You Cannot Escape Your Past

Today I found a disappointing case in California where a middle school science teacher lost her job due to past appearances in pornographic films. She stated that she had taken this role due to financial issues after her boyfriend left her. Students and some teachers looked her up and the school district decided such a history meant she could not function as a teacher. Additionally, she had been deceitful about her nine months in the adult film industry.

What the hell? I grant that the theory behind this is that students are supposed to see teachers as good role models but is it any better to teach them that your personal history is all that matters to your life in the present? That you cannot change from poor choices you made in the past? It might be one thing if the teacher in question had done various illegal activities in the past, but pornography is legal in the United States. It's not right that a brief choice made for financial reasons results in a teacher losing her career. The only portion that I legitimately see as a reason to fire her would be that she did not mention her pornographic appearances when taking the job at the school. However, given the reaction to when this information came to light I do not think I can blame her for concealing it.

This is disappointing because everyone has made mistakes in their past. I have alcoholism and received a disorderly conduct misdemeanor from one unfortunate event in my past, but I learned from that event to improve my behavior in the future. It is unfortunate that children are encouraged to believe that changes in behavior are irrelevant, once you have done something it marks you forever.

Congress's Petty Infighting - Destroying Government Efficacy

It's no secret that the United States Congress has not been popular lately. Unfortunately, that unpopularity has gone to some stellar lows lately. One poll shows that Congress is less popular than cockroaches, Genghis Khan, and the world famous band Nickelback.

 

Although to be fair, it's hard not to like a man who rocks dressed like this.

Why is Congress so unpopular lately? It's completely ineffectual. All that Congress does lately is delay making important decisions, such as how to address major revenue issues, taxation, and the infamous debt ceiling, in order to score political points with pundits.

After all, getting favorable comments from Fox News is guaranteed to increase your likelihood of publishing a best selling memoir after your political career is over.

One lovely example of this is introducing bills that have a part that most people agree with, such as keeping interest rates on student loans from doubling and then including an addendum that the other party cannot vote for, such as removing part of the healthcare reform law or raising taxes on businesses. After the law does not pass, the Democratic or Republican party can go on a media blitz of how the other party does not support education and wants to screw students over. This kind of behavior does not encourage members of the parties to work together to get legislation that actually passes through Congress. All it does is take up gratuitous amounts of Congress's time between recesses on bills that are guaranteed to never become laws.

Additionally, the parties frequently insult each other in the press. For instance, a forthcoming Republican strategy retreat was greeted by the Democratic Party with  a long mocking list of topics to focus on, such as how to speak to women and minorities and a need to take a course in science 101. Although political humor can be amusing, it should be saved for venues like the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. It should not be employed by Democrats or Republicans to burn any chance of a positive relationship with the other party.

 Especially since politicians are generally incapable of being as amusing as comedians.

How can this problem be fixed?

For starters, reducing the influence of the media blitz from networks like Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC would help. All of these networks produce partisan coverage that only serves to divide the public and prevent politicians from coming to any sort of compromise. Cutting back on the number of fanatical guest pundits might also help these shows actually have an informed and reasoned debate instead of a holy war between conservatives and liberals.

Another helpful addition could be to reduce or eliminate the number of bills that are produced with additional unrelated legislation attached. The majority of large bills have multiple riders that are not at all necessary to the issue the main bill is meant to address. This makes it extremely difficult for Congress to act efficiently, as every important piece of legislation is joined by little additions that benefit a tiny portion of the country or that may not be a good idea at all. However, since the larger bill is important to pass, these small additions make it into law. Alternatively, these riders may make it impossible to pass the main bill because they are destructive and unacceptable to one party's values.

A typical bill in Congress. It may be useful but it also comes covered with ferocious bees. 


