[caption id=“attachment_6252” align=“aligncenter” width=“400”] Scarlett Sleeping[/caption]

Sleep is one of the most stress-inducing topics for parents. Well, for first time parents. I imagine that, baring some medical conditions, once you’ve figured out how to get one kid to sleep through the night, you can reapply the template over and over. I think one of the reasons sleep tends to be so stressful is that parents are so gosh-darned competitive. It’s ridiculous, but every parent is in a competition with every other parent. People like me are cognizant that this is stupid and don’t do it consciously, but my mind is always playing on my parental fears and bringing it up. “Hey, that kid can walk/talk/insert skill and is the same age as Scarlett so why can’t Scarlett do that?” Other people do it on purpose - it’s how they get their sense of worth - their kid is better than those around them. These are the same people who will be asking in 18 years what college Scarlett is getting into - not because they care but because they want to tell me what school little Dylan got into. And sleep is one of those activities where the parents actually have some control (unlike their mental skills) and so it’s seen as a sign of bad or weak parenting if you can’t get your kids to sleep through the night.

One of the earliest demands for justice children make is that of fairness. What parent hasn’t heard the complaint “That’s not fair!” uttered by their children? Scarlett isn’t there yet (shoot, she’s barely speaking so far), but I imagine one of the hardest things I’ll have to do in her toddlerhood is to explain to her that life isn’t fair. It must be such a scary moment for children. It’s the first time we realize that the adults in our lives aren’t always going to provide justice. It’s funny because it’s an extremely important life lesson to learn, but it often arises out of frustration when another child won’t cooperate in the fairness regime. And it’s a tough balancing act if you’re sovereign over both children between requiring fairness and teaching that fairness just isn’t in the cards all the times.

Unsurprisingly, Scarlett is once again the subject of the Photojojo. Also captured, a visit by the in-laws. I think the most interesting thing is that I find her way cuter as she looks now vs a year ago. But back then I found her way cute. Scientists say it peaks at age 4. I guess we’ll see.

During the month of May I continued to try and completed story-based games in my library.

[caption id=“attachment_6370” align=“aligncenter” width=“480”] Quantum Conundrum Science Ball[/caption]

Quantum Conundrum (3 hrs) - I started playing the game early this year. I really, really enjoy this game, but the imprecision of the moves really bugs me. I’ve been playing it with a keyboard and mouse, does anyone know if it plays better with a control? I keep dying because I go too far in my jumps and it’s annoying when I’ve figured out the puzzle but keep dying because of platforming issues. In other words, when I play Sudoku I don’t fail because my pen lands in the wrong box when I try to write a number. The thrill of the game is solving the puzzles. I enjoy teasers and, while I admit I sometimes have to use a guide to solve the puzzle, I always try really hard to see if I’ve considered all the possible ways to use the game’s elements to solve the puzzle. I don’t know if the game is evenly balanced, but I think there are three halls and I’ve finished one of them. But I spent around 30 minutes of of the three hours this month trying to get through a puzzle I’d solved but I kept falling to my death. So I put completion of the game on hold to play other games. I may not ever finish this one.  We’ll see.

There’s an interesting tension in democratic nations. For democracy to work there needs to be transparency. A lack of transparency leads to corruption via information asymmetry. Humans, being humans, tend to exploit this to bad ends. Sometimes they have noble intentions and sometimes they have evil intentions, but the results are the same - an abuse of power. Examples include testing drugs and diseases on African-Americans, testing drugs on military and CIA employees without their knowledge, or the lies about the US winning in Vietnam. However, nations have always needed to maintain a level of secrecy to preserve information asymmetry over other nations. It’s why Caesar of the Roman Empire invented his eponymous cypher. It’s why all countries have an equivalent of the NSA to protect their secrets and obtain the secrets of other nations. So we want our countries to keep secrets, but not the wrong kinds of secrets.

Ever since Danielle and I started talking about marriage 10 years ago, one of the nightmare scenarios in my head was my kid acting like a brat in public and me getting accused of kidnapping the kid because he or she didn’t look like me. My parents are Cuban and hers are Vietnamese. All kids go through impertinent phases and some of them threaten to accuse their parents of abuse and other things in an attempt to blackmail their parents. I would hope that I would raise my kids with more respect than that, but in my head I saw them pretending I wasn’t their parent in an attempt to get me to buy them something. Joke’s on them, I’d let them sweat about being put into a foster family. But how do you prove your kid is your kid? It’s damn near impossible. But I also have an over-active imagination so I figured this wasn’t a real thing. Until I came across this news story.

