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One of my favourite games of the past decade was Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance on the Game Cube. I liked it so much partly because I enjoy the tactical gameplay, but also partly because I was able to really get into the world and the characters.

For instance, among the games many characters were two women, Jill and Lethe. In many ways, they were very similar. Both were fierce warriors who you do not mess with. Both were loyal patriots, proud of their people and their homeland. And both were bigots.

They had grown up, each hating each other's country and people, so it came as something of a shock when circumstances threw them together on the same side of a war. At first, their mutual hatred was palpable; they threw ethnic slurs at each other, because they were the only terms they knew. But then, as time passed, they managed to reach a truce, then develop a respect for each other, and finally to become friends.

These sorts of character moments weren't dealt with in any great detail, but they were nicely done, and there were a whole lot of them, so they really helped to flesh out the world and make me care about the members of my group.

Fire Emblem's Wii incarnation, Radiant Dawn, was not as good, but it was still enjoyable. As such, I was looking forward to the series making its way to 3DS in the form of Fire Emblem: Awakening. The 3DS has been very underwhelming so far, but that was one title I was looking forward to.

And then I read today that Fire Emblem: Awakening will feature marriage¹ and my heart sank. Because, of course, when a game says that it features marriage, what it probably means is that it features one-man-to-one-woman marriage. So I dig a bit further, and yep, that's exactly the case (according to a game guide, based on the already-released Japanese version).

To me, this is a Big Deal, which moves the game from my "almost certainly going to buy" list to my "almost certainly not going to buy" list.

If anyone is currently thinking "So what? If you don't like it, just ignore that feature!" or something similar, allow me to explain why this matters to me.

1. It fills in some of the gaps that were otherwise left ambiguous or unexplained. Gaps are an important part of any story, because the player/reader/viewer can fill in those gaps with whatsoever they choose. If characters sexualities are not stated then I'm happy to imagine them as hetero-, homo-, bi-, or a-, or pan- sexual as I will. If I want to imagine that things between Jill and Lethe blossom into a relationship, then I'm free to do so. If the game has an "anyone can get married, but only to members of the opposite gender" then the characters are all canonically straight. This makes the world narrower, less expansive, and less vibrant. There are quite simply fewer avenues for my mind to explore.

2. It breaks immersion. If a game has a character who is acting as a player-surrogate (as FE:A does), then I never want to reach a point where I think that I want to do such-a-thing but the game won't let me. In fact, the only thing that the game will let me do is something that goes against my personality and the personality of the character I've created. (I find it very difficult to role-play as a character who is attracted to men. Possibly this is a personal weakness on my part, but it is the way things are.) So if the game is constantly saying "hey, how about that marriage thing?" to me, while not allowing me to pursue a romance with the character that I am/my character is actually attracted to, that pulls me right out of the game and reminds me that actually, this world isn't real and living. It's a contrivance programmed onto a games console, limited in scope. This makes the game less fun.

3. It's a kick in the teeth, as the game is basically saying "you don't matter" to me. This is doubly the case when you consider that it's coming from a company (Nintendo) whose president (Satoru Iwata) has spoken about caution in embracing online gaming so as not to lose "consumers who do not have an Internet connection". Really. Apparently, Nintendo thinks that "gamers without an Internet connection" are a more important demographic than "queer gamers"². This is, of course, part of a much larger problem within society, and while I believe in picking one's battles, this is a massively easy battle for me to fight. I don't even have to do anything. In fact, it requires a negative amount of effort. Instead of taking the time and money to buy the game, all I have to do to vote with my feet is nothing. Which I think I will.

[1] I actually read it in an actual paper magazine, so the link is just one of the first things that came up in a Google search.

[2] While there are a great many people in the world who don't have Internet access, I doubt many of them are gamers. Without having seen any hard and fast data, I highly suspect that most of the people without the Internet are either too poor to be able to afford games consoles, too remote to be able to find games consoles for sale, or too elderly or traditionalist to be interested in games. Or all three.

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Dear Lazywebs,

Please talk to me about mobile phones.

