Risk-y Business

In case anyone was wondering, I tried to let that dude down easy, and he hasn't replied, so I assume he's feeling a little (-_-;)

Anyway, my students have an exam on Tuesday, and most of them had their last lab on Wednesday, so they generally wouldn't be getting the graded labs back until after the exam, but since some kids asked me for them, and since I am such an excellent TA, I came in today (Sunday) just to grade them. It's not particularly long or anything, but I will make sure they know how I slaved and slaved for their benefit, of course.

Grading took at most an hour, since I already had one of the two sections graded and since I am very lenient and tend to grade people that I know work together just once and replicate the grade across the group. So I had a bunch of time left over, and the math grad organization recently came into possession of a bunch of board games for the purposes of a board game night, which I didn't go to in order to play board games in Virginia, but I have the combination to the locker in which they are stored, so I decided to simulate some world conquest in my office. As secretary (maybe???) of the organization, I have a lot of pull as to what we do with our money (note: I took the job because there is no work and I am not even required to go to meetings), so I insisted we get Risk. There was plenty of money, so this was no issue. The president (my officemate) picked out the original version of Risk, as per the advice of the department board game aficionado. So here is what is different:

Not much.

There aren't III or V pieces, just oblong pieces that represent X's. The I's are in this version just wooden cubes. Interestingly, there's no brown, but there is pink. I am guessing that they realized that guys do not like to play with pink things in general. I assume that most people who enjoy Risk are men, as well as nerds. I also couldn't find in the instructions, which seem to be pared down for the re-release, how many armies each side starts with, but fortunately I remembered. If there are six players, each gets 20 armies, and for each fewer player, each side gets 5 more, by the way. If you only have two players, there's some sort of dummy third player, but I'm not clear on how that works because who plays Risk with two players?

I think a big part of the fun is the unofficial diplomacy that occurs when you actually have 3 or more (ideally at least 4) people playing that know how to play and don't get all butthurt when you inevitably break your alliance by smashing through their continent's defense. Some more unorganized thoughts about the game:

It's interesting how taking Australia first almost always ends not just in disaster, but in a particular kind of disaster. Almost every time I play, there ends up being a color that is almost forced to try to take Asia because there simply aren't enough continents for everyone to take a safer one at the beginning, and somebody has to get stuck with a bad position, including a couple territories in northern Asia. That guy basically has to try to take over all the undefended territories in a way that lets him maximize the armies along the border, which means for slow playing. Trying to take Asia in one fell swoop at the beginning is essentially suicide, so you get this weird thing where there's one guy with Australia whose goal is basically to get out of Asia, but has no choice but to go through Asia, and one guy who is stuck with most of Asia but no army bonus because he doesn't have Siam/India/Middle East, which is the Australian's path to expansion. But, because he's always taking these little undefended countries, the Asian guy gets to collect a lot of cards, which means he'll eventually get a set, and it tends to be at a time after the Australian guy has his continent but doesn't want to expand north because it would be trying to take Asia from the guy who has been trying to take it all game. What usually happens is that the guy with the set smashes through the border because the set will by that point outweigh the continent bonus, and likely will just take over Australia in a single turn. Maybe it is only due to using the usual rules for sets, which highly favors taking territories because the set values quickly outweigh everything else. I'm not sure what happens if you use the rules where sets only increase in value by 1 each time, but I do sometimes play that way, and it seems like a similar thing happens, in that I don't think I've ever played a game where the color that take Australia first wins.

Since I usually have to play by myself, I have to make sure to preserve features of the game that come from different people playing, and I try not to bias it towards any color or anything by making one guy do stupid things, but of course that isn't perfect. I always have a soft spot for the color that ends up being what I want to term the "roving empire," or maybe the huns of the game. Usually everyone's best strategy at the beginning of the game is to take a continent that that are set up to take, but as I mentioned, if you play with six players, there really aren't enough continents for this to work, so one player will inevitably end up losing this bid. This player never, in my experience, wins, but he's (pardon my androcentric pronouns, but generally all sides are me) also generally isn't really knocked out until later because eliminating another player requires a lot of armies, which nobody will have early in the game. So, he's just this guy who inhabits a non-claimed continent but can't take it from a more powerful player, meaning that his best chances lie in trying to survive long enough to get cards and hopefully establish himself again once the superpowers start fighting over the Bering Strait or something. In effect, he becomes this wandering army, trying to take weak territories, but not really holding onto them because the cards matter more than any individual territory if the continent is impossible to get. I think it's natural to root for this guy and much more fun to play than the guy who has to take the other strategy for a guy who lost his continent bid, which is to sit like a rock, collecting armies and hoping that somebody gets messed up. Probably just counting out armies is annoying.

Some places in the game inevitably get contested more than others, particularly ones that are on the boundary of two continents, and it's funny that for every one that mirrors some historically conflicted area, such as the whole Mediterranean sea, which reminds me of Rome vs. Carthage, or Greece and Turkey, or the middle east, or even 30 Years War-esque battles for Europe, there is an oddball, like Iceland vs. Greenland, two places which have probably never had a historic war, or North Africa vs. Brazil, which seems almost laughable if you look at an actual globe.