In my 20s I learned something important that changed my idealism when it came to how the world would be awesome if all the politicians would listen to me - the law of unintended consequences. I came across an interesting example in a 22 May story Planet Money did about the uneven Marijuana Laws in the USA. One of the biggest arguments in favor of pot legalization is the legalization will reduce the street price which will allow drug lords and gangs to have less money. This allows them to have less power and we all win. The same number of people get baked and Mexican and border cities don’t become war zones. (For the record I am conflicted. I think legalization does imply a sort of endorsement by the government - “this isn’t that bad for you or it’d be illegal”) Turns out this has pretty much worked exactly like that:

[caption id=“attachment_6300” align=“aligncenter” width=“640”] Aida at the Park back before digital[/caption]

I have mentioned many times before how much I was into photography back before digital existed. Despite film and developing costs subsuming all my allowance money, I still took tons of photos. Three years ago, I decided to check out the film photography renaissance. In April I got my first batch of film and a Holga. And soon I had shot some photos. And a few weeks later I had my Holga and Yashica film back.  And since then I’ve … not shot very many more rolls of film. There are a few reasons for this; some of them don’t even have to do directly with film. For example, I’m just taking less photos in general. A lot of that has to do with Scarlett. I have lots of photos of other kids in the family because you can hang back when it’s not your kid. You don’t have to worry about anything- someone else is taking care of him or her. But children, at least at the toddler and below stage, require a lot of attention. Also, I want to be present in her life. In order to photograph you have to withdraw a bit. And that’s fine when they’re five or six and off playing on the playground on their own. But Scarlett needs our assistance and attention to be able to use pretty much any part of the playground. Indirectly, because I have a desire to play with her in a way that my father couldn’t (his 9-5 rarely ended at 5), I have to be a better manager of my time. And I have committed to writing more this year. And there are some games I want to play. And there’s TV and time with the wife. Also, I am traveling less and I don’t happen to find Baltimore anywhere near as photogenic as New York city or Oahu.

[caption id=“attachment_6344” align=“alignleft” width=“478”] Chell from Portal[/caption]

Gender is a pretty interesting concept when it comes to video games. Putting aside “Choose Your Own Adventure” books, video games are unique in that the players are active in constructing the narrative. Some games, like puzzle games don’t REALLY have a narrative (but that doesn’t mean my brothers and I didn’t come up with the “story” behind what was going on in Tetris - paragraph seven) But the rest have stories and put the play on a spectrum from games like Mario to games like Mass Effect and all the way to the The Sims franchise in which you have complete control of the narrative through player agency over all the characters in the house.  (See here, here, and here) As the player plays, the player takes the character’s story onto him or herself. This is at least partially the rational for the dearth of female protagonists. Everyone “knows” that not only are all the gamers male, but they also couldn’t stand the idea of playing as a female. Off the top of my head the only top tier female protagonists I can think of are Laura Croft and the girl from Heavenly Sword. There’s also Samus Aran, but that’s also a bit of a cheat since she’s nearly always armored and the reveal that she was a woman was one of video games’ first huge reveals.  But I know this is untrue - at least among the video game aficionados I know. Dan, members of the Giant Bomb Squad, and others who write about games online played Mass Effect as a female Shepard. Ryan or Jeff (or both, I can’t remember) of Giant Bomb plays as a female every time a video game gives him the option.

On 6 May Ars published a story about some Chinese scientists who were trying to see if they could make avian flu better transmit to mammals. They claimed the point was to better study how it is that these viruses mutate to become infectious to mammals. However, the scientists used guinea pigs for some reason. For some reason left unexplained in the article, guinea pigs have both mammalian and avian receptors so they’re susceptible to avian viruses anyway! But the biggest problem, as pointed out by Robert May, is that this is China. You know…the country that has lead in toothpaste. He posited that we can’t really trust them to keep the virus contained if they do create a mammalian supervirus. A bit of an elitist attitude from the West? Maybe, but China doesn’t exactly have the best track record on doing stuff up to Western standards. Just one mistake and we have all those crazy infection movies coming true. It’s especially not worth it since other experts quoted in the article also say that you can’t really learn a lot about how to prevent or limit the spread of the mutated flu in the wild with the kind of study they were doing. They almost come across looking like a real life version of Aperture Science.