See, technically, I do own one of these devices. However:

1. It hasn't actually been turned on for over a year, nor used in a good way longer than that.
2. I don't know where its charger is.
3. I also haven't a clue what its number is.
4. It is an old old 2G phone capable of calls, text messages, and pretty much nothing else nothing else (a Nokia 2100, if anyone cares).

For the longest time, I've been putting off getting a more modern one because, well, it's not as if I really need one, right? I mean, I hardly ever leave my flat, and while I'm here, I have a land line and a laptop which serve my purpose nicely. Except, of course, that "hardly ever" is not "never", and besides, maybe I'd be more inclined to actually get out if doing so didn't leave me so isolated.

This has never been enough to actually motivate me to get one, mind, mainly because these things cost money and money doesn't grow on trees. However, given that I can probably buy something better than what I currently have for threepence ha'penny and a shiny button, I think it's time to reconsider this stance.

Of course, given how long it's been since I was actually in the market for buying a mobile phone (excepting when I bought one for while I was in the US, which entailed me going "help! what do I buy?" and looking pitiful), I'm not exactly approaching this from a position of knowledge. Technically, there probably are people in the world somewhere who know less about mobiles than I do, but I expect that most of them live in Amazonia or the Andamans or somewhere.

So, I'm looking for advice. All I know is that I don't want to be tied to a contract, because I wouldn't get enough use for it, I don't want to pay a fortune, and that I like geek toys. Suggestions, lazyweb?

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One of the charges more frequently levelled against study of higher mathematics is that it isn't something than anyone will ever use. And while xkcd's response rings true, I think it's also good to question the base assumption. If people never internalise mathematical concepts and forget them as soon as they leave school, then of course they're never going to make use of the knowledge. How can you possibly hope to make use of knowledge you don't even possess?

Personally, I find that I will often see things out in The Real World that I can best make sense of in terms of mathematical knowledge. One perspective that I find myself considering relatively frequency is that of the difference between local and global maxima and minima.

Consider the following graph:



(It happens that this graph shows the function f(x) = x^2 * sin(x), though that's arbitrary here. I just wanted to mention it, since I think it's a pretty function. And the letters are just for easy reference.)

If you look at this graph, then a few points are immediately obvious. The highest point on the graph is the one that I've labelled A, and the lowest point is the one labelled F. Equally, you can see that points C and E are higher than anything surrounding them, and points B and D are lower than their surroundings.

In mathematical parlance, we'd say that A is the global maximum¹ but that C and E are local maxima. This is defined by saying that a point is a local maximum if every point immediately adjacent to it is slightly lower. This is a concept that the typical human brain stands to understand intuitively. If you're a mountain climber, then you know without thinking that the peaks of K2 or Kilimanjaro are much more important than a random point a metre from the summit of Everest, even though that random point is higher than those summits.

This is also something that is intimately familiar to anyone who has studied physics at a high level. One of the fundamental rules of nature is that everything tries to get into as low an energy state as it possibly can. A simple example of this is to consider a ball placed on a slope. Imagine that someone made the graph above into a physical object and then dropped a ball on it. Where would the ball end up?

Under the effects of gravity, the ball will try to get to the lowest point, at F. However, depending on where you drop the ball, it may very well not end up at F. If, for instance, you started the ball just a tiny bit to the left of point C, you can say with absolute certainty that it will end up at point B instead. One thing that you can be sure of though is that it will end up at one of the local minima: B, D, F, or one of the two unlabelled ones in the middle (or it will fly off the edge, but we'll ignore that one.)

Another thing you can be certain of is that once the ball has settled at, for instance, point D, it won't just magically up and jump to point F unless you give it a hefty shove up past point E².

So how does this fit into real life? Well, in a lot of circumstances in life we try to make something either as big or as small as we possibly can. This means we're striving to reach either a global maximum or a global minimum. We'll assume a maximum, since it's intuitively easier to associate bigger with better (higher score, more money) even though there are a lot of situations where we're trying to minimise something (less waste, fewer mistakes).

