Halfway down the Danube

The Mountain of Moses

So we went for a drive today, Jacob and me.

We weren't going anywhere in particular. Drove out past the airport, in the direction of Echmiadzin.

Leaving Yerevan that way? The first thing you pass is the US Embassy, which is a mile or so outside of town. It's huge -- three large buildings set on several acres of green campus, all surrounded by a wall. It's much bigger than the US Embassy in Romania.

Why do we need such a big embassy? Well, one, the influence of the Armenian diaspora, and two, the fact that Armenia's a friendly country that borders Iran. It's a bit depressing that it's a walled compound, but that's SOP for US embassies these days.

Anyway. A few miles past the Embassy is the turnoff to the airport (after first passing through a village full of garish casinos, the peculiar welcome for everyone flying into Armenia). And a mile or so past the airport is the village of Musa Ler.

Musa Ler was originally the name of an Armenian region in Turkey, far to the south and west of here. It means "Mountain of Moses". It's much more widely known by its Turkish name: Musa Dagh.

You can't miss Musa Ler. The village is nothing special, but there's an enormous monument on the hill above it; you can see it from the main highway while you're still miles away.

The monument is several stories high and -- there's no nice way to say this -- fugly. I'm sure the builders meant well, but it was built in the 1980s and combined two of the 20th century's most regrettable architectural trends: late period Soviet monumentalism, and in-your-face screaming-eagle nationalism. I mean, it literally has a huge eagle on it. Along with a bas-relief of Armenian warrior, done in the ancient Assyrian style, except carrying a rifle. The fact that it's made of bright orange brick is just gravy.

(I note in passing that the erection of such a blatantly nationalistic monument should have been a flare-lit signal that something was Very Wrong in the 1980s USSR. But the growth of nationalism in the late Soviet period went strangely unnoticed at the time, and is poorly studied even today.)

Where was I... oh, yes, the monument. Well, it was ugly, but I thought, what the hell -- if I don't go up there, I'll always wonder what that thing was. So I turned off the highway, drove through the village, parked on a slab of concrete over a drainage ditch, and put Jacob on my shoulders. Then we walked up about a hundred crumbling stone steps. Then, well, there we were at this big orange brick thing.

It did have a pretty impressive view over the plain of the Araxes. I would say a spectacular view except, honestly, the plain of the Araxes is nothing much to look at... it's just a flat scrubby piece of steppe wedged in between Armenia and Turkey. The monument itself was in good condition, clean and very orange; it looked good to last for hundreds of years. The paving around it was slowly faling apart, though. Off to one side was an enormous fountain, which had obviously been dry for a very long time.

There was nobody around. It was a hazy warm day, the sort that warns you spring in these parts is short and summer takes no prisoners. I could feel Jacob starting to droop on my shoulders -- it was around his nap time, and he didn't see anything interesting up here.

There was a bit more to see. A hundred meters or so behind it was a graveyard. We went over and looked at it, and there were seven or eight graves, all with very handsome stones (and all engraved with images of the dead -- that's a Russian thing, but the Armenians do it too.) All but one of the dates were between 1992 and 1995, so I figured it was from the Karabakh war. Sure enough, I found out later -- they were dead fighters who were descended from the Musa Dagh survivors.

While we were looking at the cemetary, three women appeared over the edge of the hill, walking slowly towards us.

-- It's late here, so I'll continue this in another post.

I blame the painkillers.

After extensively analyzing recent reader response (18 replies to a post on theoretical nuclear physics, zero replies to a post on kittens), I've determined that Halfway Down the Danube's core demographic is actually Jeff "Skunk" Baxter, former guitarist for the Doobie Brothers and current defense consultant for the US government.

In his spare time, he wrote a five-page paper on a primitive Tandy computer that proposed converting the military's Aegis program, a ship-based antiplane system, into a rudimentary missile-defense system... "Skunk really blew my mind with that report," Mr. Rohrabacher says. "He was talking over my head half the time, and the fact that he was a rock star who had basically learned it all on his own was mind-boggling."

Of course, on the opposite side of the political fence, there's Grand Funk Railroad.