As much as I love Risk, the end game isn't very fun, and I usually just give up because I know how it's going to end and counting out 50+ armies for a set becomes tedious. I think the +1 rules are better for sets in general and probably should have started playing that way today but didn't, so I got stuck counting out too many armies, which is especially tedious without III's and V's.

Alright, well, that's probably enough for now.

Gaydar

So, I went with my friend who happens to be gay to a meeting for a grad students' gay rights thing because he didn't want to go alone and because there was a free happy hour after the meeting. The meeting was alright except there was a Chinese kid and an Indian kid, neither of whom understood the icebreaker of saying which muppet you would be. I chose one of the two old dudes, by the way. The happy hour was fun and saved me having to make my own dinner. Maybe I should have specified that I am not gay, though, because some dude sent me an email, which I got this morning, asking me out. Oh, dear. (~_~;)

Takoyaki party!

Since it's been almost a week since my last post, and since the trickle of comments has dried up on that one, I've decided to post some more pictures of my trip. One day, Mie's older sister, who has two kids, invited us over to make takoyaki. Before that, we passed the time playing sugoroku, which is a generic name for a type of boardgame that generally just involves rolling a die or spinning a spinner, etc. to decide how many pieces to move. So, like Candy Land, except without the candy theme. This particular game was all about ojisan gyaggu, old puns and jokes that older men tend to say. An ojisan is an uncle, but it's also the term for any older guy who isn't old enough to be an ojiisan, a grandpa. So, you would play like normal, and on certain squares, had to say one of these gags, which are very corny and dumb, so of course I love them. The little girl in the picture is Misato, Mie's cute-as-a-button niece, whom we often call Mi-chan. Her younger brother was with his dad, so it was just the three of us and Mie's sister (not in the picture), Kaori. I don't remember who won, actually.


Here's us making the takoyaki. Tako means octopus, and yaki comes from yaku, which means to fry or burn or bake or whatever. The character is 焼く, if you are interested. The character for octopus is 鮹　or 蛸, but neither is used very much. Anyway, as you can probably guess, takoyaki is cooked octopus. Specifically, it is little balls of dough with octopus (sometimes other things like shrimp, too) that are cooked in this special maker thing that looks like a hot plate. It has little half-sphere indentations, and you fill those up most of the way with batter, and then add the stuff that goes inside. You have to turn the balls to make them cook evenly and get a nice shape to them, which requires a bit of skill.

Misato is quite the little cook, so hers were probably the best. Apparently, I don't turn them fast enough, so mine get cooked more thoroughly, but I think it's better that way. We divided the hot-plate into territories for which we were each responsible for one, except Misato, who was in charge of her mother's territory, too. Despite that, she still had time to intervene in mine because from her and Mie's point of view I ran my territory rather like a third-world country. Regardless, they were delicious!

Misato and her mom gave us these matching hats for Christmas, which turned out to be pretty convenient because it was easier to find each other on the ski slopes with them on. But, that's a post for another time!

Belated Pictures of Sand

I got pictures of my winter trip to glorious Nippon a while back, but I haven't gotten around to posting them yet, obviously, since it's one of those big projects, at least as blog posts go. So, I'll try to get them up with some sort of commentary about what we were doing, but it won't end up in chronological or logical or morphological or any other kind of -logical order because I've no doubt forgotten details in the time since and organizing stuff isn't really my forte.

Here we are celebrating our ascent to the top of the Tottori Sand Dunes. When I heard about the sand dunes, I figured it was just going to be like a long beach, but it turns out that the dunes are quite sizable and climbing up them is rather like hiking up a hillside except that the hillside is made of sand and thus more easily deformable under your feet. Forgive me for the topological terminology but I've been computing fundamental groups lately.

Perhaps this picture will give you an idea of how large the dunes really are. We hiked up to the top of the biggest dune we could see, which seemed to be the thing to do. It was cold and clear that day, so we were wearing winter clothing, which seems sort of odd against the backdrop of sand and sea.
My outfit, incidentally, was almost 100% Japanese made. The pants, jacket, and neckwarmer were all gifts from Mie, who apparently has a different idea than most westerners of what looks good on me. The shoes I bought last year in Japan, and the hat was a gift from Mie's niece, who should show up in a later post.


We weren't alone on the trip. Mie's friend accompanied us there. She lives in Tottori (the city, which is on the opposite end of the prefecture from Yonago, where we stayed), so she acted sort of as a tour guide. Her name escapes me at the moment because most of Mie's friends have names that end with -ko, which is very typical for Japanese girl names, but makes remembering them an exercise in frustration.

After tromping around on the dunes for a while, we decided to take a ride on a camel. But there was no real reason to do that, and it was cheaper just to sit on the camel and get our picture taken, so we opted for that. Also, I think we were sort of cold and tired at the time, so it was more practical. When we were sitting on the camel, it started making some weird noises, so the dude there had to calm it down, or at least we thought so. Mie's friend told us after that it was really just pooping and he was probably trying to get us not to notice.

