Why Ropecon?

I had a sleepless night this week, and my thoughts wandered to how I'd answer to a reporter asking how why I got involved with organizing Ropecon. I think I ended up with some good reflection about what has kept me on it, and with the vanishingly small odds of ever getting to say it in a real interview, not to mention my lack of ability to form a coherent picture of it in spoken words, I decided to write down an imaginary discussion.

Q: What makes Ropecon as an event interesting enough to spend lots of free time on?

A: At its core, the success of Ropecon is a celebration of diversity. And it's all for the better that Ropecon organizing never consciously intended that and never marketed the event as such.

Let me put this in numbers. Ropecon, and the gaming scene, is roughly divided into five subcategories: roleplaying, live action, card games, miniature games and board games. It draws some four thousand visitors, which is far more than five times the audience of any event in this country dedicated exclusively to any of those categories. Granted, events like Tracon draw similar numbers of people, but Tracon is really just another manifestation of the same spirit. The point is, something is working there that goes beyond simple common interests.

It was in the first Ropecon I went to, in 2002, that I was first awed by the enthusiasm that is so apparent there and began to have a vague idea of what was special about it. If anything, I've grown more cynical regarding the impulsive herd behaviour, but my fascination remains as to how such different people are held together in a single event. Why don't all the rants about smelly card gamers and underdressed teenage larpers get realized as anything more concrete than talk?

What I think is that all the ranting doesn't have to be exaggerated, even though some of it surely is. Not everyone has to like everyone else in the scene, because the scene is organic. Just like self-interested species can create a vastly complex whole in natural ecosystems, the social connections of more or less narrowly focused people form a system that is the gaming scene. While the event may be centrally organized, the visitors certainly aren't. Those who are interested in more than one of the things Ropecon has to offer may act as some kind of glue, but overall a common point of contact for everyone is not necessary. What Ropecon has done right is simply to become the ideal place for that social aspect of the scene to shine. And it's always as exciting to see, and help, that happen.

Hayabusa - good luck, and goodbye

Damn. Looks like Japanese space engineering ingenuity is going to pay off this time. Hayabusa's almost home.

In 1970, the three astronauts of Apollo 13 were brought back with improvisation the like of which nobody thought could be pulled off in-flight. Today, nobody thinks of the flight as yet another space mission that failed to fulfill its mission objectives, even if that's technically true - as a space quote, "Houston, we've had a problem" probably stands second in fame only to Neil Armstrong's immortal "giant leap" remark. While the fact that no human lives are at stake this time might lessen the impact of the heroism, JAXA is compensating by resorting to far more extreme measures in saving crippled space hardware.

Mr. Hayabusa (according to the Planetary Society, in Japan, ships and the like are referred to as male) just celebrated its seventh anniversary in space. That's three years more than it should ever have been there, and the impact of running machinery at so much beyond the design lifetime shows. Things stopped going by the plan long ago, though. Hayabusa was supposed to pay only a quick visit to the asteroid Itokawa, named after a Japanese space pioneer, but a series of instrumentation issues, including problems with the sample collector and the mistargeting of the attached minilander, culminated in total loss of communication in late 2005.

It took one and a half months even to hear from Hayabusa again, and three to speak with it again properly. By then, it had drifted well away from its asteroid outpost. Even though the sample collection system hadn't cooperated, optimism that some asteroid dust had been gathered in the capsule led the controllers to decide to try and conclude the mission as originally intended, by bringing the capsule back to Earth - only three years later than intended, as it was already too late to embark for the return trip on that orbit.

The trip back to Earth has been an eventful voyage. When Hayabusa left Earth, it had four ion engines to propel itself. Starting the return journey, it was down to two. Right now, all Hayabusa has left to change its trajectory is two half engines whose parts have been rigged together to work as one that is lousy but should just be good enough. The power system is old and damaged, requiring an extra maneuver to warm up the capsule with sunlight before its release. And did I mention the hydrazine fuel that is supposed to be burnt to turn the spacecraft in the right direction and perform the crucial final maneuvers? Well, every bit of it is gone. The maneuvers are instead done with the much weaker improvised ion engine, and for attitude control Hayabusa struggles with the said engine, combined with its final working reaction wheel and by using its solar panels as improvised solar sails to keep it under control. For perspective, another Japanese spacecraft is going to launch any day now to deploy the first experimental solar sail - that's just how cutting edge the technique is.

As I write this, Hayabusa is travelling towards Earth 10 million or so kilometers away, getting closer and speeding up (as the Earth's gravitation pulls it) day by day. Compared to the distance it has travelled, that's just in the neighborhood, and almost in the right direction. "Almost" meaning that at the current trajectory, it would miss the Earth by about 200 km. Only a few days before the June 13 touchdown in Australia, a final nudge should fine-tune the course to the landing site.

Which brings me to the two points of writing now, rather than in late June when the mission is hopefully succesfully completed. Firstly, there is still a definite chance of failure, and I want to grab the opportunity to congratulate the Hayabusa mission control of the amazing feats have managed - for having it to "go up in a hurtling piece of machinery and pull it back at the last yawning moment", however remotely. More importantly though, it's still possible to say goodbyes. For the crippled Hayabusa mothership, too weak to turn away after releasing the protected capsule, will perform its final act in finishing the delivery and burn up in the atmosphere of its home planet, joining the Apollo 13 lunar module as a piece of technology that was sacrificed to turn failure into success against all odds.