While GFR may be best remembered in the West as Homer Simpson's favourite band ('the bong-rattling bass of Mel Schacher,' eulogised Homer), their impact in poorer nations should not be underestimated: Cuban maestro Juan de Marcos Gonzalez told me GFR and Steely Dan were his favourite American bands in the 1970s, while Mohammed Sacirbey, Bosnian Ambassador to the UN, loved the Funk so much he inspired them to briefly reform in 1997 and play benefit concerts for a Bosnian children's charity.

Wow, Sacirbey definitely has the Yugoslav male pattern baldness thing going. Honestly, if minoxidil had been discovered before the Constitution of 1974, the Balkans would look very different.

Kittens

img alt="fpi_glasses.jpg" src="http://www.bookcase.com/~claudia/mt/archives/fpi_glasses.jpg" width="50" height="50" border="0" /> We got 'em.

Lot of cats in our neighborhood. They range from someone's pet to purely feral, with most sort of in between. Last year we found a couple of young kittens in our yard. We took them in and tried to keep them alive, but it didn't work out.

So. But there are still plenty of cats around. Our neighborhood is really designed for them... lots of trees, lots of walls and fences, lots of low houses that are close together. Invisible cat highways crisscross our yard and our roof.

-- Here's a thing about our house. It's not a very big house, but it's very much a thing of parts. It began as a bungalow, back in the Khrushchev years, a place to escape the worst heat of the summer. Then decade by decade people added rooms, and it gradually grew into a real house. This is one reason the heating, plumbing and electrical systems are weird... they weren't planned, they just sort of grew. Also, the house has some odd spaces: a lumber room under the porch, a second floor bathroom that protrudes like a nose, a couple of strange crawl spaces.

I heard the mewling while giving Jacob his bath. Finished putting him to bed, then went downstairs and got the flashlight.

The mother is this long-haired grey cat from next door. She's a tough creature, half wild, but I think I gave her the shock of her life.

They're in the crawlspace over the stairs, behind the front balcony. It's open to the outside; I can see where she got in, there's a sort of long hole under the eaves.

You get into the crawlspace through a little hobbit-sized door with a latch. She had the kittens in the corner right next to the door, probably for the warmth that leaks out from the house. So when I opened it, they were literally at my feet.

Mom cat response: RUN from the stranger with the blazing light, take two steps, then FREEZE at the realization that he's RIGHT OVER THE KITTENS, turn around eyes wide --

I stepped back and shut the door. Poor thing!

It's quiet now. I hope she hasn't taken them away.

The shores of the island

This is one of those random stories.

The other day I was looking for something online, typed too fast, and entered the capital letter "S" into the search engine. After a moment's thought, it directed me to the Wikipedia page for Sulfur: chemical symbol S.

I was about to navigate away, but the pretty periodic table caught my eye. (Yes, I am easily distracted.) So I clicked on it for a closer look.

Well. The periodic table goes up past 200? Who knew?

It doesn't, of course -- yet -- but I had some fun clicking around (completely forgetting my original search, but hell, it was the weekend and the baby was asleep) and after a while I ended up at this article on superheavy elements:

We now have data on the properties of 29 new nuclei with atomic numbers between 104 and 118. The decay modes, energies and lifetimes of the heaviest nuclei all agree with the predictions of the microscopic nuclear model, which provides the first experimental evidence for an island of stability in superheavy nuclei.

But we have only reached the shores of this island. We have found a steep rise in the stability of superheavy nuclei with atomic number, but we are still far from the region in which nuclei may live for thousands, maybe even millions, of years. The problem is that we do not yet know how to make the neutron-rich nuclei that will take us towards the magic number N = 184. However, there could be a way round this. If the longest living superheavy nucleus has a half-life of tens of millions years then it should be present in very small quantities on Earth. The only difficulty then is finding it.

You want to take a look at this lovely graphic. See that blue bit on the upper left? That's the island, where they're trying to go. They can't quite reach it yet.

Anyway. I liked the article, but what struck me was the name of the author: Yuri Oganessian. Another Armenian! They're everywhere!

Well, maybe. Googling shows that Oganessian -- who is sort of the dean of superheavy element study, if you're working in this field you know all about him -- Oganessian was born in 1933 in Rostov, which is at the top of the Caucasus but still some distance away from Armenia. Of course, Russia is full of Armenians and Russo-Armenians; further googling showed that Oganessian is a Slavicization of "Hovhannesian". So he's probably at least of Armenian descent.