However, these solutions will only cover up the main issue-that Congress does not seem able to compromise anymore. I feel that a large part of this problem is because of Gerrymandering, the drawing of election district borders. Many Congressmen are set up so they reside in a liberal or conservative stronghold. This means that the only threat to their reelection hopes is if a more liberal or more conservative challenger arrives to provoke the extremes of the voting population against the representative. Although this is convenient to reduce the likelihood of losing elections, it also makes it so representatives are beholden to the extreme views of their party. Compromise is not viewed as acceptable by some conservative or liberal zealots, hence the inability of House Speaker John Boehner to get his party to fall in line with the national party's position on the recent fiscal cliff legislation.

What's needed is for someone to slay the Gerrymander. I don't feel that this is likely though, instead the United States will be stuck in muck and mire for generations to come.

Will a hero arise who can defeat the fearsome Gerrymander? Only time will tell.

Crafting in RPGs

One common feature in roleplaying games is the addition of a crafting system. This allows players to make useful items such as healing potions, weapons, and item enhancements. I personally do not like the way the system is usually implemented-where you must buy materials from vendors combined with materials you find questing and then piece them together. For example, here is a typical crafted item in Dragon Age:

To create a paragon frost rune, which adds frost damage to a weapon, a player needs to make 32 novice frost runes and upgrade each of them to the highest level as well as purchase 63 blank runestones and 56 etching agents from a vendor in the game. That's a hell of a lot to keep track of. And that's for just one rune-many weapons and pieces of armor can have several runes placed on them. The crafting portion of Dragon Age takes the player from enjoying a videogame to playing Microsoft Excel. Dragon Age 2 made a welcome change to this tired formula. Instead of relying exclusively on items purchased from vendors, the game's resources for crafting exist in the actual world. There are several different varieties of resources for each of the types of items you can craft in the game.

Here the common herb elfroot, useful for healing potions, is discovered.

I enjoy this method because it encourages full exploration of the world since crafting resources are found all over the place. Some are only located after defeating optional bosses, providing a benefit to undertaking difficult battles. These features make crafting a natural part of the game, instead of a task where the player has to open up a bunch of menus and do math to figure out what they can create. Additionally, the actual crafting screen in Dragon Age II is simple and elegant.

In the lower left it shows which resources you have located and the right side mentions what is required to create the individual item along with the information on what the item does. All you do is pay the gold cost required to make the item and it appears in your inventory, ready for use. Recipes for items are also integrated into exploration. Some are available from vendors, others from certain quests, and finally some are located in chests or other treasure areas. Throughout the game I always searched every area thoroughly to ensure that I didn't miss any precious recipes or crafting items.

Especially in the remains of this fellow after I slew him. Never know where some deathroot might be hiding!

 All that being said, there are some improvements that I feel could be made to the system. Some of the items like elfroot and deathroot are under-utilized because you only need three to four of them to make every item in the game, but there are a total of nine to find in the game. There also are not that many recipes. Perhaps adding some recipes that required more of the common items in the game would fix both problems.

Cancer Screening-Overused for Older Individuals

Cancer is one of the most frightening diseases out there. Many forms are difficult to treat, particularly if they are not caught early. The routine use of many screening tests to catch cancer in its early, more treatable phases over the last few decades has allowed many individuals to be cured before their disease progressed into its later stages. However, the overriding fear of cancer in public consciousness may have led to an unintended effect. Many older adults, long past the age when they should be receiving screening for some forms of cancer, are still receiving these tests on a regular basis. A recent report reveals that Medicare spent $1.9 billion between 2003 and 2008 on cancer screening for adults who were older than government recommended age guidelines for cancer screenings.


On the plus side, all this spending does create jobs that let people look at breasts all day.

Why do these age guidelines exist?
One of the reasons why cancer screenings eventually lose efficacy is that life is finite. Eventually heart disease, strokes, or other conditions are going to end it. If someone is ninety years old and has severe heart disease, they are going to be dead before a newly discovered case of prostate cancer becomes a problem. Cancer has become a rather potent fear in society so it's hard to just believe that letting it go on and grow is the best option, but sometimes it simply is. There's no reason to put a person with a host of other health problems through chemotherapy and surgery for a tumor that isn't going to cause any problems before the individual is likely to die.