Earth Hour

Looks like Earth Hour got lots of unwarranted negative attention because its idea ended up being misunderstood. While the original purpose is clearly stated as being to raise awareness, the media seems to have largely presented it as a collective energy-saving effort of sorts. Even the most numbers-blind eco-zombies should be able to tell that tiny energy savings for one hour per year should not make a difference. And that was certainly noticed by the passive aggressors seen commenting every new story on the subject, who were all too eager to label Earth Hour as another example of environmentalist stupidity.

I am usually don't care for publicity stunts like this, but I rather like the concept of Earth Hour. It is a rare example of public awareness event that goes straight to the point without being overly intrusive or trying to use a popular theme to sell a political agenda (the Buy Nothing Day being an example of a repulsive campaign of the latter kind). The way I see it, what Earth Hour asks you to do is:

1. Turn off as many lights as you can while still being comfortable, or perhaps some more.
2. Consider which lights were actually necessary.
3. When the hour is over, rethink which lights you actually need to turn back on.

The point is to assess how much, and what kind of, use of energy (or other resources, for that matter) contributes to one's own quality of life. Much of our current consumption actually has a minimal effect on it, instead being caused by the combination of the convenience of not caring about waste, and cheap the cost of energy. Unfortunately, forcing people to actually reconsider energy use by rising costs would probably require very steep increases in prices, which would make many actually important energy-requiring things prohibitively expensive. For example, most people would think that refrigerators are well used 24-hour electricity (although it's debatable if cooling 20 °C indoor air makes sense in a country with average outdoor temperatures about the same as the fridge). If we assume that with energy costing 10 times as much as it does now, people would cut their energy spending by half, electricity bills would still go up by a factor of five. This would tempt many to save on the important things as well, including those that affect health, and thus the policy would backfire in public healthcare costs. In any case, while we may well have to eventually compromise on our standard of living to keep sustainable, we might as well start with cutting the wasteful stuff first.

Saturday's party was a good example of how people would deal with parts 1 and 3 of the list above without having to be too conscious about part 2. Lights went off at 8:30 with the lighting of a few candles, people would turn them on to use the bathroom and for other essential things, and nobody felt the need to rush back to the light switch at 9:30. The majority of the lights remained off for most of the evening - I'm sure we weren't the only place to have this effect. And as long as there was anybody to whom that realization gave reason to reconsider their habits with energy, Earth Hour has served its purpose.

Randomness and luck

Did you unwittingly save or take a life yesterday? How about last month? Or, for that matter, during all your previous life? The short answer to the last question, justified by the famous butterfly effect metaphor, is "yes". The longer is "quite probably, but in practice, it's impossible to tell". The indirect consequences of one's actions, as well as the indirect causes of any observed event, will typically remain unknown, and practically also unknowable. Events that are behind a long enough chain of causal relations are treated as effectively random, as far as the subject is concerned. The natural question then is: what is randomness from a human perspective, and how does that affect our decisions?

Discussion of randomness with anyone vaguely familiar with physics concepts nearly invariably comes down to pointless arguments about free will and the nature of quantum randomness. Surely (as pointed out by Philip Ball in the book Critical Mass), there is a profound philosophical difference between things being unknowable in principle and in practice. But while quantum mechanics does seem seem to indicate that there is true randomness in nature, these concept are luckily irrelevant to the principal point. Indeed, physicists have dealt with the mathematics of random events even in the era of pure mechanistic determinism.

The most significant principle of the field of statistical mechanics is that when we do not or cannot know the state of a particular process exactly (such as the location and speed of every gas molecule in a box), we can nevertheless model it as a random process with some degree of uncertainty. Furthermore, given a lack of information, we have no other choice than to accept a level of randomness in our model.

Inverting the above logic, one can take it a step further and define subjective randomness as lack of information. That is, the less one knows about something, the more random he can consider it. This definition makes an interesting change to the whole concept of randomness as it is suddenly transformed (one might say "demoted") from a purely mathematical concept to a subjective phenomenon. Since the amount of information about a topic varies between people, so does the subjective randomness. Televised poker games are a good example: the spectators who see all players' cards have more information and thus less randomness in the game than the players. There is still some excitement left for the TV watchers as well, as they don't know the full contents of the deck or the decisions made by the participants.

While this concept works well even at the extremes of the amount of uncertainty, they are not the interesting cases: the full-information case is one of determinism (which is boring), and the no-information case implies total subjective randomness - pure random noise (which is irrelevant). As is often the case, the most interesting things happen in the transition zone. This is where people make, often unconsciously, decisions based on statistical models of events that are, at least in principle, completely predictable (in the poker games, the broadcasters do their best to keep the viewers' interest up by giving them just the right amount of information to keep it interesting).

If the amount of information available on a subject is perceived as determining the degree of randomness, one could as well give a sort of a Bayesian treatment to two randomness-related everyday concepts. Firstly, odds are the a priori probability, the individual's estimate of the probability of something happening before the event. Secondly, luck can very well be said to exist, and without any supernatural notions - but only in the a posteriori sense, or after the fact. Luck is then consistent with the information theory concept of self-information, or the amount of "surprise" presented by the result of a random event. Small surprise value implies neutral luck, while good or bad luck are related to high surprise value combined with an estimate of the favourability of the outcome.

Of course, nobody uses such involved definitions in their everyday lives. Still, this line of thinking can make it clearer to see how people make decisions subconsciously, based on personal estimates of odds. It also highlights the importance of clear thinking and the dangers of prejudice (that is, flawed estimation due to personal bias) in decision-making where probability and risk are weighed.

Further reading: Philip Ball, "Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another" (2004), ISBN 0-434-01135-5.