...superheavy elements. If we do find any stable ones, they're likely to be strange. Their nuclei are so massive that relativistic effects become important. So, instead of just being a heavier version of platinum or whatever, they may have very odd chemical and magnetic properties. (And one of them may be a gas. A very dense gas. How cool is that?)

To link this to another preoccupation of this blog, superheavy elements have been a topic of science fiction since forever. There's a Poul Anderson novel, naturally. And Oganessian himself has appeared at least once in science fiction... in Michael Swanwick's Periodic Table of Science Fiction, of course:

It began when an international team of researchers headed by Yuri Oganessian at the JINR in Russia (then the USSR) boasted of doing the deed first by bombarding uranium with argon-140 ions and then by bombarding thorium with calcium-44 ions. This claim was disputed, and the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) declined to give credit to the Ion Jets, as the team styled itself.

Then "Big Al" Ghiorso and his homies at Lawrence Berkeley—they called themselves the Supercolliders—made a bid for turf. But again, the evidence was too close for the IUPAC to call.

Soon thereafter, the Atom Smashers, a Teutono-Russo-Finno-Slovak gang operating out of the GSI in Darmstadt, said they'd bombarded a lead target with nickel ions and produced three atoms of what was then given the temporary handle ununnilium. Unfortunately, by the time the IUPAC referees got there, the atoms were gone, decayed to hassium, seaborgium, and rutherfordium.

Finally, the Ion Jets, under their new leader Yuri Lazarev (Oganessian had been deposed in a knife fight), said they'd created element 110 by bombarding plutonium with sulfur-34 ions, and also as part of the alpha-decay chain from their discovery of element 114. By this point, emotions were running so high that the IUPAC judges changed their names, moved to a neighboring city, and hid under their beds, waiting for the whole thing to blow over.

Which is how it came about that all three teams agreed to settle the matter once and for all, in the parking lot out behind the gym after the big game. They brought shivs and zip-guns, and wore their gang smocks. When the blood stopped flowing, the Darmstadt Atom Smashers were the last ones standing. Which is why ununnilium is now officially called darmstadtium.

Science isn't pretty. But the scientific method gets results. If you don't believe me, you can always take it up with Yuri the Knife.

The Road to Ptghni

Really, its the road through Ptghni. Sorry.

Ptghni is a village on the road that goes north from Yerevan to Lake Sevan. It has nothing to do with anything except, come on... "Ptghni"? How can you not love that?

I was driving north with Jacob because I wanted to go hiking. We have a book of hiking trails, and it showed one in the village of Fantan -- right, I should make a list -- Fantan, about 30 km north of here. I have one of those baby-backpack carrier things, and Jacob still fits in it. So I thought, hey, Sunday hike.

Didn't quite work out... See, while Fantan is only 30 km away, it's about 700 meters or 2000 feet higher than Yerevan. So while the flowers are just about to start blooming down here, up in Fantan the snow hasn't finished melting yet. So we could drive to the trailhead -- through streets full of slush and mud, and gutters frothing with meltwater -- but the trail? Went straight up the side of a hill that was still covered with snow.

Beautiful view, though. I pulled over by the side of the road and let Jacob out. The sun was very warm, almost hot, despite the snow... well, we were almost 2000 meters up, so that can happen. Sheets of meltwater were running down the road, and Jacob happily stomped and splashed while I took in the view. We were there five or ten minutes and nobody passed us. It was quiet. Then we got back in the car and drove down through the village and back to Yerevan.

...the village. Fantan is a village of maybe a thousand people, and it's obviously seen better days. I've seen devastated inner cities, but never before a devastated inner village. But that's what this looked like. In the center of the village was a crossroads where several larger building stood. It looked like one had been a store, another a school, a third perhaps the town hall. All were empty and ruined, gaping windows and crumbling masonry. There were also a lot of empty houses, some boarded up, some just falling apart.

Rural Armenia has been hit by a double whammy: most of the able-bodied men and ambitious young people have either moved to Yerevan or gone out of the country to find work. Yerevan has nearly doubled in size since 1991, but almost all of the country's small towns and villages have lost population. The same is true in most post-Communist countries, but it's much worse here.