So let's say we're trying to get something as high as we can. We started out and then found that there were a bunch of improvements we could make, so we gradually got better and better until we reached a point where any possible change we could make would actually make things worse. So we've succeeded, right? Not necessarily. We're actually more likely to be at a local maximum than at the global maximum. We're more likely to be at point C or E than point A. It's unlikely that our starting point and our initial direction led us in exactly the right direction. This is even more the case in real life which is considerably more complicated than our graph and is likely to contain a lot more local maxima but still, by definition, only one global maximum.

If we are at point C, we can get to point A, but in order to do so, we have to get worse before we get better.

A couple of examples:

1. Imagine you're playing some sort of game. Your opponent is playing a very basic approach. Maybe it's a fighting game on a PC or games console and your opponent is a button masher. Maybe it's a game of (association) football and your opponent is employing a hoof-it-and-hope technique. You know that a refined and sophisticated style can win so you try to play the game the "right" way. Unfortunately, you're not the most gifted player/team, so their basic approach ends up beating your attempt which falls somewhere between B and A, but not as high as C. You may be more skilled, in the sense that your play was closer to optimal (closer to point A), but because it isn't a straight line between C and A, you actually end up losing.

2. I read an article recently about how many people in the USA are working extremely long weeks, which is reducing their efficiency and productivity due to stress and tiredness, leading to overall worse performance than they'd get with much shorter weeks. To me, one of the obvious problems here is one of local versus global maxima. Let's imagine someone is working an 80 hour week. They are almost certainly exhausted and stressed, and not working nearly as well as they could do. So you could reduce their working hours to 75 hours a week. Except that even after this reduction they'd still be stressed and exhausted and operating at low efficiency, but they'd not even be operating at low efficiency for as long, so their overall output would go down. In order to get to the global maximum, they'd have to go through areas with lower output. Again, you'd have to get worse before you get better.

So we know all this; what can we do about it? Two things are obvious to me. First, if you are designing or creating everything, it is important to try to keep the learning curve as smooth as possible and to try to avoid lots of different local global minima and maxima. This can apply in all sorts of fields, and all sorts of things that you can be creating: a program's user interface, a game's rules, a training program, a business plan, and so on and so forth. Whatever you're making, you want to make a smooth and steady route from base to apex.

Obviously, if you're making anything complicated, then it's unlikely that you'll be able to avoid bumps entirely, but by being conscious of them in your design decisions, you're much more likely to be able to minimise them.

Secondly, if you're in a situation which you don't have control over and are trying to maximise (or minimise) something, it's important to always be conscious that you may only be headed to a local maximum. Ideally you want to try to figure out where the global maximum is as quickly as you can and figure out the smoothest route to it. You also want to have plans in place for the bumpy roads in between maxima that you'll need to traverse, and you need to always be conscious that there may be a better way of doing things that you just haven't seen yet.

Again, with real life being all complicated and messy, you'll never be able to avoid all pitfalls, but if you're conscious of them, then you stand a better chance of falling into as few as possible.

Of course, none of these steps really require any sort of a familiarity with maths. You can think about all of these things in other ways and be entirely successful. However, to the mathematically trained eye, these sort of things just jump out. They are obvious enough that it's hard not to think about them. It isn't the specific knowledge that's useful; it's the way of looking at the world.

[1] It's actually only the global maximum if we're constraining the function to the range shown on the graph. Over the full function f(x) = x^2 * sin(x) the global maximum is infinite.
[2] One of the interesting things about quantum physics is that subatomic particles can and do make random sudden jumps like that. The process is known as quantum tunnelling and is responsible, amongst other things, for the way that one type of electron microscope works.

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For anyone not familiar with this, Mass Effect is a much-beloved video game trilogy. The third and final game of the trilogy came out recently, and while the game was well-received, the game's ending was, to put it bluntly, not. The epic space opera story had been built up over the three games, and to hear a lot of fans talk about it, you'd think the ending was "and then you woke up and it was all just a dream" or something.

Here's the thing though: I actually like the ending. Here's why.

( spoilers for the entire Mass Effect trilogy, up to and including the ending for Mass Effect 3 )

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One of the most-well known pieces of physics of the twentieth century is Einstein's theories of relativity. One of the most well-known consequences of relativity is that it's impossible for anything to travel faster than the speed of light¹. One of the consequences of this is something called the light cone².