Anyway, after that we headed back and I bought some pear-flavored soft serve because I had never had it before. Pears are a specialty of Tottori prefecture, so we never had it in Shimane. It was really good, even better than green tea ice cream, which is what I would normally get if I were eating ice cream in Japan.


Finally, here's another picture of me. I ran down to the ocean while Mie and her friend stayed up at the top. I suspect they didn't want to climb back up the hillside since it was rather a lot of work. Can you tell which one is me?

I was originally planning on posting more here, but there are too many pictures and I don't feel like spending the next two hours crafting a blog post, so it will have to wait. Until then, it's time for more category theory!

Eric

I should have posted something earlier, but I didn't. I don't know what else there is to say about Eric, but here is a fitting song from an album we both liked. Maybe it's a little obvious, especially given the first lines of the song. It's weird because neither of us had this music during college and we both came upon it afterwords, so it's just another one of those things that we only got to share indirectly.

I was in Japan when Eric died, which was sort of worse. Japan was a thing we both got to experience for a while, but never together and I had hoped we would get to some day. He loved talking about what he did when he was studying in Tokyo and I think it was some of his best times. He loved going to Coco Ichibanya Curry, so I went there with Mie as a sort of tribute to him. I never really understood why he liked it so much, since it's kind of just a chain restaurant and curry is such an easy thing to make. So I had level 4 hotness curry because I think that's what he recommended. It was pretty good. Later I walked around looking for a vending machine that sold Boss coffee because he liked to talk about that, too. Well, I guess that is my tribute to Eric.

He was a friend of mine.

Sorry I couldn't find the Bob version.

Title

Since new posts push old posts down (I believe this would be FILO), comments accompanying old posts get sort of lost in the shuffle and I can't be sure if people read the responses I leave to comments there, so just to clear up some Japanese, I'll make this post.

The title of my blog is Iwakan, in Chinese characters, 違和感, which translates roughly to "feeling out of place." For some pointless but fun (for me) analysis of the word, we break it down into its roots, which for Chinese-root words (漢語) conveniently means by character, since each character roughly represents a single concept, as well as a (possible multiple) reading. I've written the Chinese reading* in parenthesis, just so you can see how the following borrowed readings (音読み) change them a little.

違 - (wéi) i - This character is also read chiga-u, which even people who only know a little Japanese would recognize from Chigaimasu!, meaning wrong or different. My dictionary tells me that you could also use the character 異,　(yì) i, for the first character. This has a similar meaning of foreign or different, but is much less common. The only words I can think of that use it are 異人　ijin, meaning "foreigner" or "barbarian" and kotonaru, which isn't very common, but means "to differ."

和 - (hé) wa - This character is important in Japan because it is an old name for Japan, one that dates back to some ancient Chinese tome, but also because it means harmony, which is a central principle here. Social harmony is very important.

感 - (gân) kan - This one is simply feeling. It doesn't have a Japanese reading, at least not one that I've ever heard of being used, but interestingly enough, it is used as a suru-verb, meaning that you can attach the verb suru, to do to the end of it to make it into the verb "to feel," but it is so common that over time this has changed into the easier to say kanjiru, which then conjugates as one would expect a Japanese verb to do.

Now, the word in the URL (I don't remember what this part of a URL is called) is fukakai, written in Chinese characters as 不可解, meaning "incomprehensible." Again, let's break down this word.

不 - (bù) fu - Not. Of the famous "bu yao!"

可 - (kê) ka - Possible.

解 - (jiê)kai - Explain, understand, solve.

So, if you put it all together, you get "not possibly understood," or "incomprehensible."

I thought the names were fitting.

*making the upside-down circonflex is more hassle then it is worth, so you get stuck with thinking that the town I'm implying is up-down, when it's really more like down-up.

More Math

I said I would get around to another short post, so I'll do that. There should be a Christmas post coming, but I don't have pictures yet, so it wouldn't be as good as it could be.

Anyway, while reading about Bayesian inference on Wikipedia, I came across the Raven paradox, also known as Hempel's paradox. You can just read on there about how it works, or you can read my explanation which will be basically the same thing. So, here goes.

Consider the statement "all ravens are black." As a logical statement, this is the same as "if x is a raven, then x is black." Like all logical statements, it is logically equivalent to its contrapositive, which is "if x is not black, then x is not a raven." If you don't deal with logical statements like that, you should probably think about why statements and their contrapositives are logically equivalent.

Now, if we use the scientific (inductive) method, we can support or disprove this statement (or its contrapositive) with evidence. For example, if we see a raven that is black, we support our statement, and if we see a raven that isn't black, we have disproven the statement. Of course, since the statement and its contrapositive are equivalent, support one is the same as supporting the other and disproving one is the same as disproving the other.

So, what if we see a green apple. It is green, and since an apple is not a raven, it supports the contrapositive "if x is not black, then it is not a raven." So, this observation supports the original statement. But what happens if we start with the (obviously false) statement "if x is a raven, then x is white"? The contrapositive here is "if x is not white, then x is not a raven." Seeing the green apple again supports this contrapositive, so this observation simultaneously supports the (obviously contradictory) statements "all ravens are black" and "all ravens are white."

Weird.