Also: lots of people standing around in the streets. Some were working -- shoveling snow so the meltwater could flow -- but most were just standing. When we drove through town in our big Ford, everyone turned and unabashedly stared. I could see them staring after me in the rear-view mirror until we were out of sight.

* * *

In other news, Armenia's Prime Minister died last night. I never met him. The official word is heart failure. The most interesting thing about this is, I heard it from a colleague this morning -- around, oh, 11 am -- by which time he'd been dead for a while. But the official news wasn't released until about 3 in the afternoon. In the West we're used to getting very immediate news, but things don't work that way here.

Late night thoughts on "Well, I read..."

Two weeks of a chest cold, and one of bronchitis. It's a wonder I can even type. Some quick thoughts on the recent post:

The fastest form of learning I know of is the Garcia effect: taste aversion after one trial of a nauseating substance. Individual vocabulary terms during language acquisition can be that fast. Acquiring and learning to use new concepts, however, tends to take rather longer.

At least two types of bad knowledge acquisition seem to happen among readers. In the first, the reader trusts the author to present accurate knowledge about the world, and the reader extracts new but incorrect knowledge from the material by context. However, the reader might lack the skills to evaluate the correctness of the knowledge, or the reader might overvalue the reliability of the author. An infamous mainstream example of this would be Robert Browning's use of the word "twat" in his poem Pippa Passes, which he thought meant "a nun's headgear" from its context in an earlier poem. (NB: it doesn't.)

There's also the "double bind", described below, which -- hypothesis -- induces psychological stress in order to convince the reader of a counterintuitive premise. (A stage magician will "force" an audience member to choose the three of clubs during a card trick.) This is not a simple extraction of (incorrect) knowledge from context. Note that if one already accepts the premise, the double bind acts as a reward, not a stressor. Note, too, the meaningful content of the premise is not closely related to the form of the double bind.

The knowledge learned from the double bind appears to be more deeply held than knowledge taken naively from context. Is knowledge learned from the double bind more quickly learned than knowledge learned from context? Anecdotally, texts with double binds appear to be texts readers are prone to re-read. Perhaps because these crucial passages are read multiple times, the premise is 'naturally' reinforced in the mind of the reader, rather than any deeper psychological association caused by the method.

(The ideas in the last two paragraphs could, in principle, be tested experimentally, I think.)

I feel like there's something important just below the surface here: learning theory, theories of mind and autism, structuralism, and psychological projection all seem connected. It'll be interesting to learn what the neural correlates are, if any. Hopefully the physical functioning of the higher processes of the brain will be able to be understood by the higher processes of the brain, i.e., there will be a high level of abstraction. But that's just a hope, and if anything there's empirical evidence against it.

Well, I read a science fiction novel that tells me it’s not a problem.

Biblical literalists are widely recognized as not the sharpest knives in the drawer. But do you know what group is even dumber?

Written science fiction is dying demographically anyway. But sometimes, I want to give it that extra push into the rendering truck.

Leave the most stupid ideas people have gleaned from science fiction novels in the comments. (Or stories, either.) I'll start it off: "Think of it as evolution in action."

(New stuff below the fold.)

Mike R., you've been quiet. What do you think?

Noel brings up a classic Heinlein quote from Starship Troopers:

Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst.

The anthropologist Gregory Bateson came up with the concept of the cognitive "double bind" in his 1956 paper, "Towards a theory of schizophrenia". The double bind, as Bateson presented it, had three components:

1. When the individual is involved in an intense relationship; that is, a relationship in which he feels it is vitally important that he discriminate accurately what sort of message is being communicated so that he may respond appropriately.

2. And, the individual is caught in a situation in which the other person in the relationship is expressing two orders of message and one of these denies the other. [A pair of Bateson's examples would be, "If you do not do so and so, I will punish you," and "Do not see me as the punishing agent".]

3. And, the individual is unable to comment on the messages being expressed to correct his discrimination of what order of message to respond to, i.e., he cannot make a metacommunicative statement.

Now look how Heinlein's argument is constructed. It's in an extremely didactic setting: a monologue given by the charismatic instructor in the narrator's History and Moral Philosophy class, which in the novel's scenario is an exact science, as rigorous as physics. The reader is intended to be engaged in an intense relationship with DuBois's message. Point 1.