If some event happens, then it will take time for the rest of the universe to know about the event. At the exact instant of the event, nobody else can know about it. Nothing can travel faster than light, so the spread of the knowledge of the event cannot be instantaneous. Of course, in practical terms, light is very very fast, and it only takes a second to travel 300,000km, so the information can spread quite rapidly.

Even so, there is a fundamental limit on how fast information can propagate, which becomes more apparent when you start to cover large distances. Nothing that's happening on earth right now could have any effect on the moon for about a second, on the sun for about 8 minutes, on Alpha Centauri³ for 4 years, and so on.

What this means is that the longer ago something happened, the bigger the volume of space that it can possibly influence. No matter how momentous an event, if you lie outside its light cone, then not only do you not know about it, but you fundamentally cannot know about it. From your perspective, it may as well not have happened. But as time passes, its light cone expands, and you can come to know of it.

All of which is a round about way of saying: it's my birthday today. I'm 31. That means that — provided I've done my sums right — my light cone is about 9.9*10^51 (9.9 thousand million million million million million million million million) cubic metres larger than it was this time last year. News of my arrival is spreading.


[1] Note that when we say "the speed of light" what we actually mean is "the speed of light through a vacuum". If you send light through a medium like air, water, or glass, then it travels more slowly (which is why things look bendy if you look at them in water). It's perfectly possible for other things to travel through a medium faster than light can travel through the medium, which can result in the light equivalent of a sonic boom, known as Cherenkov radiation.

[2] This is not actually a cone at all, but a sphere that increases in size over time. Which is equivalent to a four-dimensional hypercone. Physicists are a weird bunch.

[3] I always thought this was a weird name for a star when I was little. Turns out that it's so called because it's the brightest star (hence alpha; the second brightest would be beta, and so forth) in the constellation of centaurus. It's also actually two stars, which are close enough that they just look like one when we view them with the naked eye.

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Because I clearly have nothing better to do with my time, I went through my iTunes playlist and made a note of how many tracks I have of each genre, going by the track's genre metadata.

( The full list )

Now, it's worth noting that I didn't enter more than a handful of these myself. The vast majority come from either whatever was there when I downloaded the track, or whatever was on CDDB when I ripped the CD. A few come with whatever was there when I was sent the track by a friend. When I have to enter track metadata for myself, I pretty much never bother with genre. But the important point is that someone somewhere entered all of these.

So what have we learned?

* If in doubt, just put "pop" or "rock" as a genre.
* "World" is a horrible way to describe music, unless you're contrasting with Mars music or something. I am glad I only have 3 tracks genred thus.
* "International" is also ludicrous. What does that even mean? Is it in contrast with the equally baffling "National Music"?
* "Native American" is also about as much a genre as "Native European", which is to say that it isn't. Especially since the artist in my library who is given this genre (Erykah Badu) is not, to the best of my knowledge, actually Native American. (And to for completeness, Susan Aglukark, who is Native American, isn't listed as this genre.)
* Similarly "Brazilian" is a spectacularly bad way of describing the music of a band from Portugal (Flor-de-Lis).
* And while we're at it, "Gay" is also not a genre.
* Some people are really spectacularly bad at describing musical genres. Cyndi Lauper is not drum & bass, no matter how hard you squint. Moxy Fruvous are not country. The Indiana Jones theme music is not blues. And above all, having polka as an umbrella term to describe Neil Diamond and Tribe 8 is possibly the most ludicrous thing that I have ever heard.
* Sometimes the two discs of a double album have managed to acquire different genres. Is Frank Sinatra's greatest hits Jazz or Swing? Why not split it half and half!
* Is "vocal" really a genre? Are we planning on splitting all music into vocal and instrumental and ignoring any other aspects?
* Alt Rockers are so alternative that they can't even agree on how to spell their genre.
* Electronica is even worse. I have 4 different versions of that genre, apparently.
* Unclassifiable is so broad a genre that some people feel the need to subdivide it into General Unclassifiable and... some other form of Unclassifiable? I'm not sure I want to know.
* Genre is a really really useless bit of metadata.