Although it does give a good excuse for wearing a Hawaiian shirt.

Why are excessive screenings harmful?
There's a basic idea that more screenings and tests must be better than less. After all, if it can potentially locate something that can be treated early, why not do it? The problem with this thinking is that these tests and screenings are expensive and they are not always accurate.

Every screening test has the risk of false negatives and false positives. A false negative means that a case of cancer was missed by the test. A false positive means that a case of cancer was falsely identified as being present. A false negative means that cancer isn't being treated and may even result in early cancer symptoms being ignored because, hey, the screening last year didn't show any problems. A false positive is extremely frightening for a patient and may result in unnecessary biopsies and surgical procedures, which also pose their own risks.


Wait... it was benign?

An additional problem is that screening tests should also be shown to have some sort of benefit on survival of patients. For example, let's say there's a new screening test for metastatic pancreatic cancer. It detects it successfully 100% of the time. Unfortunately, there isn't anything at all that can really be done to treat metastatic pancreatic cancer, the median survival is between 6-10 months. At best, treatment will give a patient a couple months of extra life. This means that there is no point in using this screening test for the general population-it will not cause any improvements in survival and is thus just a waste of money.

It's actually pretty difficult to create screening tests that do not have too many false negatives or positives and are shown to improve survival rates for patients. Even some formerly routine tests are more controversial lately as research results have come back.

A good example is the Prostate-Specific Antigen test for prostate cancer in men. It used to be done routinely for men after age 50, but now the evidence reviewed by the United States Preventive Services Task Force suggests that Prostate-specific antigen–based screening results in small or no reduction in prostate cancer–specific mortality and is associated with harms related to subsequent evaluation and treatments, some of which may be unnecessary. Many physicians are still debating whether to continue performing the test or not, but it's certainly an example of a potentially gigantic waste of money.

Conclusion
Cancer screenings are a great tool to reduce cancer-associated mortality when they are used appropriately. However, they have become over-utilized in inappropriate groups of people, particularly the elderly. In many cases cancer may simply be able to be ignored in older adults because they are likely to die from something else first. As one example, many older men die WITH prostate cancer, but very few die FROM prostate cancer.

Perhaps the best way to view this information is to take a look at the overall health status of the person in question. If they are an extremely healthy eighty year old, maybe it's worth doing a screening because they may get a decade or more of life out of an early identification and treatment of cancer. If they have severe heart damage, Alzheimer's disease, and other problems, maybe it's a better idea to avoid doing the screening.

Deus ex Machina Ruins Another Novel-Out of the Dark

A few months ago I read the book Out of the Dark by David Weber. It caught my eye in the library for two reasons. One was that the cover featured a passing interest of mine, an alien invasion of present-day Earth.


Although I wonder how that floating city stays in the air.

The other reason was that it was a stand-alone novel. I figured this meant I could get a satisfying ending without having to read four or five other books afterward. It's a rare thing to find a single fantasy or science fiction novel anymore. I suppose the trilogy or series is something of a standard of the genres now, but most authors just pad their books with trivial details and conflicts just so they can get three books out of one big idea. Unfortunately, my expectations for a good ending were betrayed by Mr. Weber. Let's go through the book and see what the problem was.

The Plot
The basic plot is that a group of aliens invade the Earth hoping to colonize it and use us as a client species for their own future conquests. They were dispatched because of a scouting expedition that witnessed the battle of Agincourt and were apparently horrified by the barbarity of man in that fight. Unfortunately for the aliens, humanity advanced at a much faster rate than any other species that they had previously encountered. They expected humans to stay at a Medieval level of technical development, so when they arrived to find assault rifles, Abrams tanks, and the internet they were taken aback. However, the aliens had the ability to bombard the Earth with meteorites so they went ahead with their invasion, destroying most major cities, military bases, and armies with their orbital bombardment.