It's a statement that denies most people's experience of the real world. And yet, the reader is not only told that their perception is wrong, "wishful thinking at its worst," implying it will be punished -- Bateson's primary negative injunction; but that any punishment would not be punishment at all, but the natural, predictable outcome of history -- Bateson's secondary negative injunction. Point 2.

Moreover, in the context of the book, Dubois's statement is actually correct. The book is rigged, and no argument, no metacommunicative statement is possible. Point 3.

Dubois's statement is crucial to Heinlein's book. But Bateson's point 2 can be extended to much of the science fiction genre. If a counter-intuitive authorial premise is not understood, then the character will be punished; but it won't be punishment per se, but the workings out of the cold equations of the Universe.

Now, Bateson thought that "when a person is caught in a double bind situation, he will respond defensively in the manner similar to the schizophrenic". Here I should note that Bateson's paradigm, while evocative, is not yet amenable to hypothesis testing, and it's not in the mainstream of schizophrenia research. With that in mind, let me extend the evocation a little further.

Many science fiction readers have tried to express what makes the genre different from all other genres. An often-used term is the "sense of wonder". Sometimes this correlates with the numinous, the cosmic. But much, if not most, science fiction does not deal with numinous or cosmic subjects. Might the readers be describing a "sense of double bind" instead?

I'm going to leave my next extension unsaid. Y'all know what I'm thinking anyway. This is how you differ.

[Addendum: anti-troll links added in comments]

Single parent again

Just me and Jacob.

David's in Germany with the grandparents. (He loves it. Doesn't seem to be missing us much, either.) Claudia should be landing in the US with Alan right about now. So, for the next week, it's just me and the kid.

So far, so good. He clearly notices people are missing, but he seems to like the undivided attention.

Domestic life posts are almost as boring as weather posts, though. So what do you guys want to talk about?

Iran, closer and closer

So the gas pipeline from Iran opened today.

There's a lot of backstory to that pipeline. Here's the short version. Armenia has no energy sources of its own -- no coal, no oil, no natural gas. They used to get oil and gas from Azerbaijan, but then they had a war with Azerbaijan, so no more oil or gas.

There's a gas pipeline from Russia. Unfortunately it goes through Georgia. The Russians and Georgians don't always get along, and that gas pipeline is prone to mysterious explosions. (The Georgians say the Russians do it; the Russians say it's Chechen rebels in the north Caucasus.) Also, Russia has been jacking up the price of natural gas in the last few years. Armenia used to be able to buy gas from Russia dirt cheap, well below world prices. No more -- now they have to pay like everyone else.

Fortunately for Armenia, there's a friendly country, rich in oil and natural gas, right next door. So the Armenians could turn to Iran for gas. Simple, right?

Ah ha ha ha.

The Russians absolutely hated this idea. After all, a pipeline from Iran to Armenia could easily be stretched a bit farther, to Georgia. That would make the Georgians independent of Russia for their gas supplies. And in Moscow's eyes, the Georgians are too damn independent already.

So Moscow set some conditions.

One, it restricted the size of the pipeline. Originally it was supposed to be 1.5 meters wide. The Russians told the Armenians it could only be 71 centimeters wide. That way, it can only carry enough gas for Armenia, not enough to sell on to Georgia.

Two, Armenia has already decided to sell the Armenian side of the pipeline to Gazprom. We all know Gazprom, right? The totally independent Russian energy company. So.

[But wait, you ask. Isn't Armenia an independent country? How can the Russians just come in and tell them what to do? Well, that's an interesting topic, but it really deserves a post of its own. Let's just note that they can, and they do, and move on.]

At first the pipeline will only deliver about 400 million cubic meters of Iranian gas per year. Since Armenia is currently importing about 1.5 billion cubic meters of Russian gas, that will only be a supplement. However, by 2009, when the pipeline is at full capacity, it will be able to deliver about 2.3 billion cubic meters per year. That figure is bigger than current Armenian needs, but the Armenians say they'll need more energy as their economy grows.

The Armenian side of the pipeline is being built with a loan from Iran. Armenia is supposed to pay the money back by exporting electricity to Iran. Who knows if that will work, but anyway the two countries are going to link up their power grids later this year.

-- I'm actually okay with this. Armenia gets some options. That's not a bad thing.