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So there's that thing with the UK government consultation about same sex marriage (or, as I would prefer, gender-neutral marriage, in which gender is never mentioned in marriage law at all, although given that it's only at consultation stage, who knows how it will end up). So, yay? Right? Well, sort of.

Gay people may be able to get married soon, but poor, gay, disabled people will still be screwed. As, of course, will poor, straight, disabled people. You're on ESA? And you have a partner, you say? Excellent, now you're not on ESA any more. And if your partner's income isn't enough to support two people, well, then doesn't it just suck to be you?

Oh, and if you're transsexual and gay then you may also be kinda screwed still. As part of the gender recognition act, if a married person wanted to have their transition legally recognised, they have to divorce first, then have their change of gender legally recognised, then enter back into a civil partnership. Which, needless to say comes with a. cost and b. distress. It will come as no surprise that the government is doing nothing to try to set this particular foolishness right, and will probably require yet another set of additional cost and stress if these people wish to convert back to a marriage after it's allowed.

So yay. Yay that one group of people of which I am a member may get to be recognised as fully human by the law before too long. But it's hard to get terribly excited when two other such groups are still being systemically mistreated.

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It seems there is yet another story in the news about allied soldiers killing civilians in Afghanistan. Stories like this seem to come out fairly frequently. Sometimes it's the killing of civilians, sometimes it's the desecration of enemy corpses, sometimes it's an incitement of extremists by mistreatment of Islamic texts or artefacts, and so on.

The details are different, but the core is the same. Troops from the UK, the USA, or other allied nations are not behaving as we would wish and are not adhering to the international conventions and laws on what actions are and are not appropriate during war.

To this, I say well, duh. This is war. It is brutal, nasty, violent, bloody, and harrowing. Of course if you put thousands of people in situations where they are being shot at or where their friends are dying or where they are forced to do some pretty distasteful things, some of them are going to snap. You never know who beforehand, but it's inevitable that some people won't be able to handle the stress and will end up doing things they would otherwise never dream of doing.

This does not mean we should be indifferent when these things happen. Rather, it means that they must be weighed in and accounted for in any decision to go to war or remain at war. The government in the UK, at least, likes to try to sell us the myth of the just war in which we engage only enemy combatants, and act exclusively as a force for good. This sort of war does not exist. Sometimes, war can be justified. Sometimes, the cost of not going to war is greater than the cost of war. Whether the war in Afghanistan counts as such a war, I'll leave as an exercise to the reader. But what we must not do is delude ourselves into not including atrocities (and the effect they have on both sides) in weighing up the cost of a war.

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OK! Time for the answers to the real place, fake place game. If you haven't already answered and want to, go do that now, because there are spoilers here.

However, before we get into that, there are two things I need to say. First off, I shouldn't need to point this out, but apparently I do. Mocking people for not knowing an answer to something is not cool. The exception to this is if you know someone and you know that they're OK with it and you are mocking with love. Cruel mockery is not OK. Well intentioned mockery of people who don't take well to such is not OK. Mockery of people you don't know is not OK. This is not rocket science, people.

Secondly, as some people pointed out, not all of the places I mentioned had definitive and unambiguous answers. Some real places are named after fake places, and some fake places are named after real places. In the answers I'm giving, mostly-fake places will be referred to as fake, and mostly-real places will be referred to as real, but I'll give notes where appropriate. If you gave the alternate answer for a good reason, then you may award yourself a point. If you gave a wrong answer just by being wrong or because you were only guessing, don't award yourself a point. We work on the honour system here, and it's important that you don't cheat because of the high value associated with a high score! (Note: getting a high score has absolutely no value at all.)

Anyway. Answers!

( Answers within )

I hope you all learned something. I know I did while I was looking up some of this.

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Some of these places are real. Some of these places are not real. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to try to figure out which ones exist in reality, and which ones exist only in works of fiction.

Of course, Google, Wikipedia, and looking at other people's answers are all cheating.



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