At this point, the story got quite interesting. Although the aliens had impressive looking technology, such as hover tanks, spacecraft, and drones, their tactics and equipment were inferior to modern weaponry. Their ground based vehicles did not have enough armor to withstand handheld anti-tank weapons or even small arms fire in some instances. Additionally, their infantry were mostly unarmored with weapons inferior in range and power to modern firearms. They also used appalling tactics to fight against human forces.

The explanation given for this was that the aliens were accustomed to fighting technologically inferior foes so all of their equipment was developed with subduing primitive societies in mind. Armor that blocks a spear isn't very difficult to design while armor that stops a high explosive shell is quite a bit more challenging. The result of this imbalance in power was that the only superior force the aliens could offer was their ability to send in meteorites to destroy anyone resisting them. This is a rather indiscriminate way to eliminate enemies which limits its viability since the aliens wished to colonize, not destroy, Earth.

Mr. Weber did an excellent job through the beginning and middle of his book by describing the improvised efforts that local forces throughout the world used to battle the aliens. In the United States, national guard forces who grabbed equipment from their armories and civilians with personal firearms inflicted a heavy toll on the aliens. Similar events occurred in Russia and Romania. The aliens, in reaction to this, tried to build trust and rapport with humanity by working with some of the few remaining human authority figures to get the remaining rebels to stand down.

The building drama was that the aliens realized that they were going to lose way too many of their soldiers and vehicles trying to fight this war so they decided that they had to find a way to end it. Since they still wanted Earth, an asteroid bombardment was out of the question. That left them to decide that a virus was a good idea, which they decided to develop on the surface using human test subjects. Some information on this leaked out to the resistance forces, who realized that they needed to do something about this.

The Problem
At this point, I had about fifty pages left in the novel and wondered how the hell David Weber was going to end this book successfully. I figured maybe he would have a resistance group break into one of the virus manufacturing facilities and retool it to kill the aliens. This wouldn't be very creative, as it is only a slight twist on War of the Worlds, but it would have been a plausible ending.

Instead, Mr. Weber came up with a "brilliant" idea. Remember how one of the areas featured resisting the aliens was Romania? Weber brought them into the picture by having a soldier returning from Afghanistan have his C-130 plane crash in the area, leaving him and a few other Americans stranded in the area. They were found by a local group of backwoods Romanians, who led the American soldiers back to their camp. They fought a few times against the aliens alongside the U.S. soldiers. The Romanians were represented by Weber as being extremely stealthy guys able to sneak up and slit the throats of alien soldiers. The climax of this portion of the novel was that the aliens decided to send a large force to attack the Romanian camp, prompting a large fight that eventually killed most of the Americans.

This pissed the Romanians off quite a bit, so they revealed their true nature by turning into gas clouds and slaughtering all the aliens with their vampiric powers. They then flew up to the alien ships in orbit and killed all of them up there as well. Apparently their stealthy nature was supposed to foreshadow that the Romanian leader was Dracula and his companions were vampires hiding out for all these centuries in the Romanian backwoods.

Wait what?


I guess David Weber feels like he might have a good reason to keep that cross handy around his neck.

Why this is a Bad Ending
Besides the fact that vampires are massively overused in books right now as it is, there was absolutely no hint that this was going to happen anywhere before the end of the book. David Weber did a great job building up a somewhat plausible story where resistance forces acquired weapons and figured out how to fight an enemy capable of throwing meteors down on top of anyone putting up too much resistance. He then threw all of that away in the final couple of chapters by throwing in invulnerable vampires with godlike powers to easily slaughter every single one of the aliens and save humanity. As an author, if you're going to have some crazy shit like that happen at the end of your novel, you really need to foreshadow it, not spring it up out of nowhere because you only have a few pages left to end the book.

About the only positive thing I have to say about the vampires is that at least they didn't sparkle.

Civilization V-An Improved Combat System

Although Civilization V received many good reviews from professional reviewing groups, popular reception was mixed. Many complained that changes to the game just left them clicking the end turn button repeatedly since there just wasn't much to do in a typical turn. Although I agree with many of those comments, one aspect of the game that I found much improved was the combat system.