However, I had to roll my eyes at this:

President Robert Kocharian and his Iranian counterpart Mahmoud Ahmadinejad inaugurated on Monday a long-awaited pipeline that will allow Armenia to import natural gas from Iran and ease its strong dependence on Russian energy resources.

Lighting a symbolic torch, the two leaders officially opened the first Armenian section of the pipeline during a ceremony held in Agarak, a small Armenian town on the Iranian border...

[Ahmadinejad] called the event a "big step" in the development of bilateral ties. "I am very happy and grateful to Almighty God for enabling us to open the Iran-Armenia gas pipeline and to provide a new service to the people of Armenia ," he said. "I told my good friend [Kocharian] that we are very happy because he is happy, the government of Armenia is happy, and the people of Armenia are happy," he added.

Bleah.

But people have to stay warm in winter somehow. So.

The Return of Squirrel Boy

So we've been dosing our son with drugs.

All for his own good, of course! Alan has mild ADHD. It's not crippling, but it's definitely an issue. It's hard for him to concentrate. When he's having a bad day, he can't stop moving, wiggling, talking -- and he won't meet your eyes, which drives his mother crazy.

We've tried various things. Routine, routine, structure. That helped some. Dietary supplements -- fish oil, for the fatty acids. That helped a bit. Avoiding certain triggers. (7-Up soda. Makes him totally manic. No idea why.)

But there are limits to what you can do, and more limits to what you can do in Armenia. There are some wonderful new physical therapies out there for ADHD kids. Not available here. (Hell, Armenian doctors aren't really aware that ADHD, like, exists.)

So, drugs.

First we tried Ritalin. That actually worked pretty well. It calmed him down, helped him focus. We were a little freaked at first -- we're drugging our child! -- but that passed. Because he was happy.

Ritalin wasn't perfect. It seemed to depress his appetite. Alan eats like a bird to begin with, so that wasn't good. And while unmedicated Alan -- aka "Squirrel Boy" -- could be pretty high maintenance, still, we weren't entirely comfortable with putting him on a daily dose for the rest of his life.

Ritalin had one other big drawback: you can't get it in Armenia. Armenian medicine tracks Russian medicine. Russian medicine knows nothing of this ADHD nonsense, but it does know that you can take Ritalin to get high (if you eat it like popcorn), so it's simply not available here.

So, Step Two: Strattera. Strattera is a non-stimulant ADHD medication. Not controlled like Ritalin, so you can buy several months supply at once. Helpful! We switched from Ritalin to Stratera in January. That seemed to work okay, too.

But over several weeks, we decided that Strattera wasn't as good as Ritalin. He was a bit more focussed, but he was still Squirrel Boy a lot of the time. And Strattera has problems too: it's expensive, it's relatively new (meaning no long term studies yet for side effects) and you have to give it consistently every day.

So, we could have gone back to Ritalin. But by this time we were getting a bit blase about this whole drugging-our-kid thing. (It is amazing how fast that can happen.) So, we decided to try Ritalin AND Strattera.

In our defense, we asked the doctor who scripped us the Strattera, and he said it would be okay. Still... one kid. Two drugs. Was this really a good idea?

Well. Ritalin plus Strattera?

It works.

It works really well.

Alan got very focused. He could color an entire page, inside the lines, by himself. (Unheard of. He has never done that before.) He dressed himself from scratch -- went to the dresser, got the clothes out, took off his pajamas, got dressed. A whole sequence of scripted actions which, as a just-turned-five year old with ADHD, had been as far beyond him as calculus. He even did all the buttons on his shirt -- which, since it requires both small motor coordination and patience, was something he'd never quite managed before.

At school he finished all his tasks in the alloted time.

When he came home, he went into his room and played quietly, building something. He didn't even make a mess, much. All day long, he didn't spill anything, break anything, trip over anything, fall off of anything, or run into any walls.

He was like a different kid.

But.

This different kid... was really a different kid. Like, not Alan.

He was serious. He hardly smiled. (Understand that Alan is a boy who laughs and smiles constantly.) He seemed to have something tied in knots inside him -- stiff, a little angry. He frowned a lot. When balked, he didn't cry much -- also unusual -- but he got very frustrated and a little aggressive. At one point he snarled at us, which is so not-Alan I'm still a bit creeped just remembering it.

