints resulted in the Kickstarter campaign. They were seeking $10,000. They ended up getting $313,341...

...and a lot of people wondering why nobody was doing woodblock art these days.

You can go here if you want one.

The Other Refugees On Boats

When the original group of British convicts was sent to Australia, the major reason Australia was selected was that it was remote. There was no way in hell someone sent to Australia was going to show up in London again. But that doesn't mean a desperate individual can't bridge a gap between Australia and somewhere else. The 'somewhere else' in this case is Indonesia, and much like the United States, the gap between Australia and Indonesia is routinely traversed by people looking to escape dangerous political situations in other countries throughout the region and seeking refuge in the most stable nation they can reach (the United States taking in those from the Americas headed by Mexico; Australia getting those from Asia with no one nation really out front).

The distance from Cuba to Miami is 90 miles. The checkpoint those departing from Indonesia are trying to reach is Christmas Island, about 220 miles off the Indonesian coast, about 2 1/2 times the length from Cuba to Florida. Meaning a longer trek, and more opportunity to not make it. The general quality of the boats is worse than the ones departing from Cuba, too.

It's become a major plot point in the presidential campaign currently underway between incumbent Kevin Rudd, who has taken a hard line against those trying to reach Australia, and challenger Tony Abbott, who has unveiled a boat buy-back plan that has been widely and quickly ridiculed. This has led David O'Shea to head to Indonesia...



UPDATE: The polls have closed. Tony Abbott has won.

Blame It On The Rain

In the United Kingdom, Walkers is a popular brand of potato chips. Or 'crisps'. Whatever. You people and your languages. Anyway, potatoes like rain. Not too many other people like rain, but potatoes, which I've just realized that I've implied to be people, like rain. So Walkers, which pushes a potato-based product, in 2010 opted to base a promotion around rain.

Here's how it worked. When you bought a bag of chips, the bag came with a code. You were given a map of the United Kingdom. The map was divided into a grid as mapped out by the Met Office, the UK's national weather service, or at least based on what the Met Office was using. You were to select a location on the grid, and predict rain for that location (according to the Met Office standard of 1 mm) on a time and date of your choosing. If you predicted correctly- that is, if at least 1 mm of rain fell on your selected patch within a 4-hour window- you won 10 pounds.

When you're doing promotions with prizes at stake, a crucial thing you need to do is build in something sufficient to ensure you only are handing out a certain amount of prizes. Hand out too much, and you end up costing yourself more than the amount of the business you drummed up, defeating the purpose. A number of Kickstarter campaigns have unexpectedly gone down in flames this way when the creator of a project gave out too much in reward-tier and stretch-goal swag, spending money on rewards, and shipping rewards, that should have been going towards the project itself. This was Walker's first mistake: there wasn't enough of a limiter. They limited people to two predictions a day, and limited spots on the grid to one prediction at a time- but this was something of a skill competition, as enough knowledge will permit you to figure out where it's likely to rain tomorrow. And 10 pounds- about $16 at the time- is, of course, many times the cost of a bag of chips (40 pence in this case, with 100 pence to a pound). What needed to happen here was a lot of dry weather, or rainy patches of land going unpredicted.

From 2008-2012, the United Kingdom received an average rainfall of 1,220 mm per year. The United States, by comparison, got 715. It's not exactly tropical-level stuff- Costa Rica got 2,926, for example- but it's pretty rainy by European standards. As a result, there were quite a few correct predictions. And in an already-rainy country, Walkers happened to hit a wet spell during the contest period, which itself was held in the fall, also known as the UK's rainy season. At one point, David Spiegelhalter of Cambridge University calculated that, predicting randomly, one could expect to make 1 pound, 20 pence off of any given 40-pence bag of chips, which triggers the classic marketing blunder of offering a prize worth more than the cost of the product.

Walkers, at some point, quietly reduced the prediction allowance from two per day to one per day.

What happened next depends on what source you're going by. If you're going by the Uncle John's Bathroom Reader (Zipper Accidents, specifically) where I originally caught wind of this, Walkers saw an especially rainy week coming over the horizon and prematurely cancelled the promotion. If you go by Marketing Week, an angry player complained about the reduction in play allowances to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), who, the following March, agreed with the player and ruled that Walkers should not have altered the rules after the contest was launched, and that they may not run another promotion in that form. (These two versions of events aren't mutually exclusive, but they don't make any effort to confirm each other either.)

If you're going by UTalk Marketing, the whole thing was actually a great success. Which leads me to ask how many chips they bought.