The Major Changes
The single largest change is that you can no longer stack units together on the same hex. Every unit needs its own hex space. This changes the look of a major battle from this:


San Antonio is besieged by an entire army, from artillery to cavalry to infantry, all secure in one hex of jungle terrain.

To this:


Two sides face off in Civilization 5

Just from a glance at the game's main map, you can tell how much opposition you will be facing. In previous civilization games, a player can store an entire legion of troops in one hex that slowly advances toward your cities. In Civilization V, you see the entire horde spread out and can also easily tell what kind of units are attacking.

Another advantage of this system is that it requires players to think more about the terrain they are advancing through. In previous games it was easy to throw all your troops up on top of a mountain or another formidable defensive bastion, but now terrain with more marginal defensive benefits have to be considered as well. After all, only one unit can go up on the mountain or inside the city, the rest need to find a place to camp out as well.

The last major change is that certain units, such as archers and artillery, can fire at enemy soldiers from a distance rather than having to just directly attack like every other unit in the game. In the past, this ranged advantage was noted by making archers have defensive advantages or by allowing them to inflict some damage on attacking units before the random dice rolls began to play out. Now archers can pick off some enemy soldiers before they get in range to retaliate, a much more interesting system. Additionally, it requires a player using archers or artillery to protect them with melee units in front so that these valuable soldiers don't get slaughtered in close combat.

Why is this an improvement?
My biggest complaint with the combat systems in Civilization II-IV is that the defender received an overwhelming advantage at times. If an enemy is advancing, the solution is to garrison your towns and cities with every nearby unit, which apparently have no trouble housing or feeding the entire army of a nation, and it will be very difficult for the attacker to defeat them unless they brought a far superior number or quality of units along for the fight.


The entire population of Greece defends Athens.

Civilization II at least had a couple features that made it a little easier to take out a defending army. If you stacked units outside of a city or a fortress and you lost a defensive battle, the entire stack of units was destroyed. Additionally, when a unit defending a city lost a battle, the city lost one unit of population. This could even cause a city to be destroyed if it was reduced to a population of 1. Unfortunately, these were removed in Civilization III and IV.

The worst part for Civilization IV is that there are so many features that should add depth to the combat system. There are many units with bonuses against other units. For example, macemen gain a significant bonus in strength against other melee units like swordsmen and pikemen gain a significant bonus when fighting cavalry. There is also unit veterancy, which allows for units to gain bonuses to their basic combat abilities or to gain extra potency against the units they specialize in fighting. Unfortunately, these don't add a lot of depth to combat because of two problems. One is the ability to stack a limitless number of units on top of each other. The other is that when attacking a stack of units, the best defensive unit is always picked to defend. So, if you're attacking a archer and a knight with a pikemen and a horse archer, the archer will be chosen to defend against the pikemen and the knight against the horse archer. This means that you are guaranteed to lose either way when you attack.


Even Landsknecht in their snazzy uniforms have to follow those rules.

All of this isn't to say that winning a military victory was impossible in previous Civilization games, but it was only possible if your opponents didn't know what they were doing. All you have to do to survive an assault is spam units to defend your cities with and it becomes cost prohibitive to try and defeat an opponent in warfare. Although Civilization V was a step backward in many respects, the combat system certainly added a lot of depth and interest for me.

Vladimir Putin-Action Hero

Vladimir Putin, the current Prime Minister and former President of Russia, has taken greater advantage of masculine photo-opportunities than any other current political leader. This is partly because he's stayed in great shape for his age, still participating regularly in Judo. Compared with Boris Yeltsin, who was wracked with heart failure for much of his Presidency, Putin's general good health has allowed him to participate in many physically taxing jobs that his constituents hazard on a regular basis.


Such as tiger tracking.

Here's a collection of photos from Putin's political career, showing the various jobs that needed the assistance of a Russian leader to tackle.


Check it out or Prime Minister Putin might take you out!