We talked to his teacher in the evening. She said that he'd done all his work perfectly. But she (and all the other teachers) had noticed a difference. He was competent, very competent, but morose. Focussed, but unhappy. On the playground, where he normally skips and bounces (and falls), he was obviously not enjoying himself.

It was chilling, she said, to see him like that. She used that word: chilling.

So.

We'll probably go back to the Ritalin. But, boy, we'll be more careful now. This was educational. And a little... no, more than a little disturbing. We gave our kid a completely new personality, even if only for a few days. Hello, brave new century. What's next?

Meanwhile: tonight he was off of everything. And he was totally manic. Talking constantly. Bouncing off the walls. Some sort of rebound effect, it looked like. In bed he was twisting himself into odd positions -- feet up the walls? Hm, now let's try sideways -- until he finally, poof, fell all at once asleep.

And he was smiling. And laughing.

Squirrel Boy was back.

And welcome.

Serbia: still no government

Serbia still has no government.

(I haven't blogged about Serbia here in forever. Well, that's because I've moved my Balkan bloggging over to A Fistful of Euros. But the Fistful is in limbo at the moment, with comments closed because of a nasty spam attack, so I'll go back to posting this stuff here.)

They had elections on January 21. In a typical European parliamentary democracy, it takes a week or two of haggling and horse-trading after an election to form a government. In Serbia, it takes much longer... after the last election, back in 2004, it took them seventy days. This time they're up to fifty-six days, and counting.

This comes at an interesting time for Serbia; the Ahtisaari plan for Kosovar independence has gone to the United Nations, while Serbia's hopes of EU membership have been blocked by their failure to cooperate with the Hague Tribunal. Not an ideal time to be without a government, but there it is.

More on this in a bit.

Buzz

It's International Women's Day today.

Some countries take this seriously, some don't. The US does not. Armenia does. It's a no-kidding holiday: shops closed, no school.

Men are supposed to turn up with small gifts -- chocolate, flowers. So yesterday the streets were full of flower sellers. Don't know where they came from, but there were daffodils and cut roses everywhere.

And I saw my first bees of the season, buzzing sleepily, still dopy with the cold, over the bouquets.

I'd forgotten about the bees. April is a month of blossoms here, and the bees go wild. A few more weeks, and all the trees in our back yard will be bent down under masses of blossoms, and each will be surrounded by a humming halo of busy bees. I'm looking forward to that.

But also: today, after lunch, I took the boys out for a long walk. I wanted to get them out the door quickly, so Claudia could take a nap while the baby slept. So I didn't clear lunch off the table. And when I got back, a single, solitary fly was buzzing slow circles in the air above the dirty plates.

The flies are a curse here in summer. I'd forgotten that. By August there'll be hundreds of the filthy things in the house -- more coming in every time the door opens -- and the kitchen a perpetual battlefield.

Still: spring. I can't feel bad about it.

It's about time

My sister, who is off to Berlin -- glamour! -- has accepted her boyfriend's proposal of marriage. Woo Cam and Mike!

Note: Mike is a very nice Chicagolander who likes Vienna Beef hot dogs, Mike Royko, and Studs Lonigan. He does not have a robot sidekick named Skeets yet. My father once made him eat a bug. He'll fit right in.

Ou sont les nerds des antans: Wargaming

My friend Sydney Webb (1) recently wrote this over on soc.history.what-if:

When I think of 'wargaming' I think of 16mm hexes, 1/2" counters, zones of control and odds-based CRTs. And rule books that did so much to prepare me for the intricacies of the Income Tax Assessment Act.

Yet in 50 years time when I'm dead and Doug and Claudia are enjoying a well-earned retirement at a coastal spa I don't think *anybody* will be playing John Edward's _The Russian Campaign_.

Is wargaming dying? Of course not! Traditional miniatures - Napoleonics and Ancients - are as popular as ever, at least in the UK. The younger generation have their Orcs and their Robots as well. 30 years later RPGs are still going strong, albeit more sophisticated that the D&D and EPT of the mid-70s. And gaming takes new forms - CCG and the German fluffy games that have an elegance that we could only dream of when we played _Monopoly_, _Squatter_ or _Careers_. In particular, there are the computer games. There must be a 100 times as many people playing _Call of Duty_ now as were playing _Sniper!_ a third of a century ago.