Ah Yes, That Whole Thing

Part of the argument in favor of action in Syria- I had considered this as well- was the fact that our last limited operation, the action in Libya to take out Moammar Gadhafi, had been, in fact, short and successful.

And in that limited scope, it was. Gadhafi was killed, national flags were swapped, cheers, celebratory gunfire, the lot. And then we left, as was our aim. Job done, right?

Well, it turns out it depends what we mean by 'job'. If the job was just to get out Gadhafi, then yes. Job done. But a key component of regime change is that whoever the replacement is will be better. This is not to say it was the wrong move to see off Gadhafi, but it is very much worth noting that there wasn't a clear singular challenger to Gadhafi's rule; no obvious candidate to assume power. Which means once he died, a power vacuum was created. And when power vacuums are created, chaos reigns while multiple parties vie to fill it.

I had forgotten about that small detail. Quite a lot of us forgot about that small detail. Patrick Cockburn of the Independent remembered that small detail. Going back and taking another look reveals a country that has in recent months seen oil production drop to just over 10% of what it could be doing because of strikes and mutinies over lack of pay and which has increasingly fallen under the control of local militias. Oil that is being pumped is hitting the black market, and some has actually had to be imported- to Libya, mind you- just to keep the lights on. The prison system is not immune from mutiny either; that's never good. Replacement Prime Minister Ali Zeidan's government can be described as "shaky".

The aim was never to decide Libya's next direction, and it isn't to decide Syria's next direction either. But it's going to depend largely on who, if anyone, is poised to take over should Bashar al-Assad be toppled. Unfortunately, there isn't a chief candidate there either, only disparate groups of rebels, in fact more disparate than Libya's. News articles disagree on who the leader is. Is it Ahmed al-Jarba? Is it Salim Idris? Is it Haytham al-Manna? Is it Abu Adnan? Is it anyone at all?

So assume that the US acts in Syria. Assume that the operation is successful. Assume that Assad is removed from power. Great. Awesome.

Then what? And do we consider that to be a significant concern to us?

Everything You Know Is Wrong

I have a tendency to put up a fair amount of results of scientific studies here. It's really a relatively stable beat if you know what you're doing. You're pretty much guaranteed to learn something- such is the point of a scientific study, after all- and the scientific peer review process is markedly different, and much slower and more thorough, than the fact-checking process that governs what goes in a news article. A news article often has to be put out on a deadline, which much of the time is the same day, while in science, you can take as long as you like. Getting it right is the focus.

And yet it is by no means perfect. The scientific process is, after all, run by imperfect humans. No less than the Nobel Prize committee has gotten caught out; the 1938 prize in physics was awarded (PDF) to Enrico Fermi for "his demonstrations of the existence of new radioactive elements produced by neutron irradiation". According to the rules of naming elements, a name gets only one shot at landing on the periodic table; if the evidence for the element it's representing falls apart for any reason, that name can then never be used again. Fermi, and the Nobel committee, thought he had discovered element 94, which Fermi had called hesperium. He had not. He had discovered nuclear fission instead- still a fine achievement, but not what he said he'd done. You today know hesperium under the name by which it was actually discovered: plutonium.

And so sometimes the journals that publish scientific studies also have to issue retractions. Sometimes someone messed up an experiment, sometimes it got written up wrong, sometimes there's active malice by a scientist looking for notoriety. The consequences are greater, as these studies affect the direction of future studies and the information they work off of, and if everybody's working from bad premises, well, you know the old saying: garbage in, garbage out. Which in turn just slows down the whole pace of scientific progress. But typically they get about the same amount of press as a news retraction: not much. So what you get today is a site that deals exclusively in scientific retractions, the reasons behind them and assorted name-and-shaming of regular customers: Retraction Watch. They're not really staffed up well enough to tackle every scientific retraction that comes across the wires, but they keep up as best they can. It's enough of a job keeping up with the constantly-rising retraction count of Dutch social psychologist Diederik Stapel, who left a wide swath of academic fraud in his wake by essentially telling people what they wanted to hear, and building his career through a history of his experiments always seemingly ending in success, even though anyone who so much as watches Mythbusters knows how often scientific experiments fail. The root story about Stapel can be seen in this New York Times report; the running tally of retractions counted by Retraction Watch is here.

As of today, Stapel's up to 54.

Your Health Advice For Today

Prayer is not an effective vaccination against measles. Not even if it's done at a megachurch. God does not care how big your prayer space is. You know what is an effective vaccination? A vaccination.

That is all.