So wargaming will live on. The channels of delivery, to use biz-speak, may change but the experience of "You are in command..." will live on.

(1) Not an actual person.

I wish this were so, but it isn't. Nerdy stuff follows.

I used to love wargames. Russian Campaign. Midway. Avalon Hill's Third Reich. Civilization -- the big boardgame with seven players, not the computer game. A House Divided. Kingmaker.

Understand that these were all board games. The board was usually a map divided into lots of little regions. In your classic tabletop wargame, there'd be a hexagon pattern for movement and dozens or hundreds of little cardboard counters representing panzer divisions (or Roman legions, samurai, or Viet Cong). Some games involved just two players; others might have four, five, or more.

They usually took a long time to play. Russian Campaign was an evening, three to six hours. Third Reich was several evenings, fifteen or twenty hours. Civilization was a Sunday game... you invited your buddies over after brunch and, if all went well, it would be finished in time for a late dinner.

(I say "your buddies" because these games were a guy thing. Completely. Once in a great while some poor girlfriend might get dragooned into a game of Civilization, but over ten or fifteen years of wargaming I met hundreds of wargamers and there wasn't a single female among them. It was the guy-est thing imaginable.)

So where are these games today?

Gone, mostly. Tabletop wargaming is a dying hobby.

Oh, there are still people around who collect and play these games. (If you want to find them, grognards.com is the place to start.) A few publishers are making new ones. There are even conventions where the faithful still gather.

But it's dying. Go to a convention, and you'll see hardly anyone under thirty; the median age is more like fifty. The publishers are mostly garage-shop operations. One or two of the games have found a niche, are modestly popular, and will probably hang on for years... I'm thinking of "Axis and Allies" here, but there are a couple of others. Overall, though, the hobby is visibly circling the drain.

Why? Well, various reasons... demographics, changing habits, some bad business decisions. But the big one is computer games. Computer games killed tabletop boardgames just as sure as TV killed old-time radio. If you like wargames, it's just so much easier to play them on your computer. The games can be far more complex. And you can play against one opponent, or five, or a thousand.

Which is all well and good. I don't even miss tabletop wargames that much. Not that much. Oh, I wouldn't turn down a chance to play Kingmaker again, and a House Divided was just a terrific little beer-and-pretzels game, but I don't miss it the way I miss, for instance, role-playing games. (Which still exist, to be sure. Just not here in Armenia.)

But I want to address Syd's point. Yes, the experience of "you are in command" lives on. But it's a very different experience. So much so that I have to consider computer wargames as a completely separate medium, as different as books and movies.

Tabletop wargames were different. There was a nerdy physicality to them... all those counters to be sorted, the tables to be shoved together, the smell of the cardboard, the involuntary gasp whenever someone bumped the edge of the board. Even when the rules of a computer wargame are the same, the experience of playing it is just totally different. To give just one example, a multiplayer computer wargame involves guys staring at screens, facing away from each other; a tabletop wargame involved a bunch of guys sitting around a table, watching each other push counters around.

This is probably why, with one exception, (2) attempts to directly transfer tabletop wargames to software have been dreadful failures. There were computer versions of Third Reich and Kingmaker, but they were awful. The message is the medium. The board is the game.

(2) Diplomacy, which is actually better as play-by-e-mail than as a tabletop game. But Diplomacy was never exactly a wargame.

So, while I enjoy computer wargaming well enough -- I just won my first Conquest victory on Civilization IV the other day -- it's not the same. I don't say that in a bad way. It's just... not the same.

And that's all.

Project Orion at the Guggenheim, teaser

Saw Freeman Dyson last night at the Guggenheim. "How We Might Have Gone to Mars in 1965".

It's taking an effort of will not to quote Dave Chappelle.

Note to self

Someone secretly replaced my brand-name caffeinated coffee with decaf. Okay, it was me not looking at the label. Thought I was bitten by a tsetse fly or something.

Some content: Olin Shivers describes, acknowledges.

Dan Everett gives a talk on the extremely unusual Amazonian language Piraha through here (unfortunately, it's not streamed, Doug).

YouTube: improbable jam, buzkashi. (No, I don't know what Hogun the Grim is doing with Bruce Willis. Are you going to ask Hogun?)